About ActSmall

Mission

Most civic websites stop at the headline. They tell you the problem is real and large and important, and then they hand you a donate button. ActSmall tries to do the next thing: pick one action that fits the place you’re looking at right now and make it one click to take. If you already donate, that’s wonderful — we are not asking for money. We are asking for the next ten seconds of your attention.

We do this on seven sibling sites that share a recipe:

• water.actsmall.org — drinking-water gaps, water stress, treatment techniques
• air.actsmall.org — live PM2.5 against WHO 2021 guidelines, indoor air actions
• fire.actsmall.org — NASA FIRMS hotspots, defensible-space and home-hardening
• forest.actsmall.org — forest cover, intact-forest extent, protected land — with a CC BY-SA library
• food.actsmall.org — WFP HungerMap LIVE, IPC classifications, food-bank action
• ocean.actsmall.org — marine protected share, threatened-fish listings, one action per coast
• bees.actsmall.org — managed beehive density, GBIF wild-bee observations, pollinator actions

Editorial posture

Six commitments hold across every topic. None of them are negotiable; they are why the project exists.

• Source-cited. Every substantive claim links to a primary source — the actual paper, technical report, or published survey, not the press release.
• Plain English. Not dumbed down. Just direct. Jargon is defined the first time it appears.
• If we are uncertain, we say nothing. Trust is the only currency this site has. When the data is genuinely contested, we either present the contest fairly with sources for each side, or we don’t publish the page yet.
• One picked action per click. Every map click chooses the single highest-leverage thing you can do for that place right now — not a list of fifty options.
• No data is itself an action. When a country has no current reading, we don’t guess and we don’t leave the panel blank. We surface a path to help open the data — observation networks, civic-data petitions, fork-the-dataset projects.
• No engagement loops. No accounts. No login. No newsletter. No comments. No third-party trackers. No cookies. No mailing list. No donate button. No tracking pixels. We don’t measure how long you read or whether you came back.

What sits behind the map

Each topic has a small scheduled AWS Lambda that pulls its public-data feeds once a day at their published cadence. Never scraped, never crawled, never bypassed a rate limit. The Lambda normalises every dataset into a common shape and writes a single JSON file that every visitor reads. Public APIs are hit at most once per day no matter how many people are reading the map — we are deliberately quiet, welcome clients of the data sources we depend on.

The recommender is deliberately simple. From a tap location it derives need-signals (e.g. drinking-water gap, PM2.5 ratio, IFL loss, hunger gap, beehive density), and ranks the per-topic catalog of citizen actions by use-case match plus simplicity. Lower cost and lower required skill rank higher. It is a discovery tool, not a prescription.

Full methodology lives at /methodology/. Per-topic data-source citations live on each topic’s About page.

What ActSmall is not

Full terms of use live at /terms/. Privacy and analytics live at /privacy/.

Who runs this

ActSmall is built and maintained by a small group of contributors. The source tree is currently maintainer-only, not a public repository — the site, the data, and the audit log at /live/curator.json on each topic subdomain are the public surface. Editorial review for every published claim is by humans. We may use language-model tools to draft outlines, suggest rewrites, generate alt-text, or repair confirmed-broken outbound links — full disclosure at /methodology/#ai-tooling. The text is the source of truth; the AI is a tool.

To help: see /contribute/. To report an error or out-of-date source: email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong. If you organise a class, scout troop, parish, library hour, or office volunteer day, /share-builder/ assembles a single one-click URL you can hand out.

License

All written content is published under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. Share, translate, and adapt freely — please keep source citations intact and republish under the same license so the next person can keep building.