Open Climate Data Now

I’ve been following, with some interest, over the last few years the open data movement. For me it started with Hans Rosling’s 2006 TED talk: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen.

The first time I watched the TED video I was blown away, not just but Hans Rosling’s compelling speaking style but by the data potential he wanted to tap. In the video above he shows how data can be used to help us better understand the world. How poverty affects infant mortality, how the growth of the internet affects a country’s GDP and how that in turn might affect child survival. He was able to do all this analysis with what data that was openly available from places like the UN at the time. He made a call then for governments to open up their publicly funded data.

Since then the open data movement has taken root and the flowers Hans Rosling hoped for are starting to bloom. As Carol mentioned a few days ago, a lot has happened in just a year since Tim Berners Lee (inventor of the world wide web) put out the call for Linked Data Now.

Now along comes a very interesting project from the Climate Change Secretariat: The Apps 4 Climate Action Contest. The provincial government has opened up their climate change data catalogues and are inviting designers and developers to create applications to interpret that data. How cool is that? What if we take that kind of thinking about data and context that Hans Rosling applied to world development and apply it to climate change? (check out his website, gapminder.org and the graph for CO2 emissions since 1820).

The aim behind the contest is that “the apps will raise awareness of climate change and inspire action to reduce carbon pollution by utilizing data in new applications for the web and mobile devices.”

The four main judging criteria are:

1. Usefulness and relevance of the Application to raising awareness of climate change and climate related issues
2. Innovation and creativity
3. Visual appeal
4. User experience

Analytic Design Group is a contest sponsor and we’ll be involved in both the judging as well as offering support to the developers in terms of designing apps that are as both usable as well as useful.

Best of luck to all the contest entrants!