This has happened before, but I thought I’d write it down this time, because it’s such a lovely story.

After a few years of quietness while I built ib1.org, a month ago I relaunched the Dgen constellation social directory. I need to note here too that Icebreaker One itself grew out of the Dgen constellation in exactly the same way as this. There’s a straight line, except it’s not really a straight line, it’s a constellation line.

Within two weeks over 60 people had reactivated, and one posted a bid in our Signal channel (thanks Matt) – within days a dozen people had expressed their interest and we had two calls, joined a briefing session with the prospect and now have an active and genuinely multidisciplinary group (banking to sound art) and a bid taking shape.

Some of the individuals coming together hadn’t seen each other for over five years (pre-lockdown) and so, of course, the majority of our calls weren’t about the work, but about catching up with each other, sharing stories and was inspiring to hear. The act of people just getting together to make things is always just lovely and we reflected that, unlike COVID, the current global sentiment is a very different shape, and carries a very different kind of weight.

On one level it doesn’t really matter what happens next, I’m just really happy that we’ve continued to build on our many-parts, loosely joined community … to find a way of getting really lovely people together to make new and unpredictable connections. Everything is all anchored on and around people who just love just doing stuff. If we win this particular commission it’d be amazing of course, but it is almost beside the point: the constellation doing what constellations do is the point. The bid is part of the constellation experiment.

The speed in which I was able to do this (I still run IB1) is supported by the tech that I’ve built very specifically around what I need, rather than someone else’s product or beholden to an enshitified product, is part of what we’re building here: tech that doesn’t enables and gets out of the way, doesn’t track or mess with our data in ways we don’t want. Part of the good side of what ai can enable is that we can all now build the tools (not the agents) we want to see in the world, rather than being someone else’s extractive product. I also have had to reflect that the nickname/handle I’ve used online for the last 20+ years (agentGav, thanks to Manu) now has a certain irony to it!

*** UPDATE *** One of our Constellation has just let me know that “One thing that emerged from the constellation is [anonymised] and I getting married. During the pandemic [anonymised] connected over a project and that’s how we met”. Oh my.

A screenshot of part of our Constellation below for reference, just to bring it to life – if you’d like to join, the link and description is here. If you’d like your own Constellation, please get in touch (yes, of course it’s open source).

Diome
[noun]
A data biome that represents a temporal cluster of data from which specific insights can be learned, analysed and/or derived.

Discussion

This is public on LinkedIn (open gdoc here if you’d like to contribute)

• when training AI, if you have a load of similar diomes you’ll end up with monocultural outcomes.
• in the same way, ‘monoculture’ biomes means you cannot have the degree of biodiversity to sustain a planet, if you don’t have enough diomes you wont be able to represent the richness of our world (natural and human)
• ensure that the diome has as complete a representation of the system as possible, with appropriate granularity, resolution, quality, volume and systems ontology?

Builds on the definition of Biome

“A biome is a biogeographical unit consisting of a biological community that has formed in response to the physical environment in which they are found and a shared regional climate. Biomes may span more than one continent. Biome is a broader term than habitat and can comprise a variety of habitats.”

Three climate actions you can take today.

One of the challenges we all face in addressing climate emergency is “what can I do that would actually make a difference?”

As individuals, we often feel powerless to make a difference (we need to heat our homes, eat, travel, etc. and it’s tough to really reduce our consumption). Surely it’s up to the finance community to direct money to net zero? Yes, but we are not powerless. On my journey over the years, I’ve spoken to many hundreds of people from the most junior to the most senior to politicians.

My one takeaway is that everyone needs ‘permission’ from someone else (their boss, their board, their shareholders, the members of their, their voters). On one level this ‘outsources’ the responsibility to someone else, but it also points to where the influence lies and leads me to think that the biggest financial impact we can all have as individuals is to do the following three things.

Ask your bank, insurer & pension provider

1. What are their net-zero commitments? (and what do they mean)
2. How will they demonstrate them? (progress and success)
3. How is CEO pay tied to net-zero success? (and what happens if they fail)

Updates

This seems to be emerging

https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/norway-fund-gets-tough-on-net-zero-6107074/

https://twitter.com/nesta_uk/status/1600466016915505155

Net Zero Data

Data related to delivering Net Zero impact on our ecosystem.

Our transition to net-zero is underway — how can we ensure it is provable, robust, secure and fair?

via The FT we have

The world’s largest oil traders are rushing to plough billions of dollars into renewable energy projects in the next five years, as they speed up preparations for a dramatic shift in the world’s energy mix. Marco Dunand, chief executive of Swiss commodity trader Mercuria, said the company was investing $1.5bn into projects in North America with private equity partners, while Torbjorn Tornqvist, chief executive of Gunvor, said he planned to commit 10 per cent of the company’s equity — hundreds of millions of dollars — over the next two years. “If you want to exist in 10 years’ time and don’t want to be in renewables then I think it is going to be tough,” Mr Dunand told the FT Commodities Global Summit. “We don’t have a choice” but meet the Paris climate goals, he said, calling it the world’s “biggest challenge”

via Forbes we have

renewables investments in Germany and France yielded returns of 178.2% over a five year period, compared with -20.7% for fossil fuel investments

Now join up with the global (excluding USA, but now including China) consensus on the Paris Accord, and the new financial reporting mechanisms (e.g TCFD) for Central Banks in Europe, and beyond.

And, with Icebreaker One, we are developing a national programme — Open Energy — which along with enabling data sharing, has an explicit, embedded target to help deliver the UK’s legally binding mission to be net-zero.

Open Energy is based on the principles of Open Banking, which is still only just getting started… this piece highlights that

the global open banking market generated $7.29 billion in 2018, and is expected to reach $43.15 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 24.4% from 2019 to 2026.

We hope to unlock similar value and growth by opening up access to energy data across not only the sector itself but by connecting energy data across the rest of the systems that must be decarbonised, including transport, the built environment, water and agriculture.

The time for theory is over. The question is how we will instrument the transition to ensure net-zero is provable, robust, secure and fair.

I’ve been receiving a lot of calls from people asking how they can use data to ‘help’. 

To help frame a potential response that isn’t just ‘we can build an app for that’ (that’s very rarely the answer), I’ve been trying to encourage people to first look at user needs and prior work. In times of ’emergency’ there’s a rush for people to want to ‘do something’— let’s harness that energy on useful things rather than squander it on ‘solutionising’?

Here’s a provocation process to ask how we can try and focus on what matters; that can unlock rapid-response from a frontline delivery team who can focus on solutions. At the same time, let’s also avoid just breaking things in the process, and give the frontline team (and the rest of us) the confidence that there is a process following them that will tidy up.

Questions to consider:

• What problems are we really trying to solve — based on actual user needs?
• How will data help these problems? (what data, what analysis, etc?)
• Who should act to convene and lead: a sector, public body, both?
• When are solutions needed and what might be our MVP intervention? (this may not need any data)
• What single-issue could act as an exemplar?

[click to comment or edit]  (or quick-link to this slide http://bit.ly/data-triage)

In City AM

[Re: Why Open Banking is the next finance revolution]

As co-chair of the original Open Banking Standard, it’s great to see the progress being made — and we fully expect this to extend into Open Finance (spanning insurance, pensions and investments). However, access to data in consumer finance is just the tip of the (fast-melting) iceberg. To respond to the impact of climate change we need to apply lessons learned to business data — to make data-at-scale work harder to deliver innovative financing for a carbon-zero future. With COP26 being held in the UK this year, we have an opportunity to combine our industrial strategy, climate targets and data infrastructure to shape our investment strategies, reveal efficiencies and better understand risk. Sorting out our ‘data plumbing’ will help power world-class analytical capabilities (e.g. artificial intelligence) to help our financial and environmental worlds align.  

Gavin Starks,

Founder, Icebreaker One

Open Banking—is a regulated standard that addresses data sharing across the banking sector. 

It addresses: 

• Rights
• Liability models
• Dispute resolution and redress
• Consent
• Security
• Legal frameworks
• Usability 
• Logistics
• Technology architecture
• Operating principles
• Myriad related issues

Open Banking was created by convening teams to develop common principles and practice for sector-wide data sharing. They included existing and challenger banks, trade bodies, fintechs, Treasury and regulators. In the UK, this led to the creation of an independent non-profit (funded by the banks) to develop and take the standard to market, with a directory of accredited organisations using it. 

The standard was (and is) developed openly—as a result, it has helped to catalyse initiatives around the world.  Similar initiatives now exist across Australia, Bahrain, Europe, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, New Zealand, Rwanda, Singapore and the USA.

This work is being extended to ‘Open Finance’. This would further include Investments, Pensions, Savings, Consumer Credit, Mortgages and General Insurance. 

We are also working on its extension into other sectors such as energy and environment (through IcebreakerOne.org). 

We are working with the UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, to help shape the direction of this work.

After an 18-month industry consultation, we opened Icebreaker One at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York.

–> More information here on the new IcebreakerOne.org website

Between this and Open Banking/Finance, we’re going to be quite busy at Dgen HQ.

We announced of our first open consultation for IcebreakerOne at the UN DRR Global Platform on 13 May 2019.