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  • RFC: Investigating the overlap between personal data, Klima and CliSci projects

Hi there, I'm Keith Axline and I've been a relatively quiet member of the community since before the public launch. For most of this year I've also been a regular contributor on the development of the dapp and website.

I'm also the founder of another project called Re-Public (@republicdao), which gives people open source tools to collect and control their data. Also run as a DAO.

Re-Public recently re-positioned itself towards more #ReFi and #DeSci use cases:

https://re-public.io/blog/re-public-shifting-focus-to-refi-and-desci-use-cases/

I'd like to propose here some sort of partnership or exploratory discussion around ways that consumer's personal data can help the Klima mission. I'm also volunteering to champion the effort if the community thinks it's a good idea.

The overlap of personal data and climate science/climate action became clearer to me after the Planet of the Klimates episode with Linwood Pendleton:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/linwood-pendleton-environmental-economist/id1597590318?i=1000556576723

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that carbon offsets and validation will rely on consumer/citizen data to some degree as scientists and governments try to get an accurate measurement of the entire planet in real-time. How will we know what's working and what isn't if we're only looking at bits and pieces of the environment, climate, and global ecosystem. Lots of places for counterintuitive or contradictory data to hide.

And then I saw this recent tweet thread from Adrian and Senken:

https://twitter.com/mr_adrianxyz/status/1562110713782493187

I'm not sure if D-MRV is a known term or one that he made up, but I think it puts a label on something that Klima should be investigating.

If there is interest and support here, I can come up with a more formal proposal. I'm not currently looking for funds or DAO resources, but just to raise the idea and see if the community would like me to do some work in this direction to find some next steps.

I think an exploratory discussion sounds like a good idea. I'm not clear exactly what kind of data would be collected/used and how it could help, but I'd love to hear where this can go. If this could help put Klima on the radar of climate scientists and/or people on the ground who work on climate change solutions, then I would love to support the initiative.

    Referencing POTK episodes in an RFC has to get some bonus points! Yes overall I think this is a great idea or at least question to ponder. I know we've talked about dMRV a few times in the podcast or office hours, and suspect it will be important for the on-chain carbon markets to eventually reach maturity. Will leave it to our real carbon giga-brains to comment on whether we could/should go down that route though. Either way, I'd be curious to hear more about wht you mean by personal data (or citizen science?) and how it would be used.

      ShimonD Phaedrus

      Thanks! A couple concrete examples would be air quality monitoring and soil carbon monitoring.

      Say the UN or some global agency decided they needed better real-time data of air quality or carbon emissions in order to direct some policy or political decision about the climate crisis.

      The centralized way to do this, and what seems likely now, is that they would come up with a budget and a project and send out employees or contractors throughout the world to deploy equipment that was probably given to them by some company in exchange for a discount or favors or whatever.

      The decentralized vision that Re-Public is trying to manifest is that the UN in this scenario could pay a fraction of that cost directly to people who setup a variety of devices that all meet a certain criteria. And they could do this via Re-Public. The hypothesis in that scenario would be that more monitoring devices get deployed way more quickly for way less money, and the money that is deployed goes to help local communities around the globe instead of a small number of contractors.

      So Re-Public is trying to build a global, user-owned data utility that could accommodate this type of scenario.

      If you've ever read The Ministry for the Future, a user-owned data platform, I believe it was called YouLock, was a key part of the solutions they tried. So if we're following that playbook, we have the carbon coin with Klima, and the data platform with Re-Public. I'm not arrogant enough to think Re-Public will be as successful as Klima, but I like the framing of checking off the different solutions of that novel. I do believe that SOMEONE will do this successfully at some point, even if it's not Re-Public.

      Next steps, in my mind, would be meeting with any interested Core Team or knowledgeable DAO members to flesh this out a bit more and come up with some concrete deliverables that I could work on that would move the conversation forward.

      16 days later

      Another way to think about this issue is in terms of decentralized oracles, like the ones provided by Chainlink.

      They gave a grant to Coorest to explore this space for carbon offsets specifically:

      https://blog.chain.link/coorest-chainlink-grant/

      I wonder what future the core team sees for oracles in the carbon markets? Will Verra come up with its own, or will publicly aggregated data feeds surpass any data that Verra can generate internally?

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