A poster style image advertising WeObserve's Open Data Challenge. The background looks like brown paper. Along the middle are thinly drawn green hexagons with icons of objects such as mobile phones, fires, dials, etc drawn inside them. Along the bottom are cartoon character style drawings of people sitting in a field using laptops. Underneath them are slogans such as "biodiversity" "food growing" etc.


Addressing climate challenges requires help from everyone, and Citizen Observatories aspire to engage citizens to gather data and information about the environment to support better decision-making, new public services and make change. 

WeObserve ran an online Open Data Challenge (ODC) over summer 2020 to create new digital transformation opportunities by using open data for solutions and services that can be implemented for wider social good. 

By opening up data from four Citizen Observatories,  citizens, communities, academics and technologists from all over the world were able to access some of the EU’s richest citizen-generated environmental open data for the first time. The Challenge used data from the H2020 Citizen Observatory projects GROW Observatory, Ground Truth 2.0, Landsense, and Scent.

With the acceleration of climate change, addressing environmental challenges has never been more urgent.  Environmental data can help to address these issues. As a result of citizens coming together with scientists and other concerned people and organisations, there is a growing amount of high-quality and open data to apply to these challenges. There are opportunities to merge open datasets from local governments and data from these Citizen Science projects to produce new and exciting data applications.

Last modified: Tuesday, 30 March 2021, 3:43 PM