POSE Archives - Catalyst Cooperative

To kick off our NSF POSE grant work, over 4 weeks in July and August we interviewed more than 60 energy data users as part of NSF’s Innovation Corps program (I-Corps). I-Corps helps POSE awardees better understand their users and contributors, and the potential for fostering a sustainable open source ecosystem.

Some of our interviewees were already PUDL users, and many of them weren’t. A fair number of the PUDL users were at organizations we’d never encountered before! We talked to academic researchers and advocates working at non-profits, but also people at for-profit companies, and folks working in the public sector. We even had the chance to talk to some utilities. Interviewee technical and energy domain backgrounds were diverse: from spreadsheet-only NGOs to startups working with cloud-based data pipelines and orchestration frameworks, and everything in between. There were software engineers and lawyers that argue at FERC, grass roots advocates and regional electricity planning organizations too.

It was an intense month for our sometimes introverted team, but overall it was a good experience and we learned a lot. So we thought we’d share some of our high-level takeaways, and see if they resonate the broader energy data community.

Introducing POSE

We are excited to share that the Public Utility Data Liberation Project (PUDL) and Catalyst Cooperative have been awarded a Pathways to Open Source Ecosystems (POSE) Phase I grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF)! This grant will fund a slate of community building and infrastructure projects to expand the PUDL community and facilitate contributions.

Why we pursued the POSE grant

Over the past few years, we’ve made substantial technical improvements to PUDL thanks to generous support from RMI, the Sloan Foundation, Climate Change AI, and the Mozilla Foundation. These improvements have made accessing PUDL data and adding new datasets easier than ever before.

We’ve spent time on community-building activities like developing relationships with open energy modelers, presenting at conferences, hosting office hours, and responding to questions on Github Discussions. We applied for the NSF POSE grant so that we can spend more time fostering the PUDL community and improving people’s experience working with public energy data.

Getting to know our community

Are you a researcher or analyst working with energy data or models? An environmental non-profit, clean energy advocate or data journalist working on the U.S. energy transition? A data engineer or open-source expert interested in contributing to the energy transition?

If so, we would love to talk to you! For the first step of our POSE grant, we’re conducting a series of half-hour interviews over the next month to better understand how people find, prepare, and work with energy data, the different contexts they’re working in, and what their biggest data pain points and challenges are. You can sign up using this link. Please spread the word and forward this link to anyone you think might be interested!

Our Focus Areas

With POSE funding, we’ll be working to get PUDL data into more hands and creating new opportunities to contribute back to the PUDL ecosystem. Here’s a glimpse into what’s in the works:

Exploring new front-end tools to make PUDL data easier to access: We’re busy prototyping an alternative to our existing UI tool. Stay tuned, we’ll be looking for users to give us feedback on our beta tool!
Creating new resources for PUDL users: We’ll be hosting a webinar aimed at nonprofits and developing new data access tutorials to make accessing our data easier than ever before.
Supporting PUDL’s contributors: We’ll be developing new resources and coordination practices for external contributors, and creating a contributor onboarding workshop.
Addressing technical barriers to contribution: Whether refactoring memory-intensive tests, or improving our data validation framework using Pandera, Pydantic, and Dagster asset checks, we’re excited to implement some long-awaited improvements to support more distributed development.
Coming to a town near you!: We’ll be traveling to academic conferences, university brown-bags, FOSS meetups and more in order to present on the PUDL project and connect with other clean energy advocates.
Developing organizational models and governance practices to sustain our growing ecosystem: In conversation with our downstream users, we’ll be developing strategies to keep PUDL free, accessible and maintained in the long-term.

We’ll be sharing updates on POSE-funded projects on our socials, blog and newsletter over the coming months. If you want to learn more about any of these projects, get in touch via hello@catalyst.coop or drop by our office hours.