Sarah Rennie
Huntingdon native Jonathan Brunette has been recognized in this year’s Call for Code Global Challenge: the largest tech-for-good initiative of its kind. The annual competition, which is supported by founding partner IBM and charitable partner United Nations Human Rights, invites developers and problem solvers to build solutions that take on some of society’s most daunting issues.
The theme for this year’s contest was originally to have focused on combating climate change, however the organizers pivoted in March to include projects designed to mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Five global finalists were recently announced, including Offship, a browser plugin that seeks to reduce the massive carbon footprint produced by online shopping by offsetting shipping emissions. Created by a team of developers from Canada, and led by Brunette, Offship was named the fourth runner-up during the virtual awards ceremony on Oct. 13.
The first-place winner, Agrolly, an application designed to help small farmers adapt to climate change, created by a team of international developers from Brazil, India, Mongolia and Taiwan, took home the grand prize of $200,000 USD, support from IBM, and ecosystem partners to incubate, test and deploy their solution. The Canadian team took home $10,000 in prize money.
For Jonathan Brunette, a vice-president and chapter lead, enterprise security platform, with investment bank and financial services company Morgan Stanley, the opportunity to have his team’s work recognized at the international level was an honour. “It was also a little anticlimactic,” he says with a laugh of the team’s fifth place finish, “but still a very big achievement.”
“It was a bit unbelievable that we had done so well in IBM’s eyes,” he admits, especially considering the brief timeframe in which they had to work to develop their idea.
For Brunette, the journey to the Call for Code finals all started at work, where one of the core values at Morgan Stanley allows employees to give back through volunteering. “This year being different, it was hard to give back in the usual ways,” he explains. He was approached by the team from New York and asked to lead an initiative that would see teams of developers participate in the Call for Code challenge. He created three teams, but as a developer himself, he thought he had an idea.
After quickly assembling a fourth team, he worked with its other members frantically throughout the summer to submit their solution by the end of July. At the beginning of September, they received an email confirming their selection as a regional North America finalist, and soon after they learned they were considered as one of the Top 5 teams. “I didn’t know how it would be received,” says Brunette, of the team’s solution aimed at raising awareness amongst online shoppers of the environmental impact of shipping their purchases.
A Chrome browser extension that uses IBM Cloud technology, Offship is a shopping companion of sorts that monitors items in shopping baskets and estimates the carbon footprint required to ship purchases based on weight and distance travelled. Shoppers are then offered a chance to counteract their emissions by purchasing carbon offset credits from a selection of environmental charities.
“I’ve always tried to be a bit more conscious of my impacts on the environment,” says Brunette, though he admits he would not qualify himself as an environmentalist. “The idea came and it kind of flowed naturally,” he says, suggesting that he had noticed a lot of people, including himself, were changing their buying habits because of the pandemic, and that these changes were likely having a devastating but hard to visualize impact on the environment.
In researching their solution, Brunette’s team discovered that 84 percent of Canadian internet users had purchased goods or services online. They also found projections that forecasted the e-commerce market could reach $6.07 trillion USD by 2024. Such unchecked growth in e-commerce would inevitably cause more strain on global transportation operations and stress on the environment.
The Offship solution was designed on a framework that is expandable and works with several online stores including Amazon and Apple. The team owns the intellectual property behind the idea, but it was created using open source applications so that it remains free and accessible.
Brunette describes the entire experience as overwhelming and humbling. “My first job was on a farm growing up in Huntingdon,” says the Chateauguay Valley Regional High School graduate. He went on to study software engineering at Concordia University, before eventually starting to work for Morgan Stanley in Montreal. Brunette had participated in the past in more regional competitions for developers, but this was his first experience at the international level.
“I thought it was a fun idea,” he says, adding that he never imagined where Offship would take him.