Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan vanberkom codethink co uk>]

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