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Join forces and fix the climate at #PlanetData

This year has been dominated by demonstrations about the Climate Emergency, from Greta Thunberg's epic journey across the globe to co-ordinated protests such as Extinction Rebellion and Climate Strike. The younger generation is clearly leading the way but the Climate Emergency is an inter-generational challenge that covers all industries and everyone needs to feel like they can be involved, like they can do more to take action.

#PlanetData is all about taking that action. We want to bring people together to share their work and their projects. Why? Because there are tangible benefits to being open:

  • more people become aware of climate-focused projects that are happening and can see the opportunities for collaboration

  • sharing work openly is an invitation for comments, feedback, and useful resources that can lead to improvements

  • working in the open can also provide the answers to another person's problem, enabling another project to become real

We know that this approach is successful - we apply it to ourselves and our projects, it forms the definition of being #RadicallyOpen. By being open, putting everything on the web, and sharing widely, people can get involved at their own pace and for the betterment of the project. For example, when we created the hexmaps for the General Election in 2017, we made them available openly. Other folk then took the resources and could create maps of their own or improve them to be suitable for multiple purposes. What do we get out of it? We get to see better and more interesting maps. And we get them sooner rather than later.

That is the aim of #PlanetData - share your work or your data, amplify, and take action to make a difference. Join us on 29 November.

We have speakers confirmed from Ice Breaker One, OMG Climate, the Environment Agency, Our Future Leeds, the Leeds Climate Commission, the University of Leeds, Trafford Data Lab, Zero Waste Leeds, Bradford Council, Northern Powergrid, and more. By sharing their work, they are not only embracing the #RadicallyOpen approach they are also demonstrating that they are taking the Climate Emergency seriously.

The day will be split into two parts - a morning session and an afternoon session, both will have broadly the same format (lightning talks from the attendees) and opportunities for folk to connect and talk about moving their projects forward. There will also be a 'data surgery' running throughout the day, where attendees can ask questions about data publishing, what data is available, what data could be made available, etc. We know that not everyone can make it to events, so we try to offer as much as possible for remote interaction. There will be a live-stream, a Slido, and live-tweeting on our Twitter feed.

Why you should be involved, and how

Working together is the fastest way forward to address the Climate Emergency. No one person, organisation or government will find a single answer, but all kinds of people, organisations and governments working together can find all kinds of smaller ideas that can be implemented straight away. Taking small actions now is better than waiting for the one big action to 'be ready.'

There are lots of ways you can get involved with #PlanetData: