Community and citizen science are foundational to my vision for AirGradient. But for quite some time now, I’ve noticed something that needs to be called out: the increasing use of ‘community air monitoring’ and ‘citizen science’ by many air sensor companies. While the words sound great, I wonder:
I just wrote and published this piece and would be quite interested to hear opinions from the community.
Especially how we should deal with other companies that utilize our (free) data but don’t want to share the data from their own monitors in return.
I’ll read this more in detail later Achim - but well done for calling it out!
Here’s my unit on the IQAir App:
Unidentified Contributor? Really?
It seems AirGradient sites are listed as Unidentified Government contributors - and PurpleAirs are marked as “Anonymous” but can be claimed.
They certainly do try and hide where their displayed data is coming from - except for official EPA sources!
Perhaps we/someone can do an analysis such as the one EPIC produced in the guidance for applicants for their grants?(sorry this blog doesn’t allow me to add the link here)
We - the Citizen Science Air Quality CoP, will certainly be adding something similar in our “Scaling-up” citizen science global initiative.
Thanks for speaking out about this. Part of the reason I went with an AirGradient monitor was the open source/community sharing aspect. I appreciate that you walk the talk!
It is indeed disheartening to know that the data from the units that we have set up in our communities were shared by a certain company (one called out above) but with no attributions as to the data owner and contributor. The local Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office and the Environment Bureau thought the data being shared on the company’s website was owned by the said company. Without attribution, there is not enough information to trust the data source and it is demoralizing for those communities contributors to have their efforts mistakenly attributed to someone else. Thanks Achim for the support to open data and citizen science.
Does this issue still persist @Kieran ? IQAir’s knowledge base says that AirGradient stations can be claimed as well. I can’t send the link to the webpage here, but a Google search with “IQAir AirGradient” will get you to the page.
IQAir now pulls the data through our data partner OpenAQ (and not directly from us anymore) but is currently violating OpenAQs passthrough attribution requirements.
OpenAQ is in touch with IQAir to rectify this until the end of this month and I believe then there should be no manual “claiming” of stations necessary. IQAir should then properly and automatically show the correct contributor name.
Right now IQAir website is still asking to “claim” AirGradient air quality monitors while showing most of the contributors as anonymous contributors apart from Government contributors. Although some individual stations show the name of the contributor but only the name, no other details.
