I work with alternative climate ventures and especially focus on climate solutions that show up in the foam of the emerging tech layer, but might not make it to realization without deliberate effort. Identifying potential and routing it where it needs to go, or turning it into a realized product is the goal. This entails explaining, networking and cultivating the human ecosystem around technology in climate, especially federated and p2p systems, open source, where I tend to prefer to work. I do technical talks, online lectures, write standards and participate in standards organizations like the Open Geospatial Consortium.

In this world, I often come across projects wishing to try something that could be revolutionary, but the technology, standards or regulations are not ready to meet them in this moment, so the experiment is either never run or the results never shared.

I have created a tool which operates against this pattern. It permits nontechnical users with web access to create, validate and work against spatial fingerprints which are canonical representations of undistorted space on the Earth’s surface. These fingerprints can be independently regenerated by any user with the same parameters (just maximum resolution - for convention, and the actual area). This turns the surface of the Earth into the index for a federated database. There no longer needs to be a Google acting as platform and monopolist just to enable data discovery. More than that, this provides the option of providing the hard parameters for reproducibility with ease. Versioning spatial datasets like we version software is trivial, meaning scientists and monitoring teams can push results out and selectively disclose their data while maintaining full auditability going forward. These pieces together enable an independent, evolutionary network to form without needing permission and management by a single central authority.

I hope in the future, carbon issuers with strange plays don’t get automatically excluded from the market, volunteers can continue and grow their connections to land regeneration they have participated in and funded and the true fact that most carbon credits do nothing is a historical curiosity. This protocol is a bedrock, enabling technology whose goal is to furnish the regeneration world with a network effect of its very own, and its finished. I don’t have to tell you how I might build it, I can show you it in operation. This funding is for pushing the standardization. I have already presented it to the OGC’s DGGS WG, who are the global authority on the open platforms this protocol wishes to augment. We could have a standards draft within this year if I can find the funding to pursue it.