(Grist) In February, the White House published a beta version of its new environmental justice screening tool, a pivotal step toward achieving the administration’s climate and equity goals. The interactive map analyzes every census tract in the U.S. using socioeconomic and environmental data, and designates some of those tracts as “disadvantaged” based on a complicated formula.
Once finalized, this map and formula will be used by government agencies to ensure that at least 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain federal climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, clean water, and other programs are directed to disadvantaged communities — an initiative known as Justice40.
But this new screening tool is not only essential to environmental justice goals. It’s also a pioneering experiment in open governance. Since last May, the software development for the tool has been open source, meaning it was in the public domain — even while it was a work in progress. Anyone could find it on GitHub, an online code management platform for developers, and then download it and explore exactly how it worked.
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