A collabathon is a new form of event based on a principle of radical collaboration and crowd-development. It is designed to leverage collective intelligence to accomplish multiple challenges of a shared goal together. The shared project where everyone contributes is open source and a platform tool that everyone is a stakeholder of. Instead of competing for a fixed period of time, a collabathon embraces collective ownership to keep participants engaged in their work. A collabathon campaign can span a broad period of time (eg. a year) but organized around 'sprints' which produce a pulse of contributions from the community over a week or a weekend. Collaboration rather than competition must be the source of collective strength and inspiration.


The Open Climate Collabathon is a form of collabathon dedicated to the open climate project. It is an open event mobilizing a global network of Universities, civic tech groups, startups and youth to crowd-develop an integrated climate accounting platform, designed to help the world track and achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement by leveraging state-of-the-art digital technologies.

Participants sign up to the open climate collabathon via nodes, mostly Universities and civic tech groups, and assemble into teams to tackle a specific prompt. Prompts are strategic projects and challenges organized around the 5 domains of the open climate project. Prompt hosts (subject matter experts) design the challenges alongside the open climate core team so that they are all represent distinct parts of the same project puzzle.


The Open Climate Collabathon was initially developed and incubated at the Yale Open Innovation Lab in order to collectively advance the open climate project. It was launched in 2019 as a proof-of-concept in the lead up to the UNFCCC COP25 climate summit.

In 2020, the Collabathon was launched as a non-profit initiative hosted by the Open Collective Foundation, organized by a collective of organizations (i.e. the co-organizing team) and governed by principles of do-ocracy. The co-organizing team is expected to commit efforts throughout a year long campaign, upon which the group is open for new organizers and team reconfigurations.