What it takes to be a Smart Citizen

In 2012 while browsing the web for new digital developments that will change city life I found out about Smart Citizen. Smart Citizen is a project of three organizations from Barcelona to supply citizens with sensors. These sensors enable citizens to measure theirselves airquality. This idea really triggered me and although my Spanish is not that good I decided to crowdfund this project via the Spanish crowfunding platform Goteo.org. I now officially was going to be a Smart Citizen.

The Smart Citizen project is what Living Cities and OpenPlans call Civic Tech. They define “civic tech” as the use of technology by cities for service provision, civic engagement, and data analysis to inform decision making. Civic Tech has the potential to transform cities and the lives of their residents. They’ve published a report about their field scan, where you can learn more about it.

The Smart Citizen project is an Open-Source Environmental Monitoring Platform. An Open-Source platform that comprises 3 technological layers: a hardware device, a website and online API. The hardware device (Arduino) carries sensors that measure air composition (CO and NO2), temperature, light intensity, sound levels, and humidity. Once it’s set up, the ambient board is able to stream data measured by the sensors over Wi-Fi.

Participating in the smart citizen project means you buy a sensorkit, what I did over Goteo. Like most crowfunded projects it took months before I got it. No worries, that’s how it works. In june I received the kit and I was thrilled that it had arrived. Setting up the kit was not that easy. I’m not that familiar with Arduino, but that didn’t seem to be the problem. What troubled me was connecting the sensorkit to the platform. This doesn’t work properly with each browser (in my case Firefox), Safari did work perfect though. After a short while I got the first data in, huray! Checking the data I saw the temperature was about two degrees higher as my analog meter. The data is shown in a well-designed interface, but I could only see data over a short period. It was not possible to see the results from a week for instance. This is something they have changed in the new version of the platform. Another issue that appeared was the battery life. A battery will run for approximitely 2 days. The sensors apparently claim a lot of energy, so you’d better connect the sensorkit to a USB-charger or Solar panel. The data from each sensor on the platform can be seen by everyone, you can take a look at my sensor.

In the meanwhile Smart Citizen got funded on Kickstarter as well. This time as a project of Arcobatic Industries from the US. They are already working on additional shields for use in urban agriculture, measuring electromagnetic fields, tracking energy consumption and air composition inside the home, and even monitoring biometrics.

I believe civic tech has a bright future as long as it’s easy to install and to maintain for the users. We’re not quite there yet, but great changes come step by step. The Smart Citizen project is definitely an important step forwards and provides valuable experiences to take us further.

What it takes to be a Smart Citizen augustus 22nd, 2013Rob Aalders