Everyone can produce data, everyone can access data, everyone can tell creative data stories about their city. This is the idea of Stadtpuls (City pulse) stories, an initiative by CityLAB Berlin that provides an open data platform to share sensor data for citizens of Berlin and beyond. The project was an experimental prototype with high promises, which had to be terminated though.   

Stadtpuls was an open data platform for Internet of Things (IoT) projects in Berlin, Germany, that everyone can join whether looking for access to open data, or data ready to share from own sensors. The initiative supported interested citizens to collect sensor data, to visualise them, and make data available for further data analysis or creative storytelling. Such analyses could help answer questions like What is the CO2 level on my doorstep compared to other streets? How noisy is my street actually compared to the city average or time of the day?  

Sensor and real-time data came from various data sources, for example, from research institutions, administrative offices, and urban citizens with sensing devices. Stadtpuls visualised the data and provided recipients a basis for discussion and further use cases. The wider purpose was to build a community, bringing the “makers” of data such as hobbyists, school projects, or researchers together with the “takers” e.g. data scientists or journalists. In that way, Stadtpuls aimed to help citizens delve deeper into the realm of real-time sensor technology and understand their own city – combining citizen science, data journalism and interactive visualisation techniques and designs. 

One premise of Stadtpuls was to make the initiative appealing to different target groups. Data assetsshould be easily accessible, requiring little technical expertise: New users were guided by extensive documentation and code examples as well as by a playful, visual designs to invite people to make their first steps.  

However, Stadtpuls came to an end in the beginning of 2023. The team behind the initiative transparently communicated their challenges as well as the basis of their decision to stop it: Some of the reasons are based on project communication. For example, the team could not manage to make Stadtpuls known to the general public and promote the provision and use of sensor data during the project period. The project ended with only around 60 accounts of which some remained unused. One principal problem was that users won’t come if there is no data but that data depended crucially on user input. Early adopters and institutional data providers were missing to actively support the concept. The core project team was not set up in such a way to permanently support a larger number of active projects. Sensor projects can also be implemented without Stadtpuls integration, while the added value of the platform comes from the provision of measurement data as open data, which is not relevant or possible for every project. The team of Stadtpuls also had to deal with several technical issues: The platform itself was easy to use, but integration via TTN (The Things Network) was complex and difficult to handle for non-experts. Finally, the topic of IoT sensor technology was not as widespread as expected and many interested parties lacked concrete project ideas that could be implemented. In the end, the Stadtpuls team came to two conclusions: Firstly, that target groups should be better understood and their use cases would need to be identified beforehand. Secondly, the feasibility of a project of such scope needs to be carefully evaluated within the resources that the CityLab team actually has at its disposal. Although the project had to be abandoned, the idea of a communal open data platform points towards the needs of such infrastructures for civic purposes as much as the honest reflection of the team allows insights into institutional obstacles to realising such infrastructures (so far). More details on the Stadtpuls project and its background can be found on the website that is still available: https://stadtpuls.com/ (in German). 

(FG)

Literature:

Hamm, Andrea (2022). “New Objects, New Boundaries: How the “journalism of Things” Reconfigures Collaborative Arrangements, Audience Relations and Knowledge-Based Empowerment.” Digital Journalism : 1-20. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2096088.  

Coulson, Saskia; Woods, Mel; Making, Sense EU (2021). “Citizen Sensing: An Action-Orientated Framework for Citizen Science.” Frontiers in Communication 6. 
https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.629700 (open access)