November 15 | Non-Profit Technology 2024 Winner
What motivated your company to participate in the Global Tech Awards?
As the first and largest open-source, open-access database of outdoor air quality measurements in the world, we felt we had a unique story to tell–a story that deserves to be celebrated.
Could you share an overview of the project or innovation your company submitted?
OpenAQ is a nonprofit environmental tech organization that aggregates and harmonizes open air quality data from across the globe onto an open-source data platform so that anyone concerned about air quality has unfettered access to the data they need to analyze, communicate and advocate for clean air and climate action. By providing universal access to air quality data, OpenAQ empowers a global community of changemakers to solve air pollution. Scientists and other researchers use data on OpenAQ to conduct health studies and other analyses. Communicators use them to raise awareness of the problem. Community members use them to understand what they are breathing and to advocate for solutions. Government agencies use them to supplement data from their own monitoring stations. Decision-makers use them to understand where to focus interventions. Businesses use them to develop such products as apps to inform the public about air quality. And more! OpenAQ serves as critical infrastructure for an issue that needs urgent attention. Air quality is the #1 environmental contributor to premature death, cutting lives short by 1.9 years on average. Air pollution harms health at all stages of life and damages every organ in the body. And air pollution is an unequal burden, causing the greatest harm to children, the elderly, and the most economically disadvantaged people.
How has your team worked together to bring this innovation to life?
This project was born in the city of Ulaanbaatar, where our co-founder, an atmospheric chemist, was working to compile air quality data to shed light on how U.S. embassy staff may be harmed by air pollution where embassies are located around the world. She found that air quality data were either nonexistent or not openly available, and when she could find them, they were typically not easy to access and not standardized. As described in the OpenAQ Origin Story, she and her husband, a data expert, decided to build a database of open air quality measurements from scratch with lots of help from volunteers who knew where to find open data. Today, OpenAQ has democratized access to air quality data across the world, pulling data from more than 18,500 locations worldwide in 131 countries and counting, and enabling countless applications to clean the air. Learn more about the technical aspects of our work on AWS Fix This podcast #82: Unlocking open data to improve air quality with OpenAQ and Data Dialogues Episode 4. The One Stop Shop for Air Quality Data.
What impact do you anticipate your innovation will have on the tech industry or society at large?
By filling a basic data-access gap, OpenAQ empowers a wide variety of individuals, organizations and sectors across the globe to apply data in pursuit of a clean air future. The benefits of clean air action are enormous: better health, a more stable climate, improved food security, greater social equity, stronger economies, healthier ecosystems, and clearer views. We also demonstrate the value of open data. The world requires scalable and collaborative data sharing to solve many of our most pressing problems. And high-quality, non-private data is a necessary ingredient for AI. The key role of open data is to enable full data use for everyone, not just data producers. An analogy can be made with art: Imagine a world in which only those who produced art supplies (data producers) were able to be artists (data users). How greatly limited the creative scope of art in the world would be! The same goes for data: If access is limited to those who produce the data, the uses of the data will be much more limited in scope than if the data are fully open and available for the public at large to apply their expertise and ingenuity to making the most of the data.
Are there any specific challenges you faced during the development process, and how did you overcome them?
Despite the benefits of open air quality data, there is considerable variability in whether and how air quality data producers (e.g., governments, academic researchers, air sensor companies) share the data they generate. We work to demonstrate the value that open air quality data brings, and slowly but surely, more air quality data producers are choosing to share their data. As a nonprofit organization, the cost of cloud-based data hosting and egress are significant for our budget. Currently, we are very lucky to have credits from AWS to offset these costs and thank them for their generosity.
How does your company foster a culture of innovation?
One of our goals is to equip users of all abilities with tools to access, understand and use our data platform. Because our users hail from countries all over the world and work in all types of sectors, we can tap an amazing diversity of knowledge, skills and experience to inform our work. These users keep us on our toes, and their input drives our roadmap, especially which new tools would be most useful.
What advice would you give to other companies striving to make an impact in the tech space?
Keep on keeping on! Focus on what you do well and continue to do that. Understand your audience well and open avenues for interactive discussion. Be open to feedback, but also know your limitations, and don’t be afraid to say no to activities outside your current capacities–a balance is necessary to keep a functional, productive and excellent organization. Develop your “elevator pitch” and continue to hone and test it with different audiences.
What are your company’s future goals, and how do you plan to drive advancements in your industry?
Our goals are to expand air quality data coverage, emphasizing data acquisition in low- and middle-income countries and disproportionately impacted communities; to develop new tools for users to access, understand and use our data platform; and to increase support for air quality leaders and community-based organizations. We also recently released our AQI Hub, a user-friendly resource for understanding Air Quality Indices (AQIs) around the globe, and are expanding that resource as time permits.
Are there any emerging technologies or trends your company is particularly excited about?
Advances in data analysis around cloud-native data formats and tooling that support analysis of big data such as duckdb are opening the analysis of large data in a very exciting way.
With respect to the data we collect, OpenAQ is keen to aggregate more “black carbon” data. This pollutant is a potent, short-lived greenhouse gas that also has immediate health impacts, such as increased blood pressure levels. We hope to help shed light on this emerging super pollutant.
To dive deeper into OpenAQ's award-winning work, visit their website at https://openaq.org/
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