air quality – Code The City

Social Sounds

A blog post by James Littlejohn.

CTC23 – the future of the City. A new theme to explore. After introductions, initial ideas were sought for the Miro board – to ease us along Bruce put on some Jazz music. This was to inspire Dimi to put forward an idea on how sounds in a City could be. This post-its gathered interest and the Social Sounds project and team was formed.

Dimi shared his vision and existing knowledge on sound projects, namely, Luckas Martinelli project This would become the algorithmic starting point visualising sound data on a map. The first goal was to using this model and apply it and visualise a sound map of Aberdeen. This was achieved over the weekend but was only half of the visualisation goals. The other half was to look build a set of tools that would allow communities to envision and demonstrate noise pollution reductions through interventions, green walls, trees plantings or even popup band stands. An early proof of concept toolkit was produced. The social in social sounds references to community, connecting all those connected by sound and place. The product concluded by show how this social graph could be export to a decision making platform e.g.loomio.org

What is next? The algorithmic model needs to be ground with real world sound sensor data. Air quality devices in Aberdeen can be upgraded with a microphone. Also, noise itself needs to be included in the map experience, this can be achieved through a sound plug in of existing recordings. The toolkit needs much more work, it needs to give members of the community the ability to add their own intervention ideas and for those ideas to be visualised on the map, highlight the noise reduction potential or enhancement, permanent or temporary. Much achieved, much to do.

2019 – the year in review

Intro

The year just past has been a pivotal one for Code The City, we’ve moved into a new home, expanded our operations, engaged with new communities of people, and started to put in place solid planning which will be underpinned by expansion and better governance.

Here are some of the highlights from 2019.

Sponsors, volunteers and attendees

We couldn’t do what we do without the help of some amazing people. With just three trustees (Bruce, Steve and Andrew) and Ian our CEO, we couldn’t cover such a range of activities without serious help. Whether you come to our events, volunteer, or your company sponsors our work, you are making a difference in Aberdeen.

Listing things is always dangerous as the potential to miss people out is huge. But here we go!

The Data Lab, MBN Solutions, Scotland IS, InoApps, Forty-Two Studio, who all provided very generous financial support; H2O AI donated to our charity in lieu of sponsorship of a meet-up; and the James Hutton Institute and InoApps who also donated laptops for us to re-use at our code clubs. Codify, IFB, Converged Comms who provided specific funding for projects including buying kit for code club, and paying for new air quality devices – some of which we have still to build.

Our regular volunteers – Vanessa, Zoe, Attakrit, Charlotte, and Shibo – plus the several parents who stay to help too, all help mentor the kids at Young City Coders club.

Lee, Carlos, Scott, Rob who are on the steering group of the Python User Group meetup.

Naomi, Ian N, David, and Gavin who are on the steering group for Air Aberdeen along with Kevin from 57 North who supervises the building of new sensor devices.

The ONE Tech Hub, and ONE Codebase have created a great space not only for us to work in, but also in which to run our public-facing events.

Everyone who stays behind to help us clear away plates, cups and uneaten food – or nips out to the shops when we run out of milk.

Apologies to anyone we have missed!

And finally YOU – everyone who has attended one of or sessions – you’ve helped make Aberdeen a little bit better place to live in. Thank you!

Hack weekends

We ran four hack events this year. Here is a quick run-down.

Air Quality 1

We kicked off 2019 with the CTC15 AIr Quality hack in February. This saw us create fourteen new devices which people took home to install and start gathering data. We also had a number of teams looking at the data coming from the sensors, and some looking at how we could use LoraWAN as a data transport network. We set some targets for sensor numbers which were, in retrospect, perhaps a little ambitious. We set up a website (https://airaberdeen.org)

Air Quality 2

Unusually for us we had a second event on the same theme in quick succession: CTC16 in June. Attendees created another fourteen devices. We developed a better model for the data, improved on the website and governance of the project. We got great coverage on TV, on radio and in local newspapers.

Make Aberdeen Better

CTC17 came along in November. The theme was a broad one – what would you do to make Aberdeen a better place to live, work or play? Attendees chose four projects to work on: public transport, improved methods of monitoring air quality, how we might match IT volunteers to charities needing IT help, and the open data around recycling.

Xmas mini-hack

CTC18, our final hack of the year was another themeless one, timed to fit into a single day. We asked participants to come and work on a pet side-project, or to help someone else with theirs. Despite a lower turnout in the run-up to Christmas, we still had eight projects being worked on during the day.

New home, service

In the late summer the ONE Tech Hub opened and we moved in as one of the first tenants. So far we rent a single desk in the co-working space but we aim to expand that next year. The building is great, which is why we run all of our events there now, and as numbers grow it promises to fulfil its promise as the bustling centre of Aberdeen’s tech community.

Having started a new Data Meet-up in 2018 we moved that to ONE Tech Hub along with our hack events. We also kicked off a new Python User group in September this year, the same year as we started to deliver Young City Coders sessions to encourage youngsters to get into coding, using primarily Scratch and Python.

We also ran our first WikiMedia Editathon in August – using WIkipedia, WIki Commons and Wikidata to capture and share some of the history of Aberdeen’s cinemas using these platforms. We are really supportive of better using all of the wikimedia tools. Ian recently attended a three-day course to become a wikimedia trainer. And at CTC18 there were two projects using wikidata and wiki commons too. Expect much more of this next year!

Some recognition and some numbers

We’ve been monitoring our reach and impact this year.

In March we were delighted to see that Code The City made it onto the Digital Social Innovation For Europe platform. This project was to identify organisations and projects across the EU who are making an impact using tech and data for civic good.

In July we appeared for the first time in an Academic journal – in an article about using a hackathon to bring together health professionals, data scientists and others to address health challenges.

We will be launching our dashboard in the New Year. Meantime, here are some numbers to chew on.

Hack events

We ran four sessions, detailed above. We had 102 attendees and 15 facilitators who put in a total of 1,872 hours of effort on a total of 20 projects. All of this was for civic benefit.

Young City Coders

We ran six sessions of our Young City Coders which started in September. The sessions had a total of 114 kids attending and 28 mentors giving up two hours or more.

Data Meet-ups

In 2019 we had 12 data meet-ups with 28 speakers and 575 attendees! This is becoming a really strong local community of practitioners and researchers from academia and local industry.

Python Meet-ups

Each of our four sessions from September to December had a speaker, and attracted a total of 112 attendees who were set small project tasks.

The year ahead

2020 is going to see CTC accelerate its expansion. We’re recruiting two new board members, and we have drawn up a business plan which we will share soon. That should see us expand the team and strengthen our ability to drive positive societal change through tech, data and volunteering. We have two large companies considering providing sponsorship for new activities next year. We’ll also be looking at improving our fundraising – widening the range of sources that we approach for funding, and allowing us to hire staff for the first time.

Open Data

We’re long-term champions of open data as many of you will have read in previous posts. We’ve identified the need to strengthen the Open Data community in Scotland and to contribute beyond our own activities. Not only has Ian joined the Civic side of Open Government Partnership, and is leading on Commitment three of that to improve open data provision, but he has also joined the board of the Data Commons Scotland programme at Stirling University.

Scottish Open Data Unconference

Beyond that we have created, and we are going to run, the Scottish Open Data Unconference in March. This promises to be a great coming together of the data community including academia, government, developers, and publishers. If you haven’t yet signed up please do so now – there are only 11 tickets of 90 still available. We’ll also need volunteers to help run it: scribes for sessions, helping to orientate new visitors, covering reception, photography, blogging etc. Let us know how you could help.

We look forward to working with you all in the New Year and wish you all a peaceful and relaxing time over the festive period.

Ian, Steve, Bruce and Andrew

[Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash\

We make a difference. So can you.

At Code The City our objective is help our local community become literate in both technology and data and to use them to full advantage. We help people, organisations and charities to gain the right skills. We are improving what we do at Code The City, and how we do it: changes which are fundamental to making that vision a reality.

Our work up to now

Over the past five years we’ve run 16 Hack Weekends and, in Spring 2018, we started to host monthly data meet-ups. Both things have been very successful but are not the sum total of our ambitions. To deliver those fully we needed a base from which to operate and to grow.

Currently

We’re now set up in the ONE Tech Hub, hosted by ONE Codebase. This has cemented our position as part of the local ecosystem. Since moving in six weeks ago we’ve launched the Young City Coders sessions. Our first one, last week attracted 22 keen young people and there is a waiting list for places. We’ll run those twice a month from now on. We’re really grateful for assitance we have received. Inoapps gave us sponsorship to get these sessions started, and both they and the James Hutton Institute donated used laptops.

The immediate future

In another six weeks or so we’ll start a Tech Tribe. That’s the name we’ve given to a programme to get people, and women in particular, into STEM careers and education. Many of them missed the chance first time round. The Data Lab already sponsor our Data Meet-ups and are now sponsoring these sessions, too.

All this educational activity is reliant on volunteer time. Two of our founders, Ian and Bruce, have now become STEM ambassadors. Part of that was getting PVG checks to allow them to work with children and vulnerable adults. We have a handful of others who are going to go through the same process. But, we want to be resilient, and scale up and so we need more people. If you would like to volunteer and get the appropriate certification, please get in touch.

This week also sees the start of the new Aberdeen Python User Group which kicks off on Wednesday. Python is by many measures the most popular, flexible and growing programming language which is used in data science, astronomy, biology, security, web development…. the list is endless.

Our next Hack Weekend will be in November and will address volunteering and civic engagement. We also hope to run another hack weekend in December just before Christmas.

We are planning a springtime event: the Scottish Open Data Unconference. Details will be announced of these very soon.

A picture takes shape

All this is like a jigsaw puzzle, the picture of which is gradually emerging as we fit the pieces together.

By running coding sessions for youngsters and mums, we are starting to help families better understand the potential of data and technology to transform their lives.

By creating Data and Python Meet-ups we are creating networking opportunities. These raise awareness of the good work that is going on in academia and industry. It exposes employers to graduate talent. We help people to share their skills, experience and expertise and to self-organise.

By running hack events we are helping charities and public sector organisations to make the most of the opportunities of digital and data to transform. We also help the local tech community of coders and developers and others to give something back to worthy causes.

By leading projects such as Aberdeen Air Quality we put the creation of data into people’s hands. This demonstrates the potential of collective endeavour for a common cause. The data is made available openly for anyone to build any new product or service. And it offers up the potential for schools and universities to use that data to better understand the local environment.

By running a national unconference we bring specialists, experts, and a wider network to the city to mix with local practitioners. This facilitates discussions at local, regional and national levels and between data users, publishers and academics at every level.

Our charity values. Your values?

In addition to all of the above, Ian, our founder CEO, is a non-executive director of the UK-wide Community Interest Company, Democracy Club. Its strapline is “Our vision is of a country with the digital foundations to support everyone’s participation in democratic life.” Now, Ian has joined the steering group of Scotland’s Open Government Network. He is also now on the board of Stirling University-led project, Data Commons.

The commitment of our charity and its founders is to create that better world underpinned by data and digital, from the ground up. That means running events of many kinds. empowering people, giving them the skills and knowledge they need.

You can do your bit too: come to meet-ups; share your work; be part of a network; becoming a STEM ambassador; coach and mentor others, put something back.

We all gain and the time has never been better.

Email us now if you’d like to help!

Thanks

Ian, Steve, Bruce and Andrew

AQ – what’s next?

For more background read this post and this one.

Last weekend we hosted the second Aberdeen Air Quality hack weekend in recent months. Coming out it there are a number of tasks which we need to work on next. While some of these fall to the community to deliver, there are also significant opportunities for us to work with partners.

The Website

While the Air Aberdeen website is better, we still need to apply the styling that was created at the weekend.

Humidity Measurement

We’ve established that the DHT022 chips which we use in the standard Luftdaten device model have challenges in working in our maritime climate. They get saturated and stop reporting meaningful values. There is a fix which is to use BME380 chips in their place. These will continue to give humidity and temperature readings, plus pressure, but due to the different technology used will handle the humidity better. Knowing local humidity is important (see weather data below). So, we need to adapt the design of all new devices to use these chips, and retrofit the existing devices with the new chips.

Placement of new devices

We launched in February with a target of 50 sensors by the end of June and 100 by the end of the year. So far attendees have built 55 devices of which 34 are currently, or have recently been, live. That leaves 21 in people’s hands that are still to be registered and turned on. We’re offering help to those hosts to make them live.

Further, with the generous sponsorship of Converged, Codify, and now IFB we will shortly build 30 more devices, and that will take us to a total of 85. We’ve had an approach by a local company who may be able to sponsor another 40. So, it looks like we will soon exceed the 100 target. Where do we locate these new ones? We need to have a plan to strategically place those around the city where they would be most useful which is where the map, above, comes in.

Community plus council?

We really want to work with the local authority on several aspects of the project. It’s not them versus us. We all gain by working together. There are several areas that we could collaborate on, in addition to the strategic placement of future devices.

For example, we’ve been in discussions with the local authority’s education service with a view to siting a box on every one of the 60 schools in the city. That would take us to about 185 devices – far in excess of the target. Doing that needs funding, and while the technology challenge to get them on the network is trivial, ensuring that the devices survive on the exterior of the buildings might be a challenge.

Also, we’ve asked but had no response to our request to co-locate one of our devices on a roadside monitoring station which would allow us to check the correlation between the outputs of the two. We need to pursue that again.

Comparing our data suggests that we can more than fill in gaps in the local council’s data. The map of the central part of Aberdeen in the image above, shows all of the six official sensors (green) and 12 of the 24 community sensors that we have in the city (in red). You can also see great gaps where there are no sensors which again shows the need for strategic placement of the new ones.

We’ve calculated that with a hundred sensors we’d have 84,096,000 data observations per year for the city, all as open data. The local authority, with six sensors each publishing three items of data hourly, have 157,680 readings per annum – which is 0.18% of the community readings (and if we reach 185 devices then ACC’s data is about 0.10% or 1/1000th of the community data) and the latter of course, besides being properly open-licensed, has much greater granularity and geographic spread.

Weather data

We need to ensure that we gather historic and new weather data and use that to check if adjustments are needed to PM values. Given that the one-person team who was going to work on this at CTC16 disappeared, we need to first set up that weather data gathering, then apply some algorithms to adjust the data when needed, then make that data available.

Engagement with Academia

We need to get the two local universities aboard, particularly on the data science work. We have some academics and post-grads who attend our events, but how do we get the data used in classes and projects? How do we attract more students to work with us? And , again we need to get schools to only hosting the devices but the pupils using the data to understand their local environment?

The cool stuff

Finally, we when we have the data collected, cleaned, and curated, and APIs in place (from the green up through orange to red layers below) we can start to build some cool things (the blue layers).

These might include, but are not limited to:

data science-driven predictive models of forecast AQ in local areas,
public health alerts,
mobile apps to guide you where it is safe to walk, cycle, jog or suggest cleaner routes to school for children,
logging AQ over time and measuring changes,
correlating local AQ with admissions to hospital of cases of COPD and other health conditions
inform debate and the formulation of local government strategy and policy.

As we saw at CTC16, we could also provide the basis for people to innovate using the data. One great example was the hacked LED table-top lamp which changes colour depending on the AQ outside. Others want to develop personalised dashboards.

The possibilities, as they say, are endless.

Help us make Aberdeen’s Air Quality Better

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.

Book a ticket now!