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.