New online network aims to bridge climate "collaboration gap"
It almost goes without saying these days that climate change can be a divisive issue. Even among people who think it's a problem, they can't necessarily agree on the solutions, or on working together to reach them.
Climate Lab, a Washington nonprofit group, has launched a new online network aimed at using the Internet to bridge this "collaboration gap," as one of the group's leaders calls it. Climate Lab Networks aims to provide the lab's "partners" with "customized streaming access" to information generated on the lab's year-old wiki. It's a new-tech way of saying there's going to be a whole lot of sharing going on.
"There's broad agreement on the need to find and implement solutions," Adam Tapley, the lab's managing director, said in an interview. "Also, that sharing is good on information related to climate change." Yet for a variety of reasons, Tapley says, even like-minded environmental groups have not been able to get past their own individual missions to collaborate more closely. The network hopes to do that with a "bottoms-up" approach, putting information out for all to use as they see fit.
It's a new venture by the lab, which a year ago launched a website and wiki aimed largely at what Tapley calls the climate "professionals." So far it has attracted about 350 registered users, who collaboratively author and collectively edit articles on climate change. Now, with the network's debut, the lab hopes to broaden the community to engage schools, academics, students, activists and others.
"It's not who you are, it's what you do," Tapley says. "If you have good information and follow the guidelines on the website so that ... everyone's contributions fit together in a productive and valuable way, then you're certainly welcome to be part of the community."
Though the network will be oriented toward finding and sharing information on responses or solutions to climate change, Tapley says the network will be open to anyone, regardless of their views. But it will be an online water cooler for sharing information, not invective, he stresses.
"We want things to be fact-based and verifiable," he says. He's hoping the network can be seen as a reliable place to vet ideas and information -- not unlike the scientific peer-review process, but with quicker turnaround and more transparency.
"What's happening is people are not sharing information, and the process is slower than some people feel is necessary, given that a lot of research going on is on very pressing problems and issues," the lab's managing director says. The group believes "that we need to speed this up and work togethr to push forward solutions."
It's an interesting concept. The idea of openness and transparency about information comes at a time when the scientific community is still struggling to cope with the furor caused by the unauthorized disclosure last fall of emails among climate researchers at a British university. Among the issues raised by the email exchanges, some of them unflattering, was the openness - or lack of it - among scientists besieged by climate contrarians bent on picking apart the researchers' data and debunking their findings.
It remains to be seen if this modest new network outside of the scientific realm can make a dent in the ideological divide that polls show has formed among the public about climate change - about whether it's a real problem, whether it's pressing, and what if anything to do about it.
(2009 Bloomberg photo, bridge over Tigris River in Baghdad, by Michael Luongo)
