Hello all candidates for the 2025 Board elections, thank you for standing!
My question is: what do you think the GNOME project, the Foundation’s and the Board’s role is regarding climate change? Do you have any thoughts about how any of those three bodies could or should be incentivised to do more about climate change? Do you think we’re doing enough?
Don’t necessarily feel you have to answer each question specifically; I’d be very happy to get a general response from you with your thoughts and priorities. I realise nobody (so far) is standing with climate change as part of their introduction/manifesto, so it’s potentially something that you haven’t thought about deeply.
I recommend you check out some of pwithnall’s excellent talks from GUADEC in previous years for a great introduction to the ways in which GNOME contributes to carbon emissions and where there are potentially gains to be made
First, my broad position is that climate change is real and an existential threat for humanity to address. That said, the GNOME Foundation’s core mission is to make a computing platform for all, and I believe that should remain our primary focus.
There are areas in which the two overlap, such as improving power consumption and making sure we have great tooling for measuring and profiling.
I do think we should be thoughtful in balancing climate considerations with activities that forward the GNOME mission. For example, while emissions from travel are a factor to consider, the social aspects of in-person collaboration do have a force-multiplying effect that can justify the trade-off imo.
If I remember correctly from your talks in GUADEC the biggest emissions are produced by users running GNOME on their computers and travelling to conferences.
The energy efficiency and emissions belong in my view to the project and should be considered part of software development. This is a hard job to do, I am aware. As I said I am not a developer, I will not get in there.
Regarding our emissions caused by travelling, it is always desirable to travel less and when we do it try to choose the most environment friendly. That is not always possible because of prices or lack of options. I do think that local events should be encouraged as they are helpful to local communities, either organizing satellite events to GUADEC, or organising their own major local events, such as GNOME Asia or Latam. I think that from last year’s GUADEC analysis on Discourse and having already a few big events where streaming was provided we can create a few guidelines to make this easier to organise and connect.
As part of GNOME Hispano I value local communities very highly and I wish this kind of community would be a standard (Nepal I am looking at you ). It will make our community richer, closer and also will help with our emissions.
The Foundation and Board need to encourage this community model but the heavy lifting lies on the local communities.
I agree with @MariMaj points about the importance of local communities, such as GNOME Africa, GNOME Nepal, GNOME Germany, and many more.
By organizing local meetups, workshops, and regional events, the local communities enable passionate contributors to gather in person without the need for long-distance travel. This significantly reduces the carbon footprint that can be generated from international flights.
When people can meet affordably and easily, they form more engaged and resilient communities. Also, it isn’t possible for everyone to do the long travels, so local meetups help diverse people to connect in the community.
Another way to look into this again is by raising awareness about efficient code and hardware use within the community is something which we can encourage massively. When we start practicing these things at the grassroots level, then only can we expect them to be implemented in a wider area.
And, do you know what the best part is in this? This model is replicable and scalable. WE CAN IMPLEMENT IT ALL OVER THE WORLD !! haha
While I agree that it is important to look at travel emissions and power consumption reduction of gnome installations as well as our infrastructure, I think there is one other even more important aspect:
We live these days in a world where most people use software through a web browser, as (energy wasting) services running on servers in the cloud. This infrastructure is responsible for the emission of huge amounts of climate gases. But nobody knows and cares about it really. The recently rising popularity of generative AI brings this to unbelievable levels…
But with GNOME distributions and our app ecosystem we provide an alternative solution. It is already since a long time known that most energy and resources are consumed not while running a device, but when manufacturing it. With the local first concept we run the apps on our own devices, that we already own. No extra computers in datacenters needed (almost). Also if an app is running on a local device, people care much more about power efficiency.
And of course we don’t do planned obsolescence.
Therefore I believe we need to focus more on local-first technologies, and finally make GNOME a successful alternative to the climate-change-propelling proprietary solutions.
About the centralized GUADEC, I don’t think it will go away. I think it is important to still keep the community overall connected, and at least in my experience an in-person gathering is not replaceable with a digital one. But of course travel could be heavily optimized towards climate friendliness. (At least in Europe it is not too difficult)
But I think for the growing community the centralized GUADEC doesn’t scale. We need more local events, where people have shorter travel distances. And I think it would not be unrealistic to expect that only a (each year changing) minority of the community would still gather at the centralized GUADEC. (It is happening already) But through that still everyone is connected with everyone else in the community. Even if it is only by “knowing someone who knows someone”. I think this is very important for community health and preventing conflicts.
About reducing our own energy consumption, I think there are already ideas and initiatives, of course funding would be always cool, but we are going on the right path already.
). It will make our community richer, closer and also will help with our emissions.