Call for Action!

i've been working on a project with a friend dealing with low-cost water quality testing and mapping in developing countries (right now we are doing lots of working eastern china/tibet). historically water quality indexing has been done by the UN and has required samples and labs and expensively prohibitive equipment so that citizens cannot carry it out remotely, nor find anything intelligible about the obfuscated results. however, some more recent innovations and developments have led to significantly lower cost equipment that can give a finite amount of good indicators of water quality, such as turbidity, coliform counts, etc etc. we're looking at providing citizen testing kits that are CHEAP to people in various regions so they can test their water and report remotely via cellphone to our database. this database then helps communites access appropriate infrastructure by connecting them w/ necessary resources (including ngos/universities/researchers etc looking to do work on these topics/regions). the database will provide information on areas of concern and enable researchers to query for regional water quality parameters to serve as guidelines for the development and implementation of locally-targeted intervention technologies. long story short, im looking to delve into this project and get some of these technical items done. i still need to talk w/ said friend about specifics, but its a project worth considering....environmental mapping is the future! (also, intelligible data visualization for this and local statistical hydrology would be ammmmmmaaaazing).
brad.