The Lake Macquarie City Council is running workshops for community members so they understand the data generated by the OPENAIR air quality sensors.

The Lake Macquarie City Council has started running air quality sensor workshops for members of their community.

FabLab/Smart Cities Lead at Lake Macquarie Council, Claire Chaikin-Bryan, says the council is keen to empower the community to be able to put air quality sensors where they’re most interested in testing air quality, “whether it be at their home, at their local park, at their school, or at their local community centre”.

She says the community needs to be well educated to understand the data that’s generated by the low-cost sensors. 

“One of the big challenges in air quality monitoring, particularly when you’re doing at a low cost, is the data,” Ms Chaikin-Bryan says.

“Understanding the data is really important and the limitations of the data you get out of low-cost sensors. That’s part of the reason why we don’t just roll these sensors out.”

She says Lake Macquarie Council have also been running workshops with the community “so that they can then communicate that to others in the community so they understand what’s going on”. 

Senior Research Consultant at UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures, Andrew Tovey, says the low-cost sensor technologies are accessible and understandable for community members.

“It’s opened up this whole world of citizen science and what we call citizen sensing and  that’s been demonstrated really nicely by one of our participant councils and projects at Lake Macquarie City Council,” he says.

“They’ve done a whole citizen science project where they’ve brought schoolchildren in, members of the community in, taught them how to build their own sensors, how to put those sensors out and start collecting data.”

“This is an important engagement exercise to help people not only understand about air quality as something that affects them, but it makes it real, it makes it tangible for people.”

Mr Tovey says he hoped that the OPENAIR resources will be picked up by practitioners and local governments, “not just across Australia but around the world and that they are really of value to everyone.”