Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness

[Carlos Soriano <csoriano gnome org>]

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 <philip tecnocode co uk> 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
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