[open-sustainability] Greetings to the Open Sustainability Working Group from Spain

Mon Dec 3 23:23:07 UTC 2012

Hi!  

My name is Félix Pedrera, and I am very happy to see this group being created and starting to move on.  

From Spain and the Spanish OKFN chapter in incubation stage there are people interested on Open Environmental Data and Open Sustainability and we are looking forward to contribute to this working group activities.

Although we are just starting, there are already a few things some people involved in the OKFN-ES creation are working on:

* Campaign against public meteorological data charging [1]

A few weeks ago, the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET) announced that as of October 29th, 2012, the meteorological raw data offered in its FTP server would no longer be available. Finally, the closing occurred on October 30th, 2012. The service allowed access to multiple types of data, such as observation measurements, solar radiation, background air pollution, lightning, time series, etc. These data is not important only for meteorology, it is also relevant for the research of climate science, air quality and other environmental issues.

We started a campaign at Change.org [2] against this decision, which has already been signed by more than 4.000 scientists, researchers, meteorology professionals, and citizens in general. Our goal is to make the AEMET rethink its decision and guide them to the right path of Open Data and EPSI recommendations. Support and diffusion about this campaign is more than welcome if you can help to spread it on your networks.

* "Adopt a Beach" [3]

The "Open Data Sevilla" group started a campaign to collect data about quality of bathing areas (beaches, rivers, lakes, etc) in machine readable format, from the original website where this information is available [4]. Both scraping and crowd-sourcing techniques were used to collect the data. A hackaton was organized a the II Open Data and Open Government Meeting [5], and the results are available at The Data Hub [6].

* Air Quality Egg [7]  

César and his IoT Madrid group are working with the AirQualityEgg [8] devices to raise the voice of the citizens on the air quality and pollution issues. They have a very interesting approach and have collected important knowledge about the deployment of the Eggs, its operational conditions, needed metadata, etc., being one of the pioneer communities around the world to have practical experience with the AQE and the hardware components.

Hope you find this information interesting for the activities of the group. If you need further details, just tell!

Best regards,

--  
Félix Pedrera
Twitter > @fpedrera

[1] http://epsiplatform.eu/content/spanish-meteo-restarts-charging-data
[2] https://www.change.org/es/peticiones/agencia-estatal-de-meteorolog%C3%ADa-aemet-que-no-se-cierre-el-acceso-a-los-datos-por-ftp
[3] http://adoptaunaplaya.es/
[4] http://nayade.msc.es/Splayas/ciudadano/ciudadanoZonaAction.do
[5] http://opendatasevilla.org/
[6] http://datahub.io/en/dataset/adoptaunaplaya
[7] http://www.meetup.com/iotmadrid/
[8] http://airqualityegg.wikispaces.com/AirQualityEgg

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