Are you using TTN for civic / community projects?

Use Cases
1

Hi there,
I am keen to talk to other people who are using IoT for civic / community projects, especially if you are sharing your data with other people or groups.
This is for a research project looking at how people / organisations share data.
Many thanks, Mark

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Yes! I use it to share airborne particulate matter measurements with the http://sensor.community citizen science platform. Also using TTN to monitor occupation of bat boxes in a city in the Netherlands, this data is not currently publicly available.

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Hi!
I’m doing a research on the same field as you, how to engage students in participatory citizenship strategies using IoT. You can find a map of my CO2 sensor node deployed at my school in my website: .: SMART SCHOOL LAB :..
Best regards,
Manuel Santos

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Hi @mjssantos - thanks for getting in touch. Your projects and the smart school lab sounds great.

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Thanks @bertrik - the sensor.community site looks interesting. I see someone is using it in my home town! Does it use devices on TTN or is it only wifi?
I didn’t know about Amsterdam’s bat boxes. Have you seen this: This Dutch town uses high-tech streetlights to keep its bats happy

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You may also like https://twitter.com/BatdarUK

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@mark-stanley I think there are quite a few projects already that use TTN with sensor.community, but they themselves don’t have an “official” way of connecting to TTN. So basically data transferred from the node to TTN using a custom encoding method, then from TTN to sensor.community using some kind of forwarder/integration that knows how to handle the custom encoding. I think sensor.community is currently the biggest citizen science project, with over 15000 sensor all over the world.

@mjssantos Sensor.community also has a “sensors2schools” sub-project. I think they are working on figuring out how to make various smaller projects benefit from each other, share ideas, etc. CO2/ventilation has become a major point of interest recently. They are discussing this on their chat server at https://chat.sensor.community/

Some of the things I’ve learned personally about community / citizen science projects:

  • Really involving people helps a lot, not just handing them a “box”, but making people invest a little of their own time in assembling their own sensor, so it really becomes their sensor.
  • Good visualisation is important so everyone can see their own data in a clear way, even if it’s just a few pixels on a map, but they are “your pixels” :).
  • A large factor in the success of community projects is not just technology, but also how people communicate/cooperate. Sounds obvious maybe.
  • The technology people generally don’t really communicate well, e.g. not able to agree on a standard, rather invent your own. Often finding solutions without understanding the problem. I know I suffer from this too sometimes.
  • You can actually have impact when measuring stuff. If you have (for example) 10 particulate matter stations in a city and perhaps creating some publicity around it, local government can no longer simply ignore you. So you can create awareness, positive cooperation, etc.
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Thanks @mark-stanley!!! Smart School Lab goals are Smart Cities and Smart Schools. We deal with school and municipalities so both can learn collaboratively. We develop citizenship strategies, supported by collective awareness digital platforms, so we can do participatory data collection from sensors, microcontrollers and IoT.

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I have put together a quick survey - I would be grateful if you would take part: https://forms.gle/NDpJ7BwhUeNMaAt26

Many thanks, Mark