Original title: Building Bridges Through Infrastructure: Citizen Science and Institutional Integration in Air Quality Monitoring
Henri de Ruiter, Kirsten Vegt, Hester Volten, Margaret Gold +1 · September 2026
Everyday people are using low-cost sensors to track local air quality. These devices record pollution more often and across more places than official stations do. However, government agencies rarely use this community data. Officials often view citizen scienceScientific research done by ordinary people, here by collecting air quality data with their own sensors. measurements as messy, unreliable, and lacking standard methods. To address this issue, researchers studied Measure Together, a government-funded project acting as a bridge between ordinary citizens and official monitoring programs. They examined how relational, organizational, and technical elements build a citizen science infrastructureThe combination of shared tools, rules, relationships, and technologies that allow data to be collected, compared, and used., and how that system begins merging with official setups to create a hybrid infrastructure. This hybrid model tries to join detailed local insights with rigorous, standardized methods. The researchers found clear conflicts: friction between generic data and local data, clashes between community demands for quick action and slow official timelines, and ongoing struggles over trust. They conclude that adaptive, participatory infrastructures are needed to balance scientific rigor with societal needs.
Imagine a street where residents set up their own weather stations in their yards. Each station uses different gear and checks at different times, so the readings never quite agree. A city office would like to use these readings to plan road salting, but it only trusts data that follows a single standard. In this paper, the residents are the people who measure air quality themselves, and the city office is the official monitoring body; the missing piece is the shared rules, tools, and coordinators that lets their data be compared and trusted.
For communities that use low-cost sensors to track air quality, their data usually gets ignored by official agencies because it's seen as unreliable. This research shows how building the right infrastructure — technical, organisational, and relational — can make that data count, and it exposes the real tensions that arise when citizen measurements meet official standards. That matters for anyone who wants local air quality data to influence real decisions.
The abstract doesn't say what the limitations are, but it is a single case study of one project, so generalising to other contexts should be done cautiously. The analysis is qualitative and descriptive, and it does not present measurable outcomes or a tested framework for resolving the tensions it identifies.
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Building Bridges Through Infrastructure: Citizen Science and Institutional Integration in Air Quality Monitoring — Henri de Ruiter, Kirsten Vegt, Hester Volten et al. — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/gz37y_v2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.