Reduce the Foundation's environmental impact
During the 2019 board of director's elections, there was an excellent discussion about the Foundation's environmental impact, and how we can reduce it. I think that all the election candidates pledged to take this issue forward.
Ideas that were generated in that discussion:
- Carbon offset Foundation travel
- Require that Foundation members evaluate environmental impact in decision making (eg. buying swag)
- Work to improve GNOME's usability on older hardware
- Create "the world's best video conferencing collaboration stack"
- Focus travel on new/younger developers as a way to integrate them, rather than more established community members. The latter should focus on motivating local talent.
- Make our code more efficient on smaller machines
- Carry out a Foundation-wide environmental assessment
- Use environmentally responsible suppliers for swag and event materials
- Discourage the use of plastic at conferences
- Discourage unnecessary travel
- Encourage people to bring their own water bottles to events
- Encourage the use of virtual events
- Reduce our reliance on hard paper copies
- Encourage people to use ground-based travel, and cover the extra cost
- Encourage the use of public transport at our events, such as having a requirement that public transport directions always be provided
- Change the GNOME culture to be more of a mix of personal/face-to-face interaction on the one hand, and electronic/asynchronous interaction on the other (rather than flipping between extremes)
- Increase remote participation in hackfests
- Experiment will all-remote hackfests
- Endorse environmentally-friendly sponsors and companies
- Create a focus group to look at environmental issues in the project
- Require hackfest organisers to consider the carbon footprint of their event, when they pick a location
- Encourage regional events (like our North American events and GNOME.Asia) to be more self-sustaining and reduce intercontential travel for speakers
- Increase the number of local keynote speakers at our conferences
- Organise remote "sprints" instead of hackfests
- Split hackfests into multiple locations and link them via video conferencing
- Provide a reliable video conferencing solution for all Foundation members
- Requirement for event organisers to consider the environmental impact of their events
- Establish the use of dynamic-scaling infrastructure as a best-practice
Edited by Allan Day