OpenClimate Community Call: March 30, 2021

Over the next six months, a series of “OpenClimate community calls” will be hosted around different topics related to the connection and intersection between the climate crisis/climate action and the open movement. We’ll do short, easily digestible write-ups for each call, but if you’re interested in going more in-depth on the topics, we encourage you to 1) join the calls, 2) watch the call recordings, 3) follow along will call notes, or 4) suggest a topic that you’d like to present about or host.

On March 30th (call recording and notes from call), we had the pleasure to launch this series of calls centered on three questions that we invited several speakers to respond to:

• What is the *thing* that the Open movement can contribute to solving the Climate Crisis?
• Where do you go to find solutions/information about how to solve some of these problems?
• How do you close the information gap?

Facilitated by Evelin Heidel (Scann), a long-time member of the open community, Emilio Velis, CEO of Appropedia, and Tjark Doering and Tobias Augspurger from Protontypes, gave short presentations.

Appropedia: Documentation for climate measurements

In his presentation, Emilio touch upon how complicated it can be for communities who are interested in using and gathering information to actually incorporate very specific pieces of equipment, and measurement devices.

To solve some of these challenges, Appropedia tries to ensure that there is information on how problems are being tackled, and how information and measurements can be analyzed and interpreted into meaningful information. Through building a set of metadata into standards and guides via Open Know-How, their goal is to ensure scientific hardware is able to be reproduced around the world to serve communities in creating and using hardware in situ.

There is a tension between standardization and contextualization — the meta to the micro — that is apparent and being grappled with. A question Emilio left for the audience was: how can we think system-wide, where hardware is reproducible and interoperable, yet also locally relevant and adaptable?

Protontypes: Patents are not sustainable

Tjark and Tobias are collaborators on the several-month-old project, Protontypes. In the call, they presented a list they are building called Opensustain.tech, which looks into how open/free software projects are helping in the fight for climate action within the sustainability space.

Their thesis is that there cannot be true sustainability without openness and transparency. In offering this list of tools and projects, they cover the gamut of what it takes to move projects from the idea stage to actuality — business models, open technology and the platforms on which this technology relies.

Key Takeaways

After the call, we obtained three insights from what the speakers and participants shared in the conversation:

• There is a challenge in creating documentation and solutions for audiences outside of the open movement (and even within!).
• Focus is needed on developing audience awareness for the needs of open material — both projects are developing their audience relationships right now.
• There is a value that open brings to the environmental space which is centered around transparency, replicability, and the ability for projects to be impactful.

Join us on April 27, 2021

If you are interested in following up with the conversation, please join us for the next call on April 27th! We’ll be exploring questions around what, how and why open data can help in the fight for climate change. Emilio will be facilitating a conversation between Anna Grijalva (UNDP Accelerator Lab Ecuador) and Angela Eaton (Open Environmental Data).