CHAOSS United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) Working Group

Scope

UN-SDG working group (wg-un-sdg) aims to empower open source communities with metrics to align their contributions with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and enhance the role of open source in achieving global sustainability.

Goals

1. Develop a framework of metrics that allow open source communities to assess their contribution to specific SDGs
2. Increase understanding within open source communities about how their work influences social and\ environmental outcomes.
3. Build partnerships between open source communities and organizations or initiatives focused on achieving the SDGs.
4. Promote Best Practices: Establish and share best practices for sustainable development within the open source ecosystem that encourages projects to adopt and align their goals with the SDGs.
5. Track and Showcase Impact: Develop mechanisms to track and publicly showcase the impact of open source projects on the SDGs to encourage greater transparency and accountability.
6. Facilitate Cross-Project Collaboration: Enable collaboration between different open source projects to address complex SDG challenges by combining expertise and resources.
7. Advocate for Open Source in Policy: Advocate for the recognition and adoption of open source solutions within international, national, and local policy frameworks related to the SDGs. This helps OSS communities have a voice in sustainability discussions at all levels.

Actions

1. Define a standard that OSS projects can follow to identify which SDGs they are attempting to impact.
2. Design a process to enable maintainers/contributors to include and update SDG reporting in an OSS project.
3. Identify existing CHAOSS Metrics that are related to the SDGs
4. Get ideas from the group on new metrics we want to create (we can also use surveys to get this done)
5. Create an SDG toolkit that helps projects understand and align their contributions with SDGs. This could include guidelines, best practices, or examples of how to integrate SDG goals into their workflows.
6. Create Partnership Programs: SDGs are broad, so we can build connections with the various stakeholders to collaborate on sustainability initiatives using OSS technology.
7. Advocate for Open Source in SDGs: Engage SDG-focused organizations to promote the role of open source in achieving their goals.
8. Work with UN evaluation team to align our work with their current process

Outcomes

• An SDG contribution Framework: A document or a system to help projects understand and measure how they are contributing to the SDGs
• SDG Impact Database: A centralized database of open source projects and their contributions to the SDGs
• Define standards for identifying if/how an open source project may address SDGs. An SDG readme file or template that can be included in open source repositories to help users/APIs discover and track the impact of open source projects on SDG targets.

Principles

• No mandates - all voluntary - do not burden maintainers
• Distributed to the extent possible - minimize central databases or single sources of information that must be maintained.

Participate

The UN-SDG working group meets every other Wednesday at 10:00am US Central / 3:00pm UTC / 5:00 pm Central Europe Time via Zoom

Agenda and Meeting Minutes

meeting link

Background

The second annual UN OSPOs for Good conference was held in July of 2024. There was a belief stated in that group of approximately 700 open source advocates that Open Source Software (OSS) and open source comunities are a great place to address the UN SDGs. A challenge was made at the end of the conference to identify the impact OSS is having on the UN SDGs. This working group is a direct response to that challenge and we hope to define standards and develop capabilites to enable OSS projects to capture when/if their projects are addressing the UN SDGs.

Contributing

This project is open to anyone interested in helping to define how to measure if Open Source Software (OSS) projects are addressing the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). We encourage all types of contributors, not just coders. Here are a few good steps as good starting points in connecting with the UN SDG WG: - Join us on our weekly video conferences. - Review the issue list and address some of the issues. - Our scope/goals/actions/principles are still evolving. Pleae feel free to weigh in and help us succeed.

Contributors

Maintainers - Dawn Foster - David Lippert - Ruth Ikegah

Contibutors

The criteria for becoming a core contributor is to participate at least once per month over a period of 3 months. Participation could include providing feedback in the weekly UN SDG meetings, providing feedback on docs, or making other contributions on GitHub (commits / issues). People not participating over a 3 month period may be removed as core contributors.

If you'd like to be on our squad, an easy way to start is by going through the issue list and fixing some. 🎉

License

The documents in this repositories are released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Copyright Contributors to the CHAOSS Project