Public Institutions and Trust: Developing Community Data Assets
Presented By: Angela Eaton, Safecast
Summary: Safecast believes that people make better health and living decisions when individuals self-generate and publicly share environmental data. As a community-contributed data platform, Safecast emphasizes raw data, transparent collection, air quality standards that allow data sets to be used in combination, and free data access to provide the greatest relevance to communities and individuals.
This abstract proposal centers on Safecast’s outdoor air quality monitoring efforts with the Los Angeles Public Library, a system of 72 branches and Pasadena Public Library, with 9 branches. The pilot project places 23 monitors at branches where librarians will train and nurture local groups of environmental scientists to review and respond to real time localized data collected at their branch and across Los Angeles and Pasadena. Network density, then, is not about evenly spreading numbers of units in a quadrant or siting monitors at known problem spots. By letting the librarians choose where monitoring takes place, the data becomes personalized - a representation of air quality in numbers that is directly experienced by each neighborhood.
Librarians are challenged to stay relevant in an age where online information eclipses what can be stored within its walls. As the branches are already trusted information, meeting, and discussion spaces, the Los Angeles and Pasadena Public Libraries are successfully using the physical “information space” to extend into the online “information space.” In this way data generated from these monitors is co-created by the community and the civic-funded organizations. Trust and access between the community and the Library are increased and scientists within the community will make use of the data to whatever ends best suits their goals for better air quality. Safecast is proud to support neighborhoods, individuals, and organizations in producing reliable environmental data and we are excited to engage ASIC participants to better serve this goal.