By empowering communities to collect data from their local environment and contribute to an interactive, worldwide environmental database, the folks behind the Smart Citizen Kit are enabling a whole new level of participation from citizen scientists.
It's almost impossible to talk about this project without going overboard on buzzwords, because the Smart Citizen Kit environmental monitoring platform is not only campaigning for funding at Kickstarter, it also has an open-source Arduino-compatible hardware design, an open-source API, and includes a mobile app and an interactive, crowdsourced data visualization available online.
Oh yeah, and the hardware is WiFi-enabled, available as a DIY kit and can be powered by solar cells. What's not to like?
"Smart Citizen is a platform to generate participatory processes of the people in the cities. Connecting data, people and knowledge, the objective of the platform is to serve as a node for building productive open indicators and distributed tools, and thereafter the collective construction of the city for its own inhabitants."
The platform has three distinct components, with the hardware at the heart of it consisting of environmental sensors and a data processing board, which can measure and log temperature, humidity, air composition (CO and NO2), sound levels, and light intensity. The data-processing unit then wirelessly streams the sensor information, which can be viewed on the second component, the Smart Citizen website (where it can also be viewed or shared by other users), or accessed with the third component, a mobile app.
150 Smart Citizen units are already deployed around Barcelona, Spain, but in order to give this project the boost it deserves, the team has turned to crowdfunding.
Their Kickstarter campaign is well on their way to their initial goal of $50,000, which will enable the team to purchase the hardware components in larger quantity (and a cheaper cost) and produce more assembled units, thereby enabling more users and more data, as well as finish the mobile app (and perhaps build an Android version). They are also working to develop additional sensors that could be used for tracking energy consumption, testing of soil and water, measuring EMFs, and monitoring of biometrics.
Find out more details about the components and the project at Smart Citizen.