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With great sadness, the Climate Collaboratorium community notes the passing of pioneering climate scientist Stephen Schneider, a member of our Expert Advisory Board and Expert Council.Schneider was a professor of environmental studies and biology at Stanford University and a longstanding member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). During his time on the Expert Advisory Board and Expert Council, he was a valued advisor to the Collaboratorium community.For more about Scheider’s life and work, see:New York Times obituary Los Angeles Times obituaryIPCC’s In Memoriam noteSee the Collaboratorium site for more information on the Expert Advisory Board and Expert Council, including a list of current members.
After a brief hiatus (to welcome my daughter to the world!) we've finished up with our latest development cycle. Numerous improvements have been made, and much of the credit for these goes to Janusz, our supremely talented programmer based near Warsaw. The laundry list of issues addressed in these release is provided below.
In our next release cycle (code named Hydra 0.5), we are planning some very ambitious development goals, which include significant modifications to the planning and debate components, in addition to some minor modifications to the modeling backend. I'm also hoping to begin our migration to Java Server Faces based portlets, in the hopes that we can extract ourselves from the Struts based quagmire we seem to be stuck in.
Stay tuned, exciting things will be happening over the next several months!
Hydra 0.4 Release Notes
New Features
Improvements
Bug Fixes
Spurred by the Climategate controversy that broke out in late 2009, the Collaboratorium community has launched a debate barn-raising on the topic, Is the earth's climate changing due to human activity?
On December 6, 2009, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Michael Totty entitled What Global Warming? A look at the arguments the skeptics make—and how believers respond. This piece summarized the leading arguments of climate skeptics and the rejoinders of those who believe the earth's climate is changing due to by human actions.
Based on the positions articulated in the article, an initial Debate summary was entered for this topic.
To view this Debate summary, navigate to the Debates page, and go to the 2nd topic from the top, directly under "Copenhagen questions."
Members of the Collaboratorium community are invited to participate by adding comments to debate posts or by voting for the positions they find most convincing.
Collaboratorium moderators will review comments with the goal of finding new and interesting ideas they can insert into the Debate summary.
More details on this barn-raising are at the wiki page, Debate topic—Is the earth's climate changing due to human activity?
We welcome all users to participate. The goal is to create a robust summary of the current climate change conversation--a list of the key positions and arguments put forward by all sides in the debate. Then, by rating the positions and arguemnts, members of the community can indicate which they find most convincing.
The final round winners of the Collaboratorium Copenhagen Challenge were announced today. They are:
The results of the Copenhagen challenge were summarized in a white paper that was delivered to Yvo de Boer, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC.
Voting continues, with current results viewable on the Collaboratorium' Plans index page.
The end date for the final round of the Collaboratorium Copenhagen Challenge has been extended to Friday, December 11. The 3 plans with the most votes at 11:59 pm that day will win the final round.
The winning plans from the final, as well as preliminary, rounds will be included in a white paper we'll deliver to the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in time for the final week of negotiations at 15th UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen.
The Collaboratorium community encourages all new visitors to go to the Plans page to view existing plans, add a new one if you'd like, and vote for the one you think is best.
If you'd like tips on how to use the site, the demonstration clips on the Videos page may be helpful.
We encourage you all to raise your voices so we can bring your perspectives to Copenhagen!
The Climate Collaboratorium today launched a new website with significantly expanded features and the capability to scale to large numbers of users. New features include:
Chief Software Architect Joshua Introne managed the development of the new system, including coding many modules himself and managing contributions by several other software developers. The system was developed using Liferay an open source social collaboration portal. A number of the modules were developed under contract to MIT by TopCoder.
The preliminary round winners of the Collaboratorium Copenhagen Challenge were announced today. The winners are:
At the same time, two changes in the contest rules were announced:
You can cast (or change) your vote by going to the Plans page.
The Collaboratorium Copenhagen Challenge is a contest that seeks to focus the efforts of the Collaboratorium community on the development of high quality plans for what the negotiators should agree to at the UN meetings on climate change in Copenhagen in December 2009.
From September 20 to November 30 the Collaboratorium community will develop plans for what agreement should be reached in Copenhagen. Members of the community will also vote on the plans they think are best. The creators of the plans with the most votes will be announced at the end of the preliminary round (November 15) and the final round (November 30). After the final round, the results of the contest will be delivered to the Copenhagen negotiators in a white paper.
For more information, see: Collaboratorium Copenhagen Challenge.
