Hack Climate Change

Climate change and ecosystem resilience are understood as incredibly complex information spaces. For humans to understand their next best moves in relation to these physical processes, we need the full potential of powerful computing tools hooked up with the insights and intuitions of experts from a wide range of knowledge disciplines.

Hack Climate Change

Semantic technologies have been promoted as the next evolutionary step in data/information/knowledge interoperation and synthesis.

Hack Climate Change (HC2) is a first attempt to:

  1. Bring the best tech hackers face to face with a massive public-good problem space.
  2. Bring the best scientific minds face to face with the potential of semantically-enhanced collaborative environments.
  3. Demonstrate to the public and policy makers what can be done in an atmosphere of open knowledge and the science commons.

What are the pitch points for HC2?

  1. A rallying point for the burgeoning SW community, not only to further their tech skills but do something for a good cause, something that many people are passionate about.
  2. A rallying point for hackers to "do the right thing"
  3. 2008 is International Year of the Reef
  4. Climate Change is a major issue, nuff said

How could it work?

An initial view is to see two groups: the scientists who "own" the climate change/ecosystem resilience problem space, and the hackers who "own" the toolset for digital engagement with a given knowledge-scape. Generally, the scientists are wanting to present their dilemmas in such a way that digital knowledge tools can get traction. The hackers want to see what they can do with real-world scenarios.

The two groups are meant to challenge each other, as well as themselves, to push towards truly emergent outcomes, including:

  • discovering new ways to characterise the problems (technical and scientific)
  • discovering new processes for collective problem-solving
  • discovering insights useful in related problem domains.

Some aspects of how the HC2 event could come together include:

  1. focus on light, fast hacks to shift entire viewpoints in the problem space
  2. work closely with the climate change scientists here to develop a tightly focused problem domain. Most of this information would be released on a wiki a month or so out from the actual event.
  3. what gets entered into the challenge becomes open sourceable so that it could be used in "real world" climate change research
  4. although the atmosphere is competitive, the rule is collaboration. This is the "Cohort of 2008" and their achievements are collectively seen in relation to furture cohorts.
  5. process models: Open Space, World Cafe, FooCamp

 

Contact

David Peterson: +61 (0)407 471 561 [sykpe:david.seth.p]

John Brisbin: +61 (0)407 471 565 [sykpe:boabjohn]