Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness

Benjamin Berg <[email protected]> Mon, 03 Jun 2019 20:49:00 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnome.foundation.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hi,

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?

It is an interesting question. I really believe that this is an
important issue and that we have an issue with worldwide politics
either not doing enough to hold their promises or even actively
undermining efforts. But, I also believe that environmental politics is
outside of the scope of the GNOME Foundation. So while I personally do
encourage every Foundation member to be active, I also doubt that it
makes sense for the Foundation to take a strong political stance on the
issue.

That said, we can and probably should try to change in some regards.
You mentioned travel, and an easy change we can quickly implement would
be to explicitly ask everyone to offset their carbon footprint when
travelling and reimbursing the additional cost for everyone who is
Foundation sponsored.

I also know that some organisations have started to make it mandatory
to consider environmental impact in their decision making process. I
expect that at least some individuals have made considerations like
this when e.g. buying swag for events. That said, I do think it is
perfectly reasonable and desirable for the Foundation to decide that
these factors should or must be taken into account when making spending
decisions.

With regard to development on GNOME to e.g. support older hardware and
prolong their lifetime (waste reduction), I do currently see such
initiatives as normal development efforts that would be supported by
the Foundation as usual.

Benjamin

> 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
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