WE NEED A GLOBAL & TRANSPARENT CLIMATE ACCOUNTING SYSTEM TO ACHIEVE THE PARIS AGREEMENT
We are calling on you and all our planetary stakeholders to contribute in the development of an open source and collectively owned global climate accounting system, platform and portal.
Lets show how the power of collaboration can create an impactful paradigm shift
necessary to addressing climate change.
WHEN
Next sprint: April 22nd (Earth Day)
This years Collabathon will have multiple sprints throughout the year.
The next sprint will be organized around Earth day.
WHERE
Remote contributions. Global Network
This year all events will be taking place online organized by local nodes all over the world. Most nodes are universities and civic tech organizations.
WHO
Anyone that has something to contribute can join
Ideal teams are composed by complementary skills such as climate experts, software developers, UX/UI designers, blockchain engineers, data scientists and project managers.
WHAT
Build a global and open climate platform
An integrated global climate accounting system, web platform and portal can be built one prompt at a time. We have laid out multiple prompts for you and your team to work on.
The event is a non-competitive open and collaborative hackathon (collabathon) to build on and develop a globally trusted tool to monitor Earth’s atmospheric carbon budget and global climate accounting. The initiative started in 2019 with a design sprint on December 8th, coinciding with the UNFCCC COP24, continued with a Hackathon in Yale-NUS Singapore and finally consolidated over the summer of 2019 incubating a first prototype of the platform. The output of this open and collaborative effort — Open Climate — is an open source software-based framework that would act as an accounting tool for Earth system governance; an impartial algorithmic system that can achieve decentralized and immutable consensus on one of Earth’s most important vital signs as well as provide accountability to all climate actors —from countries to cities and companies— on their action pledges towards a net zero carbon future.
WHY OPEN & COLLABORATIVE
Hackathons are characterized by a specific prompt, often involving a ‘data philanthropist’ or a ‘hackathon client’ that provides a dataset that matches the prompt’s background, and enough flexibility on how to achieve a validated solution. Teams then compete for a fixed period of time and a pre-selected expert jury determines the best solution presented. The winner takes all.
We believe this traditional model is unsuitable for the task at hand. Collaboration rather than competition must be the source of collective strength and inspiration. Non-rivalrous hackathons have already been developed successfully; the live code is visible and ‘forkable’ by all participants. A healthy competitive dynamic is still accomplished by tracking the participants that effectively contribute value to the shared code base. Immediate rewards come from attribution and positive social media feedback, yet anonymity is also a common feature. Participants are not limited to any confined quantity or geography since they all participate in a virtual room with version control. We propose to use this system of a global collaborative contest but include a local instance where participants can come together and work in the same physical space. The kickoff space for the 2019 collabathon will be at Kroon Hall, School of Forestry and Environment at Yale University, Connecticut, USA.