Manchester hosts public data-capture project

Smart Citizen is a crowd-funded project, which uses participatory open-source technologies to collect data, with a ‘bottom-up’ approach.

It combines hardware, mobile app and online technologies to build a platform for the collection and processing of data.

Data collected includes temperature, CO₂, noise, light, humidity and Wi-Fi saturation. The idea is that a community of ‘smart citizens’ can access the data and collaborate on open data interpretations for the benefit of the people of Manchester. 

There are 25 free Smart Citizen packs being sent to developers in Manchester and Intel is giving five ‘super-sensor’ boards (based on Intel Galileo) to Manchester-based science and innovation organisations.

The project is being unveiled and presented to delegates of the FutureEverything conference over the next two days and they will be given the opportunity to register interest in receiving one of the 25 devices and attend a training day in May alongside Manchester citizens.

After the packs have been deployed workshops will be held to show people how to interpret and use the collected data.

The super sensor boards will be used as reference points as they will contain the most intelligent and accurate data and have the best connective abilities, including remote management.

The Manchester initiative, which Smart Citizen claims is a UK first, follows Smart Citizen projects in Barcelona and Amsterdam.