[Day 4] Air Quality Monitoring

2 parts:
Focus on everyone need
Many AQ monitors/designs/etc Which is the best? starting all over instead of iterating.

Sharing data is important. Worldwide Open Air Quality data should integrate our, all data
HackAir, Luftdaten, others are already sharing data somehow, so there’s the beginning of standardisation. There’s a bigger initiative, name not remembered.

Participants background
p1: microscale measurement and impact of landscape as buffer. How to represent the data in 3D? Attempting to make one
p2: indoor AQ is one of his priority
p3: does AQ micro-mapping, interested in standards for interoperability.
p4: artist visualising things you cannot see with naked eyes. Want to do something about real-time visualisation. Tomography-like.
p5: same situation as p3, who does what, what is going on
p6: blog about AQ. Problem of luftdaten is there is no precise location corresponding to data points. Situation is blurry now.
p7: group working on an air sensing device, with multiple sensors. Data-sharing, data format, shared guidelines. Purpleair. Like a table with projects sharing AQ, how combining. Calibration, also. How to do, comparability.
p8: Work in education. PM2.5 is known in China, but Ozone was a big problem in China last year, want a cheap sensor to teach students
p9: lighthouse project for GOSH, AQ, as so many people working on it. Maybe specific issues.
p10: air pollution is a big problem in west africa, actually killing more than malnutrition, but badly known as people don’t talk about it, and no debate.
p11: public lab, factory pollution that goes afar. Nanoparticle pollution. Look for low-cost solution to monitor them
p12: interested
p13: interested in health content. Calibration importance, how to get close to expensive equipment quality.
p14: ran AQ monitoring workshop for some months. Ran into problems with people about following-up and documentation. 3/4 don’t keep-up after they leave the workshop, also because of bad connection.
p15: 10 years in AQ, went into openhardware. Think having community sharing same sensor, could spread tasks like calibration, publication, visualisation. Publication important issue. What kind of data is good enough data?
p16: problem has a lot of different sides like AQ risks to become a problem much more narrow, like visualisation, or electronics. More important to focus on the social concepts around the projects. How do people work with the devices, etc. Social club, coming to the same place once a month, everyone brings their air monitor, like a pet. to renew social bounds, and also colocate the sensors and synchronize. Should be city-scale, etc.
p17: frustrated about a project she works on: technical problems. It’s not easy to make compatible, relying on people might be problematic. Also contacting other communities can be difficult.

Is there a forum for all communities? To join, put protocols together, etc.
Conversations are often becoming focused and we don’t want the debate to be dominated.

Give minimum standard? But not fits all needs.

Public Labs is in the situation where many people want to push a standard and they facilitate. They try to do that with AQ data. People have different reasons. They have Leaflet Environmental Layer Library, connecting opensense, purpleair, EPA data, etc. Time included.

Public Lab is good for general questions. For more technical questions… Nano can help with tech. questions.

Meteo stations with calibration, cross-calibration. At least give a trend.

Openscience box: connect a lot of sensors.

Everyone is measuring air quality, what can we do as GOSHers?
Maybe the community choice is important, with someone in the background to back us if we have a problem.

Convince everyone your practice is best practice. Need to have community with you. Not everyone is using the same, but having a portal can really help one out.

Multiple tracks: data gathering between different projects, with documentation at the same point.

Outdoor quality monitoring stations should be attributed to neighbours.

Exchanging sensors between the community members, round-robin like. Also stick a sensor on a public transport.

Find common points between projects. Also cultivate a spirit of mutual help between different or similar projects.

Sometimes it’s difficult for people to even source sensors.

Action Plan:

  • Putting all informations WE have about it on the Forum (Nano and Emmanuel)
  • Defining standard about data sharing.
  • Finding out about weather stations data exchange format. Community is very big, there’s a need to correlate all kinds of data, meteo station, satellites, govt
  • Exchanging sensors between the community members, round-robin like.
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Hi Emmanuel,

thank you very much for your great summary. Let me answer some of the questions quickly. I write to you as founder of luftdaten.info. There are already some starting points and we are thankful for any help.

We have a slack community forum here: https://luftdaten.slack.com/ (ask for invitation at hallo@luftdaten.info)

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There are already a few evaluations: https://luftdaten.info/evaluation/ (sorry only in german)
And there is a strong community on github: https://github.com/opendata-stuttgart

Students of Merz Akademie in Stuttgart did this digital poster using our data from Neckartor.

p6: there is an exact position of the sensor but not displayed on the map for privacy reasons.

p7: we did a software-side humidity calibration (there is a formula) but not implemented at the moment.

Its all about awareness. We are working with paediatricians, governmental institutions, a global community, retired experts, civic tech scientists, citizen scientists and so on.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for any reason.

Kind regards,

Jan


Jan A. Lutz
Inventor and head of luftdaten.info
Lead OK Lab Stuttgart

jan@luftdaten.info

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Artists like Michael Saup and Dietmar Offenhuber did some great 3D and VR experiences out of the luftdaten data:


Hi all
I have created this post to share some resources about low-cost air quality monitoring

Please @gbathree @jcm80 @shannon can you make it a wiki so everyone can contribute
The idea is that everyone can share their resources, specially those who already have aq related projects.
The TOC is kind of tricky, if someone else has a better approach is welcome.

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Made it into a wiki!

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https://opensensemap.org

This might be the bigger initiated whose name not remembered, I mentioned them in the meeting.

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Hi Jan
Good that you join this conversation.
I’ve sent an email to hallo@luftdaten.info to join the slack forum but I received no answer…
should I write again or is there any other way to join?
Thanks
Saludos

has someone already made a 150 word summary on this for the documentation team’s report? Have a great end of the year, and all the best for 2019!!

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