Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi everyone, I've created an issue for this topic, so we don't forget about it: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Board/issues/102 Allan On Fri, 14 Jun 2019 at 00:04, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: > > On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > > > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as > > a whole? > > All the previous replies have good ideas. We should definitely enable > remote hackfests. Is this "just" about gnome.org hosting a WebRTC > service which we can already use through practically any web browser? > I don't know! > > In terms of engagement, we need conferences on the scale of GUADEC or > Gnome Asia, but in the Americas, and outside the United States, where > travel+visas are problematic. But in terms of environmental impact, I > am not sure whether this would enable fewer people to fly across the > ocean for their yearly "big GNOME conference", or if it would encourage > *more* people to fly cross-continent to the new conference. > > I wonder if it is possible to get reports on power consumption from > things like our CI runners. Maybe even power profiles for individual > runs? Or does the way things run in datacenters, where *our* CI runs > are not the only thing running on a server, make this not entirely > trivial to do? > > Federico > > ___ > 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
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as > a whole? All the previous replies have good ideas. We should definitely enable remote hackfests. Is this "just" about gnome.org hosting a WebRTC service which we can already use through practically any web browser? I don't know! In terms of engagement, we need conferences on the scale of GUADEC or Gnome Asia, but in the Americas, and outside the United States, where travel+visas are problematic. But in terms of environmental impact, I am not sure whether this would enable fewer people to fly across the ocean for their yearly "big GNOME conference", or if it would encourage *more* people to fly cross-continent to the new conference. I wonder if it is possible to get reports on power consumption from things like our CI runners. Maybe even power profiles for individual runs? Or does the way things run in datacenters, where *our* CI runs are not the only thing running on a server, make this not entirely trivial to do? Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip, Thanks for your question. The other candidates responded with lot of good ideas, I just want to say that they all look quite good to me and that If implementing some of those is helpful for the environment and increases mindshare about environment impact, that sounds like a win-win for all of us. So I won't add more on that side, the others already answered excellently. Let me try however to give another point of vision, as is not about what we can do to reduce our environmental impact, but rather what can we do to reduce it overall. As an organization, I think GNOME is already on the lowest environmental impact range already, we don't travel every day to an office in contrast with other organizations/companies as Jeremy very well pointed out. While we can lead by example, and we should, we have a greater power. That's our political reach. On the past I have been in doubt whether GNOME as an organization should take sides on certain possible political matters. This one however could be a good case. I believe we have the capacity to do a great social impact here by doing public statements, coordinating those with other FOSS organizations or contacting with companies that might be interested in this topic. From my studies in environmental science (I did one year at university, before switching to CS) what I learnt that we need most to reduce environmental impact is mindshare, social pressure and political impact, and that's what we excel at doing. I'm not sure how much is in our scope to do, but if we believe this is important for the community and helps with our mission I think it worth to try. Thanks, Carlos Soriano On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 19:11, Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > 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? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > 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. > > Ta, > Philip > ___ > 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
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
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
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip! Philip Withnall wrote: ... > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? I composed this in my head before seeing the other responses to your mail, so you'll have to forgive me if I repeat any of the points that have already been made First, thank you for raising this issue - we haven't seriously looked at the Foundation's environmental impact, and given the climate crisis we ought to look at this. Maybe the Foundation could even take a lead on this issue, which other free/open source projects could follow. I suspect that the biggest environmental impact that the Foundation has is through travel. The one concrete idea I've had for this in the past would be to amend the travel policy, to allow people to take ground transportation rather than flying, even if it comes at additional cost (within certain limits, of course). This would have to be discussed with the Travel Committee but it seems like a fairly straightforward, practical step. Outside of this, it gets a bit trickier. One of the Foundation's goals has actually been to facilitate *more* travel: we want more hackfests, greater attendance at our conferences, and so on. The other factor that makes it tricky is that the Foundation can only influence behaviour to a certain degree: we can encourage the community to hold certain types of events, and we can decide whether to support plans that are brought to us or not, but we can't independently decide which events will be held or where they will be held. That said, I think we should investigate all the options for both our travel policy and our events strategy. This might include some of the following: - Have hackfest organisers consider the carbon footprint of their event, particularly when it comes to picking a location - Encourage regional (ie. continental) events rather than global ones, and take steps to reduce the amount of intercontinental travel to these events - this might mean things like flying fewer people from Europe to GNOME.Asia and to our North American events (self-sustaining regional events are something that the Foundation should push to support anyway, I think) - Work to increase the number of local keynote speakers at our conferences, rather than those from other continents - Come up with innovative ways to avoid or limit travel. Ideas for this: - Remote "sprints" could replace hackfests in some cases. - Have linked events happen simultaneously in multiple-locations; for example, you could have a hackfest happen in one location in Europe and another in South America, and link them using video conferencing, or organise the work into location-specific streams. - Work to provide a reliable video conferencing solution for all Foundation members This is just a preliminary list of ideas and I think that we should ask the community to provide their own suggestions. The board should then consider the ideas we have, and ensure that any agreed changes are implemented. This is something that I'd be enthusiastic about and would certainly support, if I were re-elected. Thanks again, Allan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
El mar, 4 de jun 2019 a las 8:12 AM, Philip Chimento via foundation-list escribió: I think it would be interesting to experiment with all-remote hackfests, where we try to build an experience in between the normal "type text, hit submit, wait for text in return" interaction, and the resource- and time-intensive hackfest/conference experience. Not to replace either of them, but to supplement them. The board can't dictate that community members do this, but I would be interested in seeing how we could facilitate it. I think this is a great proposal. I've the same feeling, I want to participate more in some gnome hackfests but I don't have the time or energy to be travelling around the world, so this kind of remote hackfests sounds really interesting. There are tools that can help a lot with this, I think that we don't need *video*, something like mumble [1] will works for that kind of hackfests, with a room, or multiple rooms, and people working together and talking to each other. I hope this kind of hackfests will become a reality so we can collaborate from all around the world with people in real time and maybe we are able to find a mixed solution to have people in place and remote. Thanks a lot [1] https://www.flathub.org/apps/details/info.mumble.Mumble ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip, On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > 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? > Thanks for raising this interesting and unexpected question. I do think that the limited resources we have at our disposal, such as compute resources for our infrastructure and CI and travel to conferences and hackfests are quite crucial to our mission, and it is probably in our interest as an organization to increase rather than decrease. However, we could see more efforts in being conscientious about how we use the resources we do use, and in our choices in terms of travel options and compute resources. Unfortunately having a limited budget implies reduced freedom of choice, it might make more environmental sense for attendees to a conference who live on the same continent to travel by train, but if that is more expensive, this would mean that we sponsor less contributors overall. Asides from how we use our own resources, we may be able to make some impact as a publicly visible organization with sponsors. For instance, if there were some way for us to commend or endorse some of our more environmentally friendly sponsors via the friends of GNOME programme (or similar), it may at least contribute to a trend of incentivizing companies to be more environmentally friendly, at the same time as being good publicity for sponsors who may choose to participate in such a "clean computing" campaign for instance. Of course a campaign like this would require a lot more thinking and work than my brief brainstorm reply here, just trying to throw something creative out there to chew on. Perhaps this could be material for a focus group to consider too, I'm sure that if some volunteers were to create such a group to focus on this, the GNOME board will be happy to discuss and support initiatives they come up with for environmental friendliness. Cheers, -Tristan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip, On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 10:11 AM Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > 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? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > 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. > I tend to think it's more likely to disadvantage those who answer later, since the candidates who responded already have mentioned a number of ideas that I wish I had thought of first. So I had better get my response in now :-P I am trying to think what I can contribute to this discussion that others haven't already, and what I've come up with that I'm personally interested in, is figuring out how it might be possible to change the GNOME culture to make it easier to participate in hackfests remotely. I have tried remote participation with a few GNOME hackfests and it's difficult. That may sound odd coming from me since I have worked 100% remote for the last 6 years but I do have to say it's a lot harder to do it in GNOME than in a work environment. We tend to go either fully text-based/asynchronous, or fully face-to-face. Either we send our merge requests and our blog posts, and most of the time we don't pay too much attention to the human side, or we go to the other extreme and travel to a hackfest or conference where we spend 16 hours a day hacking, presenting, and celebrating in each others' company for a short, intense time. There is no in between. In fact I believe this is problematic for other reasons than the environment, as I've seen a number of instances of flame-first-ask-questions-later on GNOME mailing lists in the past year, that I hope would not have escalated so badly if people were actually talking out loud with their voices to another person's face on their screen. I see a few reasons for these extremes, first of all it's difficult to get human connection outside of the face-to-face events. People don't have time (e.g. I personally am okay to write this email to foundation-list at 11 PM whereas I would not get on a video call at that time). Also people have varying levels of comfort with video calls which we need to respect. Second, we don't really have much precedent for remote participants in hackfests. On the occasions when I've tried it, I've been the only one. Third, the free software tools for video calling and remote collaboration are quite far behind the proprietary tools. Furthermore I'm not sure that fixing this is where the expertise of the GNOME community lies. I think it would be interesting to experiment with all-remote hackfests, where we try to build an experience in between the normal "type text, hit submit, wait for text in return" interaction, and the resource- and time-intensive hackfest/conference experience. Not to replace either of them, but to supplement them. The board can't dictate that community members do this, but I would be interested in seeing how we could facilitate it. Regards, -- Other Philip ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip, First of all, thanks for awareness on this issue. As the board, I think we can make 2 areas of impact here: to add (hard/soft) requirements to the travel policy and to give guidelines for events. Whether the decisions we make should be considered as rules/guidelines or hints will of course depend on how strictly we enforce them. Hence, these shouldn't be too restrictive (or no-one will follow them) nor without exceptions (because every situation is different in its own right). The first and most obvious aspect is to give extra requirements/guidelines for the travel policy. One example is to ask people to take public transport (train/bus/...) if the event is within a fixed distance -decided by the board- of their home. As sponsors, we should consider the possible extra cost of the train over other modes of transportation. Valid motivations for the contrary exist (little to no public transport available; big increases in travel time or expenses; ...), but should become more of an exception than the rule. For organisers of sponsored events, we can publish some useful guidelines, such as always having to post online on how to get there using public transport. Exceptions can exist here also, but we should consider if we really want to go somewhere that requires everyone to take a car. For attendees of events/hackfests, we can make a small set of "reminders" that can be used as a basis on events. As an example, we can ask attendees to bring their own refillable cups/bottles (which is useful when the venue provides a way of washing them). It might even be nice to sell some GNOME-themed cups/bottles, which gives us a small stream of revenue and gives people a cool accessoire. Kind regards, Niels On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 7:11 PM Philip Withnall wrote: > > Hi all, > > 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? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > 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. > > Ta, > Philip > ___ > 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
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip and thank you for the question, I currently have little insight into how environmental impact factors into the cost-benefit analyses that the Foundation carries out in relation to meetings, events and general expenditure so my answer will be fairly broad and a bit open-ended perhaps. Open-ended in so far that perhaps the upcoming BoD should, if no such work has been carried out already, assess what measures the organisation does and could take to limit environmental impact without harming the future governance of the project and without making the threshold for contributing and becoming part of the community higher. Ideally such an assessment would result in a proposed policy document to govern the way in which the organisation makes the decisions while also taking the environment into account. More specifically, albeit broad due to the lack of insight into any such current or previous activities, I would say that there are several smaller steps we can take; - Ensuring that we make responsible decisions when it comes to our supply chain for swag, event materials, etc., (and packaging of same) aiming to strike a balance where we look at using suppliers that use recycled materials without this being offset by innumerable travel miles or other costs that it would be difficult for a non-profit of our size to cover. - Ensuring that we encourage event organisers (whether local bid winners for the larger events such as GUADEC and GNOME.ASIA or those arranging smaller hackfests, etc.) to consider the materials they use for event signage, etc., discouraging the use of plastic and, as appropriate, encouraging the printing of reusable materials for recurring events (provided the reduction in waste does not result in a steep financial outlay and a greater carbon footprint due to subsequent storage and shipping). - Discouraging unnecessary travel/meetings while also being mindful of the benefits face-to-face events and meetings have and the positive impact those improved interpersonal dynamics may have on collaborative projects in general and aiming to strike a balance that looks after both the health of the community, interests of the organisation and the planet alike. - We could even take tiny steps such as ensuring that when we remind those attending GUADEC in Thessaloniki to stay hydrated in the Greek heat, we also encourage seasoned GUADEC attendees to bring their GNOME water bottles and to refill to refuel rather than buying a new single-use bottle each time thirst sets in! - Encourage the use of virtual events/meetings/hackfests/whatever to reduce travel while also encouraging broader participation from those community members who are prevented from travelling due to cost and personal/professional commitments that otherwise make it difficult for them to attend an in-person event. - Continuing to ensure that we minimise our reliance on hardcopies when it comes to paperwork, aiming to receive and send electronically where possible. I am sure there are a number of other things we could look at too, but those are the things that pop into mind without having a greater understanding of the current situation when it comes to leaving our GNOME footprint on planet earth! Best, Christel On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 6:11 PM Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > 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? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > 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. > > Ta, > Philip > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list > -- *Christel Dahlskjaer* *Chief Communications Officer* chris...@londontrustmedia.com UK: 07475431271 International: +44 7475431271 London Trust Media, Inc. // Private Internet Access https://londontrustmedia.com // https://privateinternetaccess.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
This one hits me where I live :-). I work for a company which has over 100,000 employees, all of whom it forces to commute into central offices, despite being one of the planer's largest internet companies. Quite frankly, it's insane. I would argue for face-to-face meetings to be the exception, rather than the rule, and encourage Gnome developers to help create the world's best videoconferencing collaboration stack. I understand that personal travel for young developers can be a great way to integrate them into FLOSS teams (I'm on the way to a conference hoping to do that right now) but I feel this should be focussed on new/early stage career developers and more established folks should really try and motivate local talent without having to fly around the world producing an obscene carbon footprint. I'd encourage local groups, connected by Gnome developed internet technology. The more we use this ourselves, the better we're going to have to make it work. With the end of Moore's law we also need to start making our code more efficient on smaller machines. Avoiding crypto-currencies which seem to me to be an alien conspiracy to burn as much power as possible to cook the planet would also help (FYI, in case anyone misunderstands me, that's a joke. I don't really believe this :-). This is a long term problem which will require effort on many fronts to help everyone. Jeremy On Mon, Jun 3, 2019, 10:11 AM Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > 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? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > 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. > > Ta, > Philip > ___ > 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
