Q1/Q2 - 2021

Hyperledger Climate Action & Accounting Special Interest Group (CA2SIG) Q1 2021

This is the first half of the 2nd year of the CA2SIG. We are closing the year with 212 members in our mailing list!

The SIG began the year with 3 different working groups, each with its own team leader:

1. Carbon Accounting and Certification WG (Status: active)
2. Standards WG (Status: active)
3. Consumer Disclosure (Status: semi-active)

During the first half of the year the CA2SIG kicked off 2 additional working groups:

1. Climate Research WG (Status: active)
2. Awareness and Capacity Building WG (Status: active)

We have held 13 general meetings, 12 Peer Programming Calls, and 6 Standards WG meetings so far this year. As part of the normal cycle of co-chairs, the beginning of 2021 marks the time to change the SIG chairs. Both Martin Wainstein and Tom Baumann, the 2020 founding chairs, stepped down in order to give space to new community members to help drive the SIG forward. Woody Moore and Robin Klemens volunteered to be the new co-chairs of the CA2 SIG and the group welcomed them without any objections.

What's Working Well

• Bi-weekly calls have consistency, and we have a max group of around 10 recurring and 3-15 additional but frequently changing participants that give continuity to dialogues. The number of attendees has gone up a bit (3-5 attendees) since last year. At least one chair is always present in meeting to give continuity as well. 
• New Member Introductions feature in every call is working well. We receive new members frequently. However, we don't necessarily get first timers to continue showing up. 
• Working groups have significantly ramped up interesting conversations and get diverse members engaged. Some are working towards MVP developments, which will lead to more interest. 
• This year, members of the CA2SIG participated in a collaborative planning exercise to establish the CA2SIG 2021 Goals and Action Plan. The SIG identified several key objectives for the year, these include:
  • Develop more use cases
  • Develop more proofs of concept
  • Facilitate the development of Standards
  • Grow membership and build capacity of the CA2SIG
  • Build awareness about climate accounting and establish CA2SIG thought leadership around it
  • Build Coalitions
  • Ecosystem / Value-chain mapping
  • Explore how to develop a data commons
• Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group successfully launched their Hyperledger Fabric network. The network is part of the first layer of the Operating System for Climate Action which is the foundation of trust of all climate action. The network consists of one channel (utilityemissionschannel) and the utilityemissions chaincode is deployed. In the next step, Si Chen and his team will connect the openseas app to the network. Then we will all be able to calculate the carbon emissions of our utility bills and store the data immutably on the blockchain.
• The group has come up with 4 mentorship projects as part of the Hyperledger Mentorship Program that started in June
  • Automated Testing for Climate Emissions Ledger
  • Blockchain Integration for Climate Emissions Data with Fabric and Cactus
  • Documentation and Use Cases for Climate Action
  • Implement Client Side Security for Climate SIG Fabric Application
• The group has come up with 3 blog posts

  • Climate Change Action: Five Ways to Get Involved in Our Global Climate Accounting Efforts – May 11, 2021

  • Help Us Scale Up Our Operating System for Climate Action – April 19, 2021

  • Developer Showcase Series: Si Chen, Open Source Strategies, Inc. – February 18, 2021

Issues being faced by the group

• We are having little activity to organize shareouts and webinars and promote them. The Chairs have little bandwidth throughout the week to organize and we may need to find some members more willing to take an active role on this.  
• Working groups still have low engagement and support outside meetings, and will need more commitment to arrive towards milestones and products. 
• Meetings still oscillate in 8-15 in attendance and don't go up very much, or at least we don't get many new members that are consistently joining. More communication and outreach is needed, which falls back to issue in bullet 1. 
• The group faced several disruptions in the mailing lists, the rocket chat, and the wiki that lead to confusion and off-topic discussion during the first quarter of the year

List of planned work products

• Carbon neutrality certificate concept and MVP
• Climate standards mapping exercise
• Consumer disclosure MVP, connecting supply chains with carbon data for accounting
• Active node in a climate accounting collaborative hackathon this November. 
• Publish a technical paper about Voluntary Carbon Offsets Directory
• Kick-off a project for Blockchain-enabled CSR reporting