Following hot on the heels of our first two prototyping weeks, we took a foray into the topic of  ‘access to nature’ for our third one this month. In the spirit of reflective practice, continuous improvement and our core values of justice, openness and collaboration I implemented Louise’s suggestion to blog about the week beforehand. The post included a form for people to express an interest in participating, and was promoted using our social media channels and in online communities in which we’re active such as the Collective for Climate Action. Previously I’d only identified and approached potential participants to invite them directly.

Our fourth prototyping week from 13-17 June will explore the role we might be able to play in catalysing a fair transition, with a focus on the UK’s world of work. We’ve recently published a post inviting people to express their interest in getting involved, so please take a look and share it far and wide. As with all of these weeks, we’re keen to bring together a diverse range of people with different experiences and perspectives to help us understand the challenges and potential solutions in this space.

Zarino’s been busy documenting our progress in reports, and along with some of the other outputs from our weeks so far these are now available on a dedicated Climate Prototyping page. Having reached the half-way mark we’ve used a bit of breathing space to reflect as a team on the prototyping weeks we’ve done so far, how we might be able to refine and test some of the prototypes that emerged and how we might use our remaining weeks.

In trying to scope out a potential set of research to commission around energy efficiency in the private rented sector, Alex found a huge existing report that pretty much answered all the questions we already had. His summary and contextualisation of what it means for our fifth prototyping week – which will focus on this topic – can be read online. This week is heavily-pencilled for 5-11 July and there’s a blog post in the pipeline but if you’d like to express your interest right away please complete this short application form.

Coming full circle, Zarino and I presented our public procurement prototype and wrap-up to Hampshire-based council climate officers. We were kindly invited to do this by a participant in our first prototyping week, which explored procurement as a potential lever for local climate action.

Outreach

Outside of our third prototyping week we met a lovely bunch of organisations this month, exploring collaboration opportunities around prototyping and beyond!

Here’s a flavour:

• Green Finance Institute
• The Climate Coalition
• Brighton Peace and Environment Centre
• Autonomy
• Friends of the Earth
• Rights : Community : Action
• Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands
• Tranquil City

This month our relatively-new #civic-tech channel on Climate Action Tech’s Slack started to bubble. Myf and I volunteered to host the channel and we enjoyed our first Community Circle Meeting with some other volunteers from around the world, to get to know each other and discuss ways in which we can support this amazing community of tech workers using our skills to take and accelerate climate action. If you’re part of the civic tech community and you work around or are thinking about climate, please do come and join the channel!

We also took part in an excellent Ashden event: Government-funded retrofit: how to ensure success? – and Subak’s Data Catalogue Launch. I presented at the Friends of the Earth & Ashden case studies celebrating local authority climate action launch event. And Isaac from Climate Emergency UK and I hosted an open space session at the Transition: Together We Can summit to share the live climate services we continue to collaborate on – the Climate Action Plan Explorer and Council Climate Scorecards.

Comms

Myf and I enjoyed recording an episode about our Climate Programme for Delib’s Practical Democracy podcast, and we’re waiting with bated breath for it to be released into the wild over the summer!

Scorecards

Alex took part in the inaugural stakeholder group meeting for version 2 of Council Climate Scorecards. We’re also thinking about how to make the data we produce easier to download and work with, and the first dataset we’ve applied that to is the data for the Climate Scorecards. This data can now be downloaded as an Excel file (with descriptions for all columns), or explored in datasette (this is a bit experimental).

CAPE

Finally, behind the scenes, Sam and Struan have moved our Climate Action Plan Explorer to new infrastructure and brought the ways it’s hosted in line with our other sites. This makes it much easier to back up the data.