About

Climate Change Coders (CCCoders) is a group of programmers and people with computer skills who volunteer some of their time to work with organisations that aim to have a positive effect on climate change.

What has computing got to do with climate change?

Not enough is currently being done to prevent climate change. Two things could make a difference to that:-

  • Information – more will get done if people really start to understand that climate change is likely to badly affect them and their children and if they have the information to help them change or to force governments to change. The internet has been shown to be a powerful medium for bringing people together to affect change.

  • Technology – we can improve current technology to reduce our emissions now and in the future. We can also work on new technologies. Computing will play a big role in these developments.

Why join us?

If the following apply to you, then CCCoders is for you:-

  • you're concerned about climate change, but feeling powerless to do much about it.

  • you're a programmer or someone with computer/internet skills that could be useful to a climate change NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) or other organisation. Includes web design, database, sys admin and other non-programming computer skills.

  • you want to work on something new and challenging that's going to be very different from your day job and do more than just benefit your employer.

  • you like the idea of meeting and working with people who want to try to improve the state of the world that future generations will inherit from us.

  • you think you will have some spare time to do work with the group. No commitment required. Try spending a few hours in the evening or weekends on something that interests you and see how it goes.

People from organisations related to climate change are also welcome to join the group and come along to the London based meetups to talk with us about how we can help you out, or email us via the contact page.

How we are organised

We have meetups in both Shoreditch, London and at the Friends Of The Earth HQ near Oval, which you can sign up for by going to http://www.meetup.com/London-Climate-Change-Coders.  We have 115 members and in the first four meetings there were between 15 and 25 people who turned up.  This London CCCoders Skills Google Docs Spreadsheet shows who all of the members are and what their skills are, and is useful for showing climate change organisations what skills are available in our our group.  This spreadsheet is automatically created using the CCCoders members' profiles which they provided when they signed up, including their technical skills.  It acts like a "Group CV" showing all the skills of the group members that organisations can look at to see if there are skills that match their requirements.  We are happy to work with all types of organisations - charities, companies, governments, universities and NGOs.  We suggest to these organisations that they apply using our CCCoders Project Application Form and once a project has been speced out it is included in our  CCCoders Projects spreadsheet.

For tracking tasks we have a JIRA issue tracking system at https://cccoders.atlassian.net/ and Git repositories at https://bitbucket.org/cccoders. We aim to work using an Agile approach, working on tasks in small physically distributed teams or as individuals.  To start with we will be choosing tasks that are small and not too complex so we can quickly get results for the organisations and learn how best to organise ourselves in the process.

All of the above docs are stored in our publicly accessible Google Docs which you can browse at 

https://docs.google.com/folderview?id=0B6YW46pl-82ueUVZNDVWNTdyY0U#list

The types of things we could work on

  • Helping organisations open source some of their software and then using voluntary coders to improve it.

  • Adding features to open source software used by climate change organisations.

  • Improving/creating websites.

  • Helping run social media campaigns.

  • Helping train staff so they can do more with their computers and the internet.

  • Performing Sys Admin tasks on or setting up servers that would help organisations, including setting up cloud servers or services.

  • Writing programs to do analysis of data that could be used in climate change campaigns.

  • Mobile apps related to energy efficiency or other relevant subjects.

  • Help improve government websites and applications related to climate change.

  • Write programs to help university researchers analyse climate change data.

More medium/long term:-

  • Get involved in climate modelling systems related to climate change.

  • Help companies working with renewable energy in their modelling, engineering or other tasks.

  • Help government analyse energy usage and improve efficiency or run campaigns.

  • Try to assist in some way in the Fusion Power projects that are being worked on.


Projects and repositories

We have a free, publicly accessible JIRA issue management system up and running at https://cccoders.atlassian.net/ which we can use for Open Source projects and can support 2,000 users. This is linked to our public Git repositories at https://bitbucket.org/cccoders/ (issue are automatically linked to JIRA issues by starting any commit message with the issue number (e.g. TP-1).  CCCoders will be free to use this or any issue management system they want (or none!) and any kind of source code repository they want (or none!!!). :-)