The air you breathe in Europe’s car capital
If you want a breath of fresh air, you probably shouldn’t head to Stuttgart, the automotive capital of Europe and home to Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and Bosch. While the car industry has to reckon with seismic shifts of its own, the people of Stuttgart, Germany have deepening concerns about the quality of the air they breathe every day. Enter Stuttgarter Zeitung (StZ) with Feinstaubalarm, their sensor journalism project.
A team from StZ developed the prototype for Feinstaubalarm und Feinstaub in Stuttgart und Region’ (or, ‘Fine dust alarm and fine dust in Stuttgart and the region’) during the Süddeutsche Zeitung Editors Lab in Munich in October 2016. Feinstaubalarm maps and visualises particulate matter based on more than 300 sensors citizens have agreed to place in their homes. What’s more, the project allows users to track air quality data in real time across the region. To find out more about the implementation process and audience response, we spoke with Jan Georg Plavec, editor at StZ and member of the Editors Lab team that prototyped the project.
Sarah Toporoff: What changed from the prototype stage to the final product?
Jan Georg Plavec: We basically only had a mock-up at the end of the Munich hackathon, therefore a lot of things yet had to be developed from the scratch, e.g. data infrastructure. Yet the intended ‘look and feel’ remained the same. The most important change was not to take a look at single spots of measuring fine dust but to use the values for administrative areas. That was due to the specifications of the sensors (they are not perfectly accurate) and the rather random places where users have placed them. Therefore, adding measures up, cleaning the data and using averages brings our data closer to the real fine dust values.
How did the implementation process work internally?
The hardest thing was to persuade everyone inside our newspaper conglomerate that this is a cool thing to do. After we had our innovation manager, the two editors-in-chief and even the CEO on board, we finally got a green light in July. Besides a bit of money for the (Amazon) web server and licensing the software for text automation (by AX Semantics) as well as for air quality forecast (by Kachelmannwetter), the most important resource was the technical staff.
Our web developer Christian Frommeld (who was also part of the hackathon team) was the most important man building up the technical infrastructure. Yet, coordination was key: implementing everything into our CMS, having our designer Oliver Biwer (our third team member) involved, talking workflows and double-checking everything with our local environmental policy editors. Besides that, the text automation had to be programmed, which is well possible even for non-techies like myself. This whole thing took us about one month of intense work and yet we still only see this as temporary because we want to continuously include more data into our database, visualisation and text automation.
What is your goal with this project?
Text automation has been kind of a buzzword recently, but we wanted to go beyond what other newsrooms have done with this so far and use the technology for reports on a politically salient topic. Here in Stuttgart, the home of Mercedes Benz and Porsche, banning certain cars from entering the city is the central part of the discussion on air quality. Yet the scientific basis of this discussion are the fine dust concentrations at one of the most polluted places in the city. The discussion is therefore more or less detached from the health risks the actual citizens suffer — in fact, nobody knows so far how hazardous the air in Stuttgart is for people. With our automated reports and the fine dust map, we want to make this information easily accessible.
We are eager to see how our readers accept their — highly localised — automatic reports, and we’ll be hosting a hackathon on 20 January on how to deliver these reports in the most convenient and meaningful way. The project can therefore also be seen as a prototype for further use of data collection and text automation in the environment of a regional news outlet.
How has your audience responded to the project? Has there been any political response?
We’re quite happy with the audience response so far. The major traffic was of course on the weekend when it went live, with some 100,000 users on the map and landing page. On average, people spend almost two minutes using the map.
We do now have 2,000 visitors daily which we think is quite good. We expect major political responses as soon as we publish our first big analysis of the data, which is being prepared right now and due to be published in January.
The forthcoming hackathon will call upon a diverse group of participants (from their site: “everyone who cares about air quality and the information about it: citizens, programmers, data experts, web developers, publishers, visualisers, students, civic scientists”). Their goals will be to take the collected air quality data (both current and historical) to think about new ways to use, visualise and communicate on it “to further improve the information on air quality in Stuttgart and, as a result, improve the air quality in the city.”
Click here for more information and to sign up for the hack.
