EU’s H2020 project Making Sense produced recently the documentary “Citizen Science Revolution”, in which IAAC participated, aimed at showing the work done by empowered citizens in Barcelona, Pristina and Amsterdam who addressed environmental issues through technology.
Can a low cost sensor change the reality of a city? And dozens of them? In the spring of 2016, different groups of citizens concerned about noise pollution, air quality and gamma radiation in their neighborhoods began to collect data with the Smart Citizen Kit to measure the scope of their problems and try to find solutions. At first, governments do not recognize the data as valid because they do not come from official sensors. But the revolution of citizen science is unstoppable.
About Making Sense & Smart Citizen
Smart Citizen is a platform to generate participatory processes of people in the cities. Connecting data, people and knowledge, the objective of the platform is to serve as a node for building productive and open indicators, and distributed tools, and thereafter the collective construction of the city for its own inhabitants.
Making Sense is a EU project under the H2020 research framework. IAAC participated in this initiative aiming to show how open source software, hardware, digital maker practices and open design can be effectively used by local communities to appropriate their own technological sensing tools, make sense of their environments and address pressing environmental problems in air, water, soil and sound pollution. Over the past two years, hundreds of local citizens have been actively engaged in citizen science all over Europe.
