There’s a new project in the Mystic River – one that started at ioby, a crowd-resourcing platform for citizen-led neighborhood projects from the Davis Square, Somerville location. Ioby’s mission is to deepen civic engagement in cities by connecting individuals directly to community-led, neighbor-funded environmental projects in their neighborhoods. So when MyRWA heard ioby would be focusing on water quality, we were excited to join the conversation.
Now, with your help, ioby plans to develop an ‘open source’ water quality monitoring platform that will cost far less than typical monitoring, and will be open for communities everywhere to build and use. This neighborhood team plans on deploying their first water quality monitor prototypes in the Alewife Brook subwatershed with the goal of answering some of the questions raised in a prior community workshop. The open-sourced water quality meters will track key parameters like conductivity and temperature and potentially make this data available real-time. They are excited to test the platform against MyRWA’s volunteer measurements and high-end instrumentation (YSI Probes). It could be a great collaboration between MyRWA staff and trained water quality monitors and the people at the Public Lab.
To be successful, they’ll need your support – every donation, no matter the size, is greatly appreciated and helps strengthen this effort.
