Management of the Air For All open digital platform for Community Needs in Citizen Science, Climate and Air Quality Activities

Emmanuel Duke

Funding Area: Critical shared infrastructure / Infraestructura compartida critica

Problem Statement: Climate change and air pollution caused by human action and inaction regarding industrial and traffic emissions as well as environment depletion have serious health consequences, including respiratory problems. Tackling these major issues requires coordinated solutions. Yet, there is only a poor level of communication and action-based coordination between different stakeholders, such as local communities, and individuals. This makes it difficult to develop and implement effective climate mitigation measures to improve air quality. The Air for All digital platform has been created with help of the ERASMUS+ EU fund (2023-01-01 to 2024-02-29) as a tool for open collaboration, knowledge exchange, learning, and outcome-based coordination for citizens and staff around the world that are interested in- and work with Citizen Science methods for climate mitigation activities and air quality improvements. The platform offers access to adequate knowledge, guidance for ability to take part in and collaborate within citizen science, climate mitigation and air quality activities. The proposed work needs continuous management of the digital Air For All platform after the end of the Air For All project, to uphold a user-friendly and well-structured platform that can develop in line with the needs of its users. To achieve this, we hereby request funding for platform administration and platform development for the time from December 2023 through December 2025.

Proposed Activities: Overall funding period: • 24 months: from December 2023 through December 2025. Proposed activities: • Monthly “Public Presentation Online Events” with 2 presentations on air quality projects from worldwide contexts: Gathering and introducing the platform user community and interested publics to new approaches of citizen science for air quality, enabling thematic exchange across geographies and building out the platform’s visibility and community. o Requires 3 hours of admin work per month: Meeting preparation, public announcements, meeting moderation, meeting documentation. • Monthly “Adding of 2 Case Studies” to the platform that feature worldwide citizen science engagements for air quality improvements – covering scientific-, technical- and public policy aspects – and thereby building out the platform’s attractiveness through current content. o Requires 3 hours of admin work per month: Drafting case study, publication and subsequent dissemination. • Monthly “Community Platform Development Online Meeting” with all interested users to seize next relevant platform development steps along the user community’s needs. o Requires 2 hours of admin work: preparation, documentation, distilling action points, communicating action points to the web developer of the platform. • Bi-Monthly “Platform Development Realizations” to translate user requirements to new platform features, improved navigation and governance. o Requires 2 hours by web developer every two months. • Monthly “Platform Maintenance” activity to keep the platform safe and technically updated. o Requires 1 hour per month of developer work. o Requires monthly lump sum for GDPR compliant server hosting.

Openness: The Air For All digital platform is an open access and free of charge platform for anyone to use. The platform applies discourse open-source software. The work carried out by platform administration and platform development will ensure a flexible, user-friendly platform that applies clear communication methods along with a clear platform structure for its users. The platform administration ensures to involve any user that wants to upload and share and/or to apply methods and knowledge depicted on the platform and related to citizens involvement, climate and air quality, keeps an eye on questions by users that require response and support. Leveraging social media, the platform administration constantly raises the public visibility of the platform: Announcing open access “Public Presentation Online Events”, its documentation, as well as case studies publications constitute openly accessible content outputs. The platform development will be open for suggestions by platform users through continuous communicative dialogue with the platform administration: Through monthly “Community Platform Development Online Meetings” that help identify the needs of worldwide platform users, the platform administration continuously seizes ways to improve the platform’s usability, accessibility, and openness.

Challenges: Challenges for carrying out the work could be that platform administrators and the platform developers would not have relevant prior knowledge and not enough time for managing the work tasks. We overcome this challenge and fulfil the obligation to carry out the work within this funding by choosing citizens and staff that have already been part of the Air For All ERASMUS+ project to carry out the work tasks involved in the platform administration and development. Through this we ensure the willingness and interest in performing the tasks. Furthermore, through their previous Air For All project experience, each person that will carry out the administration and development tasks have evolved relevant knowledge capacity for managing the tasks ahead. Finally, a contract will be created where each person that will be part of the administration and development work of the digital platform ensure that the work tasks will be performed in strict accordance with the time and task management within this application.

Neglectedness: No other sources of funding have been found that are available for the type of work that the administration and development of the Air For All digital platform could be covered for. Therefore, no other application performance has been made for this work before this application. The funding from the ERASMUS+ fund for creation of the Air For All digital platform solely support funding for elaboration of the platform during the project period from 2023-01-01 to 2024-02-29.

Success: - Monthly “Public Presentation Online Events” with 2 presentations with min. 5 public participants, verified through registrations on each events’ page. - Monthly “Adding of 2 Case Studies” to the platform, verified by the publicly visible entries in the “case study” platform category. - Monthly “Community Platform Development Online Meeting” with min. 5 participants, verified through registrations on each corresponding event page. - Increased number of platform registrations by citizens and staff from worldwide organizations as well as contexts, particularly from LMIEs, verified by growing number of users. - Increased engagement rate by users, verified by number of posts read, replies posted, and new topics created. - Increased number of posts on social media that announce events, new content postings, case studies – verified by number of posts on social media. - Increase in Number of qualitative outcomes in the sense of new activities within citizens involvement, climate and air quality that have been initiated on local and regional societal scale by the help of the communication on the Air For All digital platform.

Total Budget: USD 14,760

Affiliations: - University of Nigeria - Air Quality Organisation of Västmanland County (Sweden) - Ideas For Change (Spain) - Proofing Future: Bridging People + Ideas (Belgium, Germany)

LMIE Carveout: The project fits aptly within this category as a strategic member of the team is located in Nigeria and a citizen, also, the project expects to have users, contributors, from LMIEs. Given that there is a knowledge gap and interest in understanding and implementing the projects ideals in LMIEs communities, the funded infrastructure serves to bridge this gap by offering guidance towards carrying out climate mitigation activity and to applying air quality knowledge and action in LMIEs communities using Nigeria as a pilot.

Team Skills: The team that will take part in the proposed project have already a great experience in collaborating together around the topic of the Air For All digital platform. This partnership experience originated in the Air For All ERASMUS+ project (2023-01-01 to 2024-02-29) and will ensure a strong and reliable foundation for a successful collaboration in the management of the work tasks involved in this project. Further, each team participant in this project has adequate knowledge and experience in management of the Air For All digital platform, since this team are the creators of the Air For All digital platform and therefore presently carries out necessary administration, development and dissemination activities towards presumed platform users until the ending of the ERASMUS+ project 2024-02-29. Also, the team has adequate previous knowledge and expertise within the main topics of the Air For All digital platform with focus on citizens involvement methods, air quality and climate topics. These experiences and the expertise within the team along with a successful experience of collaboration in project work will ensure a successful project outcome.

Submission Number: 105