Community-Empowered Air Quality Monitoring System

TL;DR

This paper presents a community-driven air quality monitoring system that integrates diverse data sources to empower residents, facilitate regulatory discussions, and support policy change through scientific evidence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel participatory system combining heterogeneous data for community empowerment and environmental advocacy.

Findings

The system provides strong scientific evidence through integrated data.

Community engagement encourages discussions with regulators.

The system empowers residents to influence policy decisions.

Abstract

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.