Always on
This project successfully funded on 10th December 2025, you can still support them with a donation.
River Dart Hub - A Friends of the Dart Project
Totnes, Devon, United Kingdom
Aim
During Autumn/Winter '25 Friends of the Dart are running a fundraiser to support and fund our work and we would hugely welcome your support!
This Crowdfunder is raising funds for a River Dart Hub platform that will aggregate, host, share and make available valuable information that will give a near as possible insight and picture with full transparency of our local water company spillage practises.
What is a River Dart Hub?
How would it be, if we all had access to all the available up-to-date information, to gain a clear and transparent picture of water company spill practises?
In our humble view, this is exactly what is needed to fully understand what is happening and to hold water companies to account for their current activity, as well as to demonstrate and inform the Regulator on which information is needed in the public domain, to substantially reduce such illegal practises in the future.
‘River Dart Hub’ platform addresses a genuine market gap in community-focused, federated water quality monitoring platforms. After analysing over 40 software products across six categories, our research reveals that no existing solution fully matches River Dart Hub's unique combination of community accessibility, comprehensive data management, and true multi-organisation architecture.
We have three objectives in mind with this project:
First, making it easier for us, our communities and partners (e.g. EA) to pool, jointly analyse and view data that creates a full picture of what is happening and when.
Second, consider how this tool could serve the needs of other similar groups nationally.
Third, explore what Regulator mandated transparency on sewage assets might enable, in terms of accessing and using water company data for accountability.
To support our goal of identifying and eradicating pollution sources, we are developing this revolutionary service, the first of its kind, that will for the first time combine and aggregate all relevant and available historical and on-going information from numerous sources: none of which have up until now, been available all in one place.
We are aware that there are various data platforms currently available, however, we see a gap and opportunity in terms of a platform that brings together in one place the following data:
1/. All Sewage Overflow and Other Outflow (exact) Locations
(as well as EA permit data and Event Duration Monitoring (EDM) data for each one).
2/. Water Quality Data
(including Friends of the Dart testing data, Environment Agency and testing results from other partners as well as readings from remote sensors).
3/. Population Size, Rainfall Flow Rates and Weather Forecast Data
(these are all essential to provide important context).
This will allow anyone to look at and compare the performance and any changes over time. This will allow a transparent assessing whether
Additionally, with the aim of demonstrating the benefits of full transparency, there will be a stronger emphasis on the analysis of the data, with tools that help to see spatial and temporal patterns in the data. This will support our goal of identifying pollution sources.
Thank you for taking the time for read about our plans and thank you for any support that you can offer.
One Last Favour
Please do share this with anyone that cares about the River Dart or the issue of water pollution in our water ways!
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made