Damp Busters: Citizen-Built Damp Sensors
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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Bristol City Council, the arts charity Knowle West Media Centre and the think tank Ideas for Change built a citizen-sensing method together, and damp housing was the problem residents picked first. Volunteers designed a frog-shaped box holding a Raspberry Pi and a temperature and humidity sensor, which collected a reading every five minutes into a database on the box itself, with a website for the householder and a cardboard lily pad for noting showers, cooking and drying. Five devices were built, and they ran for two weeks in five homes.
what does this mean?
The strongest source behind this entry is an independent peer-reviewed or academic study. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
The pilot was assessed for engagement rather than for damp. Across the wider programme 45 events and workshops drew more than 717 participants aged 13 to 80, and damp was one of three prototype tools tested alongside food waste and mental health; Nesta's write-up said it was too early to measure the full impact. £300 from a Bristol City Council grant covered the boxes and their deployment, and the participants allocated that money themselves through a participatory budget. A housing association asked to buy the boxes.
🎓 Lesson
The evidence stayed where the community wanted it. The co-ordinators reported that participants seemed more comfortable with data being held by a not-for-profit organisation than by the City Council, and when the paper went to press the group was still negotiating the integration of these data. What travelled afterwards was the method rather than the sensing: a peer-reviewed write-up, URBACT good-practice status in 2017, and a second Bristol pilot that applied the same framework to air quality rather than damp.
Sources
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📅 How old is the evidence?
Two clocks, kept apart: when this entry’s sources were published, and what has happened to its record in the atlas. Documented span: 2016. 3 of 6 sources carry a publication date, from 2 May 2017 to 1 January 2019.
When the sources were published
- Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
- URBACT Good Practice — Citizen sensing, where people act as sensors (operator-written, EU programme)
- Knowle West Media Centre — The Bristol Approach (operator)
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 15 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 15 addressable claims, 6 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 15
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-55959136bfb3d674
descriptive
Bristol City Council, the arts charity Knowle West Media Centre and the think tank Ideas for Change built a citizen-sensing method together
Sources carrying this claim
clm-68802b1040ed8f1e
descriptive
damp housing was the problem residents picked first
Sources carrying this claim
clm-d903531d68099151
descriptive
a frog-shaped box holding a Raspberry Pi and a temperature and humidity sensor
Sources carrying this claim
clm-06730dd8f018590c
descriptive
collected a reading every five minutes into a database on the box itself, with a website for the householder
Sources carrying this claim
clm-a882209b1a8a52fe
descriptive
a cardboard lily pad for noting showers, cooking and drying
Sources carrying this claim
clm-73e08b319d6ad172
descriptive
Five devices were built, and they ran for two weeks in five homes
Sources carrying this claim
clm-58f07c814e2ca127
quantitative
45 events and workshops drew more than 717 participants aged 13 to 80
Sources carrying this claim
clm-1e3064539841a07a
descriptive
damp was one of three prototype tools tested alongside food waste and mental health
Sources carrying this claim
clm-a59bec67b0fd91d4
descriptive
Nesta's write-up said it was too early to measure the full impact
Sources carrying this claim
clm-05af3afce193741a
quantitative
£300 from a Bristol City Council grant covered the boxes and their deployment, and the participants allocated that money themselves through a participatory budget
Sources carrying this claim
clm-9525499417dc119d
descriptive
A housing association asked to buy the boxes
Sources carrying this claim
clm-8a1e75cfd9a8a2a0
descriptive
The co-ordinators reported that participants seemed more comfortable with data being held by a not-for-profit organisation than by the City Council
Sources carrying this claim
clm-f7bd90ff35f4c96b
descriptive
when the paper went to press the group was still negotiating the integration of these data
Sources carrying this claim
clm-e6afed64154b45a3
quantitative
URBACT good-practice status in 2017
Sources carrying this claim
clm-ed564aac3ee963fa
descriptive
a second Bristol pilot that applied the same framework to air quality rather than damp
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:d6fa868099d13ca8e92dd9b507abd8266c8404821dbee27c15d06e46730bca7a
- 15
- of 15 claims mapped
- 6
- source dossiers
- 3
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- Knowle West Media Centre, with Bristol City Council and Ideas for Change
- Actor types
- civil-society, city-government, research
- Funding model
- grant
- Funding description
- Bristol City Council grant to Knowle West Media Centre
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
6 source dossiers
Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
- Stable source ID
src-8abbda36c0319695- Publisher
- Name not classified · doi.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2017-05-02
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-25
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Balestrini, Rogers, Hassan, Creus, King and Marshall, “A City in Common: A Framework to Orchestrate Large-scale Citizen Engagement around Urban Issues”, Proceedings of CHI 2017, pp. 2282–2294. Two of the six authors are Knowle West Media Centre staff and one is from Ideas for Change, so it is a participant account that passed peer review, not an outside evaluation. Carries the stakeholder list including Bristol City Council, the £300 from a council grant, the Frogbox build (five devices, Raspberry Pi 3 and DHT22, five-minute sampling, local MySQL, per-box website, cardboard lily pads), the two-week deployment in five homes, the 45 events and 717 participants, the preference for a not-for-profit rather than the council holding the data, the housing association's purchase request, and the statement that integration of the data was still being negotiated. The DOI resolves to a paywalled ACM abstract; the full text used here is the open conference PDF, and an open copy is deposited at UCL Discovery (eprint 1545216).
URBACT Good Practice — Citizen sensing, where people act as sensors (operator-written, EU programme)
- Stable source ID
src-6bbc76e99f7bfcc0- Publisher
- Name not classified · urbact.eu
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2017-06-02
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-25
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
URBACT Good Practice record for Bristol, written in the first person by the practice holder (Knowle West Media Centre) and published by the EU URBACT programme, so it is operator self-reporting on an institutional host. States “Date of label : 02/06/2017”. Carries the three prototype tools (damp homes, food waste, mental health), the 700-plus participants across 45-plus events, the list of city council departments that took part (housing, parks, building control, health) and the description of the damp-busting system including the mapping tool and trained volunteers.
Nesta — Damp-sensing frogs (media)
- Stable source ID
src-d7c34d1ff80a601a- Publisher
- Name not classified · nesta.org.uk
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-25
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Nesta case study accompanying its feature on councils using data. States that the scheme came from discussions with residents “run by Knowle West Media Centre and Bristol City Council”, that damp housing was named by residents and became the first pilot, describes the Frogbox and lily-pad diaries, and says it is “too early to measure the full impact”. The page shows no publication date.
Knowle West Media Centre — The Bristol Approach (operator)
- Stable source ID
src-f1235a5a0729c86f- Publisher
- Name not classified · kwmc.org.uk
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2019-01-01
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-25
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Operator page, shown as dated 1 January 2019. Carries “Working with Ideas for Change and Bristol City Council, we have developed The Bristol Approach”, the statement that the Damp Busters pilot followed the phases of the framework, and that the framework was being implemented within the five-year European project REPLICATE, in a strand on air quality in east Bristol. The host blocks plain automated retrieval and was read through a browser-style fetch.
- Claims linked
Ideas for Change — Bristol Approach for civic participation (co-developer)
- Stable source ID
src-c42d7f8f3c76f2d5- Publisher
- Name not classified · ideasforchange.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-25
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Page of the think tank that co-designed the framework. Names “City Council of Bristol (United Kingdom) and the Knowle West Media Center” as the partners, dates the work 2015–2016, and describes citizens co-designing open-source sensors to tackle dampness in rental houses. A self-interested account of its own method: its wider claim that the approach was adopted in eleven European cities is not used in this entry.
- Claims linked
CORDIS — REPLICATE project record 691735 (EU)
- Stable source ID
src-321f023fa0eee912- Publisher
- Name not classified · cordis.europa.eu
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-25
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
EU project record for REPLICATE (1 February 2016 to 31 January 2021, EU contribution €24,965,263.09, coordinated by Ayuntamiento de Donostia San Sebastian). Lists BRISTOL CITY COUNCIL (net EU contribution €3,409,164.50) and KNOWLE WEST MEDIA CENTRE LBG (€371,250.00) as participants. Included as context for the institutional relationship between the council and the media centre; it does not state that REPLICATE funded the damp pilot, and this entry does not claim that it did.
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Damp Busters: Citizen-Built Damp Sensors” — Bristol, United Kingdom. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/bristol-citizen-sensing/ (last verified 2026-08-25). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
