Partner institutions
Universities and research centres collaborating on the shared agenda, with access to resources and the ISL course.
Community
Monitoring our environment, on community terms.
The project's technology is built and run with partner communities — not for them. Together we deploy environmental sensors, decide what's worth measuring, and keep the data in the hands of the people it describes.
What we monitor
Air, openly sensed.
Low-power LoRaWAN nodes — Heltec CubeCell boards with BME280 sensors — report temperature, humidity and pressure. The first were built and put to work by the participants themselves, at a workshop with Bridge Rectifier in Hebden Bridge in summer 2026. The hardware is open, low-cost, and built by the people who host it.
More sites follow as the network grows. Readings will flow through an open pipeline to a public dashboard — open for anyone to see, once it is up.
Why it matters
Data that stays with its community.
Environmental data is usually extracted — gathered from a place and owned somewhere else. DATA inverts that: communities own what their nodes measure, set the terms of its use, and keep access to it. That is not just a promise about intent — the readings stay on the community's own gateway rather than being centralised with us, so ownership is where the data physically lives.
The skills travel too. Building and running the network is the point, not a side-effect.
Get involved
Three ways to join in.
Makerspaces & workshops
Hands-on LoRaWAN builds at community makerspaces — like Bridge Rectifier in Hebden Bridge — and the Innovation Systems Lab.
Open contribution
Everything's in the open repository. Anyone can read the work, file an issue, or propose a change.
The network
A network of universities.
Universities across southern and eastern Africa and China, working as equals on a shared research agenda.
University of Fort HareUniversity of BotswanaSouthwest Jiaotong UniversityA partner university in ZambiaA partner university in TanzaniaA partner university in Namibia
Join in.
Host a node, run a workshop, or contribute to the open repository. Get in touch to start.