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Event: A New Narrative for Justice and Sustainability in Digital Infrastructure

Coming to the event? Please see the running order on the dedicated page

As a famous philosopher once said, it’s not easy to be green. Especially since individual and organisational desires for environmental sustainability have in the past years fully transitioned into full-blown society- and earth-preserving requirements to protect and uphold climate justice. Human and planet rights are inextricably linked: they form a lattice of shared responsibility to safeguard and nurture the individuals and the systems in which they are realized – be they physical, digital, or conceptual.

Understanding and accepting this shared responsibility of justice and sustainability is particularly significant for those of us who work in digital infrastructure. Our technologies and systems form the backbone that holds up trustworthy, sustainable tools and apps that people rely on in their daily lives and work. They live their values in practice, and need to know they can rely on us to do the same.

So where to start?

In the last few years we have seen a number of ideas gain interest, all with common themes. You might have come across stacktivism, and the public stack, or responsible cloud, and most recently, a renewed interest in the intersection between climate justice and digital rights, and digital sustainability.

However, we need to build a shared language and narrative for these intersections, because silos hold us back.

So, the goal for the afternoon is to put a few smart people in a room to explore what these ideas look like when you need to work tactically and implement them?.

What does hiring look like in this scenario, or choosing suppliers? What standards and schemes that exist can be used now for organisations to adopt, and what need to be created?

The Green Web Foundation and Greenhost have been researching in this field, but we need people to help us sense check and understand how the pieces come together.

We hope you will join us in this brainstorm.

When

Monday afternoon Jan 30th – 12:30 until 5:00pm

We’d meet at the Green Web offices for (optional) lunch from 12:30, with a goal of being back at 1:30 to start.

For those interested in socialising in person afterwards, we have table reserved at Kremanski, a nearby bar from 5:30pm

Where?

The Green Web Foundation Berlin office
Naunynstr 40
Kreuzberg 10999

Running order

12:30 Meet at Green Web Foundation Offices

We’ll meet at the Green web foun

  1. Why we’re here (13:45 – 14:15)
    • Brief intros
    • Why we’re convening this together
      • Framing conversation from GWF and Greenhost.
      • Interplay of regulatory intervention and building alternatives
      • Long-term vision, mid-term goals, and purpose of today
    • Agenda overview and housekeeping
  2. Friendly Crit of the field (14:15 – 15:15)
    • Participants present the principles/manifestos they’ve bought (ca. 10min/per)
    • Group crits and annotates them

[Break] (15:15 – 15:30)

  1. Sythensis and Gapfinding (15:30 – 16:00)
  2. Patterns in the field (16:00 – 16:45)
    • Prioritze topics
    • Brainstorm practices in the wild
    • Map them to regulatory and building tracks
  3. Where from here (16:45 – 17:00)
    • Where should this conversation continue?
      • “Policy windows”: GHG Protocol, COP, etc
      • GWF: Fellowship, FOSSDEM, RightsCon, Digital Rights x Climate Justice Catalyst Fund
      • Greenhost: xxx
    • Who else should be in these conversations?
    • “I can, we should…”
    • CLosing

How to express interest and RSVP

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We’ll only use this in correspondence with you about this event. Nothing else.
As above. We’ll only use this to send updates about the event.
You don’t need to attend as an official representative of this organisation.

We’re aiming to keep this fairly small and friendly for the time being, for space reasons, and to keep it manageable.

We’re open to reviewing this if there is more interest.

Further reading and useful links

(more to add here as we find them)