Fellow Spotlight: Eirini Malliaraki

Our Fellow Spotlight series focuses on showcasing the work of our Fellows. This time, I sat down with Eirini Malliaraki, who is finalising her Fellowship project which looks at ecosystem mapping of open digital infrastructure for climate action.

Eirini is a design engineer and entrepreneur. Previously, she worked on digitalisation, sustainability and AI at Nesta and the Alan Turing Institute. She is also the founder of an education tech startup Filisia, and has worked as a researcher at the Morphological Computation Lab at Imperial College and Microsoft Research UK. 

Join us as we discuss the Fellowship experience, the importance of openness in climate action, and Erini’s experience working at the intersection of climate and data.

Introducing Eirini

Maisie: Hi Eirini, thanks for joining me for this Subak Fellow Spotlight! Could you start by explaining your background, and the journey that brought you to the Subak Fellowship? 

Eirini: I'm a design engineer and former entrepreneur. I would say my practice as a designer falls in the ecological interaction design between human nature and technology. So over the years, I've worked in different organisations around sustainability and digitalization. Currently, I'm Head of the Founder Community at Deep Science Ventures, which is a Venture Building Studio. We work quite a lot on carbon capture, green hydrogen, carbon neutral fuels, and different areas of net zero. 

Before that, I was working for two and a half years at the Alan Turing Institute, which is the UK National Centre of AI and Data Science, where I helped build a programme on AI for Climate Action. So working across multiple levers, from data policy, to setting up new academic projects on how we can better monitor the environment. That's where I think my interest in the space really picked up. Before that, again, I was working in AI and/or sustainability. For example, I did a stint at Microsoft Research, looking at human AI interaction in particular. Before that, at Imperial College, I was working on sustainability applications like developing sensing devices for rainforest communities in Chile and in Brazil, to help them adapt to mass extinction, creating workshops to teach students about river ecology, or circular economy plans to benefit agriculture. 

Two pieces of work sparked my Fellowship idea. A few months before I applied, I was commissioned by the National Lottery Community Fund to look at digital infrastructure for climate action, to understand what are the digital needs of communities on the ground. They were looking at the systemic role of digital infrastructure as the tools open data can play at a hyperlocal level to help communities adapt and mitigate climate change. By that point, at the Alan Turing Institute, I had been involved in scoping our collaboration with Pangeo and Microsoft AI for Earth.

Pangeo is a framework for big data geoscience on the Cloud and high-performance computing that uses open-source components from the Python ecosystem. I saw Pangeo as a horizontal enabler for our climate action work. This project opened my eyes to the infrastructural challenges of data scientific work that hinders environmental researchers (in particular), as well as the intricacies of community-led software projects. It made clear the need to support communities that build the backbone of research software and develop end-to-end data pipelines with much-needed data cataloguing, discovery and provenance features.

So, that's where I started thinking, what does that ecosystem of open digital infrastructure for climate action look like? How do we understand which parts of that infrastructure are more critical? Suppose you think of that ecosystem as a literal ecosystem. In that case, you can think of keystone species, and you can think of some packages or programmes or applications on GitHub or GitLab, where other platforms are more connected than others, right? Then the question was, okay, what are the challenges that those developers and users face? How can we create product design with more interconnectivity? How can we find more digital goodness out there in the world? So this is how the project was born.

Fellowship Findings

Maisie: Could you explain a bit more about your project and your preliminary findings?

Eirini: My project aims to pinpoint areas in the open-source climate technology ecosystem that we think are under-explored or neglected and where more funding could support novel projects. For example, we've seen some commonalities in people's challenges around governance, projects, and cross-sector collaboration. That potentially points to the need for programmatic support, either through funders or an institution, to forge those collaborations. Say, you have this methane capture assessment tool somewhere in the agriculture tech community - and then we have the carbon and the emissions life cycle assessment community using different tools. The problem is they don't communicate at all. There are so many opportunities. Because climate change is systemic, the digital infrastructure that powers any good analytical work also needs to have more collaboration embedded in it. 

We're still in the process of collecting those insights. But initially, we're seeing that areas such as wind and solar have a lot of open-source data; lots of open analytical work like software packages and analytical packages. On the other hand, an area such as sustainable finance, for example, is notoriously opaque. There are different reasons for that. They're not incentivised as a field. Openness is a key indicator for sustainable development because anyone pursuing truly sustainable intentions is interested in refining those through the open, sharing data and making code public in a way that is reproducible and accessible and can be curated and questioned. But I think specifically for green finance there is a lot of greenwashing; there is obfuscation and obscuring of results. 

For example, in terms of other sectors that are seemingly less open, we see a lot less work on carbon removal, which is interesting, as the latest advanced market commitment here is a $900 million commitment by Stripe and Meta. Now, I think we'll see a lot more open source work there, given that there are incentives and funding and more people in the space. So we are trying to understand what the value of openness in sustainability is.

Why? There are many reasons why we want open source to fuel the net-zero transition. One, for example, is trust. We are deploying new technologies at scales never imagined before, because the scale of transformation is massive. So we need to be able to keep both governments and industry accountable. For example, applications to climate pledges or deployments of different technologies - the more open those systems are, the more we can interrogate and make sure that the public has trust in the deployment of those systems. 

Another crucial reason for openness is that the global North is developing all these systems across sectors in energy, transportation, mobility, and environmental monitoring. We're expected to scale them out, not only scale them up in different contexts, but in different locations, especially in the Global South, which is urgently affected by climate change. So, by having open source open data and open digital infrastructure, we can allow for more localisation and customisation of individual and cultural needs of people using those systems around the world. This also feeds to the argument of climate justice - through openness, we can help reduce the power imbalances between countries using certain technologies. 

Moreover, to make this transition across different societal areas, we need to collaborate across sectors. This is really interesting because the value of data standards and commons allows cross-functional collaboration between different sectors and industries. I like this quote that "open source means a problem has to be solved once." We need to move at an unprecedented speed. If different organisations and institutions keep using siloed approaches, then we're not going to move at the required speed, and we're going to have duplication of efforts. 

So, I think these are some of the main arguments for having digital infrastructure on top of open data. There is a lot of conversation about open data, but we also need an ecosystem of open data systems, tools, practices, to come together. My Subak Fellowship project aims to create that evidence and better understand the ecosystem.

Maisie: I'm curious about the process behind this project - how do you go about doing your data collection? And how will you continue to do that? 

Eirini: We are using the GitHub API to curate and collect metadata - this is the quantitative part of the work. While this is not the only platform where open source code exists, most of the projects that we found and can analyse exist on GitHub. For this quantitative analysis, we're looking at contributions, topics and areas explored, the licences used, languages and programming languages, the organisations, and whether they're public, private, law, public or academic. This gives us a rough overview of the shape of the field.

For the second part of the work, we selected a mix of developers from projects across various fields, from measuring emissions, transportation, wind turbine modelling, deforestation, energy consumption, and more, to create a balance of themes. We have various questions for them, including: How do they go about receiving funding and sponsorship? How do they define sustainability for themselves? Where do they situate their project in the broader ecosystem? Which field would they like to see more collaboration? The final step will be to combine both the qualitative and quantitative analysis. It will be open-source, and we are publishing the code we're using to make this analysis.

The Fellowship experience

Maisie: What do you see as the key outputs and goals for your Fellowship project? 

Eirini: I think what is really important is to be able to create preliminary pointers for opportunities that funders can target. From my experience I think we need better evidence for how all these resources can be directed to projects that are uplifting a whole ecosystem by providing that analytical infrastructure for many projects. 

The second output is to provide more visibility about the field itself. It's very siloed. People don't have the chance to collaborate, or find one another, and find commonalities and shared challenges. So, we want to shed more light on the dynamics of that ecosystem so that more people can start coming together and creating more projects together.

Maisie: Could you speak to your key takeaways from your experience of the Fellowship with Subak? 

Eirini: It was very helpful working with the Subak team, in the beginning, to really flesh out the methodology, to situate the project and its ontology and how perhaps we may need an ontology of open-source software, not only open data, and how those two may come together. I think having conversations about how the pieces of the Fellowship project come together was very interesting and helpful for me to see a bigger picture that can fit into something bigger than just my work. 

Maisie: Finally, how can people stay up to date with what you're doing? Are there ways that people can get involved?

Eirini: If people reading this have been developing, supporting or using open-source software for sustainability, we want to speak to them. We're also looking for people to work with us on improving the opensustain.tech website and identify new and missing projects. Lastly, if you are a funder and want to support these developer communities via open infrastructure funds or other collaborative models please drop me a line to eirinimalliaraki@gmail.com. 

You can get in touch with Eirini on Twitter or LinkedIn.