How will it work?

In East London, in a neighbourhood that sits next to the 2012 Olympic Park, Streamr, Smart Citizen and other partners on the ground will work with businesses and households to help them host their very own Smart Citizen sensors​. Those sensors will produce granular real-time information about particulate and NO2 levels. Through WiFi, this data will be fed to Streamr’s Editor and Marketplace, and made available for subscription to the people who want that information the most: government agencies, environmental bodies, or even concerned parents. By monetising that data, we expect to create just the right incentives to encourage neighbouring communities to invest in sensors themselves, because they will earn money for doing so.

By the end of 2018, Streamr and Smart Citizen hope to create a decentralised​ system​, on a not-for-profit platform, where families, researchers, or the mayor of London can subscribe to the data. Everyone can have access. And thankfully, central authorities will no longer be able to control this information for their own ends.

We also know that what gets measured gets managed. So with that information, it will become infinitely easier to create real-time solutions to respond to real-time information. For example, busses and cars can be temporarily redirected when pollution levels get too high in one area.

The project, which will be on display at Streamr’s pavilion in under two weeks at Consensus 2018, will also serve as a test bed for working through the hard challenges facing Streamr and Smart Citizen. How exactly will we get $DATA in and out of ordinary people’s hands? How will we create simple-to-use front end applications that mesh with Streamr’s Marketplace?

What else?

We won’t stop with monitoring pollution. Use cases like these will demonstrate that community-hosted real-time data networks can be self-initiating (i.e., easy to install and learn) and self-funding (i.e., hosts​ can pay for their infrastructure investments​ through market mechanisms​).

And that will start to change the very nature of what a Smart City is. Not controlled from the centre, but operated by its citizens.