  Developing information technology to democratize scientific knowledge and
support citizen empowerment is a challenging task. In our case, a local
community suffered from air pollution caused by industrial activity. The
residents lacked the technological fluency to gather and curate diverse
scientific data to advocate for regulatory change. We collaborated with the
community in developing an air quality monitoring system which integrated
heterogeneous data over a large spatial and temporal scale. The system afforded
strong scientific evidence by using animated smoke images, air quality data,
crowdsourced smell reports, and wind data. In our evaluation, we report
patterns of sharing smoke images among stakeholders. Our survey study shows
that the scientific knowledge provided by the system encourages agonistic
discussions with regulators, empowers the community to support policy making,
and rebalances the power relationship between stakeholders.
