Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Trevor Hinkle head of electricityMap open source project.
Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers
Hi there, I'm Trevor Hinkle and I work on the electricityMap team part of an open source project that shows the climate impact of electricity around the world.
What can you tell us about your project?
electricityMap is an open source visualization and collection of data parsers that shows the carbon footprint of electricity that's being produced and consumed all around the world.
If you go to electricitymap.org the kind of front end of our project, you can see where electricity is being produced and consumed & where is it coming from. For example it's coming from wind, solar gas nuclear etc. And, where is the power flowing around the world and the carbon footprint at any given time.
What contributions are you welcoming?
Over the years electricity map has been built as part of a community and we've had thousands of contributions particularly around getting new data on electricity map so when you are on electricitymap.org you can see that there are some areas which have era are colored in and some which are gray. The areas which are gray are areas where we don't have data yet and so we're always welcoming contributions for people who are interested in hunting down new data sources or particularly looking for hourly data that is updated every hour with a breakdown of where power is coming from in any given region, how power is being produced as well as the cross-border physical flow so if electricity is being imported or exported
to neighboring grids that's an important aspect of what we do.
So, if you're interested we would love for people to help build new parsers and add new data to electricityMap in those gray areas but also if you see an error with an existing area we'd love for your help to integrate a new data source or correct something there.
Also, if you're interested in helping out on the user experience and data presentation side of things we welcome your insights there as well.
What skills do people need to contribute?
To work on the parsers, to help contribute data to electricityMap it will definitely help to have some development skills. Particularly knowledge of Python & data science data engineering. If you go to our repository and you'll be able to see we've given you guides and you can see examples on how to integrate new data sources.
If you don't happen to have these skills then you can also contribute by suggestions and ideas on the user experience presentation side of the project.
Also, if you have knowledge in electricity energy systems then your insights & comments are very welcome.
Finally, you can also contribute by pointing us to the local open data in regions we have lack of data.
How do I get started?
To get started you can just go to our GitHub repository and there
we've written up a guide of how electricityMap works as well as how you can contribute. You can also see the list of issues we are working on. This is the best place to start.
I also recommend looking at electricitymap.org to see how far we've gotten in our mission to map out the world's electricity emissions and see where there is still to go and maybe that might give you some inspiration.
We're looking forward to seeing your contribution on our repository reach out to us on Twitter at @electricityMap and we're looking forward to your contributions and working with you over this period & also hopefully later on!
Join, October 2nd, for CONTRIBUTING.md - a virtual Hacktoberfest meetup, free and open for anyone who wants to join. Learn what Open Source projects are looking for contributions, which communities are looking for new members, and who is looking for advice from someone with your exact skill set. Check this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers which we'll release until the event.
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