Today the results of our Yale Openlab Collabathon were presented at the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid. And so ends a three week period of collaboration by hundreds of participants at 10 universities around the world. The goal: creating Open Source tools for enforcing the Paris Climate Agreement.
Berlin was one of those locations, hosted by the Net Impact club of ESMT business school, my Alma mater. Most of the action took place on the weekend of November 16th, when 25 volunteers and strangers to each other, gathered in Tempelhof’s magnificent Ullsteinhaus.
It was here that we formed four primary teams, chose projects from a pre-researched list, and got to work on making apps, business models, and certificates, for monitoring the world’s carbon emissions, and helping to enforce the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Participants group photo following Sunday’s pitch session 
The volunteer team which made it all happen
I was one of two full-time mentors at the event who provided structure and support for the Berlin team. The Yale team, led by Martin Wainstein, provided a set of well-defined projects for teams to choose work on, and managed a Discord chat instance (like Slack) to keep the participants communicating easily. It was up to us to form and motivate teams, enable cooperation, and keep things running efficiently.
Fortunately the skills of the people who came to hack were well suited to the tasks, and teams based on preferred topic were quickly assembled, each led by a Project Manager. The ‘Open Climate Widget‘ team, for example, were managed by Marc from Deutsche Bahn.
Teams worked until close to 10pm both days at the venue, and some continued over the following weeks until the submission deadline this week. In particular the ‘Climate Terminal‘ team, benefiting from exemplary leadership by their Project Manager Nadya, not only worked consistently, but successfully recruited additional teammates from Paris and Singapore to fill skill gaps and lend additional momentum.
You can see their work in progress on the project’s website: climateterminal.com. I think this is an amazing result for an entirely voluntary effort of an international team which had never before worked together. Undoubedly Yale’s public association with the event helped, but also the quality of the task descriptions which they provided, and the interesting Open Source tech involved.
Oliver, Luca, and I being interviewed for the Mother Earth’s Heroes podcast
The weekend hackathon attracted some press attention, including Maximilian Lehmann of the Mother Earth’s Heroes environmental podcast dropping by to interview Oliver, Luca and I. ESMT’s net impact team were busy doing interviews and taking photos throughout, and we have them to thank for the pictures illustrating this post.
One of my motivations for helping to organise this event was to experience real-time collaboration on this scale; I wasn’t disappointed. Insights into that however are enough for another post.
For now I’ll say thank you to the fantastic people who participated at our Berlin ‘node’, and worked so hard all weekend! It was quite amazing to see the talent and experience brought so quickly to bear on real problems affecting earth’s climate. In particular the Net Impact volunteers, all highly capable students from ESMT, ensured we had the facilities, food, and fluids we all needed to perform our roles.
Oh, and watch out — future Collabathons are being planned, so come along if you’re in a city hosting a node next time and take part ?
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