First noting this thread from five years back:
By my reading, this post yesterday on the controversial European Union green taxonomy touches on one of three broad challenges that the open energy modeling community might wish to tackle collectively:
- how best to inform and interest policy analysts and policy makers about the advantages of switching from black‑box analysis to FOSS models and open data
Which leads to the next challenge:
- strategizing on how best to get the necessary data into a genuinely open knowledge commons
And then the third — and in many respects the most difficult:
- community governance spanning the above two points and also looking into good modeling practices more generally
Let me expand on that final challenge of essentially deep governance — although without citing specific initiatives by name.
There are now several efforts — some more connected than others — to define ontologies, harmonize workflows, collaborate on data standards, quantify semantic differences, experiment with cross‑model validation, create standardized scenarios, inventory available tooling, and so forth. These simultaneously parallel and connected themes might collectively come together within a public interest framework to constitute “open public policy analysis”.
Having a more formalized coordination does not, of course, preclude experimentation and all manner of non‑conforming activities.
I have begun talking to people involved in the Debian software project. Debian has invested considerable effort into community governance and developed outputs like the Debian social contract. And there would seem to be some parallels between building complicated operating system distros like Debian and our particular challenges and objectives.