Civic Tech Field Guide

Starkey Livio AI

Using integrated sensors and artificial intelligence, Livio AI enhances your listening experiences, proactively manages your health and provides access to information to simplify your life.

Deaf

Air Matters

Providing real-time Air Quality Index & Allergy Pollen & Weather Data, as well as Protection Recommendations and Forecast.

A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences

A bold reassessment of "smart cities" that reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers, by Shannon Mattern

FaceBit

Small and easily secured into any face mask, FaceBit is accompanied by a mobile application that provides a user interface and facilitates research.

Network for Clean Air

Oxford, UK

We've been organising a programme of citizen science to measure air pollution since 2013

air quality

Bruitparif

Axe Pleyel 4 B104 32 boulevard Ornano 93200 Saint-Denis Paris

Cette plateforme mise en œuvre par Bruitparif centralise les cartes stratégiques de bruit (CSB) disponibles au sein de la région Île-de-France dans le cadre de la mise en œuvre de la directive européenne 2002/49/CE.

cities
noise

Nexleaf Analytics

We create data and technology solutions for better health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. By working alongside health advocates, governments, local communities, donors, and manufacturers, we provide reliable

Smart Cities and sensors

SmogOff

Cornwall

We'll be looking at ways to visualise air pollution in situ and in real time, so people can see the pollution levels on their streets.

air quality

Smart Cities and sensors

Mapping Makoko

Nigeria

A combined tech and journalistic effort to map the Makoko informal settlement

Did You Feel It?

United States of America (the)

USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, responsible for monitoring, reporting, and researching earthquakes and earthquake hazards

BeeMonitor

Snowdonia National Park, United Kingdom

Open source project using Raspberry Pis and sensors to learn about the health of a bee colony by monitoring the temperature and humidity inside and outside the hive over multiple years.

Sustainable cities and communities

Ride Report

Portland, OR

From bikes to scooters and everything in between, dockless mobility offers cities a range of new options and challenges. Ride Report is your comprehensive toolset to manage emerging mobility services.

apps
cycling

ShotSpotter

Newark, CA, USA

ShotSpotter is the leader in gunshot detection solutions that helps law enforcement officials and security personnel identify, locate and deter gun violence. Our public safety solution, ShotSpotter Flex, is deployed in urban, high-crime areas to help identify, locate and deter gun violence by accurately detecting and locating gunshots and sending real-time alerts to law enforcement.

Boston Smart Cities Playbook

Beijing Air Tracks

Beijing

The causes and effects of air pollution comprise a complicated chemical recipe that is all too easily reduced to superficial observation (the color of the sky) or an abstract statistical reading from static instruments. In reality, the total experience of a city’s air quality is a combination of highly localized as well as more regional effects that shift in intensity as one moves through an urban landscape.

air quality

Google Acclima partnership

Aclima announces a new partnership with Google Earth Outreach to map and better understand outdoor air quality.

Google

Safecast

LoRaWAN

Rigakade 10 Amsterdam, Netherlands

To allow low-powered devices to communicate with Internet-connected applications over long range wireless connections.

Placemeter

425 Broadway, New York, NY, USA

Placemeter is an open urban intelligence platform. Create your account to automatically quantify pedestrian and vehicular movement for a selected area: streets, parks, stores, and much more.

The Smart Enough City

Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future

books
cities

Plume air quality device

Air quality monitor Flow tracks pollutants PM10, PM2.5, NO2 and VOCs. Accurate sensors measure pollution in real time. Flow helps parents, cyclists, runners, commuters or people with asthma avoid pollution and breathe clean air.

Waze Connected Citizens

Waze, Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

Over a thousand cities and other public sector partners are already working with Waze to gain better data and insights; reduce driving alone with Waze Carpool; and to make their communities safer with Waze's Beacons and Crisis programs.

CUSP Quantified Communities

Urban Intelligence Lab

Clean Air Myanmar

Yangon, Myanmar

Learn about the air we breathe.

air quality

Hush City

Hardenbergstraße 40, 10623 Berlin, Germany

With Hush City app, you are an active part of a soundscape and citizen science research project to map and evaluate everyday quiet areas.

Audit of the Administration of the Internet of Things

Massachusetts

In this audit, we obtained an understanding of the Commonwealth’s current IoT environment in terms of device use and planned use by surveying a sample of Commonwealth agencies (see Appendix) where we believed IoT devices were used for significant purposes.

Future of Privacy Forum on Smart Cities

SONYC Sounds of New York City

Brooklyn, NY

SONYC is currently seeking citizen scientists to help address NYC’s noise by annotating audio clips for our machine learning technology.

cities
noise

Smart Cities Expo

Barcelona, Spain

Smart City Expo World Congress is the world's biggest and most influential event on urban innovation.

Placelet

Cambridge, MA

Placelet is a system for collecting, analyzing and visualizing data on the human experience of urban places.

Pollution Explorers

Wearable technology to map subjective perception of air quality. Pollution Explorers is a participatory project exploring air quality issues through people’s subjective perception and wearable technology.

Beta Blocks

Boston, MA

Exploring new approaches for community-led innovation in public spaces.

Anti Ring

This is a project to counter the Amazon Ring doorbell camera surveillance infrastructure. We provide information for users and community members concerned about the country’s biggest company planting always-on cameras all over our streets.

HeatSeek

New York City

Heat Seek's sensors monitor heat for New York City tenants during heat season.

housing

Link NYC

LinkNYC is a first-of-its-kind communication network, bringing the fastest free public Wi-Fi to millions of New Yorkers and visitors.

VisitMilano beacon network

Open Connectivity Foundation

The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) create a specification and sponsors an open source project to unlock the massive opportunity in the IoT market, accelerating industry innovation and helping developers and companies create solutions that map to a single open specification. The OCF’s vision for IoT is that billions of connected devices (devices, phones, computers and sensors) will communicate with one another regardless of manufacturer, operating system, chipset or transport. With the OCF fulfilling this promise, anyone – from a large technology company to a maker in their garage – can adopt the open standards of OCF to innovate and compete, helping ensure secure interoperability for consumers, business, and industry.

Hello Lampost

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)

The playful, city wide system that lets you talk to street furniture.

cities

Luftdaten

Stuttgart, Germany

Measure air quality yourself

air quality

Harlem Heat Project

Harlem, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA

Produced with AdaptNY and ISeeChange, along with WE ACT for Environmental Justice. WNYC's resilience reporting is supported by The Rockefeller Foundation.