Posted today · be early
Independent Consultancy - Technical Planning and Coordination
Global Energy Monitor
WorldwideremotePosted 1 day ago
Skill Required
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Key highlights
- Budget: Approximately US$135,000
- Experience: Minimum 8 years in data architecture/management
- Duration: 12-month consultancy
- Effort: Approx. 20 hours per week
- Location: Europe preferred
- Key Requirement: Experience managing technical projects across multiple organizations
Role overview
The Open Energy Research and Analytics Consortium (ORA)—a partnership between CREA, Ember, GEM, OET, and TransitionZero—is seeking an independent consultant to serve as Technical Coordinator. The role involves facilitating and project managing a 12-month foundational planning phase to create a technical and governance blueprint for a shared open energy data platform and orchestration system. The Technical Coordinator will conduct research, interviews, and analysis to integrate member datasets, open models, and analyses into a cohesive system. The ultimate goal is to produce a consortium plan and an implementation-ready roadmap for the next phase of the platform and the flagship Open Energy Outlook product.
Responsibilities
- Facilitate the planning process with all five ORA members, preparing agendas and materials, guiding discussions, building consensus among members with different practices and priorities, and documenting decisions and next steps.
- Interview the data leads at each member organization to assess data assets, systems, workflows, and priority user needs.
- Facilitate a shared definition of the platform’s priority users (for example, energy modelers, policy analysts, journalists, civil-society researchers, planners in developing geographies, and AI systems) and the access patterns, tools, and guarantees each needs.
- Lead members through review of, and decisions on, the proposed shared protocols, architecture options, and data hub scope, ensuring all members have meaningful input.
- Develop and manage an integrated workplan for the foundational phase, with milestones, dependencies, and responsibilities across the five member organizations.
- Track progress, risks, decisions, and action items.
- Coordinate with the ORA Secretariat on communication with members and ORA leads.
- Coordinate with GEM on the data hub proof of concept; define its requirements with the members.
- Develop a centralized map of the datasets, scrapers, and in-house data held across the five members, and identify gaps and opportunities for greater interoperability.
- Develop proposed common schemas, identifiers, and metadata documentation, including a framework for a jointly governed identifier crosswalk linking each organization’s records.
- Guide the members to develop shared approaches to automated validation and open, machine-readable documentation.
- Analyze and recommend a design for the data platform (whether hosted, federated, or hybrid, and potentially varying by data product), ensuring datasets are clearly versioned and provenance is traced to primary sources.
- Work with GEM’s Chief Data Officer to contribute to a strategy for presenting the consortium’s trusted datasets to AI systems as a preferred source for energy and climate queries, and a structured learning exchange on AI-assisted research methods.
- Scope and define requirements for a limited proof of concept showing how a centralized hub/platform could serve particular user groups, and assess the prototype.
- Co-author the consortium plan with the five members and prepare an implementation-ready technical and governance roadmap for the next phase.
- Produce the following deliverables: Inception report and integrated work plan; Assessment report on members’ data assets, systems, and priority user needs; Cross-member data map and gap analysis; Agreed priority audiences and use cases; Draft shared approaches to metadata, identifiers, validation, and data documentation; Options paper on platform architecture; Architecture recommendation and draft shared data protocols; Requirements and scope for the data hub proof of concept; Final consortium plan, including the roadmap for the next phase; Meeting agendas and notes, and monthly progress reports.
Requirements
- A minimum of 8 years of working experience in data architecture, data management, or data product development, preferably in climate and energy data.
- Demonstrated experience facilitating and managing technical projects or working groups across multiple organizations in English.
Nice to have
- Strong facilitation skills and experience building consensus among organizations with different practices and priorities.
- Demonstrated experience designing or implementing data integration and interoperability, such as common schemas, identifiers or entity resolution, metadata standards, and data documentation.
- Knowledge of the open energy data ecosystem, including open datasets, open-source energy modeling tools, and reproducible data pipelines.
- Experience with platform architecture choices (hosted, federated, and hybrid), versioned data releases, and APIs.
- Understanding of how AI systems consume data, including machine-readable metadata, APIs, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
- Experience working with open-source, open-data, digital public goods, research, or mission-driven organizations, including governance, licensing, and data stewardship.
- Based in Europe, to support time zone overlap with consortium members.
Additional details
- The consultancy is expected to begin in mid-December and will run for 12 months from the agreed start date.
- The estimated level of effort is equivalent to approximately 20 hours per week over the assignment (planning estimate rather than a fixed weekly schedule).
- The proposed budget allocation for this consultancy is approximately US$135,000.
- Services will be provided on a time and materials basis at an hourly or daily rate agreed before execution.
- The consultant will submit monthly invoices showing time worked and services provided, along with a brief progress report against the workplan.
- The Consultant manages their own schedule and working arrangements and is responsible for their own taxes, insurance, equipment, and benefits.
- GEM, as the current host of the ORA Consortium, will be the contracting party and administer the consultancy.
- GEM’s Chief Data Officer is the primary technical and contract contact.
- Eligibility for an independent consultancy will be assessed in the country where the services will be performed before a contract is offered.
- Application submission requirements: CV/Resume, Cover letter (addressing experience, availability/start date, and location/time zone), one or two examples of relevant work, and proposed hourly or daily rate in US dollars.
- Application deadline: November 11, 2026.
