As reported in an earlier post, we are releasing a widget entitled “Improve Your CARMA” that allows users to submit information back to the CARMA site. We are all very proud of the data CARMA provides to users, but we believe that through a collective effort, our power plant data could become much richer. This new widget allows our CARMA friends to collaborate with us by submitting better mapping coordinates, providing images to our Flickr account, and adding feedback about these power plants.

Improve Your CARMA is designed to give us all a better picture of power plants than what our data currently provides. There are plants all over the world that we have carbon data for, but we do not have anecdotal information that users on the ground can help us gather. Whether through uploaded photos, saved marker points, or just general feedback, we want to collect this information so you and I have a better idea of what these plants are really like. We set out to make this widget informative, intuitive, and most importantly, fun. As we have hoped to educate people on climate issues related to plant emissions, we want to give our users an opportunity to educate us. We highly encourage the CARMA community to embed this widget on blogs and sharing it with friends; we can greatly improve the CARMA data if we work together. Details on how the widget works are provided in the video below: