[okfn-discuss] Introduction and an idea

Mon Dec 17 08:16:48 UTC 2012

Hi

I just wanted to introduce myself, before hopefully meeting some of you tonight at the Cleanweb drinks.

I am Maya Forstater. An independent consultant. Particularly concerned with open data on corporate environmental impacts, but also working on open government issues with the Transparency and Accountability initiative.

I am more  of an information user than a data wrangler, but i am hatching an open data idea, which i aim to make happen in 2013, and I would appreciate any thoughts, offers to collaborate or pointers in the right direction.

You can read the full outline here (with links etc...) http://hiyamaya.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/a-little-tweak-to-the-broken-carbon-dashboard 

But basically the idea is to try to make the data that we have on corporate carbon emissions (which is getting better all the time) more meaningful, useful and accessible.  

A few companies have already adopted a way to report emissions in the context of a global carbon budget; relating the proportion of the global emission budget they use each year to the proportion of global value creation they provide.

This methodology is widely praised for tying individual company emission data to the global challenge and to economic performance. However it has not been widely adopted, because companies say it is too hard to compile and interpret. In fact the technical difficulties of calculating and communicating carbon stabilisation intensity measures are not insurmountable. 

The underlying data to calculate comparable emission intensity pathways for other companies and industries is in the public domian, but largely lock into paper and pdf carbon disclosure reports rather than an accessible data stream. If this data was converted into a machine readable format it could be combined with with financial data to create live charts which put company and investor performance into context using this methodology.

The idea of this experiment, then is to unlock carbon emission data and create a rich interactive visualisation which enables users to put it into context.

Happy to chat more about it on here or in the pub!

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Phone: +44 (0) 7966676465
Blog: www.hiyamaya.wordpress.com
Twitter: MForstater

Sent from my iPhone
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