David C. Roberts – Quartz – “Every year, outdoor air pollution kills more people worldwide than malaria and HIV combined. People in China, particularly in its largest cities, are some of the most affected, since the country’s rapid economic growth has come at the cost of air quality. This issue remained largely unaddressed until the US embassy in Beijing began to tweet out air quality data in 2008, providing a remarkable demonstration of the transformative power of democratizing data. The tweets sparked an energetic environmental movement that forced China’s leaders to acknowledge the massive scale of the problem and begin to take measures to combat it.”

• “Systematic monitoring of air quality are lacking in many parts of the world, especially in cities where air quality is poor. Since 2008, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing has been collecting real-time air-quality data from a monitor on the Embassy’s rooftop and sharing that data publicly through social media. Using this freely available data, as well as those from four other U.S. consulates in China that are also now collecting and sharing data publicly, we demonstrate that rooftop air-quality monitors installed at embassies and consulates can further our understanding of air quality and provide a rich, hourly-averaged, long-term data source for the academic community and decision-makers…”