Open Climate
The Open Climate Project, now one of the primary program activities at the Open Earth Foundation, originally began as a project at the Yale Open Innovation Lab.
In 2018, I had been introduced to Dr. Martin Wainstein, the founder of the Yale Open Innovation Lab (and now Executive Director of the Open Earth Foundation) by a mutual close contact and longtime collaborator at the MIT Media Lab, Dr. John Clippinger.
Martin had just published a white paper on "Nested Climate Accounting", a powerful idea to be able to rollup environment accounting emissions and pledges from local community, city, and state levels, transparently up to the "nationally determined contributions" of countries:
In the Open Climate white paper, Martin detailed plans for a global decentralized Open Climate Accounting System for climate actions and assets based on open standards and open source technology, using decentralized and distributed technologies and methodologies wherever possible and practical.
To kick off development of the Open Climate project, Martin facilitated a series of "Global Collabathons" through the Yale Open Innovation lab, feeling that collaboration was one of the most critical social technologies, and the more radical the collaboration, the better!
At my first Open Climate Collabathon, I got involved with this the amazing group of developers and thought leaders . I contributed significantly to one of the first prototypes of the Open Climate Accounting System portal, and learned so much about the space and all about concepts such as "Renewable Energy Credits", "Carbon Credit Additionality", and "International Transfer of Mitigation Outcomes".
Over the next 1.5 years, I contributed significant continued thought leadership and technical development work to the Open Climate project, culminating in two demos delivered at the 2020 Open Climate Collabathon, "Nested Climate Accounting: RECs and Post 2020 Climate Markets", as well as "Open Climate: Dynamic Adaptable Schemas".
From its humble beginnings as a white paper and and a committed community of radical collaborators, Open Climate has graduated into a full-fledged project and production Open Climate Network, now led by a world class team of developers, policy makers, and researchers.
In supporting the Open Climate project, I also participated in supporting the Open Climate NFT drop, Carbon Drop, the first net-negative NFT drop that brought in $6.7M in seed funding to help support Open Climate and other climate tech initiatives now stewarded by the Open Earth Foundation.