What’s the air quality like in rooms at FOSDEM?

This post is placeholder until there’s a clearer plan to try instrumenting a few rooms with affordable CO2 sensors at FOSDEM, well known, free open source conference held in Brussels.

Why do this?

Broadly speaking, I think it’s a good idea to let people make more informed choices about being in crowded rooms, with unclear ventilation for extended periods of time. Particularly if they are wary about various airborne diseases, or have people close to them who need to be careful because they might be immunocompromised.

I’m clearly not the only person thinking about this, because in the Policy Dev Room I saw this thing here, which I found out later to be an some kind of portable air filter:

I started a thread on Masto asking about it last year. And another one yielded some info I didn’t know about sourcing them too.

I don’t have a spare air portable filter, and to be honest, I don’t know enough about managing indoor air quality know if it using something like this would be worth it.

I know I’d like to base any response I might make on data though, so if nothing else, I can always try solving that problem first.

How would you do this?

I’m trying to keep this very simple to start with, as in embarassingly simple, in the hope that it can be improved upon later by others.

I’m speaking in the Inclusive web Dev Room at 11m on Sunday Feb 2nd.

It’s common for some rooms in FOSDEM to be at full capacity well in advance of popular talks, so regardless of how much of a draw your talk is, it could be rammed.

From memory, none of these rooms have any kind of instrumentation at all for air quality.

So the bar right now is on the floor – any data, even bad data from a crappy cheapo sensor would likely be an improvement on the expected state of affairs.

So, I’ll bring a sensor and leave it plugged in, where the readings are visible to people watching my talk. If the organisers in the room want to use it for the whole day, I’m happy to lend it to them, and use how they see fit.

What kind of sensor it?

TBH, it doesn’t matter that much right now – start simple, remember?

Back in November, I bought a cheap portable CO2 sensor I use in our flat. It has wifi, speaks to my phone, charges via USB-C, and has a battery built-in, so it can handle being unplugged by accident and still show info to onlookers. It looks a bit like this, and I picked it up cheap from AliExpress, as an impulse purchase.

It’s probably underspecced for a room of more than 10 people. But again, the bar is on the floor, and I’d rather start with something simple that I know sort of works for me, before I start thinking about a proper set-up worthy of FOSDEM geeks.

I don’t recommend buying this one yet – I’ll try and update this post when someone with a clue gives me an idea of might work better for a room where you might deliver a talk at a conference.

Who else is doing this?

Apparently, it’s not just me interested in doing this:

Andy Piper seemed interested with the Social Web Dev Room.

Laura Czajkowski of the Community Dev Room also seemed interested

Tim Panton also seemed interested for the RT DevRoom.

I’lll add links to others on this page, for other devrooms as I learn about them, until I think of something better to use, if there’s interest in coordinating.

Is this going to help at all?

I honestly don’t know!

In a perfect world, we’d have nifty Grafana-style dashboards displaying data gathered from neat open hardware, open software IOT thingos in each room that wanted it, via some metrics server like Prometheus or something.

We’d use this to create an evidence base for future interventions, so we can actually act where air quality is really bad.

But in the meantime, I’ll be bringing along a cheap CO2 sensor and place it prominently for folks to see. If there’s enough interest, it might justify using a proper one next year, or trying to borrow a better one from soneone who has one already.

This sounds an interesting. I’d like to do something similar.

Cool!

If you use social media, the easiest thing to do would be to respond to this post here on Mastodon where I first mentioned it if you want others to see, or this one on Bluesky if you use that.

You’re welcome to contact me directly, too, but I might not respond that fast, and I don’t want to be a bottleneck.

Also, here are some other links I’ve found of interest:

The UK National Health Service’s own guidance on using air filtration devices to minimise infection risk in enclosed spaces (gawd bless the NHS)

My specific case

In my case, my partner is immunocompromised, and in her (non-tech) work, whenever events happen in that industry with lots of people in the same space, for long periods of time, it’s common for her and others in her field to come down with something too.

There’s lots of information out there linking high recorded levels of indoor CO2 with various infections, and while I obviously have some intuition about when I might be in room where I might be more likely to catch something, or pass something on to others, and I know I can mask up, it’s useful to have some data to back up my vibes-based assessment of the situation.

Even without my personal reasons for caring – this post was somewhat nudged into existence by seeing this post from Wren Reilly at Chaos Communication Congress.

I had been thinking about it anyway, and while I’m not organising a devroom this year, it occured to me that I didn’t need to, to try to start a data-informed conversation about air quality at conferences in a world where we’ve seen one COVID lockdown already.

Anyway, if you’re at FOSDEM in February, so say hi!