 Good morning. We're going to get started here in just a minute. How's everybody doing? It's great to see so many lovely faces here today. My name is Katherine Griffin. I'm here with Good Company Ventures. We are a social impact accelerator based in Philadelphia, and I'm joined by Garrett Melby, founder and managing director of Good Company Ventures. Sophia Tu from IBM, Ruben Katz from Geeklist, and Beth Beck from NASA. Welcome to Startup Climate, harnessing climate data to ignite entrepreneurial innovation. We're here today to talk about the White House's recently announced climate data initiative and the commitments that each of us have made to it in an effort to, one, make data actionable to the business and entrepreneurial community, to foster the multilingualism and cross-sector partnerships that we heard about from Kathy Clark on Tuesday, and finally to catalyze, accelerate and deploy real, tangible, practical adaptation and climate preparedness tools. Before we get started and I turn it over to our panelists, I'd like to take a minute to introduce the climate data initiative briefly. It was an announcement made by the White House in April as an effort to leverage the federal government's extensive climate data resources to stimulate innovation and private sector entrepreneurship in support of a national climate preparedness strategy, an effort to develop data-driven tools to help farmers, city planners, resource managers, hospitals, etc., better understand, plan and manage for the real-world impacts of climate change. It's a broad call to action by the White House, by the Obama administration, to innovators to leverage government-opened data resources to build tools that can make America's communities more resilient to climate change and to forge cross-sector partnerships and multilingualism that can really maximize the utility of these tools. I'd like to quickly thank Bina Venkataraman, who is the White House senior advisor on climate change, whose leadership is the reason why we're all here today. Unfortunately, she couldn't join us. So now I'd like to turn it over to our panelists here and give them an opportunity to introduce themselves and their organization's commitments to climate change and to each of you really what drives your engagement. Beth, I'd like to start with you because you've really been a leader on the climate data initiative. Hello, hello. There you go. So I'm Beth Beck. I've been at NASA forever, so I quit counting the years a long time ago. It's one of those things I started. The government was going to spend two years at NASA and then move on to the other stuff and somehow I fell in love with space. Who knew? So we are part of the open data. My office does open data. And one of the mandates from the White House has been to make all of the government data available, transparent, accessible, and what that means is machine readable. So we are NASA's an open data agency. We, by mandate from our Space Act, have been told in 1958 just to make all of our data research and development available to the public. So we've always done that and we have more websites than any other agency and we get criticized for having too much information. But now it's on the flip side is that we need to take all that information and format it in new ways. So with this, the Climate Data Initiative, the White House came to NASA and said, would you curate the data for all the federal agencies? And so we accept it. So our science mission director is the one that actually produces lots of data about the universe. And so they're actually coming in a leading effort to curate it because my office is the open data office. We've been helping to put together the website, working with Beena really closely to make sure that we have everything in one place and it works right. So we're committed to making our data open. It's a huge job. So be patient with us as we try to convert all of this data into a format that you can go make money from. So we have it available and it's just a matter and if you have, if there are certain data sets you want and we can do that. The climate data a lot so far on climate.data.gov is really NOAA and some other agencies so far but we are continuing to add to that. Thanks. My name is Ruben Katz. I'm the founder and CEO of Geek List and the founder of a movement called Hack for Good. We unite organizations, NASA, the WWF and other organizations similar to solve global social problems. Geek List itself is a LinkedIn for developers for lack of a better, for lack of more time. And the Hack for Good movement is something we started about a year and a half ago in a small format and it's grown globally. We focus very heavily on bringing together data organizations, nonprofits like the WWF or Save the Children, MSF, Doctors Without Borders. And we unite them with developers around the world to solve challenges provided by field workers and organizations that know what's really going on on the ground and what they really need to solve. There's been a big gap I think between the data that's available, the information available on the ground, organizations that help companies grow out of ideas that they've built. And we've tried to unite that gap in a way by providing a place for developers to unite and donate basically their time. And what we try and do is explain to them, you know, we're donating your time to try and solve social good problems. Next week on Friday we have a social good hackathon for climate change specifically in 43 cities around the world. And we've just recently, to address data a little bit more, just today we announced the launch of our open data portal built by an organization out of Canada working with the UK government and the Canadian government and now with the US government and NASA as well to try and provide data available for the developers to work on and for them to choose to build apps and solve problems out of. I think that's kind of us in a nutshell. Hi everyone. Good morning. My name is Sophia too. I'm with IBM Corporate Citizenship, which is our CSR and corporate philanthropy arm. So through citizenship, IBM donates its talent and technology to tackle social issues around the world in the communities that we live and work in. So our involvement with the Climate Data Initiative is through a program called World Community Grid. And World Community Grid is a way for anyone to donate their unused computing power to scientific research in health, poverty and sustainability. So the way this works is that scientists who are tackling massive research issues that they need computing power to help solve break their big questions into millions of smaller computer-based experiments, virtual chemistry experiments. Anyone who wants to volunteer goes to worldcommunitygrid.org, downloads a small application either onto their computer or mobile device, and then whenever they're not using the full computing power of that device, either if they step away to, you know, take a call, take a break, or even when they're doing something lightweight like surfing the internet, in the background this application will run these virtual chemistry experiments and do something. So for example, one of our projects is currently helping researchers at the Scripps Institute search for a treatment for HIV AIDS. And so the drug candidates are modeled against the HIV virus to see what might help to disable the virus. So that's just one example of the kind of experiment that you can run on World Community Grid. This technique, computer-based research, computer-based modeling, has become essential to the kind of work that many scientists are doing today. And in fact, this technique won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The scientists who pioneered it were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year because the technique has gotten good enough that it can very accurately predict the results of real-world experiments. So what this means for scientists is that they're able to take something where traditional techniques might have them going through a very time and labor-intensive process of synthesizing molecules in the lab and then testing them for the properties that they're looking for. And in a given year, a researcher might only be able to examine three or four, you know, half a dozen molecules. Using these computer-based techniques, like the ones we support on World Community Grid, a researcher is able to accelerate that a thousand times, a hundred thousand times. For example, one of our projects looking at materials for solar energy is screening over 25,000 molecules a day. So what that means is that not only can researchers dramatically accelerate the pace of work that they're doing, but they're actually able to go out and make bets on things that might be long shots that have a huge potential upside but would be too risky that they wouldn't be able to commit resources to using traditional techniques. So we got our start primarily doing medical research, HIV-AIDS, cancer, a lot on neglected tropical diseases like malaria, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, and then more recently have gotten started in the sustainability space. And we're really looking to expand that and particularly to support and catalyze the work that's being done on climate change adaptation. So one example of something that we've already done and the kind of success we want to build on is a partnership that we have with Harvard University on their Clean Energy Project, which is looking for the next generation of affordable and highly efficient carbon-based solar cell materials. So carbon-based solar cell materials are really exciting because they are flexible, they could potentially be painted on roofs or woven into fabrics, they could bring solar energy to places that currently aren't able to afford access to electricity. But the materials that are currently on the market are not nearly as efficient as silicon-based cells. So what Harvard is striving to do and what we've worked with them on is to look for the next generation of cells that can do this and bring this technology to market in a big way. So working with them over the past three years, we've helped them to screen nearly 3 million molecules in this quest, and they have already discovered 35,000 that have the potential to perform a double the efficiency of materials that are currently on the market. And to put that into context, 35,000, what does that mean? All materials that are currently on the market today are synthesized from less than a dozen materials that are currently known to be highly efficient. So this is really opening up that space and really accelerating it exponentially. So coming back to the Climate Data Initiative, our commitment is to work with researchers who are working on any issue related to climate change adaptation, whether that be food crop resilience, watershed modeling, looking at climate modeling or anything else that kind of falls into this broad space and providing them access to dedicated supercomputing resources on the World Community Grid platform, up to 100,000 years of computing runtime, which is the equivalent of $60 million in today's costs. And also, through the way that we engage volunteers, giving them a unique platform for accessing, for engaging the public, citizen scientists, lay people on their research, given the urgency of this issue and the fact that we're here talking about the ecosystem and how we can better collaborate, having a better connection and communication between the scientists who are discovering new things every day about climate change and its impact on local communities and practitioners and policy makers who could take that data, that information, and turn it into innovations on the ground, we think that this is a really powerful contribution that we can make to this space. My name is Garrett Melby. I'm here representing Good Company Ventures, so I want to thank you for coming. I want to thank my colleague, Catherine, for pulling together Climate Ventures 2.0, our commitment to the Climate Data Initiative. I'd like to thank a couple people in the room as well. My co-founder five years ago, Joel Stiker, our executive director, is hiding there in the back. Our board member, John Moore, and the founder of the Philadelphia Chapter of Investor Circle, our most ardent financial supporter, is here as well. And Dermot Murphy from Halloran, whose grant has made our work possible. And Mike Cox from the Impact Hub, who gives us a home in Philadelphia. So thanks for all the Philadelphia folks for representing today. I wish Brian Hill were here, but he won the People's Choice Award. He's one of our graduates, and I think he celebrated a little too much last night to join us. But he's an example of our work. So our work, for lack of a better word, Good Company Ventures is known as an accelerator. But I think of it really as a platform for transforming innovation into impact at scale. We pick up where prize programs and fellowships and incubators sort of leave off. They surface groundbreaking innovations, often application of a new technology to an old problem. And we engage with the entrepreneurs to figure out how to take that innovation to scale. What kind of value is created in the field by that innovation? How do you build a commercial model around it to drive the delivery and deployment and development of the innovation? And what type of capital strategy is going to be required to take that innovation to scale? And our real focus of ours is to make sure that these social entrepreneurs, with all of their insight and all of their charisma and all of their passion, are prepared to meet the expectations of all investors, not only impact investors, but even those investors who care less about their passion and more about their financial outcomes. So we pride ourselves on rigor. Our program asks a lot of the entrepreneurs. We spend 12 weeks with them walking through a very structured curriculum to make sure that all of the critical issues that an investor requires be answered are answered. And then we present them to the finance community and help them seek investment. To date, we've been very successful. Our graduates have raised over $50 million in private capital to fuel social impact, a result that we're very proud of. We also think that this allows us to act, as I said, as a platform for catalyzing impact. Those that have supported us have found that as a capacity-building investment, a dollar of our program spend has produced 700 times that in private capital mobilized. So when we think of ourselves as a platform, this is how we approached the Climate Data Initiative. We were talking with Beena about the really impressive array of resources she had organized in response to the President's call. Really the leading organizations in terms of scientific research, technology, corporate networks. But we didn't see a pathway to put the primary actors in the middle of all those resources. And so we offered our platform as a way to engage entrepreneurs in making this data actionable and turning it into real impact in the field. And so we have begun in the last few months to build a consortium who can contribute to this platform, leverage it, and make sure that all of the resources that entrepreneurs require to make their impact felt in the world and help the world prepare for the climate changes that the data say are coming, a reality. Great. So we've done our best here to array quite a diverse panel, as you can see. And before we get into kind of how we aspire to work together, I'd like to just acknowledge that we've talked a lot about climate change over the last two, five, ten years, but it's largely been in a political context, right? Rarely is data, is big data part of the conversation. So I'd like to hear from the panelists a little bit about how and why using data for climate change preparedness and adaptation can be such a powerful tool. Working. Okay. So we are a scientific agency. We don't make judgments about what the data says. So I always have to say that when I talk, so I'm not giving a political statement. We provide the data for you guys to determine what that means. And if the data means that you may have to move out of your house because you're on the coastline, wouldn't you want to have that data? So the predictive data, I mean, we have data, and then there's predictive tools, modeling. One of the things that we're, through the climate.data.gov, we're trying to provide a lot of tools and modeling. There's also an additional site, and I can't remember the name of it. It's a dot org that's going to have a lot of tools on it, more modeling tools than are on the data.gov. But we want to give you the opportunity to make some choices, and we want to offer one of the things that we've found in working with the climate initiative through the White House is that we've got entrepreneurs who can create awesome, awesome tools. And then you've got officials who don't know how to use those tools, and they don't know what data that you need to make your tools. So I guess that's really the follow-on question of how do we even have the same language and speak what we need to go forward. I've actually forgot what the question was. There's so much I want to talk about how the government works. What specifically do you want to... How can data be such a powerful tool to address climate change? So I guess I was answering it. Yeah, I was going, where was I going with that? It's really fascinating that I never thought of data as being a tool. It was just a thing, information, it's out there. There's so much that what I've learned through the eyes of entrepreneurs who use data is how powerful it is. And so one of the things from the government side, so I will speak generally from the government, it takes you guys to teach us the power of what we have and we take for granted. What we have at NASA is we have missions that gather information about space and Earth. One thing I always like to point out, you know that NASA data, we don't just look at the stars, we have Earth science and Earth science applications, so there's a lot that we do that helps you live your life in a better way. But you're the ones that can kind of harness that for us. So the outgrowth of the missions that we are authorized to do through Congress is that you will do these missions and here's the money to do these missions. And then we produce data, we produce results that we use for what we're doing. It's so cool to recycle, revalue that so that we can have multiple values on the stuff that's just an output of what we're doing because we're NASA. This is what we do. And so the fact that you can create more power, it's not just about research and development, but it's about making your lives better. I'm extremely passionate about that. I don't just work for the government. I happen to work for this awesome agency that can really make your life different if we just make the connection. So we want to get smarter about the power of what we have. We recognize the power of our data in the government, but we would recognize more as we see how you use it and let us know how you're using it and how we can package it in ways that's even more useful. And then you can tell Congress to give us more money to do that. That's a side story. I guess we'll go down the line. So we can be linear about it. And to address data and how powerful it can be, there's close to 12 million software engineers building stuff around the world. And that number is minuscule to what it's growing into. And it's probably underestimated right now if you take into account all the students in their teens that haven't been counted yet. They're the ones that built everything that you utilize in your phone, everything that you see on the web, every way we communicate now. It's all done by software engineers, people that are inside Geekless meeting each other and doing things, but they don't have the access, and sometimes they don't have the interest to go out and find information, find data that is available to solve problems. They also don't have the ability to go out and communicate with NGOs and say, hey, what problems do you have? What are we trying to solve? What can we solve that Save the Children is trying to solve famine in certain regions? How can data from NASA help that? Well, they don't have any contacts to NASA. NASA's not necessarily communicating directly with Save the Children. Sometimes it takes, and because they're both large organizations, it takes a lot of heavy lifting to get them to do anything. Years of policy, years of problems, the way that hackathons, and what we do help that, and the way that data is so important for us, is we're a completely open network. Nobody's limited to what they can build. They're under no obligation to sell it, they're not trying to use it to build their next startup. They're trying to do it and donate their time to build something that's very powerful to change the world. And when you motivate people that have the power to build things and you give them the tools, the data that they need to solve the problems, and you give them the organizations to provide them the ability to know what the problem really is. They can solve it. A good example would be we ran a Hack for Good event at the Web Summit last October, in November, last year sometime. And a lot of people got together to build projects. The developers came and said, well, we don't know what to build, and we invited NGOs and people to come and show up and just announce what they were thinking to build. And a gentleman showed up who you may have seen once or twice on television. He wears this funky British hat that it's got a British flag on it, and he goes and jumps in front of a camera at the US Open and says, kaka kaka, stop deforestation. And you can Google him, it's Jungle Bird Man. And if you know anything about deforestation, you've probably heard of him, or if you like golf. Oh, and baseball. He ran the bases at a Mets game recently. And he said, gosh, this guy must be nuts to do this stuff. He gets arrested half the time he does it, and he always gets let out. But he showed up at the event, and he had nothing in his pocket except videos of him doing this stuff. That's all he'd been going around the world trying to solve. He showed up at the event with an idea to try and find and help governments locate where illegal deforestation was happening. A bunch of developers surrounded him at our pre-event meetup. They got together the next day at the hackathon and started working with him on it. And he's working right now with Interpol. He's working right now with governments in seven nations between South America and Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa as well, where they're actually physically ground testing the ability to do this. And he's working with organizations like Google and others that have open data sets where they can showcase what was built, where it was built, obviously the access to real-time or somewhat real-time satellite imagery helps. Thank you, NASA. But that's a perfect example of somebody who had a crazy idea to stop deforestation, to really affect change and take action and utilize data, utilize engineers that we bring to the table and by doing that, by the way, he had to go out and find advisors and investors and raise capital, but more than raise capital, get funding, which was a big struggle for him or for anybody, I think. That's the missing link and that's why we're on the money stage is because there's organizations like IBM, organizations out there that are capable of funding these projects, but the projects aren't necessarily getting built. So what we're trying to do is take it, unite it and make a change in the world, a real change, an actionable change. And we can't do those things without the data. We can't do those things without organizations like Good Ventures and Rockstar is a similar organization in Amsterdam, accelerators that help entrepreneurs, and most of them are just developers that want to build things and they need partners that can help them build them and advise them what's the legal structure. I mean, we had another developer build an app that, not climate-related, he was in Minsk and he used the camera in his laptop to take pinpoint locations on your face so that you could move the mouse on your screen and he called it Stop Web Disability. And you can Google it and you'll find Dmitri and, hi, I'm from Minsk and I want to stop Web Disability and he actually was able to create an app that does this and showcase it to the world and all of these things happen rapidly and they build them but they don't know who to talk to so I try and advise them. We get advisors on board to try and help them, you know, what legal structure, where should they incorporate? How do they take that data? Are they legally allowed to use the data? Should it be MIT license or some other open source license? Who owns the data during the event? You know, they're all issues that we try and solve on a daily basis but need more minds to think about. And I think that, you know, without data there is no possibility for the, you know, data can be knowledge from Save Your Children or it can be knowledge from NASA. UNFCCC plays some challenges. If you go to hackforgood.io it'll take you to the event page and you can see there's about 30 plus challenges already listed for the upcoming event and there'll be close to 100 more that we're trying to sort through and organize. Again, it's all about data. Great examples of work on the ground how data is able to accelerate this work. I want to zoom out a little bit and think about, so going back to your question about the way that having access to data can really accelerate the work on climate change adaptation. Climate change is incredibly complex. It is a system of systems. We're learning new things every day. Some of them counter-intuitive about how climate change is going to impact communities in different parts of the world. And so because of that, we can't rely on hunches about how climate change is going to impact different communities. We're just going to be wrong a lot of the time. We need data and we need a lot of data. We need data at a granular level to really understand the impact at the local community level because interventions are going to happen at those levels and they're going to need to be custom for different communities around the world. So there's a big role to play for organizations that are acting at a global level, that are coordinating across sectors, that take regional perspectives. But at the end of the day, this is going to come down to action on the ground in local communities. So I think that the power of data is that we just need as much work as we can on really understanding how climate change is going to be impacting different communities in different ways to empower people to then take the actions they need to mitigate those effects. So that's my... The data is powerful for so many of the social issues that we're talking about at SoCAP all of this week. But I think particularly for something like climate change where the more we learn, the more that we know how much more there is to learn, data and kind of very data intensive research is going to be a crucial component of figuring out our path forward. I'd like to echo that. That's one of the two observations I had to make about data is that for the community of change makers here at SoCAP and the folks that we work with, it's critical that they are engaging with the world as it is rather than the world as it should be or as they wish it were. And data is the way to ground the work and what's really going on and what really needs fixing. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the signaling effect of data which I think is really important. We've been practicing our craft at Good Company for five years but for the past year we've been working on a consortium project that's similar in conception to Climate Ventures 2.0. It's a project known as Fast Forward which was one of the cities that won a million dollar grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies and our mayor asked us to create this consortium to address urban issues and engage social entrepreneurs in urban problem solving. And so the work we did was focused on public safety. And when we were given this mandate we thought, oh, public safety. I'm not sure how much social enterprise interest there is in that or how big a market that is but the third partner in the project along with the city was the Wharton Social Impact Initiative and we tasked them with the challenge of doing primary research in the city agencies and with third party subject matter experts to articulate the public safety landscape. And we asked them to do this in the sense that in my background as a technology venture capitalist VC firms and other investors rely heavily on technology forecasting research performed by firms such as Gartner and Aberdeen and PWC and others. It's a multi-billion dollar business to go out and ask CIOs and CTOs what their next challenges are and what type of budget they have against these next challenges. But I don't think that's done in the social sector. The research that's being done is published in policy papers that aren't being read by social entrepreneurs. So we tried to model a behavior in the Fast Forward project where we'd go out and look at the data what types of cost were the unsolved or public safety problems imposing on the city across all departments and where were the problems most addressable where were the most intractable which programs had been somewhat successful which programs have been tried and failed and it really provide a roadmap for prospective social innovators to know what to get after. So notwithstanding my initial concern that public safety might not be a really robust target of entrepreneurial action the Wharton research compiled broke down public safety into 11 different problem sets that all together compose a 120 billion dollar annual market across the country and that's the kind of reinterpretation of primary data that entrepreneurs can get after and so it's one of our hopes for climate ventures 2.0 that Wharton and other research partners can help look at the data sets and re-present them in ways that help entrepreneurs prioritize the most near term and most substantial pending threats and also help them understand the type of economic opportunities that are offered by solutions to these threats so we hope to be revealing more of that work in the coming months before we engage entrepreneurs to respond to the problem. So we have access to the data thanks to government organizations like NASA and we have access to the technology and the expertise and we know how powerful these can be and yet there remains this gap Ruben that you mentioned between the hosts of the data and the hosts of this expertise and the entrepreneurs that can really make use of it in ways that can solve these really really sticky problems so I'd like to take a moment to discuss how we can foster kind of the multilingual cross-sector partnerships that we've talked about over the course of the conference these last couple of days to bridge this gap to bring these disparate parties together and solve these problems in ways that can be felt on the ground. Garrett let's start with you. I don't have the time to prepare. Yeah the way I think about this is all of us that have been sort of engaged in the SOCAP community over the last several years have been working on sort of a two-dimensional problem set taking the silo of investment and capitalism and the silo of social change and philanthropy and creating a middle ground, some connective tissue some new practices that drawn the best of both of those areas of expertise but now what we need to do as it matures is sort of bring other dimensions on board so how do we connect the basic scientific research I guess start with policy that drives the research agenda translate the research into actionable data that entrepreneurs can get at provide them prospecting and direction as I mentioned before but then also make sure that they're not just working with Flint and Steel to light a fire make sure that the technology resources from mainstream technology organizations like IBM and the supply chain networks from other CDI partners like Walmart and other folks that provide global outreach and the global networks of knowledge and reach and service that the foundations that have committed to CDI are all part of forming this new approach to getting after problems one thing I've seen it reflected on in some of the panels this week is I do think it's really important that as you try to bring more actors into this multilingual conversation that you not try to ask a native French speaker to speak Farsi but as you try to put together these consortia you make sure that the role that you're asking everybody to play draws on their strengths respects their political or organizational limitations which takes a lot of creativity and a lot of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good you try to engage with partners as they're ready to engage and find a role for them to play I see the challenge as sort of a platform host so we are trying to build that consortium and I'm gonna say again shameless plug if anybody feels like they ought to or their organization ought to be a part of this consortium we'd be happy to speak to you and devise a role that you can play because for these entrepreneurs who have these big ideas and so much work to get done I think one of the most exciting aspects of this kind of third sector movement is that they you know social enterprise I think has become respected as sort of a mainstream undertaking that corporate citizens and government leadership are willing to support and we want to make sure that there's a pathway for those who aren't actively engaged with the entrepreneurs yet to figure out how within their own mission and their own limitations they can support them Gary if I can ask what is your vetting process that you go through when you look for entrepreneurs and organizations and I pose the same question I think to IBM as well because I know that we work very heavily on the side of software engineers who are ipso de facto entrepreneurs they weren't trained necessarily as entrepreneurs they are helping on an idea helping build something at some point they may need to find a CEO they may need to find somebody in the organization that can help them create a company and get to that later stage of being ready for and into an accelerator and I think that the gap that we are seeing is trying that we're trying to fill within Geeklist at least is that location where developers the people that actually can solve the problems and build them in many cases the inventors of the technologies that NASA uses and I think one of the guys that built some of NASA's first websites is in Geeklist a guy named Goran Alusa funny guy he creates achievement cards that I built the NASA website that does this and this and the other thing but these people are all usually behind the scenes and it's very hard for them to come out and they don't know how to pitch an accelerator they start working with an NGO but many times they can be squashed by the challenges that you've mentioned where organizations are very slow paced we're dealing with it right now with two, three dozen NGOs that may or may not be able to provide specific data they have to formulate their challenges just right so that it's politically correct at the same time giving enough leeway to developers to open source a solution or close or do it privately with them if they can't open source it how do you see that gap from developer and entrepreneur making that jump to an accelerator and then how do organizations like IBM solve that because I think that we see that there's solutions in the data in the accelerators in the big money that can come in and create solutions but one of the things that we've found for example is it's very hard once the event is over to find the right funding and the right people to place them in and we're just working very hard on trying to unite that just getting accelerators involved that's been a year and a half process what are some steps that they can take that can make that easier and I'd open that up to the floor if anyone's got ideas there's so many topics sort of baked into that set of questions but for our own selection we do an open call for applications whenever we mount the good company accelerator or a program like Fast Forward and we will do so with ClimateVentures 2.0 the number one thing we are looking for is entrepreneurial leadership and there's lots of sort of definitions and lots of discussion about what makes an entrepreneur but we know that we are looking for evidence of doing so I don't assume that a software developer is an entrepreneur necessarily my definition of an entrepreneur is someone who gets a lot done with little and so that's essential as we look for what we call evidence of doing and we see that a lot from people coming out of social service agencies where they're asked to do a lot and their passion compels them to do a lot with very little in terms of financial resources the other thing I think is really indispensable though is a degree of domain expertise most of my failures as an investor and as a mentor in the good company program I've been with folks who are brilliant behind the desk but have not engaged with the problem set in the field enough and have not engaged enough with the people they hope to serve to understand why the problem hasn't been solved yet and it's one thing to sit behind a desk and say oh the world should be this way and there's an enormous hubris to that to not actually assume that there's lots of smart caring people who've tried lots and lots of things so I'm always looking for evidence of doing and actual exposure to the problem in the field as pretty indispensable now because we select this way we often have people that are lacking in a technical background and we need to develop a better pipeline to partner these people with the domain expertise and the capability of doing with the technical resources because if you don't have both it's a good thing we met the other thing as I said in the sort of overview introduction we have come to see ourselves a bit as a graduate school for other programs and so one of the things we really want to leverage in the climate ventures 2.0 program is working with folks that are doing hackathons, idea competitions fellowships around climate as a way to identify things that are really really compelling and that's the other thing I would say about ourselves is we don't ask for a lot of polish on the application on the idea, we just want the idea to be new enough that it's not obvious what the path to market and scale is so that we have an interesting problem to work with so we do a lot of reading between the lines on the applications if we see the seed of innovation we're happy to jump on it so better polishing and preparation is essential signaling and selection and filtering that comes from prize competitions and hackathons and other things like that is a big deal so we're looking forward to working with NASA on their idea competition and I think I've mentioned MIT climate co-lab does an idea competition focus on climate that we hope to work with closely to identify promising candidates and we're really excited to see what comes out of the next hack for good in 10 days 7 days as feedstock for this whole program to answer your question with World Community Grid as with other citizenship initiatives we're really looking for our criteria kind of break up into two categories one is the rigor of the approach so in the case of World Community Grid we're talking about scientific rigor is this approach something that has been validated by peers in the field as an interesting research question is it thoughtfully structured so we go through a sort of peer review process through our colleagues at IBM Research and also externally with other scientists in the field when we receive applications from researchers the other question that we look at is capacity to absorb the kind of support we're offering so that is going to be different for every one of the corporate citizenship programs that we offer but in the case of World Community Grid we're looking at is this a team that has funding support so that you know the projects that we run on World Community Grid can stretch for anywhere from a year to you know five or seven years and so if they're putting in an application to use World Community Grid for five or seven years we want to have some assurance that they're going to be able to continue that work and actually analyze the data when it comes off the grid and to work on you know publishing and sharing that insight with others so I represent big brother and I have a different perspective collaboration is something that I truly care about the thing that I always help people I used to say collaboration is messy now I just say people are messy so doesn't matter what you're doing people are messy they're hard to work with we all bring our baggage to the table you know we all bring our expectation to the table and the biggest problem in speaking the multiple languages is you know if someone brings their expectation to the table and they don't just claim it and call it then that's what starts to make these collaborations and partnerships really really difficult and what I've through my years of doing this what I have learned is that NASA and very very fortunate is that NASA is a convening power that is powerful as the data so we can convene these conversations that people will come to the table just because the NASA.gov email went out to them and they're just curious so they'll come so and having as you convene these conversations with partners or collaborators or however you do it I think what I would like to see to the entrepreneurs in the room it's just like I told my daughter when she she got an offer to go work on the hill to work for the house for free and I would do it go work for free and you're gonna jump into the government with a higher level salary then you would have if you'd gone you know to another job so and that actually happened she's at Homeland Security but for entrepreneurs if you and for you know potential nonprofits who want to come to the table and have these discussions if you can come as an in kind supporter to it and at the table in the conversation I can promise you that it will reap benefits usually financially in the future because big brother and the others you know we get used to you and we like you and we figure out a way to you know keep the conversation going but if you come to the table and say I've got this really great idea and now we need some money then it's like okay now I'm not having an open conversation anymore now I feel like you're having a conversation only because you'll get something out of it so this is the people are messy thing if you can figure out a way to speak the language of the people at the table and not just as you said not just to force your French on you know I used to tell people if I'm you know I could have the greatest things to say but if I'm speaking in Portuguese and the room doesn't speak that they're just you know blah blah blah that's all I hear so you have to learn how to you know there's one shared thing that you passionately care about and if it's climate and I will call it resilience not climate change if it's climate resilience and how do we want to make sure that our planet is resilient enough to support our symbiotic you know humans who are sucking life out of the planet and you know sorry the planet should support me because I'm here but if there's a way that we can work together planet and me and live peacefully if you have if that's your passion or if your passion is you know say the children you know save the apes I mean I have lots of passions and I want them all to work but that's the one thing that will be the shared language no matter what you do if you care for that one thing even if you don't like each other which happens with messy people you'll still stay in it because there's a value on the other side so I think to build on that there's also a role for organizations that have that kind of multilingual capacity to do that translation work to bridge the gap for people who are newer to the space with organizing you know with other sectors that you may have familiarity with their language you've built trust so in our case we're helping researchers to translate some very technical language into language that policymakers or entrepreneurs can get excited about and can understand and that is something that you build up over time learning the language but also learning the trust so that they trust when you take what they're saying and translate it for another audience that they trust that you have captured the kernel of what it is that they're trying to convey one of the other things that in knowing the language is also knowing the capacity of certain players that people can do certain things so for instance we can collaborate partner once you get into partner there's a legal connotation and our lawyers freak out so there's certain things that I've learned to not say words to make the freak out factor but if you in knowing and the reason we kind of came together is because I was talking to be nice that you know we had a climate data challenge as part of space apps we have another one in April we had these really great you know 8,000 solvers came to the table around the world to chew on these you know really interesting challenges we had and take the data and my limitation is I can't now fund them now there are some prize competitions that you can but that's not what I'm we're not running that so finding someone now what and I and I was talking to being about I said we really want this innovation pipeline I want to be able to you know do the hand off the baton and say okay now look at these awesome solvers with these skills that are incredible and then you know who can take them and so being a connected us and so that's what we're looking at now we're going to have look at an accelerator challenge where we can now look at some entrepreneurs build on what we've already built and now hand them off to someone who can train them to be more successful because you know as big brother I don't I don't really need to do that you guys can do that so that's just another finding people that can fill those gaps I can only do so much when I come to the edge who's going to meet me there and and that's the real and finding those translators to say you should like being a you should you should you too should talk you should and the White House can't pay for things they come to us so we pay for things and then we come to you so that you can pay for things it's a village I'm going to I'm going to jump in here because we only have a couple minutes left I'd like to open it up to you all to see what questions you might have for our panel Joel in the back what does the data look like well I it's very diverse I think that what you're saying Beth is that there are well I think the the most important thing is that we're looking for machine readable data data that you can really you know plug and play but to just give a couple examples of information that comes off of World Community Grid and by the way we are a staunch supporter of open science and so all research that's conducted on World Community Grid is published available to the public free of charge to really support that kind of ongoing collaboration but a project like the Harvard Clean Energy Project the data coming off of that is electrical properties for each of these three million molecules that we've scanned with them so that so that other researchers and entrepreneurs can take those and start to synthesize the molecules test them in the lab potentially turn them into products to take to market for a project like our computing for sustainable water project with the University of Virginia which was modeling the Chesapeake Bay watershed and how different policy interventions would change the nature and use of clean water in the bay you know that data looks very different that's about maps and what how the water you know levels and where it's going to be is going to change the quality of the water so it really depends on the specific issue I think. Beth you might want to add. For the coastal flooding which is the first batch of data that the first community on climatedata.gov what was really fascinating for me to learn because we have scientific data on sea level rise you know what how the ice is melting what does it look like how many inches per year you know could the predictions be so that's a scientific like planetary thing that we look at but in having a workshop for the first debut of this the climatedata.gov and bringing in the city planners and the state planners insurance providers it was eye-opening for me to see that let's just and I'd never really thought about it if sea level is rising and you know it's rising you know what kind of insurance you need on your home and then do you at what point do you know you need to sell your home but then who do you sell it to because then they're stuck with what you've got I mean there's all kinds of issues with dealing with just keeping things safe and then what does it look like if the sea level is rising are the storms going to be greater and then what does that do with the coastal impact so there's a lot of city planning and community planning and there's a lot of things that have to happen so that data can help the communities and individuals make some choices but it's scientific data that that's what we provide and it's how you choose to use that. I think there was a question. So that starts to answer some of my question. My question was about who do you see as the customers of the companies that are going to be started through this process whether it be government or and also who do you see as the funders for those companies is it do you think it's going to be traditional venture capital or impact venture capital or whether there be other funding sources that would match up better with these companies. That's a great question. We don't know because we haven't chosen them yet is one answer. A better answer is that we like for the customers to be the people who are avoiding harm to the extent that they have an ability to pay or from a justice perspective they should be asked to pay. But as we begin to look at coastal threats food system threats it's clear to me that there are many commercializable opportunities. Just the home protection market opportunity in response to coastal flooding is clearly a multi-billion dollar market. Crop protection and financial security for food producers in response to more extreme weather events is clearly a multi-billion dollar market. I don't have any great concern that there's anything about this subject matter that implies that only the government will be a consumer for the solutions. I think the government will be a critical partner in terms of enabling deployment of new solutions and providing a piloting platform for some of the solutions and for organizing the actors in these new markets to respond. But ultimately I think the amount of value the equation in my mind is that the harm has enormous cost so a solution to the harm has enormous value and where you have enormous value you have markets. I don't know the specific answer but I'm not at all concerned about the dynamics. I might be able to add a specific answer to that actually because a good example would be that Treetag organization that I mentioned before is now working with Harmon Cardin and Gibson guitars to make sure that they're not using illegally forested wood because Gibson I don't know if you're aware was fined a considerable multi-million dollar suit because they were unknowingly supposedly or knowingly using we don't get into who's right and who's wrong but they were using wood that was found to be harvested illegally from countries where they weren't even supposed to be harvesting the wood so they were found and they came to this organization said listen we can help ensure and prove that your wood is not from an illegal illegal forestation activity and that's one that's one minimal point it's not just homeowners it's not just other people but this Andrew Dudley from Treetag went out and found these organizations that got really excited when they heard about what he built and said hey we don't want to buy the wrong wood can you help us make sure we're not doing it we'll pay or fund or sponsor your organization to do that so on the flip side of every solution is somebody who is an effect from that solution and or could be causing harm like in in oil spills organizations that can help trigger or find oil spills faster or identify where they're occurring from over sees it from satellites all of those things are very real life solutions I think great so so I'm getting the cut signal here but I'd like to thank all of our panelists for coming out and thank each of you for being here and we'd love to continue this conversation so if we didn't get to your question please don't be shy we'll be here for couple minutes we'd love to talk