On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, Hi Philip,
> Thanks for running for the board! > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? Great question! Keeping us on our toes... :) As others have suggested, I think our ecological impact as a Foundation is most acute in travel, then after a significant gap, energy usage of our services, then probably anything else. As Allan pointed out, we've been pushing for increasing travel to hackfests etc as after our staff, hosting and organising events is the most significant and impactful way we can add momentum to project initiatives, giving something of an "opposing force" to any initiative to reduce travel. We've also (with only modest success) been trying to rotate the location of some of the conferences so that we're able to provide more local face to face events, potentially alleviating some of the requirement to travel larger distances. In terms of where the Board "legislates" I see two main places which we've looked at over the past year and could make some changes to what is required - the travel sponsorship policy, and the templates (and requirements) for evaluating hackfests and conference bids. Both seem very feasible to improve the consideration of environmental factors. In the travel policy, we could go ways potentially place requirements there, such as taking ground transfer when it is safe to do so and does not increase the journey time / cost more than a certain percentage - and/or (IRS permitting) making ground travel more comfortable/pleasant (eg allowing a first class upgrade etc) so we have both carrot and stick. The travel committee might have some more insight here. In the event approval processes, simply updating the templates to add a requirement to assess and then ameliorate the environmental impact means we can engage the ingenuity of the volunteers who are helping us to set up these events. Monitoring something changes the behaviour. Best practices or requirements could emerge from this (ie, if we see good ideas, we could roll them out as something we ask/look for specifically). In terms of energy usage, Andrea & team are already using cloud technology (OpenShift) to make more effective/dynamic use of our donated computing resources, which is a good way to get more "bang for buck" versus having statically scheduled machines idling away. Generally dynamic scaling for CI and other "intensive" workloads is a best-practice we do and should continue to follow. We should never use any crypto currencies. I think providing some "gold standard" real-time audio/video infrastructure for the use of the project would be a superb investment in time/infrastructure to allow more effective collaboration outside of events. We certainly practice this in the Board and make extensive use of Bluejeans and Uberconference for effective voice and video collaboration. It would be great to have a self-hosted and FOSS system we can use and make available for the project. There is quite a lot of other "cute stuff" like avoiding single-use plastics at conferences, un-necessary swag, having non-meat-eating days during events that are catered to reduce the carbon impact of food preparation, etc, but I suspect that one person taking a single transatlantic flight would obliterate the cumulative benefit from all of that. I think these things can and should be done "at the leaves" as everything helps, but the policy changes outlined above would be more impactful in effecting that change in a more persistent manner. > Obviously, those who have already served on the board will have some > insight to share about what the board already does, and concrete ways > it could improve; hopefully this doesn’t disadvantage those who > haven’t > already served on the board. My decision to "sleep on this" has made my answer look significantly less original. C'est la vie - however I think it's clear that there is some good alignment between candidates and we should be able to make concrete moves on at least high-level policy changes so that some of these factors are considered in the board's day to day activities. > Ta, > Philip Thanks, Rob > _______________________________________________ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list > > _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list