Open Climate community call #6: Wrapping up season one

From March to September 2021, we hosted Season One of a series of “OpenClimate community calls” around different topics related to the connection and intersection between the climate crisis/climate action and the open movement. For each we did a short, easily digestible write-up, but if you’re interested in going more in-depth on the topics, we encourage you to 1) join future calls, 2) watch the call recordings, 3) follow along with call notes, or 4) suggest a topic that you’d like to present about or host. All information can be found on the Appropedia landing page for OpenClimate.

On September 28th (call recording), for our sixth Open Climate call, we did a wrap-up with the Open Climate organizing team and asked people to join us to think about next steps for the community. We started with a small celebration of what the work has covered and how the community has grown, sharing:

• Open Climate at the 2020 Creative Commons Summit in which several of the organizers joined together after a session on “open questions in a warming world”. This conversation was continued with a mapping exercise of the space during MozFest 2021.
• The community organizers wrote the “Open Climate Now” article for Branch Magazine to lay the foundation for where these conversations are springing from and the opportunities and challenges ahead.
• We piloted a series of six calls (write ups here) that covered topics including the meta-question of how the open movement can contribute to addressing the climate crisis, how open data works in decision-making, what content gaps the open movement is missing in relation to the climate crisis, the challenges of openness and environmental research of the climate crisis, and how the open Internet can dismantle the power structures that delay climate action. We welcomed ~110 people to these calls over the six-month period.
• Finally we gave great thanks and gratitude to all the speakers who shared their stories, work and wisdom and all the call participants who did likewise.

After our small celebration, Shannon Dosemagen facilitated a conversation with the Open Climate coordinating team asking two questions. One of the questions focused on a previous call topic or Open Climate in relation to the work they do (to be covered in subsequent posts), and the second was a simple yet hefty, “for you, why Open Climate and why now?” To the latter question, responses were:

Scann: I cannot think of a more important topic to be working on right now. I think we all feel that way — this is an existential threat to humanity in a lot of ways, and investing your time in doing anything else might not be the best thing that you can be doing right now.

Luis Felipe Murillo: I think there’s an urgency for all of us when it comes to the question of climate change. It’s not a matter of choice, right? We don’t really have a choice. We all have to be working on it, whether we like it or not, whether it is something that is really close to what we do or not. And in terms of Open Climate, it’s this sense that we’ve come a long way as a community, Charlie [a call participant] was talking about his 20 years of research in free and open source technologies — we’ve come a long way in terms of new research and development. Now we need to get that community and what we’ve learned and find ways to interface with climate research.

Michelle Thorne: I plus one both what Luis Felipe and Scann were saying about the urgency of action. I found personally that I’ve gone through versions of climate grief and paralysis, and realized for me the best antidote to feeling despair was action. So even if we don’t always know what’s right or what’s going to be most effective, even just showing up and thinking about it, and doing that in the open, has already given a sense of possibility and gotten me out of despair and into some sort of mode of “let’s grab optimism” and make it work for us. The climate crisis is not a single issue, it’s a whole era. It is happening now, it has been happening, it’s going to keep happening for the next generations. We need to bring all the most effective tools we have to solving these problems and I think openness is one of the underutilized ones and one that I have hope for us using effectively.

Alex Stinson: This is an all-hands-on-deck, world problem. And every single person needs to be here. I think the quote from the UN was, it’s “a code red for humanity”. And it’s not just the climate crisis, right? It’s pollution. It’s the biodiversity crisis. It’s COVID. It’s the socio-economic kind of disaster we’re creating with this current economic system. All of these things need, and must have a backbone of knowledge, and shared understanding of what’s happening in the world. For better or worse, open communities have created much of that backbone for the internet, and I think we need to be really conscious about the power that brings. And we need to show up now with that power, in a way that’s constructive rather than just kind of nonchalant. Often the fallacy of open communities is, “hey, it’s open, you can use it” but providing no accessibility and no conscious support for the communities that most need that support. This is the equity move we need to make. And we need to be conscious of it, we need to be intentional, and we need to create space for the people who need it the most.

Emilio Velis: I’m here because our narratives are currently based on knowledge. A person who does not have access to knowledge does not have access to the narratives to make changes, or to be part of them. In that sense, openness is a core value that has to be embraced by different social justice movements. I think the open movement has lived enough so that we start to understand that we are supporting other values and other causes; that we bring value to all of these people who are in the field, who are policymakers, who are scientists, etc. The mission of the open movement has to start shifting towards serving, to be useful, and to be supportive, because all of these causes are the ones that are creating real social change.

After the conversation we went into small break out rooms with several prompts, namely two that we then discussed:

1. What resonated with you from the past conversations (or this conversation)?
2. What would you like to see in Season 2?

For the first question, responses included (summarized):

• It is hard to know how the policy around open knowledge will create a specific impact. We do not have an IP Framework to preserve heritage equally all over the world. Global north countries have developed preservation exceptions and those are inexistent in many global south countries.
• All-hands-on-deck is the right vision. Open will create action faster than proprietary.
• The topic of climate & openness are related to each other; there’s a lot of openness in a lot of areas, but in climate there’s still not a lot of awareness about openness.
• How cooperation between different communities can work. And how can these novel approaches be more visible, rather than everyone reinventing their own wheel! There are areas where no open science or open source is being created, for example, in the area of sustainable investment. There’s a lot of potential to fight greenwashing with openness — there’s so much greenwashing going around and there’s a lot of confusion.
• There are few tools to measure the sustainability of companies in a transparent way.

Responses to the second prompt included (summarized):

• How to design global and manufacture local. Would love to start discussions about global design and manufacturing in local efforts. Science shows that openness moves us faster to solutions than proprietary!
• An explicit connection with solidarity building and organizing groups that are doing the work.
• Pushing for IPCC reports and related materials to be put under open licenses, so as to allow for this expert content to spread more easily.
• Joint action, such as “doathons”.
• More conversations with climate activists, environmental groups, and frontline communities
• More about how we can fight greenwashing with open and transparent data and software

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the first season (and year) of Open Climate activity! Keep an eye out for further actions, calls, and opportunities on the Open Climate site and follow along and Tweet your own content and announcements at #OpenClimate!