OS-C is a non-profit, non-competitive organization that seeks to use open source technology and collaboration to align the efforts of the financial community in addressing the challenge of global climate change while preserving the opportunity to innovate and compete in global capital markets. This approach is a crucial component for closing the $1.2 trillion annual gap in investment needed to achieve Paris Climate Accord goals. The organization’s members include Allianz, Amazon, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, KPMG, Microsoft, the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance and many more technology and financial leaders, with membership having tripled since the community’s launch in September 2020.
Red Hat brings a wealth of experience and expertise in building open source communities for other Linux Foundation projects, serving as a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and many more. Beyond the technical skill to actively contribute code to these initiatives, Red Hat also provides the nuanced understanding of how to encourage collaboration between organizations that would otherwise be competitive in-market.
The open source model championed by Red Hat and selected by OS-C is intended to enable the creation of a complex, multi-layered ecosystem for OS-C members, including an open data platform that can be adopted by individual organizations for their own specific uses. This helps to provide a more level data playing field that meets a variety of regulatory requirements, providing global financial institutions with better, deeper views to evaluate climate change risk and opportunity as a core part of finance, banking and investment strategies.
OS-Climate Data Commons
To help adopt financial flows to the physical and economic market impacts of climate change, financial institutions and banks need a clearer view into an ever-growing tide of related data. To address this need, OS-C is working to build the OS-Climate Data Commons, an open platform that aggregates a variety of structured and unstructured data, from SEC filings and corporate PDFs to scientific and market research, into a single library of trusted data. OS-C’s goal is to make publicly available as much high quality data as possible, while also linking to public and commercial data and enabling its use in open source analytic tools.
Red Hat’s work around the Data Commons initiative is intended to help create a portable, enterprise-grade data platform that supports members in managing complex data ingestion and processing flows using the latest advances in machine learning. This helps to collate and sanitize public and proprietary data sources, while still supporting compliance requirements around regulatory disclosures. The platform is also intended to provide open, interoperable tooling that organizations can consume alongside their own workflows and internal processes.
As part of its membership, Red Hat will commit a team of eight solutions architects, data engineers and software engineers to the project, emphasizing the creation of OS-Climate Data Commons. The company will also provide community management resources to help OS-C establish the proper infrastructure and collaboration processes to effectively engage its growing membership.