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My name is Andreas Weingartner, and I would like to welcome you at the Water Transparency. I thank you for your interest in us, and for reading this letter.  My dear hope is that “us” will include “you” very soon, and with this letter, I want to try to explain and promote this idea. So, what is so important about “water” and “transparency” that we decided to build a new initiative around it ? My personal motivation: Water quality has always been my passion, starting with a short University career, continuing into my longer business life. Recently I have sold my company s::can Messtechnik, which was for sure the most difficult decision of my life; but provides me capacity now to give back to society some of what I have received over the years. As much as this separation hurts, it gives me the freedom to look at the world of water quality from a neutral perspective.  I have accumulated 20 years of experience with being a manufacturer of online water quality sensors, and  a service provider in same field, developing my company from a small start-up to the global market leader. We built several ten thousand water quality monitoring devices over the years, from single sensors to large multi-point monitoring networks, with the Ganga river monitoring network in India maybe the most prominent one. I worked with water authorities, politicians, providers and engineers, in all fields from clean water over environmental water to waste water, with government organisations, all kinds of businesses, NGOs, .... I travelled millions of miles around the globe and have seen almost all and any aspects of water quality and it’s deterioration ... and have learned a lot: About water, but also about politics, and about human beings and our ways to avoid looking at the truth of pollution; and at the truth in data. Maybe there has not been another person globally who had more direct access to online water quality data than me myself; and I used this access with passion, day and night (ask my family), retrieving data and looking at water pollution via computer or cellphone, connected to hundreds of monitoring stations, globally. Every single minute, all these sensors together are today producing hundreds of thousands of data, and have accumulated billions of data over the years. Now, how much have all these data helped to improve water quality, globally ? How much are they under daily observation and analysis by experts, and who translates these for common people to help them understand the degree of pollution ? Some of the waters I have seen made me really angry, or feeling ashamed for the careless or greedy ones who caused the killing of those water streams, and the administrators and politicians who allowed it, and are still looking away. I am afraid that especially with regard to accessibility, and now we introduce the word transparency, we are standing in a starting position. Barely any of these water data are accessible to a broader audience, and the condition of some of the most polluted waters in the world is by far not published enough, not discussed enough, and therefore, the stakeholders do not feel motivated enough to change, and to improve. So, my conclusion was: The sensors are there, the data are there, but why are they not accessible. Isn’t it a democratic right of every citizen in the world to know and understand the pollution of a nearby river, of any public water, at any point in time, or even more, the quality of the water in the glass that he/she, or their kids are drinking ? So, I thought, somebody must make these data accessible, and transparent. What that means, technically, we will discuss in the relevant parts of our portal.  Often, the legal environment is demanding transparency, and data are (theoretically) accessible; but nobody can read them, nobody can explain and understand what they mean, the situation they describe. Which means that once the data are freely accessible (“accessible” = step 1), they must be validated (“valid” = step 2) and transformed into information that everybody can understand (“barrier-free” = step 3), and then it must be (loudly) communicated that everybody should come and see what is going on (“democratised” = step 4). By our internal standard, we summarise these four steps into our key paradigm: Transparency. My personal feeling is that for (1) and (2), there will be broad acceptance by everyone; but how about (3) or even (4) ? I would not claim these are common sense today, with big differences from country to country  – but if we can help make these more common sense, we did a good job. Once situations are transparent, action will hopefully follow, by administrators and politicians. And here, we already have the main tasks of our initiative, and with this, my story. If you find this plausible or even supportable, please come in, look around, and give it a chance.