1001 Smart Cities

Permanent project revision

Damp Busters: Citizen-Built Damp Sensors

Revision 2026-08-25-bristol-baseline · effective 2026-08-25

Current revision. This is the snapshot used by the live entity page.

unreviewed

Created the first structured Evidence Passport with 15 claims and 6 source dossiers.

sha256:d6fa868099d13ca8e92dd9b507abd8266c8404821dbee27c15d06e46730bca7a
All revisions → Current entity page →

Change set

  • add /evidencePassport — Added claim-level evidence mapping and source dossiers.
  • add /revisionHistory — Established a permanent, hash-addressed baseline revision.
15
of 15 claims mapped
6
source dossiers
3
publication dates recorded
0
archives linked
0
exact locators
0
content captures hashed

Claims, one by one

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.

Claim 1 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
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The operator states it verbatim: “Working with Ideas for Change and Bristol City Council, we have developed The Bristol Approach”. The paper gives the same list from the other side: “The stakeholders were: KWMC, the researcher, Bristol City Council, and the innovation think-tank Ideas for Change”, and describes KWMC as having “support from Bristol City Council to deliver an inclusive and sustainable citizen-sensing programme in Bristol”. Ideas for Change, the third partner, names “City Council of Bristol (United Kingdom) and the Knowle West Media Center” as the partners in developing the model and dates the work 2015–2016.
Caveat
Co-development is not adoption. No source found says the council took the damp readings into its housing operations.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Knowle West Media Centre — The Bristol Approach (operator)
  2. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
  3. Ideas for Change — Bristol Approach for civic participation (co-developer)
Claim 2 clm-68802b1040ed8f1e descriptive
damp housing was the problem residents picked first
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Nesta: the scheme “came from a series of discussions with residents” and “Damp housing was cited as one of residents’ biggest concerns, and became the focus of the first pilot project”. The paper describes the identification phase (network analysis, artist-led conversations in hotspots) that produced the choice.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Nesta — Damp-sensing frogs (media)
  2. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
Claim 3 clm-d903531d68099151 descriptive
a frog-shaped box holding a Raspberry Pi and a temperature and humidity sensor
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The paper: “Five devices were built using Raspberry Pi3 and DHT22 temperature and humidity sensors”, on a design that “looked like a frog and affectionately became known as the Frogbox”. Nesta describes the same object: a temperature and humidity sensor in the middle of the frog’s back, connected to a Raspberry Pi 3.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
  2. Nesta — Damp-sensing frogs (media)
Claim 4 clm-06730dd8f018590c descriptive
collected a reading every five minutes into a database on the box itself, with a website for the householder
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The paper: “The Frogbox was designed to collect data every five minutes using a Python script. It was then saved to a local MySQL database”, and “A simple website running on each box was developed to provide users with access to the data”. Nesta gives the reader-facing version: data every five minutes saved to a simple database, with a website showing temperature, humidity and dew point.
Caveat
The data stayed on the box; neither source describes a central platform collecting readings from all five devices.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
  2. Nesta — Damp-sensing frogs (media)
Claim 5 clm-a882209b1a8a52fe descriptive
a cardboard lily pad for noting showers, cooking and drying
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The paper: “the Frogboxes were designed to sit on cardboard lily pads for people to annotate the timestamp of events that might lead to condensation such as taking a shower, cooking, or drying clothes on a radiator”.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
  2. Nesta — Damp-sensing frogs (media)
Claim 6 clm-73e08b319d6ad172 descriptive
Five devices were built, and they ran for two weeks in five homes
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The paper states both halves: “Five devices were built using Raspberry Pi3 and DHT22 temperature and humidity sensors” and “The Frogboxes were deployed for two weeks in 5 homes in the neighbourhood.” It adds that the group decided to make and test a few sensors “before scaling up to larger numbers”, which is the scale-up that did not follow.
Caveat
One of the five stopped reporting before the end of the test period; the paper records the community’s suspicion that children had put it in contact with water.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
Claim 7 clm-58f07c814e2ca127 quantitative
45 events and workshops drew more than 717 participants aged 13 to 80
Published field
impact · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The paper, on the ten-month activation phase across two neighbourhoods: “45 events and workshops were run, with over 717 participants aged 13-80.” URBACT reports the same figures for the pilot programme: “Over 700 people were involved in more than 45 events during the pilot project.”
Caveat
These are programme-wide figures for the activation phase, not damp-specific ones; the entry says so.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
  2. URBACT Good Practice — Citizen sensing, where people act as sensors (operator-written, EU programme)
Claim 8 clm-1e3064539841a07a descriptive
damp was one of three prototype tools tested alongside food waste and mental health
Published field
impact · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
URBACT: “Three sets of prototype citizen sensing tools were designed and tested: tackling damp homes, food waste and mental health.” The paper says the same from the other direction: “Here we report on one of the three outcomes from this stage: the Dampbusters intervention”.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. URBACT Good Practice — Citizen sensing, where people act as sensors (operator-written, EU programme)
  2. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
Claim 9 clm-a59bec67b0fd91d4 descriptive
Nesta's write-up said it was too early to measure the full impact
Published field
impact · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Nesta: “While it’s too early to measure the full impact of this ongoing project, the project is already providing residents with knowledge and resources to help them solve issues of damp or challenge landlords to take action.”
Caveat
Nesta wrote this while the project was still running. No later source was found that publishes a measured effect on damp, in the homes tested or anywhere else.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Nesta — Damp-sensing frogs (media)
Claim 10 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
Published field
impact · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The paper, verbatim: “to cover the cost of the Frogboxes (and later for the deployment), KWMC allocated a further small sum of money (£300) from a grant given by the City Council. Participants administered the funds following a participatory budget approach, using the online voting tool, stickymoose.com.”
Caveat
The £300 is the hardware and deployment line only, not the cost of the programme, which no source states.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
Claim 11 clm-9525499417dc119d descriptive
A housing association asked to buy the boxes
Published field
impact · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The paper, under the heading Tensions: ownership of the commons: “A housing association approached the community, requesting to buy the Frogboxes. In response, the community member who had led the development of the Frogboxes launched a business to service the sensors and help tenants tackle damp.”
Caveat
The paper does not name the housing association and does not say whether a sale or a service ever followed.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
Claim 12 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
Published field
lesson · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The paper quotes a media arts producer on where the data should live: “[They] seemed more comfortable with the idea of data being held by a not for profit organisation than by the City Council.”
Caveat
This is a co-ordinator’s account of what participants seemed to prefer, not a survey of them.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
Claim 13 clm-f7bd90ff35f4c96b descriptive
when the paper went to press the group was still negotiating the integration of these data
Published field
lesson · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
In the outcome phase the paper lists what the project contributed to the city commons and writes that “The community is negotiating the integration of these data in” — the object of the sentence is a link that the PDF text extraction does not resolve. What is unambiguous is the tense: as of publication in May 2017, integration had not happened.
Caveat
The destination of the proposed integration could not be read from the extracted text, so the entry says only that integration was still being negotiated.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Balestrini et al., “A City in Common”, CHI 2017 (peer-reviewed)
Claim 14 clm-e6afed64154b45a3 quantitative
URBACT good-practice status in 2017
Published field
lesson · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The URBACT Good Practice record for Bristol, “Citizen sensing - where people act as sensors”, states “Date of label : 02/06/2017”.
Caveat
The record was written by the practice holder and describes the framework rather than the damp deployment.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. URBACT Good Practice — Citizen sensing, where people act as sensors (operator-written, EU programme)
Claim 15 clm-ed564aac3ee963fa descriptive
a second Bristol pilot that applied the same framework to air quality rather than damp
Published field
lesson · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The operator page states that “The Bristol Approach framework is also currently being implemented within the five-year European partnership project REPLICATE”, in a strand of work on air quality in east Bristol and its effect on travel behaviour.
Caveat
The page is dated January 2019 and the air-quality pilot has itself since ended; the operator's own accounts date the damp and air-quality pilots to 2016 and 2016-2019 respectively.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Knowle West Media Centre — The Bristol Approach (operator)

Source dossiers and revision state

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.

unreviewed Revision 2026-08-25-bristol-baseline effective 2026-08-25 · created 2026-08-25

Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.

sha256:d6fa868099d13ca8e92dd9b507abd8266c8404821dbee27c15d06e46730bca7a
Revision history → Permanent version link → Machine-readable record → Evidence Constitution →
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) doi.org · 12 linked claims

Open original source ↗

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
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).

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
URBACT Good Practice — Citizen sensing, where people act as sensors (operator-written, EU programme) urbact.eu · 3 linked claims

Open original source ↗

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
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.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Nesta — Damp-sensing frogs (media) nesta.org.uk · 5 linked claims

Open original source ↗

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
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.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Knowle West Media Centre — The Bristol Approach (operator) kwmc.org.uk · 2 linked claims

Open original source ↗

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
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.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Ideas for Change — Bristol Approach for civic participation (co-developer) ideasforchange.com · 1 linked claim

Open original source ↗

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
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.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
CORDIS — REPLICATE project record 691735 (EU) cordis.europa.eu · background

Open original source ↗

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
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.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
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.