WHY: 2015 has been named by the United Nations as the International Year of Light (light2015.org). Electricity and light have many obvious benefits for human mankind, but they also pose some relevant threats: the every day increasing excess of light thrown by humans to the sky seriously threatens to remove forever one of humanity’s natural wonders, the view of our universe. More importantly, it has also an adverse impact on our environment and economy (energy wasted to the sky costs 2 billion US$ per year in the USA and around 3 billion € per year in Europe) and on the health of hundreds of species, including pathologies in human beings (e.g., stress, insomnia).

Many professional and amateur scientists are already fighting against light pollution. However, it is necessary to increase social awareness about the importance of preserving the darkness of our cities and environment. WHAT: STARS4ALL will create a Light Pollution Initiative (LPI) incubation platform that will allow generating (and maintaining) customizable on-demand domain-focused LPIs (e.g. a light pollution working group in Brussels). The platform will be self-sustainable: it will integrate a crowdfunding tool to fund the LPIs; it will consider incentives that motivate citizens to participate in LPIs, as well as policies to handle those incentives; and it will provide innovations in data acquisition from sensors deployed by citizens and in games with a purpose. HOW: STARS4ALL “aims at helping to reduce light pollution so to let everybody enjoy stars at night”. We will initially deploy 10 LPIs, which will be already operating by the end of the 1st semester of project execution, creating collective awareness during the rest of the project. At that moment we will pave the way for the creation of other LPIs by citizens, especially in cross-disciplines such as Energy Saving, Biodiversity, and Human Health, and will organize open competitions among them.

At the end of the project, STARS4ALL will have created a total of 30 LPIs and an open self-sustainable platform to host any number of LPIs in the future. The UNESCO declared the sky as “an inalienable right of humankind equivalent to all other socio-cultural and environmental rights1”. The name of this project aims at representing this right of “stars for all the citizens”. Our objective is to encourage citizens to care and preserve the darkness of european skies beyond 2015, the International Year of the Light.