The scarcity of standardized and accessible data at the convergence of human climate impacts and the financial sector prevents economic stakeholders from effectively aligning world-wide investment and capital flows with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) objectives. The majority of financial companies cannot afford costly bespoke ingestion and curation projects, and so climate-aware investing remains limited without the benefit of shared data or open protocols.

At the Open Source Climate (OS-Climate) community, we are building an open data science platform that supports data ingestion, processing and quality management for data from both corporate climate reports and investment related data. In order for this global community project to succeed, OS-Climate must implement traditional scalability of compute and data, but that alone is insufficient. The community must also scale the operation of its cluster and software deployments. Furthermore, it must effectively scale its ability to onboard new data workflows from actively contributing members. Last but not least, it must be able to scale its own governance at each of these levels, as they mature.

In this talk, Erik will introduce OS-Climate and tell the story of how this open community has managed its own evolution to continue scaling data, computation, operations, member contributions and governance. The audience will learn about tools from software, data science, platforms, and community architecture that can help their own communities grow.