Stories from OpenAQ, a Global and Grassroots Open Air Quality Community

Air pollution, responsible for more deaths each year than HIV/AIDS and malaria, combined, is a global public health crisis. Yet many scientific questions, including those directly relevant for policy, remain unanswered when it comes to the impact of air pollution on health in highly polluted environments. Often, specific solutions to improving air quality are local and sustained through public engagement, policy and monitoring. Both the overarching science of air quality and health and local solutions rely on access to reliable, timely air quality data. Over the past year, the OpenAQ community has opened up existing disparate air quality data in 24 countries through an open source platform (openaq.org) so that communities around the world can use it to advance science, public engagement, and policy. We will share stories of communities, from Delhi to Ulaanbaatar and from scientists to journalists, using open air quality data from our platform to advance their fight against air inequality. We will share recent research we have conducted on best practices for engaging different communities and building tools that enable the public to fully unleash the power of open air quality data to fight air inequality. The subsequent open-source tools (github.com/openaq) we have developed from this research and our entire data-sharing platform may be of interest to other open data communities.