Mozfest 2019 writeup: Using IoT to Measure Outdoor Air Quality in Africa
As part of Mozfest 2019, I attended a session in the Openness space called ‘Using IoT to Measure Outdoor Air Quality in Africa’. The session was going to be led by Warukira Theuri who wasn’t able to make it* (for reasons I learned later which I’ll add a note about below).
There were about a dozen of us gathered so in the spirit of Mozfest... we kind of put our own session together on the topic.
This post is to document what was discussed. I take no credit for the topic, and advise anyone interested to follow/contact Warukira who is clearly an amazingly talented and smart young woman.
The session was facilitated using techniques I’ve picked up through my design jam facilitation days. The basic steps are:
Check in - a quick round of introductions for people to say their name, who they are and what they hope to get out of the session
Ideation - individually, everyone has 10 minutes to write down their thoughts on the topic. These could be challenges, questions or general comments
Clustering - what themes arise from people’s notes?
Discussion - normally in a design jam we would want to format the themes into ‘how might we?’ statements to help frame the future prototyping and research.
Discussion part 2 - taking the role of the critic, what are the questions, new provocations, criticisms we can think of?
Ideation - based on the themes that have been identified, what could help address these issues?
Check out - we swap contacts/social media handles and say ‘til next time!’
What themes came up?
As a group we noticed our thoughts and questions could be divided into a couple of core themes:
What standards do we build IoT products to?
Should we look to EU standards?
Questions were raised around ipv6 and general security of devices
Are there lessons from environmental tech for protecting and monitoring endangered wildlife for privacy paradigms? e.g. rhino tracking
How can we ensure quality of data created by IoT devices?
Does it match with quality of other public data assets?
What is the right hardware?
How do we learn to make the hardware?
Are there IoT devices that can boost wireless strength (to help deal with issue of lack of connectivity in rural areas)
Are there any accessible courses to learn how to program for IoT?
A diagram of our ideas mapping can be found here: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1U_OVPPGElw0b3F4T0cLANYlDUDEyuFu68nQDxPtqrNA/edit?usp=sharing
Some provocations...
“OK, the air sucks - now what?”
This connected to question about how one turns data into action. Reporting that pollution levels have changed is one thing but is that enough to convince local councils? Is there a social/political organising aspect to support community tech?
Who else is doing this around the world - can we work in solidarity?
What are models of successful activism [informed by data obtained from open source IoT]
IoT will collect data for AI. Where does the responsibility lie?
Any good resources?
We ended the session by sharing potential resources that could help us all address these questions. The resources range from regulatory, to service design practice, to people working on similar projects facing similar obstacles (one thing that came up was that actually the dynamics of local politics and access are very similar whether in East Africa or Western Europe!).
Here is the list we put together:
Papers and research
Global information society watch 2018: Community networks
Community networks: the internet by the people, for the people
Designing Connected Products
Community centred tech
Luftdaten (Berlin)
Internet Society
Afrinic
Web Foundation
Women’s Rights online research
Design
This is Service Design Doing
Decolonising Design
Global Design Jam community
Campaigning
Friends of the Earth, Scotland - FYI, there are global networks so find your nearest one!
Regulatory
European Environmental Agency
Data
52 North wiki - specifically work on specific project called “sensor web”
SOME FURTHER COMMENTS
At a later conversation, I learned that the reason Warukira wasn’t able to make it was due to the “usual” UK government hostile environment idiocy which messed up her visa application.
I intend to write about this in a bit more depth but as someone who has attended Mozfest before and tends to hang out a lot with the folks attending from Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, this isn’t unusual. However, what struck me was the attitude of ‘us’, us in a collective sense meaning the hosts, the volunteers etc etc.
To me, the spirit of Mozfest should also be about solidarity as much as it is about people having fun, ‘just getting involved’ and having a can-do DIY attitude. Maybe it would have put the organisers into too much trouble with the authorities, but honestly, I wish more of us attendees and fellow facilitators could also have known about all the amazing people who weren’t able to make it because of the UK governments despicable policies, so that at least we - as the Mozilla family - can show our support and solidarity.
Now as I said, this happens every year and honestly at this rate will keep on happening - it will probably even get worse, so long as the conference remains in Europe, which it will. In the meantime, what those of us with relative privilege can do is to call it out, let our governments and local councillors know that we know what’s going on and that this is NOT OK. As a community, we should be explicitly talking about the fact that our fellow civic technologists are being unfairly treated due to neo-colonial nonsense. At the very least, this repeated issue with visa applications is an important lesson for the younger generation of technologists and academics in countries like the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, the US, Canada; in countries that are only at the top of the pile because of centuries of colonialism and occupation, to demonstrate why we cannot imagine technology is somehow in an ivory tower that will never be affected by politics.
I’ll stop there because I’m working on a proper article about it, especially now my initial fury has eased so I can talk a bit more thoughtfully about this.
In short, it would have been amazing to meet Warukira in person but I want to say a huge thank you to her for putting in a kick-ass session which provided an opportunity for us to discuss some really fascinating ideas and to learn from each other.