2017 ICT4D Conference

Air inequality - the unequal distribution of clean air to breathe across the world - is responsible for one out of every eight deaths globally and one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. OpenAQ (openaq.org), our global and grassroots community of scientists, software developers and lovers of environmental data are sparking an open air quality movement to attack this imminently solvable issue. We have built an open-source platform (github.com/openaq) that provides programmatic, real-time and historical air quality data in a universal format. To date, we have aggregated 30 million air quality datapoints that often would be lost completely or difficult to access from 40 countries around the world. This presentation will share the story of our amazing community who are creating apps, conducting science, writing media articles, and activating their communities to address air inequality. The presentation will also make a call to action for those attending to get involved.