We already had a good conversation at Sustain about the Climate Emergency. The notes are here. I’ve started writing up a report, here. I’d love to get eyes on it, talk about it, and see if we can move forward.
Purpose
To both hold a space for us to talk about the larger questions of open source and tech sustainability as it relates to climate change, and to provide resources for helping others navigate the issue.
Goals
Develop a report on climate change and open source
Provide resources for pushing greener practices in open source projects
Provide resources for lobbying local governments to pursue better climate policies when it comes to technology
Educate our colleagues about this issue
Guiding questions
What does it mean to be sustainable environmentally in tech?
What resources are there to help make technical work more sustainable?
How can we effectively galvanize the open source community to adapt to the environment effectively?
How can we support open source offices and efforts for environment-related NGOs?
I am going to be hosting the first call on this next Monday at 1400ET. You’re invited, naturally. Notes will be shared after. Ping me if you want an invite.
I managed in the last months an initiative we called “sustainable digital challenge” , 3 months for companies to refactor their software projects in terms of eco-design principles, code and architecture, with mentor on the topic.
It was mainly French mentors and teams/companies for this first one, but we are also trying to write a paper about all best practices and open source tools to help developers. The idea is to nurture a Green Hat developer community and a GreenOps practice (including environmental constraints and tests into the DevOps Continuous Delivery process)
We are interested to participate in the call
I never posted the notes for the last meeting! They are here, such as they are.
The main takeaways were that it would be good to research more about what exists already for climate and sustainable tech, and to build a resource to help explain how developers and sustainers can build better environmentally sustainable practices into their existing workflows and organizations. My goal is to build out a website-like resource that can use the Sustain brand to get this knowledge out. I’m currently the only person with actionable items on this front (as far as I remember).
We were set to meet yesterday; however, it was a US holiday, and I never posted the meeting agenda. With that in mind, let’s plan to meet in two weeks, on Monday June 8th at 2:00pm EST. Does that work for everyone, again?
Hi, Medhi asked me to join you. I’m a developer in a cooperative. For a few months I’ve been working on the environmental impact of digital technology: awareness of people in IT (meetup, trainings, podcast in french, sustainable challenge mentioned by Medhi above), eco-design, tool development (Carbonalyser).
After these few months of explorations, in my opinion, before developing anything
we need to understand the impacts of IT on climate change, but also the social and economic impacts that go with it. A lot of fake news are circulating on this subject (please delete your emails, ahah!).
communicate, raise awareness on these topics.
Because we don’t really need tools, we need to change our behaviors and our digital lifestyles.
Welcome, @supertanuki! Thanks for showing up here.
I don’t think we’re interested in developing tools; for now, our bandwidth is pretty limited. Our goal is to disseminate better information around what behaviors and lifestyle changes we should make. It sounds like you have thoughts here! That’s great. Looking forward to meeting you on the next call.
At the moment, the #1 resource for this WG is @Ly0n, who has really hit the ball out of the stadium with his project Protontypes and https://github.com/protontypes/awesome-sustainable-technology. I would join their calls at the moment! Happy to set up another call or discuss other ways to take this further, though.
Hello! Not sure where exactly this message will head (new to Discord)
I’m Anna, a physics student, currently still at ETH Zurich. Just talked to @RichardLitt via MozFest. Would love to stay in touch, e.g. concerning the funding issue!
(Currently trying to get several projects off the ground at ETH, but feel the need to get more involved in OpenSource… will try to make time!)
I meant “licensing to prevent bad things is the flip side of this list of positive, constructive things”, that was verrrrry unclear - sorry!
e.g., there are a couple of anti-carbon licenses out there; parallel efforts in banking/insurance divestment; talk of anti-NFT licenses. Seems like no real survey of those efforts that I’m aware of, though?
@LuisVilla Not that I know of. Might be a good idea to do start one.
Right now, I don’t know of anyone (or can’t remember at this exact moment) besides @Ly0n actively working on the ecological side of sustain and open source. If anyone else wants to do some work or get some feedback, happy to stand up a call to see if discussion would help - or support in any other way.
I’ve been on a bit of a retreat the last few weeks as I’ve been taking care of my son. If you are interested we can create a Climate Emergency WG inside of SustainOSS. At the moment I’m also in contact with Appropedia to kickoff the “OpenClimate” calls:
Is this the kind of license you are talking about?
In practice, I also think it is very hard to really enforce. Also it is very hard to distinguish who is really part of the oil, gas and coal industry. In principle, a large part of the automotive industry is also part of this industry.
However, I have never seen a major open source project that used such a license. That’s why they are only of theoretical importance for me so far.
If you like we could start a single session for an ClĂmate Emergency WG on this topic. Maybe we will find more action points and little projects to create the WG on a regular base.
Thanks @RichardLitt for pointing that out. I hope I can join the other WG soon again.
@Ly0n Those OpenClimate talks look very good for orientating ourselves, mapping out how the two movements can work together - thank you so much for posting the link!
This week, we had the internal ETH NettoNull KickOff, in which I am representing the student body of ETH Zurich. Our mandate (from the ETH board) is to write a white paper until July 2021 containing strategies on how to achieve a net-zero-emission ETH by 2030. We have started strong and as you can imagine, I want to take my role in this seriously! So I think what I can do best now is first join in with the OpenClimate calls to follow the discussion, get myself firmly rooted in the NettoNull work and then see whether I can fit in helping with a Climate Emergency WG a bit later. I just want to make sure I am not half-committed!
@Ly0n Great call on Tuesday! You know what simple thing I could do to support your OpenSustainTech tool? Put you in contact with the people here at ETH working on our energy monitoring systems, let’s say. What do you think? Interested?
Also just found this database for “Alternative Data Governance in Practice” on the Mozilla page. Its format is very useable. Did you know about this?
On the side, there is also an “Environmental” Filter
Hey all. A couple of things: