As part of an ongoing series From The Bottom-Up, we look at the participants of MakingSenseEU across Europe, we shed the light on how, why and what motivates communities of bottom-up citizen scientists

(Make sure you press the ‘CC’ button for subtitles)

The post A different kind of citizenship appeared first on Making Sense.

Hopefully nothing remotely as catastrophic as the Chernobyl or the Fukushima disaster will ever happen again. However, if you live in the proximity of a nuclear power plant, you might want to have access to reliable data about any variation of radiation levels in your neighbourhood.

The developers of GammaSense believe that citizens should have at home the tools and means to monitor radiation levels. Immediately, inexpensively and with a fair level of accuracy.

The team found out that it is possible to use devices with a CCD or CMOS-based camera as gamma-detectors. Research by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation has indeed demonstrated a correlation between the amount of gamma radiation and the number of white spots and streaks that appear in photos taken by phone which cameras have been covered with black tape.

The aim of the GammaSense project is to develop an open emergency-infrastructure that can be deployed within minutes, using only your laptop or smartphone and a piece of black tape.

When you cover your camera with a piece of aluminum foil, which is covered with black tape, you can start measuring. Cameras and webcams can thus capture the Gammas radiation and convert them into one unit per minute. This allows large increases to be captured and plotted on a map.

The experimental platform is still in development and being tested through a series of workshops with citizens, experts and policy officers who live in the vicinity of a nuclear plant. The workshops are also organized in cooperation with municipalities, RIVM (The Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment), WISE International (a NGO that is campaigning for cleaner energy since 1978) and Waag Society (the motor behind the project.)

GammaSense is the third Amsterdam-based pilot of Making Sense, a CAPS project with participating pilots in Barcelona, Pristina and Amsterdam. Making Sense’s key objective is to empower people with technology that allows them to get a more hands-on understanding of their immediate environment. Next to awareness on the topic, it will show the potential of citizen-driven data collection, which eventually leads to people making more informed decisions on behavior in their environment.

The pilot version of the radiation monitoring tool is available at www.gammasense.org

I asked René Post and Ivonne Jansen-Dings from the Waag Society in Amsterdam to tell us more about GammaSense:

Hi Ivonne and René! I’m surprised at how simple measuring gamma radiation is. I just open the GammaSense page, put black tape on my webcam and that’s it. Or did i miss something? Is it magic? How can it be that simple? Where do you get the data for the measurements?

No, you are completely right, that is it. It is known since 5-6 years that gamma rays produce white dots on CMOS-based cameras. By completely covering the eye of the camera with black tape, all visible light is blacked out. The remaining light that is registered by the camera, is a combination of faulty pixels (degeneration over time) and background noise. This background noise normally consists of a very low level of natural gamma radiation. Since you can look at gamma rays as supercharged light particles, anything less then centimeters of lead will not stop them. So the black tape means nothing to the gamma rays, and functions like a filter to block out all other forms of light.

With a base-measurement, it is possible to measure the combination of the degradation of the camera and the background noise. When we have that value, and we see sharp increases of white dots, we know it must be due to what we call ‘man-made radiation’.

What the gammasense-platform is doing, is counting the white dots per image from the video- stream, and from that we calculate a ‘counts per minute’: the number of occurrences per minute. This is exactly what the traditional measuring device for gamma radiation, a Geiger-Müller tube, is doing. So by a completely different (digital) route, we have measured something that could only be done before by the analogue Geiger-Müller tubes.

The advantages of this method are that the sensors are already in our homes on the day that they might be useful. The disadvantages, are that the sensitivity of the webcam is lower compared to standard measuring devices. Several labs have performed comparative research and they showed that the usefulness of the mechanism is actually quite good, and seems to be more dependent on the quality of the formulas that are implemented to analyze the stills.

In the project, we aim for a long-term collaborative strategy, by open innovation on Github. We have compiled a first version that runs on Chrome and are in the process now of releasing the formula that comes out of analyzing the results from data-dumps we have performed at the nuclear lab of the RIVM in Bilthoven, the Dutch official institute for environmental research.

Gammasense.org is the first website on the Internet that makes it possible to measure gamma radiation directly, without installing an app. As underlying protocol, we rely on WebRTC.

Another unique feature is that apart from the site and formula, the data is open as well. The idea is that when something happens in say France in 2021, people can instantly copy the files and begin to mobilize their local environment to join in the measurements. Institutions can jump in, and do calibrations for certain types of phones, which will make it very easy to interpret sections of the data because they all used gammasense.org to upload their data.

In one of the blog posts you write “Information about incidents concerning nuclear radiation usually takes around 3 days to reach citizens.”I had no idea it took such a long time. Do you know why citizens are not informed faster?

It is an combination of bureaucracy, fear of causing panic, unavailability of facts, cross-border communication etc.

Won’t people obsess and worry too much whenever they notice small discrepancies in measurements from one day to another or from on street to another? Aren’t you afraid of spreading paranoia? Of seeing people desert certain areas of a city?

We do have a responsibility to deliver a useful tool. So the relatively large measurement error forces us to be really careful with statements. If ‘1’ is OK, then ’10’ means something could be happening, ‘100’ something is surely happening and ‘1000’ please leave the area. That is why we need to do this together with the institutions that are already responsible for delivering the kind of data on a daily basis to the authorities and the public.

By now, i think you’ve done workshops in the cities of Bergen op Zoom, Eindhoven and Maastricht. Are these events just about demo-ing the technology and showing people to use it? Could you describe what happens during the workshops?

The workshops were intended as co-creation sessions, and to some extend they functioned that way. We quickly learned though that at first we assumed way too much knowledge: in the first workshop we had an audience that for a large part didn’t have the faintest idea what gamma radiation could be. Something to do with wifi or smartphones, was the general feeling. What a nuclear power plant was, what it produced and why, most people in the room had no idea. So we did get some usable feedback, but the phrase co-creation was not at all times completely justified. But in another way, it made it very clear to us that this is the level of knowledge that we need to adapt the tool to.

How do people react? Do you feel that citizens have different concerns from one city to another? Different levels of awareness?

In some cities, like Bergen op Zoom (in the vicinity of the nuclear power plant in Doel) and Maastricht (not too far from the plant in Tihange), there was much more awareness compared to Eindhoven, which is a bit further away.

Since the tool was still in its infancy, we had more theoretical discussions. The fact that the RIVM and WISE International were there as well to present their take on the matter greatly helped the trust people had in the project that Waag Society was carrying out.

What can people do with the knowledge acquired through the workshops? What happens after the workshop?

We hope the workshops strengthen a DIY-mentality and raise awareness of the fact that when we need data, we can quickly organize ourselves and generate it together. People are being kept informed through our newsletter on the progress of the tool. For instance, with the incorporation of WebRTC into iOS coming september, all iPhones will be able to run the tool as well.

This project is the third Amsterdam-based pilot of the Making Sense program, could you sum up briefly what the previous pilots were about?

The first pilot was aimed at DIY air-quality measurement with civilians who lived on certain streets in Amsterdam that were among the most polluted in the Netherlands.

The second pilot was called Smart Kids Lab, where schoolchildren where shown how to measure their environment with very simple means. Examples where the acid in water-meter and the particulates meter for fine dust particles in the air.

Thanks Ivonne and René!

Original article by Régine Debatty at we-make-money-not-art.com

The post Gamma Sense. Open, fast and free gamma radiation monitoring for citizens appeared first on Making Sense.

After two intensive months of systematic measurements, the Research and Monitoring Committee, led by activists of Peer Educators Network and Science for Change Kosovo Movement, have completed the measurements which took place in several locations: in Plemetina, a neighborhood located few kilometers outside Prishtina, just nearby the coal-powered Power Plants Kosovo A and B. Other locations such as Obilic, Krusevc and Fushe Kosova, which also are located nearby the power plants, have been regularly monitored. In addition to this, a small team of the Research and Monitoring Committee, led by our activist and ecology student – Adhurim Hoxha, is running a research study on bio-indicators (i.e. lichens) aiming to identify the impact of air pollution.
As part of our efforts to bring the data closer to citizens and in ‘campagnable’ formats, we launched a call for teams to join our first Hackathon: Visualizing Air Pollution. In just 1 week, we received close to 50 applications from tech community across Kosovo and beyond, where only five teams had the opportunity to join the Hackathon and develop a minimum viable product. Hackathon served as a space to bring together developers, designers, artists, activists and environmental students, and together develop variety of data visualizations models. It was for the first time that in Kosovo such an event takes place. The Hackathon has concluded this Sunday afternoon—an immense difficult work was prepared by the Judging Panel to select the winner of the Hackathon—with the GX Data team winning the prize, and rolling up the sleeves to deliver the full data visualization product in the upcoming weeks.
Full social media coverage of the Hackathon can be followed in the Facebook pages of Science for Change Kosovo Movement and Peer Educators Network.

#ClimateDiplomacyWeek

Between 23-30 June 2017, European Union Office in Kosovo has organized Climate Diplomacy Week, bringing together the representatives of EU Member States, representatives of Kosovo institutions, civil society and general public in Kosovo to raise awareness on climate change topics through a series of events including: exhibitions, round-table discussions, movie screenings, drawing/video competition for students etc. Peer Educators Network and Science for Change Kosovo have presented “Making Sense EU” project by organizing street-happenings, where activists and citizens met face-to-face to speak about air pollution and ways they can contribute to reduce it.
Full coverage of the Climate Diplomacy Week can be found under the hashtag (see the title) and in Facebook page of European Union Office in Kosovo.

The post From targeted measurements to campaignable data & more appeared first on Making Sense.

REsite invited us to give a hands-on workshop on citizens science, a topic that Waag is working on for quite some time now, with the latest Making Sense and Do-It-Together-Science projects as the main activities in this domain. Making Sense looks for methods and open source technology to empower communities in measuring their environment. And Making Sense was what we represented in Prague.

Prague, as many other European cities, is facing more and more environmental problems with the air- and water quality. So we took the water topic as a starting point to trigger the participants in building their own open-source webcam spectro-photometer that was developed for Waag’s BioHack Academy. The idea of this DIY kit is that if you shine light through water and ‘break’ the light, this results in a certain spectrum. This spectrum changes when things like minerals or other colour absorbing materials are present in water. So we looked at water quality in Prague and compared many liquids: from our own collected water from the Vlatva river, to the national liquid of pilsner.

Like many other citizens science experiments, the result is sometimes hard to make sense of, but triggers a bigger discussion about the role of citizens in our future cities. This is also what happened in Prague. Questions like: ‘How to engage with citizens in designing the ‘Smart City’, and ‘Why should we ask citizens to do this?’ came up. Waag Society sees ‘Smart Citizens’ as crucial in this future. In co-creation with many stakeholders we see that citizens bring an essential narrative to the discussion of the quality of living in our city. Hopefully this inspired some (future) architects to look more at combining bottom-up and community driven initiatives with their city planning and designing of the public space.

The conference ended with an inspiring keynote from Teddy Cruz, American architect and Professor at University of California, San Diego. Cruz is someone who sees the urge for community engagement in designing cities for the future. Because, as he claims: ‘we should rethink urban development from the bottom up, to change top-down policy’. That message supports the Smart Citizen in co-designing the future of the city, and that’s something we warmly welcome!

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Last two months were immensely busy in Kosovo. In the beginning of May, Kosovo Government lost a no-confidence vote, setting the scene for an early national elections which were held on 11 June, thus leaving only 10 days campaign for political parties. To use this opportunity, and to advocate for putting air pollution and environmental problems in the programmes of political parties, Peer Educators Network and Science for Change Kosovo Movement started immediately to gear up its campaigning committee. Under the slogan #VoteForCleanAir, written in white boards held by the mannequins and positioned in the main square of Prishtina, the campaign asked citizens to pressure at candidates of political parties for putting air pollution as priority in their campaign programmes. Along with the mannequins, activists were distributing voting ballots to citizens, asking them to #VoteForCleanAir. Moreover, activists were running real-time measurements in the square, demonstrating to citizens the methodology of data collection as well as the meaning of data. The action has received a nation-wide media coverage. Nonetheless, Peer Educators Network and Science for Change Kosovo Movement has tried also to organize a public debate with representatives of all political parties around the topic of air pollution. We have sent an invitation to political parties, but none of them have accepted the invitation to join the debate, although the debate would have been moderated by Jeta Xharra, one of the most known TV anchor in Kosovo. Perhaps it was too challenging as a topic?!

Targeted measurements

The Research and Monitoring Committee, led by activists of Peer Educators Network and Science for Change Kosovo Movement, is running systematic measurements in several locations: in Plemetina, a neighborhood located few kilometers outside Prishtina, just nearby the coal-powered Power Plants Kosovo A and B. Other locations such as Obilic, Krusevc and Fushe Kosova, which also are located nearby the power plants, are regularly being monitored. The measurements in the above-mentioned locations are being done through digital Airbeam sensors in regular schedules twice a day – morning and afternoon. In addition to this, a small team of the Research and Monitoring Committee, led by our activist and ecology student – Adhurim Hoxha, is running a research study on bio-indicators (i.e. lichens) aiming to identify the impact of air pollution.

A small victory, but meaningful one!

Kosovo Environmental Protection Agency (KEPA) is the responsible agency for monitoring air quality at national level in Kosovo and informing citizens about levels of air pollution. But KEPA, which function under Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning, has been silent since 2016, not publishing any data in their website for 2017. Concerned with their silence and lack of responsibility, Science for Change Kosovo Movement and Peer Educators Network, using Facebook, started to call KEPA’s attention and advocating for data transparency around air pollution. On 29 May, only four days after our call, they published all the data in their official website, for the period of January-April 2017. A small victory, but a meaningful one which pushes us one step further towards our aim – to democratise the air in Kosovo.

The post Small victory, campaign street action, air pollution measurements and more… appeared first on Making Sense.

As part of an ongoing series From The Bottom-Up, we look at the participants of MakingSenseEU across Europe, we shed the light on how, why and what motivates communities of bottom-up citizen scientists

(Make sure you press the ‘CC’ button for subtitles)

The post Awareness, action and change appeared first on Making Sense.

As part of an ongoing series From The Bottom-Up, we look at the participants of MakingSenseEU across Europe, we shed the light on how, why and what motivates communities of bottom-up citizen scientists

(Make sure you press the ‘CC’ button for subtitles)

The post Citizen Scientists in Barcelona appeared first on Making Sense.

Over the past few weeks, residents in the Placa have been gathering data with their Smart Citizen Kits, and making notes in their notebooks, comparing digital data with the specific things we saw and heard.

After our sensing period, we printed up graphs with the data gathered from all of the Smart Citizen Kits, and overlayed the times of the day to get a better sense of when noise levels were at their highest and lowest. We also compared the data we collected from the data gathered from Barcelona City Council’s sensors. We were amazed at how high the noise levels were on a consistent basis.

Our next step is to look at what to do with this data. We were visited by the folks from 300.000km/s, a firm of architects, urban planners and engineers, who joined us to start a conversation about how to use big data to paint a picture of Barcelona. They demonstrated ways of visualizing data in order to create different ways of seeing and understanding the city, including a map that marked a location in the city each time it was tagged on social media. This started some great conversations within our group about what kind of stories we are trying to tell about Placa del Sol, and about how we use the square. It also demonstrated the power of visuals to open doors for communication.

Art and design were part of another workshop we had with the design team Domestic Data Streamers. They showed us some of their innovative data visualization projects, and then engaged Placa del Sol residents in an activity to think about how to share the data findings, who we want to communicate with, and what we are hoping to achieve. This was a great first step to think creatively about our data and how it can be used to make a real change in the community.

Next steps? Stay tuned as we start to map a history of Placa del Sol and decide what we want our community to look like!

The post Art as a driver to tackle pollution issues appeared first on Making Sense.

At the end of Making Sense we aim to build a Minimum Viable Open Manifesto to provide other projects and their communities with our own insights to better devise citizen engagement strategies and sustainable action plans. The process is currently open and ongoing and we accept all contributions from all possible sources to keep on amassing new lessons.

These are some lessons on the participatory and community building side of Making Sense, mainly harvested and developed from the activities and debates that took place in the past year.

A big thanks to Liz Sanders and Mercé Grael for helping us jumpstart it. More to follow!

A MINIMUM VIABLE OPEN MANIFESTO

Part 2

Standardize tools for documentation, data collection and reporting as soon as possible.

Start by embracing a mindset of minimum viability in all process and tools. Understand that a shared process or tool that is used in real time and works across all contexts will ensure that insights can be shared along the process of community building and sustaining. This will help all partners and engaged citizens to integrate both sensor data and human perceptions in a similar fashion for instance. Which in turn will help everyone to better interpret, visualize, enrich and disambiguate the captured information, and we will get common points of understanding and comparison. One way of doing it is making documentation as easy as possible to interpret and apply in multiple contexts and by people with different levels of expertise wherever and whenever possible.

Explore and iterate alternative ways to use documentation and the data itself.

In standardizing processes and tools we should never neglect experimentation and iteration in the ways we present and use our data and documentation. Multiplying these will mean that citizens and other stakeholder ultimately have different entry points into our outputs. Its usefulness is always the key we need to consider. If what we get out of our crowdsensing is not readable and usable by those who should benefit more from it, we need to rethink and iterate more the sense making part of the crowdsensing as a whole. We will often need embedded technical to social translation mechanisms by design, and this not a bad thing if done within an open fashion.

Celebrate the difference between pilot and testbed contexts.

Pilot testbeds can be characterized by incredibly diverse material conditions, issues and people. Communities in each place can start and end with completely different resources, existing technical solutions, social awareness platforms, or even issue driven community champions. This situation poses challenges not only for common tools and processes, but also for choosing action and documentation strategies. But it will also provide tremendous opportunities for the outputs as they become richer through the granularity of testbeds, the diversity of best practices and lessons learned across contexts, and above all, the possibilities for cross fertilization between testbeds.

Plan to expand and enrich the project over time with potential spin-offs and forks.

Go after possibilities to make your project grow from its initial context and players. Use specific communities to get to others. Engage children to engage parents and teachers for example. Seek connections with other individual or collective actors even if they are not in synch with all your goals. Consider starting by adding like minded people or organizations, profiting from them to complement your technical or communication teams for instance. Bring in more diversity as you integrate those who came before. Create links with collective players already established in the physical or conceptual territories you want to work in, and turn to them for expanding your activities and influence. Aggregate external innovators, storytellers, curators of information, media influencers, local champions, and others, and stimulate them to spin or fork parts or the entirety of your project.

Build new governance models and don’t be afraid of divergent and unpredictable outcomes.

Open and inclusive relationships between citizens, communities, NGOs, public administrations, companies and others, are to be encouraged and supported towards common goals. This entails an environment of mutual respect between citizens, experts, decision-makers, and whomever else get’s involved, together with availability to exchange views and to change the issues at stake. But consensus needs not to be the only model of governance and interaction in projects like ours. We need to allow for mutual acknowledgment of competing and divergent ideas of common good. And we need to support ‘sharing of power’ frameworks where all involved allow the outcomes to be unpredictable and with present and future substantial consequences.

Engage as many forms of knowledge that you can in a transdisciplinary way.

Transdisciplinarity generates comprehensive knowledge for solving concrete issues through collaborative platforms, which operate both horizontally, to involve and mix different areas of expertise such as design, computer science, IT development, social sciences, environmental sciences, etc, and vertically, to include stakeholders and non expert knowledge from civil society, may it be from institutional private and public sectors, or plain lay citizens dealing with vernacular knowledge and know-how. Bringing together everyone interested in this mix and keeping their involvement is a key challenge to be tackled from the beginning. Not all forms of knowledge are created equal but they all deserve an opportunity on the clear assessment of problems and their possible solutions.

Have we missed something out? Let us know on Twitter – #MakingSenseEU

The post Towards a Minimum Viable Open Manifesto #3 appeared first on Making Sense.

At the end of Making Sense we aim to build a Minimum Viable Open Manifesto to provide other projects and their communities with our own insights to better devise citizen engagement strategies and sustainable action plans. The process is currently open and ongoing and we accept all contributions from all possible sources to keep on amassing new lessons.

These are some lessons on the participatory and community building side of Making Sense, mainly harvested and developed from the activities and debates that took place in the past year.

A big thanks to Liz Sanders and Mercé Grael for helping us jumpstart it. More to follow!

A MINIMUM VIABLE OPEN MANIFESTO

Part 2

Envision tools and processes that can be directly appropriated and hacked.

Start by involving citizens and their communities in all possible processes from your first actions onward. Bringing them in at later stages may be a good choice in some cases, but if you can, you should open all your activities at the beginning and insist on keeping them open until the end. Promote things that everyone can use, hack and reinvent directly, and remember to mention that you trust them with this type of processes. Reflect on the fact that sometimes technical efficiency and quality are not the most adequate criteria to allow for inclusion and appropriation. If done right, this usually leads to non experts acquiring new skills that in turn will strengthen their autonomy and allow new ventures. In the end you should always make it simple for citizens and their communities to continue without your support.

Be aware of how the lack of technical skills can hamper the impact of your tools.

Average to high levels of technical proficiency are still needed and even expected from citizens and communities to operate and maintain most of the technical tools we develop. But if they are expected to get such tools successfully running we need to grant them access to material, technical and methodological resources and assistance they can easily access online or offline while working on their own or within their communities. Providing such advice in the form of online video or interactive tutorials is often more useful than creating technical reports and guidelines. Offering starter kits as onboarding tools with step-by-step instructions of a first batch of projects with a growing level of difficulty might also be a good option to stimulate skills.

Always consider knowledge, cultural, economic or contextual asymmetries.

Do not assume that most citizens can or will engage in equal terms in the technical or social activities you want them to be part of. We often need to start by arguing about who is or should be part of the community we’re aiming to engage or build. And we need to discuss simple things beforehand, such as if our onboarding messages should be mainly technical, issue-based, or both for instance. Take into account possibly existing asymmetric resource distributions that may hinder participation. If disregarded they can jeopardize good work or social bonds inside the project. Also, never ignore that local and contextual circumstances in which you establish your activities might matter in ways that you do not plan for, and can turn into serious material or symbolic constraints to participatory sensing.

Account for, plan and promote multiple forms of diversity and inclusion.

Start by considering and reflecting about gender, education, ethnicity, family composition, income or geographical origin of the citizens and communities you want to engage. These will impact the capabilities or intentions some of your community members have and above all the type of collective you’re aiming for. Sometimes you might need to adapt or restrict original plans if this becomes the only way to avoid building unidimensional groups of citizens, which might turn your project into a flat venture at the social level. Consider meet-up places where your target citizens or communities are familiar with as they already get together there, and lower potential barriers for social interaction such as meeting hours or associated fees, which may exclude people with low income, childcare responsibilities, special working schedules, etc.

Explore all possible social spaces and media channels for community engagement.

Online forms of communication and engagement are efficient and can easily expand our outreach activities. We should always try to report what we do through specific or general online platforms. And citizens can easily share our activities and their engagement through individual social media accounts using dedicated hashtags for example. But people often like to be with other people and exchange experiences and ways of thinking and doing. Face-to-face meetings can show us how strong and active our communities of interest and practice can be. Possible activities to explore can be simple meet-ups, committees of participating citizens that serve as decision-making teams, bootcamps with social and technical trainings, or even targeted guerrilla street interventions.

Consider mixing physical and digital worlds to maximize your interactions and outputs.

We should never neglect the power of blending online with offline interactions and all the good unplanned things that may emerge. This kind of mix needs to be a constant in our community building efforts. Some citizens may be more comfortable meeting others in person. And computer mediated interaction may be the preferred option for others. But they don’t need to be disconnected from each other if we envision good middle ground activities that feed and combine both worlds and give them chance to interact. Moreover, using shared outputs for the two can be a good solution to tackle resource constraints and maximize efforts. A hard copy newsletter that can be disseminated in face to face public events can also become a targeted blogpost or social media publication, and the other way around.

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