So we don't start with sensors. We start with what you already know is wrong — the smoke at night, the haze over the valley, the smell that wasn't there last year — and only then decide what's worth measuring. The instrument follows the concern, never the other way around.
Three moves, repeated. None of them is the technology — the technology only serves the loop.
Open-hardware sensors measure air, noise, heat and humidity around the clock. An AI-assisted WhatsApp bot lets any resident report what they see — burning waste, smoke, a new smell — in their own words, in Indonesian, English or Balinese.
Both streams land on one public map. Every reading is checked against international guidelines — WHO for air and noise, EPA and ASHRAE indoors — and translated into plain language. No login, no tracking, no paywall.
Seeing is the start. From there: workshops, advocacy with the banjar and local government, changes in homes and schools. Fab Lab Bali runs the response loop with local partners.
Most sensing projects start by buying sensors. We start by asking what matters. Right now we're in Phase 1: collecting the concerns that decide everything downstream.
Collect matters of concern from residents. Decide what this campaign is actually about.
Convene contributors — schools, banjar, NGOs, fab labs.
Co-design what to measure, where, and how often.
Deploy the sensor network and the citizen-reporting bot at scale.
Read the data together. Turn signals into shared understanding.
The community decides the response: visibility, advocacy, intervention.
Document what worked, what didn't, and what comes next.
Fab Lab Bali leads — accountable, run by people who live here. The method and the hardware come from a decade of open work elsewhere, adapted for this island, not imported wholesale.
Local fabrication lab and maker community. The accountable institution. Part of the global Fab Lab network.
2015–2017 H2020 project. Pilots in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Pristina. Fab Lab Barcelona / IAAC.
Originated at Fab Lab Barcelona / IAAC. Open-source environmental sensing, used worldwide.
Bioregional hub framework, plus federated discovery linking peer initiatives across the world.
The EU Making Sense project gave us the loop: start with concerns, sense, show, act. In Bali we're extending it in three ways that matter — turning a one-line message from a resident into structured, verifiable, shareable evidence, without surrendering it to anyone.
A resident sends a photo and a sentence to a WhatsApp bot — that's the whole ask. No forms, no categories to pick, in Indonesian, English or Balinese. The barrier to contributing environmental data drops to almost nothing.
A vision model running on Fab Lab Bali's own hardware — not a distant cloud — reads each photo: is something burning, is it waste, how serious. A person verifies before anything is published. The intelligence stays local, low-cost, and accountable to the community.
Every verified observation becomes an open, structured record — a Murmurations profile on a sovereign PlanetAI node, discoverable across the Fab City network. Bali's data isn't trapped in one database; it federates with peer initiatives worldwide on shared standards.
Put together, it's a real shift: the community owns the concern, the sensing, the AI that reads it, and the data it produces — sovereign, local-first, and federated by design, not bolted on after.
A 45-minute lesson where students compare their schoolyard's PM2.5 to the WHO guideline — then to a reference school in Barcelona via Smart Citizen's global network. Or a half-day workshop to build and install a classroom sensor.
Bring it to your school →Making Sense Bali is led and moderated by Fab Lab Bali — a real, local, accountable institution, not an anonymous platform. Every report is human-verified before it appears. The data is open; the methodology is documented; the people are reachable.
fablabbali@gmail.com →"We're starting with your concern — and only then deciding what to measure."