Register your interest now
EcoCounts
EcoCounts is a North London charity aiming to revolutionise the way we account for CO2 emissions. Our methodology involves participants meticulously recording their personal carbon footprint, derived from their daily purchases and activities. Our objective is to implement carbon budgets for participants, eventually progressing towards the implementation of personal carbon trading.
Description

Our vision is for a world in control of CO2 emissions - a fair social and economic approach that motivates and supports people and organisations to reduce their carbon footprints.

Our ultimate mission is to persuade people, business and government that together, we can take meaningful action using our Carbon Accounts framework. We believe this could inspire governments to introduce the same mechanism to reach science-based emission reduction targets on a national basis.

In Brief

Ultimately we want to build a personal carbon trading platform for our participants. But first we need to create a carbon accounts app, which lets users record their carbon footprint. This video on Youtube explains personal carbon trading.

https://youtu.be/5kQBvrpKHVc?si=zVuH4IV8OTxA1Fs-

For more info and how we want to get the world to do this, see this page on our website: https://ecocounts.community/carbon-allowances/

The first stage is to build a carbon accounts app so that participants can build up an accurate picture of the carbon emissions to start with. People have to build up trust in the system before they will start trading.

The carbon accounts app has two facets – user input where participants record what their emissions are, created by their actions and purchases, and then reporting, where participants can see how their emissions build up and compare, both with their prior footprint and with the footprints of others in the group or external benchmarks, e.g. A typical Londoner, a typical US citizens for instance.

Please remember, personal change is only one of the five ways that we can change society - we don't focus on personal change alone, we want to change our community, our local businesses and our local government.

You should check out our manifesto to make sure you agree with the ways we advocate for the way forward in the climate crisis – are you happy what we suggest is one of the best approaches? https://ecocore.org/ecocore-manifesto_compressed/

Duties
  1. Create a database with input and maintenance screens for the emissions factors (the activity or item specific data that people base their carbon footprints on) (web-based is fine if quicker)
  2. Create the basic MVP or prototype that fetches an emissions data item and logs an amount to a user carbon account
  3. Create some wireframes or even just images of the screens required for the first deployable MVP

What are we looking for?

We are looking for someone with skills, experience and passion in these areas:

  1. Scrum or other iterative approach as part of team
  2. Planning – using miro.com or UX PIlot or Figma or whatever
  3. Development
  4. Testing
  5. Deployment
  6. Maintenance
  7. Projections of download rates, bandwidth and data storage requirements
Who will the volunteers be working with?
EcoCounts director Adam Hardy has a long working career in IT and software development before he became a climate activist. We aim to set up a team of around 3 coders, although this will be run on a developer-led basis so you will have input here.
Training
Any training required will necessarily be developer-led.

Time commitment

This would require a reasonable time commitment on a weekly basis - please get in touch for more details.
Application deadline

This organisation is one of our community partner organisations.

Like all volunteer recruiters we work with, they have signed up to our service standards, agreeing to abide by our policy on partnership working to keep you safe and supported whilst you volunteer.

You’ll never be out of pocket for volunteering through us – with in-London travel expenses to and from your volunteering guaranteed.

In addition, the team here at Students’ Union UCL Volunteering Service is here to support you throughout your volunteering journey – you can get in touch with us at any time.