The Public Lab nonprofit is excited to announce that it has received support from the Passport Foundation to launch a pilot digital infrastructure and outreach program for people impacted by poor indoor air quality (IAQ). The project will give special attention to inhabitants of manufactured homes and emerges out of research by Dr. Nick Shapiro and Public Lab research on over 120,000 chemically contaminated former emergency housing units that were resold to under-resourced communities across the United States.

Unlike traditional, geographically organized environmental health concerns, sufferers of poor IAQ often comprise a dispersed network based around building material choices, home construction practices, and in-home behavior. Because of this, it is currently nearly impossible for sufferers of poor indoor air quality to come together to determine causes, impacts, and routes to advocacy. The goal of this pilot project is to create a cost-effective means of overcoming these limitations by creating an online database and community to connect sufferers of poor IAQ with each other and resources. The web platform will empower residents to gauge the magnitude of indoor air quality related illnesses; raise awareness of indoor air quality as a health threat; build a community of users in disparate geographic locations sharing stories and best practices; engage those affected in the process of assessment and mitigation; and begin to remedy the lack of epidemiological and symptomologic data on low-level domestic exposures.

The project will be organized on the Indoor Air Quality Monitoring page where initial wireframes for the new site have been posted: http://publiclab.org/wiki/indoor-air-quality