The combined infrastructure required to tie all of these disparate parts together can be expensive or cumbersome to put together from scratch and has frequently slowed projects down.

Our Urban Monitoring system, a collaboration with the University of Bristol, is a research project that aims to create an open-source, flexible framework that will reduce the implementation time of the data-gathering research projects from months to weeks and enable a secure, resilient and scalable collection of data.

A further improvement over previous solutions, is that all of the data is kept within Bristol, as it’s stored on OPCR.

Currently, 8 homes on Cotham Hill are using the Urban Monitoring suite to collect information about noise pollution. They each have smart sensors, an edge device and can view their own information and securely by logging into their personal dashboard on OPCR.

As part of KWMC’s We Can Make and Twinergy projects, we are taking this further – two prefabricated homes are being built in Knowle West, ready for the the owners to move in early next year. Each home will be filled with smart sensors, energy monitoring and generation devices and everything will be tied together with the Urban Monitoring system.

The OPCR network allowed for rapid development and iteration, with the project initially coming together over a weekend as part of the EU vs Virus hackathon. It has proved to be an invaluable resource, bringing together hundreds of people in the local area and has grown to include a long and unexpected list of actives:

• Collecting Prescriptions
• Food Shopping
• Dog Walking
• Gardening
• Rubbish Clearance / Litter Picking
• Adding Credit to Electricity Keys
• Office Support
• Surge Testing Site Volunteering
• Well-Being Box Delivery and Support
• Giving Lifts
• Cleaning
• Heavy Lifting/Moving
• Meal Collection
• Befriending Calls
• D.I.Y.
• Deliveries
• Flyering

Many strong connections have been made through use of the site and many activities are now organised offline, peer-to-peer. Without the OPCR network, the ongoing development work and hosting wouldn’t have been possible.

We have been working closely with Bristol City Council and their wider volunteering provision, Can Do to improve our system and explore if and how it could be rolled out to the rest of the city, including the over 11,000 Can Do members.

Part of this work has included Penetration Testing, to ensure the security and integrity of the web application. The OPCR network is unique, being hosted and secured within Bristol as connections to the wider-web are opened only where needed and with strict security policies in place, to protect all sensitive and personal information.

The system has allowed for a development server to be used for testing updates as well as a PenTest server to allow for external testing.

The project is built openly and collaboratively on GitHub.

Part of this will include co-designing richer, more engaging visualisations to Bristol’s Open Data Platform, such as Solar Plots.

These new features will be developed, hosted and served on the OPCR network, allowing the Council to augment its existing public platform by utilising the advanced power of its private and secure, local R&D network.

We believe this approach to development could form the framework for future Council R&D for the public’s benefit.

KWMC has a portion of the Open Stack environment and projects, as well as their own Wireguard VPN server for development access, an open-source Nginx Proxy Manager for domain management, a LoRaWAN gateway and ChirpStack management tool, and an internal GitLab to host private code. This portion of the network, is KWMC’s “cloud” environment.

Not everything on the network is locked-down however, in fact this very website is being served from KWMC’s cloud, as well as other projects outlined on this site, such as To/Fro, BristolAirQuality.co.uk, Urban Monitoring Dashboards and more.

This safe, local environment allows for training, R&D and rapid deployment. The number of users accessing parts of the network, whether the inner circle or open web applications has grown rapidly over the past couple of years. There will be more training provided in the new year, starting with workshops around Machine Learning.

This invaluable resource fits squarely with Bristol’s One City Plan, especially around connecting up every community, a city-wide innovation ecosystem and responsible innovation – it’s amazing to be part of this development and look forward to seeing more communities connected up.

We created a simple live dashboard, displaying the machine bookings for the day and are now working with a developer to create a new bespoke dashboard, as part of our wider Community Dashboards project, that will include our latest social media posts, more Fabman information as well as other community date, such as air quality.

In the new year, we will be building additional functions to allowing us to book out all machines in one space with the click of a button, for when we have workshops or events, such as Maker City and also creating an internal finance tool, to simplify invoicing for our members.

As a trusted partner, we’ve been given the green-light from Fabman to start building our own IoT devices that will allow us to provide members with smart lockers, door access and simplify materials purchasing.

The OPCR network provides the research, development and hosting space for this new framework and utilising the core features of KWMC.cloud, the development workflow for deployment of projects on the platform is also going to streamlined and overhauled, to allow for more easy and seamless updates to all of the web applications hosted on the network.

Once the dashboard and deployment methods are in place, we then want to open them up to the wider-community, sharing with them the tools needed to create dashboards that are relevant and personalised to them.

BristolAirQuality.co.uk is a collaboration between the University of Bristol and KWMC; running on the OPCR network, it provides Bristolians with the most feature and information-rich portal available, for viewing and exploring live and historical Air Quality data, generated within the city and surrounding area.

In the new year, 1 PhD and 6 Undergraduate students will join workshops with citizens, to co-design new features to make the data more understandable, such as better visualisation and comparison tools.

The project is built openly and collaboratively on GitHub.

Slow The Smoke

The above mentioned workshops form part of Bristol City Council’s Slow The Smoke, which supported 10 citizens to build and install their own Luftdaten sensor, all of which are featured on BristolAirQuality.co.uk and BCC’s Open Data Platform.

An additional comparison tool runs on OPCR, which pulls in the sensors’ data and allows the participants to explore and compare their readings with the others taking part.

The project is built openly and collaboratively on GitHub and builds upon resources created in previous projects.

Chatbots

We’ve frequently collaborated with the fantastic Women Reclaiming AI community, who help people to create chatbots that provide a needed alternative to Alexa and Siri, with a focus on openness, locality and representation.

Inspired by this, we partnered with the University of Bristol to create a local chatbot, by and for Knowle West, which ran on the OPCR network.

Explainable AI

In the new year, we will be running workshops with the Bristol Digital Futures Institute – another frequent collaborator of ours – with an aim to make ML more relatable and understandable to the community. First we will investigate current interactions with data and ML, then explore future uses and approaches. The OPCR network can provide people with the resources to gain hands-on experience with ML algorithms and processes, to help demystify theoretical concepts and work on improvements.