Welcome to the U4RIA forum

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Welcome

A forum for those interested in promoting the role of systems modeling for public policy support. The initial focus is energy systems but water and land use management are natural extensions.

U4RIA explained

In relation to energy modeling for policy support (EMoPS), U4RIA introduces guidelines to promote the following:

  • Ubuntu (community): requires identifying those to whom EMoPS should be accountable and to what degree. This will include: their role in the organizational workflow, determining the EMoPS output of relevance, and its translation and interface requirements in relation to EMoPS digital workflows.

  • Retrievability: functional retrievability is necessary. Noting that even published data are often neither easily findable nor accessible.

  • Reusability: we note that though elements of EMoPS might be reusable, common licensing constraints make this difficult.

  • Repeatability: though elements of EMoPS might be retrievable, lack of an explicit and user‑friendly digital workflow, make repeatability functionally difficult.

  • Reconstructability: extends ‘repeatability’ to include the instructions for how to rebuild the EMoPS elements, such as input data, model relations and resulting scenarios. This is done with appropriate ‘digital’ metadata, as well as appropriately documented digital and organizational workflows. Organizational workflows are required to reconstruct stakeholder input (noting that this may result in difference with different circumstance)

  • Interoperability: allows for scenario outputs to be (1) tested by other models or approaches and (2) their compatibility to sub‐sector or broader integration with other modeling for policy support. An example of sub‑sector integration includes technical operations required to integrate high levels of renewable energy technologies (RET) into a power system. An example of broader integration would include assessing potential tax revenue changes associated with (subsidized) electric vehicles (EVs) replacing (more heavily taxed) fossil‐fueled cars.

  • Auditability: is essential as EMoPS is part of the policy process it needs to be held accountable to good governance principles. Those include direct accountability to the internal or external funder of EMoPS, as well as to society more broadly.

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Editing on this platform

This posting makes some comments about editing on this platform.

Markdown

The platform runs the discourse software which uses a flavor of markdown to allow simple typesetting — that flavor is called CommonMark. Things to note:

  • some help on the CommonMark syntax
  • single and double linebreaks are significant: to flow your text in a paragraph, make sure no linebreaks are present
  • wikiposts are postings that can be edited by any registered user
  • if you edit a wikipost, please leave a commit message if appropriate

Advanced topics

Here are some advanced markup options:

  • to add a contents listing to the top posting, utilize the following (requires the DiscoTOC component):
<div data-theme-toc="true"> </div>

<h2 id="heading--advanced-topics">Advanced topics</h2>
  • to add a status line (officially an insert), add the following, with the rendered example below:
<ins>**Status**: state</ins>

   Status: state

Referring to other users

If you wish to refer to another registered user, could you please use their  @username  handle — which offers the following advantages:

  • the user will be notified by email by default (although this behavior can be overridden)
  • other users can click on the handle to reveal some background
  • if the user asks to be erased, then discourse can automatically replace all mentions with a random string

Editing grace period

During the first 5 minutes after posting, editing will not create a new version in the post history. This is the default value and will probably apply on other discourse platforms too.

Emojis

Custom emojis include :open_access: :open_access: and :closed_access: :closed_access:. Also sometimes useful is :arrow_heading_down: :arrow_heading_down:.

Experimentation

You can experiment using a sandboxed version of discourse offered by the development team and reset each day. You will need to sign up first using a valid email address. This discourse instance has no extra components installed (like discoTOC) and lacks the customizations found on this site. Your edits are also public for a while.

Language

Suit yourself whether you edit in British english, American english, or some other language. If you edit in a non‑english language, could you add the appropriate tag to the topic.