Climate Impact and KDE

[Martin Steigerwald]

Jens - 20.09.19, 11:02:44 CEST:
> So recent discussions about Climate Strike raised some very good
> points about what KDE as a community can do to decrease its
> footprint. I want to thank Friedrich for raising them.
> 
> Personally I think this is a rather fun focus for design, community
> work and development (and I should probably have thought about it
> faster so it could have been squished into the goals voting/suggesting
> - but such is life) and just want to toss some ideas around if others
> are interested
> 
> Community ideas:
> Making a clear statement that carbon footprint in travel will be a
> factor in travel support from the eV. Basically we know that there is
> zero possibility for some to choose, say trains (train from India or
> across the Atlantic is not feasible), but adding that as a part of the
> application process; "choose best transport with ecology and
> environment in mind" can go a long way and for larger events asking
> organizers to look up alternatives and present them as part of the
> "how to get to X" page (much of this is already done of course but
> formalizing it would be awesome).

Given enough fund raising for KDE events for necessary flights KDE could 
at least do some compensation via Atmosfair. I recently backwardly 
compensated for some flights I did years ago. As I support KDE with money 
I'd be totally okay with some money allocated to that. Of course 
reduction is better than compensation, so compensation should not be an 
excuse to fly more.

> Technical Ideas:
> Look at Plasma and applications energy consumption - and I know it is
> a piss in the ocean but its several pisses in the ocean - and how to
> either improve that further or create systems to minimize energy
> consumption or creating something to more clearly and accessibly show
> energy consumption and suggestions to improve it.

I'd love to see that, I just wonder how much can still be optimized 
there.

> Publish our own energy consumption and carbon footprint in regards to
> servers etc (Ben Cooksley posted a link and perhaps a clear write up
> on the subject would be cool?), and mention/formalize our own
> commitment to it.

That would definitely be cool to have. There are some web hosting 
providers who care about that.

> A closer relationship with Fairphone and Postmarket OS. So, from what
> I can gather have a pretty good relationship with Postmarket OS (via
> Plasma Mobile), perhaps explore that with regards to Fairphone
> together with them? Explore hardware vendors who try to minize their
> ecological impact and see if we can either do things with them - OR
> do things aimed at their hardware?

Wasn't there some contacts with Fairphone?

Plasma / KDE could also work together with people who refurbish old 
computers. For many use cases it is not necessary to buy a new machine 
these days as even computers from 5 years ago are fast enough to do a 
lot of tasks. I know this as I still use a ThinkPad T520. It fast enough 
for all desktop related tasks. Especially as in the last years Plasma 
was optimized heavily for good performance.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin