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Making Sense Bali
A community-led environmental sensing campaign for Bali, anchored by Fab Lab Bali, within the Fab City Bali chapter.
Making Sense Bali combines open-hardware environmental sensors, public data from regional and global networks, and resident reports of locally observed environmental issues — burning waste, air quality events, water leaks, construction debris, noise, the matters of concern raised by people who actually live here. The work is done in Indonesia, by people in Indonesia, on concerns identified by people in Indonesia.
The campaign is hosted and accountable to Fab Lab Bali, the local fabrication laboratory in Denpasar, as part of the Fab City Bali chapter of the global Fab City network. Methodologically the work descends from the Making Sense project (EU Horizon 2020, Fab Lab Barcelona / IAAC and partners, 2015–2017) and uses the Smart Citizen Kit platform, co-founded by Tomas Diez and Alex Posada at Fab Lab Barcelona / IAAC in 2012. Making Sense Bali is led by Tomas Diez — Smart Citizen co-founder, now resident in Bali — and runs as an independent bioregional instance, in close relationship with the original projects.
Live: makingsense.fablabbali.com
Related work in Bali
Bali Air Dispatch — a live island-wide register of
PM2.5, reading across seven sensor networks, with an evidence brief, a solutions guide and
a data review of the island's garbage fires. It is a separate and independent effort,
and Fab Lab Bali and Meaningful Design Group are listed collaborators.
The two projects fit together rather than overlap. Making Sense Bali collects and moderates
resident reports and runs open-hardware nodes; Bali Air Dispatch aggregates the island's
sensor networks and renders our reports layer on its map — the dashed circles, sized by
count, fading over thirty days. Its community WhatsApp
group is also the source of
docs/community-knowledge.md.
New here? How to contribute.
What Making Sense Bali looks like
Three surfaces, one campaign:
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The public site at makingsense.fablabbali.com/ — the campaign's home: methodology, status, the live dashboard, the matters-of-concern survey, the residents' reports, attribution to the broader network.
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The live dashboard at /dashboard/ — real-time environmental sensor readings aggregated from multiple open networks: Smart Citizen Kit deployments operated by the campaign, OpenAQ stations in Bali, Sensor.Community devices, PurpleAir (when configured). PM2.5, PM10, temperature, humidity, noise. Each pin shows source, last reading, links to the original platform.
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The reports layer — residents send environmental observations to a WhatsApp bot ("Making Sense Bali" in the Bali deployment). Each report is reviewed by the local operator before publication. Approved reports appear on the public site as community-sourced data alongside the sensor readings. Phone numbers are never stored.
The methodology
Making Sense Bali follows a phased Making Sense-derived approach, adapted for Bali:
Phase 1 — Matters of concern. A survey, currently hosted on Airtable, asks residents what environmental issues affect their daily life. The output isn't a ranked list of "problems to solve" — it's a map of attention. Where do people notice burning waste? Where is the noise unbearable? Where does the water taste bad? The survey establishes that the campaign is responding to community-defined concerns, not imposing an external agenda.
Phase 2 — Sensing and reporting. Two channels run in parallel. Open-hardware sensors (Smart Citizen Kits) are deployed at strategic locations — currently a campaign-operated house node and office node, with capacity to expand to schools and community sites. In parallel, the reports bot collects qualitative resident observations: photos, locations, descriptions of issues that sensors can't see. The combined dataset is published openly.
Phase 3 — Response and learning. This is the phase the network is building toward. Aggregated data and report patterns inform local action — from individual awareness (your home is in a smoke corridor) to community organizing (this trash burning is a recurring event with a known source) to policy advocacy (the regional government has data it can act on). Federated cross-bioregion learning is the longer-term horizon.
Components
Making Sense Bali is assembled from these parts. Each has its own scope and its own deployment story:
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
