[open-sustainability] Introduction and an idea...

Sun Dec 16 21:49:07 UTC 2012

Hi

I just wanted to introduce myself, before hopefully meeting some of you
tomorrow evening.

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 a data user than a data wonk, 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!

Maya Forstater
****************************************************
Skype:   Maya Forstater
Web:      www.hiyamaya.wordpress.com
Twitter:   MForstater
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-sustainability/attachments/20121216/91e0f941/attachment.html>