Sustainability Indicator Builder

Background

leonardo. is a B2B SaaS solution that helps organisations measure sustainability impact. For example, evaluating the effects of a renewable energy project on the climate, or the effects of an agriculture investment fund on the people in those project locations.

Every organisation, business, fund, non-profit needs to report on ROI. But for impact-driven organisations, this return is not in terms of profit, but rather impact. How has the investment been used to positively affect the people in a project location or the planet?

Measuring these impact indicators the correct way is complex and expensive and requires resources that many organisations simply don’t have. So many organisations simply do their best to estimate impact based on data available online, or anecdotal evidence. This is inaccurate at best and greenwashing at worst.

leonardo acts as your team of consultants and analysts. It will help you (1) to craft your theory of change, (2) to understand what indicators are applicable to your organization, and (3) to give you access to an impact dashboard that will help you monitor and report your impact over time. 

If we can achieve this, we would be helping organisations slash reporting budgets (potentially saving millions of dollars), increase the level of trust of current and potential investors, make data-driven decisions to maximise impact, comply with regulations, give beneficiaries the respect they deserve by collecting primary data, and the list goes on.

Hackathon problem statement

leonardo aims to provide organisations with a suite of tools that'll give them everything they need to measure, verify, analyse and report their impact.

The current problem that we're working on is the Indicator Builder. Our researchers do an amazing job of ensuring we have globally recognised indicators in the system. However, getting these indicators from our documentation to live on production is proving to be very time consuming. 

We want to build an in-house tool that will enable researchers to be able to build the indicators themselves in a no-code environment, test the results, and push it to staging or production when it's ready for use.

The Indicator Builder needs to:

• Be used by non-technical people. Think similar to a website builder with drag and drop features to define the indicator calculation algorithm.
• Produce results of the indicators in real time in the form of a chart visualisation so they can be tested
  • We recommend using the echarts.apache.org library
• Be able to read values from files
• Have building blocks that can be re-used again for future indicators. Some examples would be:
  • Sum of people in household ()
  • Currency Conversion ()
  • Sum of people with access to clean drinking water ()
  • Sum of people with access to tier 1 to 5 electricity ()
  • Etc
• Bonus to be able to filter or compare results by location, gender, or age

Note: The deliverable is a proof of concept that will be further developed and used by leonardo. As such, the code is expected to be written and pushed to a leonardo repo. If you're only interested in working on open-sourced projects, this is not the project for you.

People we're looking for

• Typescript and React experts
• Data Science and Data Analyst experts
• Sustainability Researcher experts
• But even if you're none of the above, please come by and say, "Hi". I'd love to meet you and just chat :), or maybe you have skills that I didn't even know we needed!

What you'll be provided with

• A set of real global standardised indicators that our clients use
• Access to a leonardo Github repository
• Asana board for task management
• Slack channel
• The chance to see this through to the end. Pushing it to production and working with us to deliver over 60+ indicators for our current clients to see on their dashboards on a part time or full time basis.
• A guaranteed interview for our 3 open positions: Sustainability Researcher, Lead Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer

Deliverable

• A proof of concept where a non-technical Sustainability Researcher can create, visualise and test indicators from a set of building blocks