Re: [Wikimedia-l] Greener travel and the ethics of carbon offset for Wikimedia community events

Lots of good suggestions. Thanks for the feedback. Calculating the amount of travel by flight and train for a conference is not a lot of extra bureaucracy if the estimated distance made part of documenting the grants and expense claims. Playing around with some calculations of my own, it makes sense that rather than expecting individual participants to add carbon offsetting to their personal costs, we instead plan as a group to make a single donation to a credible project. This might even be something that a large affiliate like WMDE or the WMF might consider rolling up and managing. Especially for shorter flights (like 500 km round trips), the administrative cost as part of the donation works out as much as the amount that would go to the end project, so a single large payment would make far more sense than at the individual level. Regardless of exactly how carbon offsetting might be arranged, it would be great it the proposed LGBT+ conference in 2020 reports the total travel figure, as part of the conference's aim to minimize our carbon footprint. If a matching payment to a carbon offset project is between 2% to 5% of the travel grants paid out, that seems entirely manageable as part of being responsible global citizens (thanks for that phrase!). The separate issue of ensuring virtual engagement, such as catering for remote presentations, is a critical way of both reducing carbon footprint and allowing access for folks or organizations that have difficulty travelling long distance, wish to minimize their personal carbon footprint, or wish to participate but are unable to commit to devoting several days full time. WM-LGBT+ has been successfully using Zoom open source videoconferencing with participants in several countries at the same time, and with the launch of Facebook Horizon in 2020, this particular conference might be a well timed opportunity to set up a VR space to the benefit of the planned workshop discussions in a far more engaging way than passive videocasting of presentations allows. Who knows, maybe Facebook might loan us some headsets? ;-) If folks want to continue to chip in with suggestions for the conference, the WM-LGBT+ user group talk page on meta is worth watching, and there are several other communication channels linked there if you prefer direct messaging or tweets. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT+/Portal Thanks, Fae -- faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae On Mon, 14 Oct 2019 at 16:53, Bence Damokos <bdamokos(a)gmail.com> wrote: