Join us on 8th and 9th June for a diverse hack weekend as we work together to identify Air Quality issues and fix them.
According to the last air quality report for Aberdeen, we have some of the worst air in Scotland. Even though we live on the coast, and generally have a nice breeze, we still have bad air days. Particulate matter is so small that we can’t see the risks: clear air does not mean clean air. This leads to health issues for some of us, and our families. It also affects how busy the health services are too.
There are some official monitors available for the city, but they don’t have widespread coverage. This means you are unlikely to be able to check the air quality around your house, your child’s school, your cycle commute or where you go running. With your help we would like to change that.
Clean Air Aberdeen sprang from our February Code the City co-design event focusing on air quality. We built some sensors, developed some analytics, and explored how to take this work further. At the end the participants wanted this to continue through an ad-hoc organisation aimed at monitoring air quality in Aberdeen as written up here. The data from every sensor is published as open data which can be used to create new products and services.
We are now ready to continue this air quality campaign to better monitor and analyse the air quality in Aberdeen. We have set up another co-design event at the University of Aberdeen on 8-9 June You can find out more about the event and book tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/codethecity-16-air-quality-2-tickets-60685063659
As before, we’ll follow our usual co-design approach to gather interesting ideas of projects, and form mixed ability teams from attending students, professionals, developers, and designers to work on ideas over the weekend.
Activities will probably include
- Building sensor kits each day
- Gathering weather data
- Improve monitoring of devices
- Use data science to create predictive models
- Match open health data with areas of poor AQ
- Creating alerts (hitting triggers)
- Test for exceeding daily limits etc
- Hosting of data for re-use
- Governance activity (Saturday)
- Better understanding of device limitations (sensitivity, fog, …)
- Discussion of any known issues/bugs (getting people to install units once built)
- Comms and promotion
- Designing UK network meetup for other city projects
And did we mention food? We’ll have great catering from social enterprise The Bread Maker, thanks to sponsorship by Forty Two Studio.
We hope you will join us and encourage friends and colleagues to get involved.
Please don’t delay as the event is only two weeks away.
Code The City 