When a massive earthquake and tsunami hit the eastern coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant failed, leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere and water. People around the country as well as others with family and friends in Japan were, understandably, concerned about radiation levels—but there was no easy way for them to get that information. I was part of a small group of volunteers who came together to start a nonprofit organization, Safecast, to design, build, and deploy Geiger counters and a website that would eventually make more than 100 million measurements of radiation levels available to the public.

We started in Japan, of course, but eventually people around the world joined the movement, creating an open global data set. The key to success was the mobile, easy to operate, high-quality but lower-cost kit that the Safecast team developed, which people could buy and build to collect data that they might then share on the Safecast website.

While Chernobyl and Three Mile Island spawned monitoring systems and activist NGOs as well, this was the first time that a global community of experts formed to create a baseline of radiation measurements, so that everyone could monitor radiation levels around the world and measure fluctuations caused by any radiation event. (Different regions have very different baseline radiation levels, and people need to know what those are if they are to understand if anything has changed.)

More recently Safecast, which is a not-for-profit organization, has begun to apply this model to air quality in general. The 2017 and 2018 fires in California were the air quality equivalent of the Daiichi nuclear disaster, and Twitter was full of conversations about N95 masks and how they were interfering with Face ID. People excitedly shared posts about air quality; I even saw Apple Watches displaying air quality figures. My hope is that this surge of interest in air quality among Silicon Valley elites will help advance a field, namely the monitoring of air quality, that has been steadily developing but has not yet been as successful as Safecast was with radiation measurements. I believe this lag stems in part from the fact that Silicon Valley believes so much in entrepreneurs, people there try to solve every problem with a startup. But that’s not always the right approach.

Hopefully, interest in data about air quality and the difficulty in getting a comprehensive view will drive more people to consider an open data and approach over proprietary ones. Right now, big companies and governments are the largest users of data that we’ve handed to them—mostly for free—to lock up in their vaults. Pharmaceutical firms, for instance, use the data to develop drugs that save lives, but they could save more lives if their data were shared. We need to start using data for more than commercial exploitation, deploying it to understand the long-term effects of policy, and create transparency around those in power—not of private citizens. We need to flip the model from short-term commercial use to long-term societal benefit.

The first portable air sensors were the canaries that miners used to monitor for poison gases in coal mines. Portable air sensors that consumers could easily use were developed in the early 2000s, and since then the technology for measuring air quality has changed so rapidly that data collected just a few years ago is often now considered obsolete. Nor is “air quality” or the Air Quality Index standardized, so levels get defined differently by different groups and governments, with little coordination or transparency.