Question:Do you have resources on odor logs and odor reporting platforms?

I know of a couple of well established online reporting platforms, each with somewhat different features:

The Louisiana Bucket Brigade’s iWitness Map. This is based on (an older version of) the Ushahidi platform, and allows people to make and classify reports of smells, visible flaring, symptoms, etc. I haven’t been involved directly with it, but I know it was very effective in 2014 when the community of St. Rose was experiencing bad pollution from a nearby tank farm. Their stack of reports, put in the right hands, resulted in regulators doing additional air monitoring in the community.

IVAN (Identifying Violations Affecting Neighborhoods) network is a reporting platform used by a number of California communities. I believe the the technology is similar to the iWitness Map, but a key component of IVAN is that communities work in partnership with public agencies to evaluate and act on the problems documented by reporting. The Center for Regional Change at UC Davis has released a study of the network (complete with benefits, challenges, and recommendations).

My lab at Drexel University, the Fair Tech Collective, has also been working on a brand-new platform, Air Watch Bay Area, with refinery neighbors in Northern California. Our platform actually has (1) a reporting component and (2) a data exploration component: it enables community members to look at historical, real-time air monitoring data collected at refinery fencelines. Reports appear alongside the data, showing not only where they are on a map but also when they happened in relation to measured levels of chemicals. Smell reporting is based on SmellPGH but also includes the ability to upload pictures, which form a kind of photo blog on a separate page. That was inspired by Ushahidi/iWitness/IVAN, but uses different code to make it more flexible with respect to the presentation of the images.

Importantly, reporting to our platform can be done via an app or via a website: we found that our potential users (many of them older people) were not uniformly comfortable with apps.

Our platform is all open source. Sufyan, one of the talented developers who have made it happen, will post with more details.

We have been in the development phase for the last year and a half and are only just feeling ready for prime time. We’re hoping usage will pick up over the coming months. We can post updates here, if there’s interest. In the meanwhile, we welcome feedback, adopters, and contributors!

Interestingly, the ATSDR has guidelines for pencil-and-paper "odor diaries".