Re: Request for comment before BONSAI 2020 General Assembly #communication #dataliberation
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Brandon Kuczenski
Hi all, I agree that the USEPA work under Wes has been really impressive and broad. Compared to BONSAI though, it is both very well capitalized and very constrained institutionally. They are (I think) limited to incremental changes that are not especially transformative. I think they are right alongside BONSAI in terms of trying to figure out how to meld their work with others into a new paradigm. I think this is going to be a process of slow accretion, where the key contributions will provide cross-links between different projects. Based largely on my experience in the 2019 hackathon, I see BONSAI as a sort of "incubator" or synthesis lab. Taking problems that can be observed and solving them in extensible ways. The ReCiPe 2016 implementation- that is really impressive and a great example (and this is the first I'd heard of it). LCIA has to be redundantly implemented by all the softwares- and even Ecoinvent has to do it- because there doesn't exist a consistent, stable third party version. Now there does. One thing you could do that would cross-link would be to provide a static export in the EPA's (quite simple) LCIAFormat (https://github.com/USEPA/LCIAformatter/blob/master/format%20specs/LCIAmethod.md). Not sure if it does this already, or if there is a generic export from brightway into a static format. Chris, Didn't you also come up with a serialization format in your regional LCIA roadmap, using data packages? I am all about serializations, especially of shared open resources in simple, transparent formats. I also agree with Matteo's comment about "integration" as opposed to aggregation being a valuable thing to pursue. Based on the slide that you posted, I don't really see how CDLCI is contributing to that- it seems like they are just modernizing their own integrated pipeline and trying to get their partners' offerings to pipe through it, rather than to cooperate or equally interoperate with it. But I'm just biased against PRe as "old guard." As for engagement- that is not limited to LCA- I have noticed that it afflicts all of industrial ecology. Look at the R community and especially the "tidyverse" (e.g. for a community that has really embraced novel communication forms to build a truly online collaborative network. UCSB is near the epicenter of that movement (e.g. https://eco-data-science.github.io/ ) and I still feel sharply to the outside of it. But then I don't use R. People need tutorials and hand-holding and blog posts and such that will help them: * make websites * publish their code * document + test their code * write tweets / respond to tweets etc. I personally need help with this. I found cmutels' python-skeleton to be really helpful in getting my very first package published on PyPI (https://pypi.org/project/synonym-dict/). BONSAI projects (and brightway-derived projects like the activity browser) are the only place where I've seen true open-source collaborative development in LCA and that is potentially a big deal. But it does take a lot of effort and a culture of constant engagement to maintain it. Some people, e.g. the "energy twitter" community, are good at this. I am not. I have found that I have a tremendously high activation energy and fear of rejection / inadequacy / impostor syndrome that prevents me from putting stuff out at all. Rather than a "hackathon" I could imagine a periodic meet-up event, e.g. weekly on slack or similar, where we all get our jekyll sites up, write tweets / blogs and then re-tweet each other, until it becomes more of a habit. Writing documentation could also be done this way. Writing clearly-stated problems, competency questions, demonstration projects, are all valuable additions. Just some thoughts. Keep up the good work. -Brandon
On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:56 AM Bo Weidema <bo.weidema@...> wrote: I echo Matteo's comment :-) -- Brandon Kuczenski, Ph.D. Associate Researcher University of California at Santa Barbara Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5131 email: bkuczenski@...
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