ActSmall · Water

About ActSmall · Water

A public-good water-quality portal: a country map driven by open data, a curated catalog of community-scale treatment techniques, and one concrete next step per place. The shared policies (privacy, license, terms, contribute) live on actsmall.org — this page covers only what is specific to water.

Mission

ActSmall · Water exists to make it easier for anyone — a community group, a teacher, a field worker, a curious neighbour — to see what is actually happening with water near them, and to find an open-source technique that fits. We combine free public data on water access, water stress, water-related disasters, and (where available) real-time water-quality readings, with a curated catalog of treatment techniques whose primary references are openly available.

The site is map-first. Every other page exists to point you at the map, or to explain what the map is doing.

Data sources for water

The country map joins these open-data feeds, pulled once a day at ~03:23 UTC (with up to a 60-minute jitter window) by a small AWS Lambda. The Lambda only consumes documented public APIs at their published cadence.

  • Drinking-water access — WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), latest release. We display the gap (100% − safely-managed coverage). Pulled from Our World in Data on a daily refresh schedule.
  • Freshwater stress (SDG 6.4.2) — FAO AQUASTAT / UN-Water: withdrawals as a share of available renewable resources.
  • Water-related disasters — GDACS (UN OCHA + JRC). Floods, droughts, and tropical cyclones, refreshed daily.
  • US water-quality gauges — USGS NWIS Instantaneous Values (public domain): pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, specific conductance, water temperature. Refreshed daily from all 22 USGS HUC2 hydrologic regions.
  • Public drinking-water taps — OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API, on demand for the current map view (ODbL).
  • Country borders — Natural Earth (public domain).
  • Basemap — OpenFreeMap & OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
  • Technique catalog — assembled by hand from the open-access materials of CAWST, Eawag/Sandec, SSWM, WHO, US EPA, IRC WASH, Akvopedia, and others. Each entry links to its primary reference.

How the daily refresh and curator work in general: actsmall.org/methodology/.

National figures hide local realities

The recommender is a discovery tool, not a prescription. National averages hide local disparities. Where a country publishes a sub-national drinking-water dashboard, drill down there — for example the EU’s WISE Drinking Water Reports, the UK’s Drinking Water Inspectorate, India’s Jal Jeevan Mission dashboard, the US’s EPA ECHO Drinking Water Dashboard, or equivalent national agencies. For places without one, ask local authorities.

If something is wrong

If you find an error, an out-of-date source, a broken link, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: please email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong. The maintainers will review.

Where to read more