RE: Why "In the Air"?

shabaz — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 14:24:20 GMT

I just recently discovered that since the 1980’s the US has published a certain amount of information due to their legislation (Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act), and since 1998 it’s been available online using a website called scorecard. (I found it in a quite old book "Wikinomics" that I only recently got round to reading).

It was interesting to explore the website, and by entering your location details and the type of report you’re interested in, you can get data and rankings. Here it is showing water status for a location I picked at random.

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It can also tell you in a breakdown what is causing the pollution (e.g. construction, agriculture) and any percentage for an unknown cause.

You can even drill down on particular chemicals and discover which factory is responsible for the most release of that chemical into the environment.

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There are different views to the data set, and literally pick your poison:

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What are people’s opinion of the scorecard site? Who has used it over the past 15 years?

Is anyone aware of legal cases that were resolved based on information from sites such as scorecard?

What similar sites exist for other countries?

Also, should Freedom of Information in the UK now be extended to insist on an API for retrieving types of data inquired by many people per year, since that would nationally save money?

Another question is, can IoT help in this area, and in a way that directly could affect people quickly? When discussing this with a friend, in my opinion, where I see a "quick win" or immediate useful impact is for empowering people over local government decisions, to hold them to account. So, for example, if a new factory is built, or nearby roadworks, or even a noisy neighbor, local residents could complain if there is more noise, more traffic, bad quality air, or bad water.

That's hard to do if it is one person (and the local government, police force, etc., will always say "nobody else has complained") but a lot harder to do if you can say "well, the residents had nodes sampling at these locations, all are affected, click here to see the data and graphs for the past month, this town is measurably the worst in water quality compared to it's neighbours" (as the scorecard site can reveal).

It's still a bit idealist (for sure local govt would claim they were not official sensors, could be incorrect and so on), but maybe that's hard to do when there are a dozen sensors all claiming a similar trend.

I guess it would make good press if someone out there managed to get a single local policy changed as a result of such a solution, but practice can be a lot harder than theory. But I’m sure there must be plenty of stories out there all over the world, of people collecting data and getting their local government/council to act on it - Erin Brockovich of course being a prime example, but even small changes to improve daily life is interesting.

RE: Why "In the Air"?

michaelwylie — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 17:09:04 GMT

Very interesting and relevant topic for a design competition. It will be exciting to see what is created from this.