Open Sustainable Technology
Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad
Problem Statement: Open Sustainable Technology (https://opensustain.tech/) is the largest index of active, high-quality open source projects that directly address environmental issues around the world. The project has been curated by more than 42 volunteers since 2020 and today has 7 active members. Through over 2000 hours of intensive research, we have managed to create a representation of the open source ecosystem in the field of environmental technology and environmental intelligence that is almost complete. Because the list focuses on listing open Git repositories, we are now able to create a meta data analysis based on all listed projects. This study is the first of his kind and called "Open Source in Environmental Sustainability". The first report was published this year and viewed over 10,000 times. This includes not only statistics about programming languages, popularity, community sizes, origin, project health but also about areas where projects are missing. The study also allowed us to make several recommendations on how open source can have a significant impact on the preservation of the environment.
Proposed Activities: We want to repeat the report every year to show which areas open source is strong and where it is not. We would like to give active members of the community the opportunity to discuss the report at conferences, and to meet in person to make further contacts within the ecosystem. A release is planned for the middle of next year and the year after. I am seeking funding for travel expenses for our community.
Openness: Our entire infrastructure is open source: project planning, backlog, the OpenSustain.tech website, the report, all open source tools we have developed for data analysis. For the future we plan to hold public community meetings so that new members can more easily join the project.
Challenges: The challenges in our work are versatile. On the one hand, the maintenance of the database is very time-consuming and also requires intensive experience in the field of environmental sustainability as well as open source. On the other hand, it is difficult to motivate the team around the work because the impact is hard to measure for us. While we are one of the most popular open source projects in the field of environmental sustainability, it is very difficult to see how the knowledge and insights we generate have a direct positive effect on the environment. However, based on feedback from the community, I am sure that we are the first open source project to have created a comprehensive overview of this topic. Before that, people often spent weeks trying to find the right open source project. Another important task will be to better distribute the work among the community. At the moment I'm still by far the most active member, though this is fortunately changing as more contributors get involved.
Neglectedness: I have already approached several funding agencies for this project. I applied for prototypefund.de many times and also for the PlaintextGroup oss-virtual-incubator. The problem is that very few people understand ecosystem analysis as we do it. Often our project is not seen as a software project, because we appear as a website only. However, especially for the creation of the ecosystem analysis a lot of complex software is involved.
Success: The success of the report can be measured by the number of citations, the number of views, but also the number of conferences we speak at. The success of a conference talk can be measured by the number of views of the video. However, one crucial metric is hard to measure which is the network a community member can build through the journey and the conferences. In my estimation, the motivation we generate for a member by funding such a trip is also a critical variable. Furthermore, it is also planned that several members will meet at a conference which will strengthen the alliance between the members and improve the quality of the deliverable.
Total Budget: 2500$
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: The community behind OpenSustain.tech is called protontypes. We are a free, independent community: https://github.com/protontypes Although the report will be published in the next few weeks in an improved version with the Linux Foundation, are currently independent of the Linux Foundation.
LMIE Carveout: We do not fit into LMIE
Team Skills: The team has very diverse skills: Aerospace Engineer, Sustainability Manager, Communications and Marketing, Data Science and Software Development.
Submission Number: 85
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