The Open Climate Collabathon: A Global Sprint Kicks Off
On November 15, the Yale OpenLab launched a first-of-its kind hackathon — termed a collabathon — that’s connecting policy experts, technologists, designers, and others around the globe for a two-week sprint that applies an ethos of “radical collaboration” to the fight against climate change.
On November 15, the Yale OpenLab launched a first-of-its kind hackathon — termed a collabathon — that’s connecting policy experts, technologists, designers, and others around the globe for a two-week sprint that applies an ethos of “radical collaboration” to the fight against climate change. With over 300 registered participants, the project aims to create an open source platform that will track accountability to carbon budget pledges using integrated insights from blockchain, IoT tools, AI, and big data. The goal is to empower a wide variety of actors — from countries and cities to small businesses — to easily and transparently record their climate actions and measure progress towards the targets set out by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Over the course of a weekend, participants in New Haven, Singapore, Berlin, Paris, and at least five other locations kicked off a two-week sprint that will culminate in several presentations and press events at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in early December. Collaborating across timezones, participants spent the weekend in a frenzy of activity: talking to collaborators in person and over Slack or Discord, sketching ideas on whiteboards, huddling in front of laptops to work on code or to research technical intricacies.
That action-packed weekend is just the beginning. As nations around the world prepare to gather for December’s Climate Change Conference, the collabathon participants will be continuing to construct a platform they hope will provide essential infrastructure for shared progress on climate change. They’re sharing their work, from videos and recommended readings to code and progress documents, online — and they invite others to join the effort.
About the Yale OpenLab
Incubated in collaboration with the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, and diverse partners at Yale and beyond, the Yale OpenLab develops and incubates open-source projects that seek to address the planet’s most pressing big-picture challenges. The OpenLab brings together emerging technologies — including blockchain, the Internet of Things, and virtual reality — with systems thinking and design thinking, aiming to create collaborative models of innovation that can scale. Currently, the lab’s projects and programs are focusing on climate and energy.