It never occurred to me that crowdsourcing radiation data from Geiger counters would be an application for Pachube! But, in light of recent events, radiation data has been pouring into the system while our community has been coming together to build how-to's and docs so people can get up and running. Open hardware and open data is coming together here to do what authorities couldn't do nearly as fast: a national real-time map of radiation data, accessible to everyone. As of Monday morning, we are hosting hundreds of feeds.
By socializing radiation data via Pachube, users are also gaining the ability to answer questions like:
Is my data consistent with others close by?
How has my particular region been affected in relation to other parts of the country?
How are radiation levels changing with the weather?
Is my data consistent with official reports at home and abroad?
Pachube is also already enabling the foundations of higher-level applications to be built on top of this radiation data. Haiyan Zhang, an Interaction Designer at the design consultancy IDEO, wrote that she had the desire to "just make something", and in an afternoon she had put together a map visualization of the data. The guys over at Uncorked Studios, a creative firm that builds mobile, social, and location products, built RDTN.org where they are aggregating data and providing additional resources. This stuff is getting built super-fast and is able to be tailored quickly to specific needs around the world.
We hope to see developers incorporating mobility in future applications, potentially allowing users to mash up their current location with radiation data and receive real-time estimates on radiation levels in their immediate vicinity. Open-source, easily customizable mobile apps already exist in our repository for community use. Additionally, our "Earth Browser" app allows you to visualize the data via a Google Earth overlay, which can serve as a head-start for an even better app (Try it! Requires Pachube login, search:"radiation",tag:"radiation", scalar:"200", then navigate to Japan).
Chatter on Twitter has been constant while this groundswell of activity has built up. Users are collaborating to decide on standard units of measurement, how to obtain hardware, and how to share data in the easiest manner. Our users self-organized from the beginning (thanks @kotobuki, @kaku60, @MarianSteinbach, @kaoru622,@miyasita, @motoishmz, @freaklabs!), we simply facilitated the process with a more public call for data and some increased service limits. This is the people-centric, open, useful Internet of Things!
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