Open Source Lead at Carbon Plan

đź“Ś Opportunity Board
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Probably a little late to be posting this now, but to wit:
CarbonPlan is a nonprofit research organization working on improving the transparency and scientific integrity of climate solutions with open data and tools. Our team analyzes the design and implementation of climate programs across the public and private sector. Our work focuses on three program areas: carbon offsets, carbon removal, and climate risks. In all three areas, we create public resources on climate solutions based on the best available science and data. You can read more about our work on our website.

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Oh, that sounds awesome. Because this forum is not only about environmental sustainability, but also about people, I have to ask:

  1. How are you funded?
  2. What is your capacity? (how many people can you support)
  3. How stable is the income flow?

These are important for other people in Open Source to understand if they can switch jobs to work on climate solutions.

  1. Can distribute one man’s salary as voluntary maintenance fee to the upstream projects?

While accessing climate sustainability, it is also important to access people well-being, to ensure that whose who try to tackle insurmountable challenges, will not burn out. It is not only about donations, but also knowing each other.

  1. Do you have plan for supporting community with presence, experience sharing and “extending the pie”?

I tend to see Open Source as an art. Something that bring joy by solving problems in a beautiful way by providing this art to others. And if there is no sharing, no communication, no conferences, discussions, meetups, then it doesn’t work. Code can be open source, but without people using it, there is no motivation. As part of a job, yes, but when funding is over, what will be left? I guess for EU funded projects, the answer is “nothing useful”. And that’s all about sustainability of solutions. A good example of the project that does the community part right is https://safecast.org (radiation monitoring).

Content review

I understand it is a bit offtopic for the project opportunity post, but while I am discovering it, it may be good to share some personal insights for validation.

  1. I had to really spend time to discover the link to GitHub - carbonplan/carbonplan.org: landing page as a vertical hash at the bottom right

There is a single issue Running carbonplan on replit · Issue #371 · carbonplan/carbonplan.org · GitHub from a user, who could not run the web site. Which probably means there is no process of dealing with user feedback (no people interested and/or allowed to do this). Nowadays, people don’t have time - they need jobs to survive, so every interested user who found the time to contribute is important.

  1. No search, quests and stories

We used to run “Hack for Future” hackatons more than a decade ago, and people like to work on sustainability problems. Most people have a lot a negative emotions and not much time and skills to change anything, so creating an environment where we could try to do something, was not very impactful (maybe), but very much needed. One of the recurring stories I remember is “double spending” problem, when one carbon credit can be used multiple times, because people had no way to check that you you’ve already spend it. I am not sure if OffsetsDB – CarbonPlan could be used to detect it, but having an article about that, would definitely help bring more interest to the project. Ideally it should be repeatable, by people - what I call “quests” - to check the double spending of carbon creding for companies in your region, that everybody can do on Open Data Days, Science Fair and other occasions.

I could probably write more feedback about the project, and the more I spend time with it, the more I like it. It looks a bit niche, with this flavor of corporate, government and the focus on scientific institutions, but the technical execution with links to journalist articles, and blog posts make it closer to the people. I would probably link databases to these posts, people and articles - something that we in our OpenData community could not implement, but we were having more fun in offline and there was almost no energy to write post meeting reports. )

People are makers nowadays, and while CarbonPlan looks like a data publishing platform, I see it as opportunity for people to contribute and get noticed. Not sure if it fits goals of the project, but that certainly would make it more interesting for various folks out there.

EDIT: For reports and community involvement, running a blog aggregator like https://planetpython.org/ - giving people an ability to write their own content - seems better than trying to write about everything under one umbrella.

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