About ActSmall · Water
A public-good water-quality portal. The map matches every place in the world to live conditions and a curated catalog of community- and household-scale water-treatment techniques drawn from open-access references. Nothing on this site is for sale.
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.
Methodology & data sources
The portal uses only freely accessible, primary public data:
- 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 15-minute refresh schedule.
- Freshwater stress (SDG 6.4.2) — FAO AQUASTAT / UN-Water: withdrawals as a share of available renewable resources.
- Live water-related disasters — GDACS (UN OCHA + JRC). Floods, droughts, and tropical cyclones, refreshed every 15 minutes.
- Real-time US water-quality gauges — USGS NWIS Instantaneous Values (public domain): pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, specific conductance, water temperature. Refreshed every 15 minutes 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 data stays current
A small scheduled job pulls each public feed once every 15 minutes, normalizes the result so every dataset shares a common shape, and serves a single tiny JSON file to everyone who visits. Your browser only ever talks to our own server for live data — the public APIs we depend on are hit once per refresh window no matter how many people are reading the map. The system is deliberately lightweight, monthly running costs are intentionally negligible, and the whole pipeline is open for inspection in the project’s public source.
The recommender is deliberately simple. From a tap location it derives need-signals (drinking-water gap, water stress, climate band, disaster proximity, recency) and ranks the catalog by use-case match plus simplicity (lower cost, lower required skill rank higher). It is a discovery tool, not a prescription. National figures hide local realities — for the United States, drill down with the EPA ECHO Drinking Water Dashboard; for elsewhere, ask local authorities.
Trust posture
Every technique on this site is one layer in a safer water system, not a complete answer. We try to be calm, careful, and honest about limits, and we revise as the public datasets behind the map are updated.
What this is not
ActSmall · Water is informational only. It is not medical, first-aid, or treatment advice; not engineering certification; not drinking-water certification. For medical questions, contact qualified local help. For drinking-water treatment, follow guidance from your local health authority. Get help →
Working with local people
The best results come from partnership with local health workers, water and sanitation engineers, community elders and farmers, WASH NGOs, and university extension. If you adapt this portal’s information for your community, please consider sharing what you learn.
Terms of use
Read this before acting on anything you see on this site.
- The content is educational and informational, not professional advice. It is general; your local conditions, water sources, materials, climate, and regulations are not.
- The content is provided as-is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.
- Use is at your own risk. You are solely responsible for assessing the suitability and safety of any practice for your situation, for any harm to people, animals, property, or the environment, and for the safety of any water you or others consume.
- Where this site mentions specific numbers (distances, depths, retention times, removal percentages, etc.) they are common starting figures from published field literature. They are not guarantees, design specifications, or substitutes for site-specific assessment by qualified people.
- Comply with local laws and regulations. Many jurisdictions regulate greywater handling, runoff, well setbacks, and constructed wetlands. Check with your local authorities before building.
- For anything beyond a small, contained learning project, get review from qualified local professionals — public-health, water, sanitation, or civil/environmental engineering.
- Links to third-party organisations (WHO, CDC, USGS, etc.) are for convenience only. ActSmall does not control, endorse, or take responsibility for their content.
- To the maximum extent permitted by law, the project, contributors, and maintainers disclaim all liability for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages arising from use of this site or anything done based on it.
If any part of these terms is unacceptable to you, please do not use the content.
Privacy
This site uses no trackers, cookies, or third-party analytics. Your map pins, your private action log (the “Mark done” / “30-day reminder” entries), and any cached drinking-water taps live in your own browser’s localStorage only and are never transmitted. Calendar reminders are generated as standards-based .ics files and downloaded straight to your device; we don’t schedule or store them. Pre-written advocacy emails open in your own mail app with the recipient empty — nothing goes through us.
Closing the loop — from recognition to action
Recognising a problem is only the first step; most public-good information sites stop there. We try to help you take the next one. When you click into a country the map picks one high-leverage thing you can do based on what the live data is actually showing — donate to a named, currently-running emergency operation; fund long-running clean-water work; cut your own water use; help map a disaster from your laptop; or forward the view to two more people. Below the primary action you’ll find three small affordances: Mark done writes a private entry to your action log so a one-shot intent becomes a habit you can see; 30-day reminder downloads a calendar event so the commitment outlives the moment; Tell two people uses your phone’s share sheet (or a pre-filled email) so reach multiplies without friction. None of this is tracked, gamified, or sent anywhere. The point is to make the next click easy enough that more people actually take it.
License
Content is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. Share, translate, and adapt freely — please keep the safety messaging intact. The CC BY-SA 4.0 license itself is provided as-is, without warranties; that disclaimer applies in addition to the Terms above.