The workshop focused on the user-friendliness of and new ways of linking up online climate and development information portals in order to reduce user confusion and expensive overlapping activities.
20 May 2012: The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) has reported on the activities of the second annual Climate Knowledge Brokers workshop, which focused on streamlining the activities of the community of climate and development information websites.
Participants engaged in finding new ways of linking up, sharing technologies, and making online climate and development landscapes more user-friendly. The main reasons for the conference’s focus were twofold: the large potential for confusion for users due to multiple portals acting as “knowledge brokers,” which both publish their own information and link to other relevant sources online; and the potential for wasted financial resources due to overlapping activities. The challenges of making datasets open and available in machine readable formats drew large attention.
The workshop was organized by the German International Cooperation Agency (GIZ) and the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) on 19-20 May in Bonn. Approximately 30 climate-related organizations participated, including representatives from clean energy information portals such as reegle, which is a joint project of REEEP and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21). [REEEP Press Release] [CDKN Website]