A curated list of open source projects that serve a social or environmental goal.
Some projects out there didn't make the list, because while being cool, didn't have any history of pull-requests and few or no collaborators. Right now, I'm only including projects that have had some activity in the past year. I might start a second list for projects that look promising, but have gone quiet and could use a revival.
These are projects that already have multiple collaborators
| Project | Description | Status / Last Commit |
|---|---|---|
| Project Drawdown Solutions | See the book. Comprehensive and modelled plan for reversing climate change based on the work of hundreds of experts. |   |
| Climate Choice | We've created straight-forward guides on the choices you can make today, to take action and help prevent earth’s climate breaking down |   |
| Climate-Watch | Climate Watch offers open data, visualizations and analysis to help policymakers, researchers and other stakeholders gather insights on countries' climate progress. |   |
| Laws and Pathways | Climate Change Laws of the World and Transition Pathways Initiative CMS + Front end Applications |   |
| NorthApp | North automatically calculates the climate impact of your daily choices by connecting to apps and services you already use. https://www.north-app.com |   |
| Electricity Map | A real-time visualisation of the Greenhouse Gas (in terms of CO2 equivalent) footprint of electricity consumption built with d3.js and mapbox GL, maintained by Tomorrow. |   |
| Python for Power Systems Analysis | PyPSA is a free software toolbox for simulating and optimising modern power systems that include features such as conventional generators with unit commitment, variable wind and solar generation, storage units, coupling to other energy sectors, and mixed alternating and direct current networks. |   |
| Wind Python | The windpowerlib is a library to model the output of wind turbines and farms. https://oemof.org/ |   |
| Trillion Tree Campagin | There's enough space in the world for lots of new trees. In total, an area the size of the USA could be reforested! Discover on the map where trees have already been planted and where more can be planted. |   |
| Oasis Loss-Modelling Framework | An open source catastrophe modelling platform, free to use by anyone. |   |
These are projects that are new, have few contributors, or are looking for collaborators
| Project | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Climatescape | Front end for climatescape.org, an open directory of organizations and investors focused on climate change solutions. |   |
| Predict PV Yeild | If we have more accurate predictions of how much electricity a PV installation will produce over the next few hours then we can reduce the amount of fossil fuel backup required. |  |
| Power Genome | Power system optimization models can be used to explore the cost and emission implications of different regulations in future energy systems. A tool to quickly and easily create inputs for power systems models |  |
| Soils Revealed | Platform for direct visualization, analysis and reporting of soil organic carbon predictions and changes over time. |  |
| Project | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Aleph | Aleph is a tool for indexing large amounts of both documents (PDF, Word, HTML) and structured (CSV, XLS, SQL) data for easy browsing and search. It is built with investigative reporting as a primary use case. |  |
| DogwoodBC's Ban Big Money API | A Django-rest api for political contributions in BC, Canada |   |
| Tabula | Useful for pulling tables from PDFs |  |
| Project | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| OpenStates | The Open States Project collects and makes available data about state legislative activities, including bill summaries, votes, sponsorships and state legislator information |   |
| Pupa | A framework for scraping legislative/government data |  |
| Councilmatic | The django-councilmatic app provides the core functionality for the Councilmatic family, a set of web apps for keeping tabs on local city council. |   |
| OpenSpending | OpenSpending is a project to make government finances easier to explore and understand. It started out as "Where does my money go", a platform to visualize the United Kingdom's state finance, but has been renamed and restructured to allow arbitrary financial data to be loaded and displayed. | |
- Warmshowers is a hospitality site for cycle-tourists - https://github.com/warmshowers/Warmshowers.org
- TerraStories is an application designed to help communities map and access their own place-based storytelling. - https://github.com/rubyforgood/terrastories
- HospitalRun is an open source hospital information system. The project welcomes new contributors, and has a very active community - https://github.com/HospitalRun/hospitalrun-frontend
- Emergency/Disaster Mapping - https://github.com/hotosm/osm-tasking-manager2
- Elcano - a self-driving recumbent tricycle - https://github.com/elcano/elcano
- Solar Concentrator - Open Hardware Solar concentrator, Linear Fresnel Reflector - https://github.com/osefrance/SolarConcentrator
- Oceanography for everyone - https://github.com/OceanographyforEveryone/OpenCTD
- Nature for People - Global Modeling of Nature’s Contributions to People - https://github.com/charlottegiseleweil/natureforpeople
- Wildbook - Wildbook blends structured wildlife research with artificial intelligence, citizen science, and computer vision to speed population analysis and develop new insights to help fight extinction. Here is our vision in one minute. - https://github.com/WildbookOrg/Wildbook
- Global Forest Watch - https://github.com/Vizzuality/gfw
- Waterbird Population Estimates - https://github.com/Vizzuality/waterbird-population
| Project | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Protecting US Federal climate data | Climate Mirror - an open project to mirror public climate datasets | |
| Stolen Bike Index | It is the most widely used and successful bicycle registration service in the world with over 188,000 cataloged bikes, 550 community partners and tens of thousands of daily searches. |   |
| ElectricityMap | Real-time map for CO2 emissions by country/region from electricity |  |
| Our Sci | Write scripts to visualize data from open source hardware sensors live on an android app. From GOAT, which is all about open source Ag Tech http://forum.goatech.org/ |
- Kaggle, Understanding Human Impact on the Amazon Rainforest: https://www.kaggle.com/c/planet-understanding-the-amazon-from-space
- Data Science for Social Good - https://dssg.uchicago.edu/
- DrivenData's data science competitions - https://www.drivendata.org/competitions/
Where else to look:
- Github's list of trending projects with social benefit: https://github.com/showcases/social-impact
- Tools for activism has some open-source projects listed along with other services: https://github.com/drewrwilson/toolsforactivism
- Datakind is a network "Harnessing the power of data science in the service of humanity". Check out their projects @ http://www.datakind.org/projects