The Safe Drinking Water Project is a team of volunteers at Code for Boston who are using data modeling and machine learning to predict the presence of hazardous drinking water contaminants in the United States. Our goals are to identify at-risk communities, hazards posed by emerging contaminants, and other health concerns related to contamination of drinking water.
Representatives for nonprofit organizations and government agencies interested in our work should contact Andrew at andrew@codeforboston.org. Please feel free to also join our Slack channel at Code for Boston and meet the team.
The Conservation Law Foundation has expressed interest in this project, and we are excited to hear from other organizations who are also interested.
We are interested in data that helps identify hazardous drinking water. Our analyses primarily utilize the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) as our violations data; this data contains information about drinking water violations for public water systems across the United States. In addition to SDWIS, we are interested in any data that may help better predict drinking water violations when combined with violations data, such as rainfall data and demographic data.
Most volunteers work in python with pandas. Some volunteers also use R.
If you are interested in volunteering for the Safe Drinking Water Project:
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Join the Slack. The #water channel has various pinned items that will be of use for getting started.
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Read the docs. The
docs/folder contains more information about the project, plus steps on how to set up the project so you can start contributing. Click here for the docs. -
Meet us on Tuesday nights. We would love to meet you! We meet alongside other Code for Boston teams every Tuesday in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA. Sign up to attend Code for Boston events here.