Climate emergency and tech

I donā€™t see why not, @naomi has already mentioned this on the other thread.

Alan Simpson, ex-Labour MP and advisor to Labour on environmental policy has an article in the Morning Star today:

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For the Spring Gathering on 25 - 26 April the theme of Climate emergency and tech looks like being discussed on the Friday.

@Dot you asked earlier if anyone is interested in collaboration in this area. So far we have @Naomi, me, and possibly a short talk by Extinction Rebellion. If youā€™re still interested would you like to get in touch?
Thanks.
@jonathan , Webarchitects

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Please let me know ASAP if this is happening, so I can get back to the XR person who offered to talk. Thanks!

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hi ā€¦ yes Iā€™m really excited to see that this may be on the Agenda. Iā€™ve been working with XR in Bath and we successfully lobbied local council to declare a climate emergency and commitment to reduce emissions to zero by 2030. This will feed through to procurement, and is something that tech co-ops could help them achieve. I also have a short talk I have given about environmental impact of tech, happy to provide a condensed version of it if that would workā€¦ and yes, I started some work in this area and have some ideas for products and services, very keen to meet others who may want to collaborate.

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yes please! great to include XR Sheffield in this

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Thanks a lot Dot :slight_smile: I think that the final agenda will be discussed online here CoTech Spring 2019 Gathering : 25-26th April in Sheffield - #74 by jonathan
and finalised on the first morning of day one.

Pollyā€™s been talking to some people about it but I havenā€™t heard the latest but Iā€™m fairly sure environment/climate will be on day 2

Best regards

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Naomi sorry I didnā€™t answer here; yes please can you ask them to come on the Friday morning please? (Day 2, say 9.30/10am)

In discussion with @polly the proposal is taht the final agenda will be discussed online at CoTech Spring 2019 Gathering : 25-26th April in Sheffield but only finalised on the first morning of each day. So itā€™s a fairly informal ā€˜gatheringā€™ rather tahn a confernce with a very fixed agenda. However there will be an all-group meeting at the start of day 1 and day 2, after which people (weā€™re expecting between 30 and 40) will split off into groups for workshops, decided on the day. Then at the end of the day weā€™ll get together for an all-group feedback.

OK?
See you there, or in the week before :slight_smile:

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Hi Jonathan , Iā€™m completely unable to give this any brain space in advance, but time is noted, and i will almost certainly be there to speak a little, even if I donā€™t make it to the first day.

However, I will speak about whatā€™s been happening in London this week, rather than about anything else; hope thatā€™s ok. I expect people will want to hear about it.

I asked Nathan to contact you, perhaps he hasnā€™t. Iā€™ll message him.

See you soon

Naomi

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Hello Naomi, thanks good to get yr email.

Thatā€™s fine, itā€™ll be great to hear first hand.

Iā€™m suffering brain space capacity issues as well, but weā€™ll get there :slight_smile:

Hope to hear from Nathan but at this moment Iā€™vve lost my mobile :frowning: Aaaagh!
so donā€™t giv him that numbr; Iā€™ll get sorted with this next week - Tues probably

See you soon :slight_smile:
Jonathan

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Proposal:
That the discussion about climate emergency aims to create a position statement, or better yet an agreed policy/strategy, that all CoTech members can support. In that way we not only educate ourselves about the issues, but we also create a platform that can be helpful in promoting CoTech as a distinctive offering, and drive internal planning and policy development within CoTech member organisations.

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That sounds a great idea @graham. Iā€™ve now been in touch, and Nathan or someone from Extinction Rebellion should be attending the Spring Gathering (Sheffield 2019 - CoTech) to help with discussion/awareness raising, on the morning of Day 2 (Friday).

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Do you have some suggestions for content for this?

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VERY broadly, a statement might look something along the lines of: CoTech member organisations recognise the paramount importance of the climate emergency, and the urgent responsibility to take action both within their own organisations and externally to promote best practice. CoTech believes that having zero negative impact on climate change is the minimum viable position that it can adopt, and is working to become a climate-positive network.

And a policy/strategy might be something like: CoTech member organisations are working to define a shared climate policy and strategy, building on the agreed position statement. This will ensure that suitable measures are embedded within member organisations enabling them to effectively assess their organisational impact and take rapid steps towards becoming climate-positive. CoTech undertakes to publish a report annually, setting out progress in respect of this strategy.

Howā€™s that for starters?

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Sitting listening to the Extinction Rebellion talk and thought Iā€™d throw Low-tech magazine into the mix, especially given their solar-powered server.

Low-Tech Magazine

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We sat in a small subgroup of the climate subgroup to make a list of things you and your co-op can do to help avoid the climate emergency. The list is here ā€”> Sheffield 2019/List of Climate Actions - CoTech

Please edit your other cool ideas in!

Especially keen to get the input from @Dot about council procurement and other stuff!

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Hello (Dot?) I wondered if there was any further news of ā€œdeveloping a network-based energy management tool for monitoring IT infrastructure energy useā€

And is it still true that no-one is providing this technology open source?

As discussed Sheffield_2019/List_of_Climate_Actions

(Caveat: Sorry, I havenā€™t read full thread.)

Re: climate change and support from tech worker co-ops. Some comments ā€“ :mag: facts, :heart: feelings, and ideas :bulb::

  • :mag: Extinction Rebellion is doing massive organizing internationally.
  • :mag: Enspiral members (notably @richdecibel) have already put some weight behind supporting them.
  • :mag: movement is staying loose, and using holocracy for organizing.
  • :heart: I feel that they need the best tools for success, which might not be open source.
  • :heart: I feel that tools to help this multi-centered operation organizer are the ones that support the spirit of what theyā€™re already doing.
  • :mag: Peerdom.org is a tool built to support holocracy.
    • :mag: peerdom is built but a neat organisation called Nothing Agency https://nothing.peerdom.org
    • :mag: I had a call with a member of the Peerdom team this morning.
    • :mag: team members are aligned with cooperative spirit, but failed to cooperativize when it came up for discussion, as they burned some savings talking about the meta of governance.
    • :mag: the peerdom backend is already open source. (Front-end is not)
    • :mag: software like peerdom feels like it could support not only the XR movement, but also the cooperative space.
    • :mag: peerdom is not short on features ideas, but on development capacity.
    • :mag: peerdom team is open to non-monetary exchanges for service, e.g., development capacity in exchange for large non-user-restricted accounts.
  • :bulb: Letā€™s invite members of Peerdom to give a show and tell for CoTech or ICA networks. cc @nicolasdimarco @Neto
  • :bulb: letā€™s try to find a way for peerdom and co-op community to mutually support one another.
  • :bulb: letā€™s find out if org mapping tools like this would support movements like XR in their existing work
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Have any of you discussed participating in the Global Climate Strike on September 20th with their coops? We will probably do so, and If there are other (tech)-coops that join the strike we could create a joined statement etc.

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Weā€™re building quite a lot of stuff for it, so not working that day might be quite counter-productive!!

In general Iā€™m not sure that striking in worker co-ops makes that much sense.

Weā€™re planning to only do climate-related (or election related work) that day - e.g. no normal commercial clients that arenā€™t trying to save the world. We could set an ā€œout of officeā€ to that effect?

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@hng @harry What about a co-operative organizing an open cowork in the negative space of the strike ā€“ targeting knowledge workers who already plan to strike, or who want to ā€“ with the premise being to build tooling for or document needs of the movement? A strike could be a great opportunity for concerted user research methodologies that perhaps arenā€™t commonly deployed :slight_smile:

e.g. ā€œwhat feels like itā€™s going well here? whatā€™s lacking? how could we all make it better?ā€ asked to all sorts of different people who show up. That sort of thinking and conversation is the empowering core of open source (and ā€œcommons-based peer productionā€ more generally), and might be interesting to engage with participants in that way

PS, I say ā€œcoworkā€ because ā€œhackathonā€ has a one-off vibe that works against longterm movement-building imho. (Disclaimer: am a weekly hacknight organizer.)

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