Community-Empowered Air Quality Monitoring System
This addresses air pollution monitoring for local communities lacking technological fluency, enabling them to advocate for regulatory change, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to a new social context.
The researchers tackled the problem of air pollution from industrial activity by developing a community-empowered air quality monitoring system that integrated diverse data sources like smoke images and crowdsourced reports, resulting in patterns of sharing among stakeholders and empowering the community to engage in policy discussions with regulators.
Developing information technology to democratize scientific knowledge and support citizen empowerment is a challenging task. In our case, a local community suffered from air pollution caused by industrial activity. The residents lacked the technological fluency to gather and curate diverse scientific data to advocate for regulatory change. We collaborated with the community in developing an air quality monitoring system which integrated heterogeneous data over a large spatial and temporal scale. The system afforded strong scientific evidence by using animated smoke images, air quality data, crowdsourced smell reports, and wind data. In our evaluation, we report patterns of sharing smoke images among stakeholders. Our survey study shows that the scientific knowledge provided by the system encourages agonistic discussions with regulators, empowers the community to support policy making, and rebalances the power relationship between stakeholders.