Clean Coffee #5
These are the notes from Clean Coffee #5 — the first one with organisers on two different continents! They may be a bit messy, and are mainly used as a stream-of-consciousness like set of notes to refer back to later for attendees, but they may be useful for you too.
Topics we talked about
- There are so many (tech/digital) projects and groups of volunteer behind them trying to create useful tools to fight climate change. The result is that there are a lot of tools, most not working great and just add noise. Great passion doesn’t bring great products without funds. How to change that? — Andrea 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- How can I gauge the impact/usefulness of a “project”? I have little bandwidth I’d like to allocate it to something that actually matters — Avishay 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- The climate-active people I’m working with do not come from Tech. We have mismatched expectations (ex: Minimum-Viable-Product-and-iterate versus Why-Don’t-You-Just-Finish-a-Polished-App-Immediately). Fortunately this is by no means the first time Tech and non-Tech have interfaced. Suggestions on how to handle? — Denton 🙋🏽🙋🏽
- Is buying carbon credits actually a net positive, or does it just provide a feel-good escape valve while diverting resources to far-off goals? Are there better directions to encourage people to focus their $ first? — Alex 🙋🏽
Topics we didn’t have time to talk about
- When discussing decisions about how you work in your team in terms of sustainability, what are your options? Can you bring it up in a retro? O you need sample policy? Is it a thing only mgmt can bring in? — Chris 🙋🏽🙋🏽
- How do you know what do ask when switching jobs to see how their actions match the severity of the climate crisis? Chris
Notes & links from the topics we discussed
Topic 1: There are so many (tech/digital) projects and groups of volunteer behind them trying to create useful tools to fight climate change. The result is that there are a lot of tools, most not working great and just add noise. Great passion doesn’t bring great products without funds. How to change that?
This ended up being a discussion about funding in the end — in many cases the projects mentioned that are started by people don’t progress very far because they run out of money. In that case, it’s similar to the rate at which small businesses fail, so it’s not surprising that few succeed.
If you are looking for funding options, they do exist.
Crowdfunding, and direct funding
There’s an exhaustive review of the options here in Snowdrift’s wiki.
Elsewhere Patreon and Opencollective are in use in other communities. Libreapay is another, very interesting, entirely open source, recurrent donations platform
Finding funding from grant making bodies
In the UK, groups like BeeHive Giving make it easier to find funds and apply based on what field you work in.
Increasingly, a number of organisations run flash grants, or adhoc versions. Examples would be Mozilla’s MOSS (Mozilla Open Source upport) grants or the Shuttleworth foundation Flash Grants.
Topic 2: How can I gauge the impact/usefulness of a “project”? I have little bandwidth I’d like to allocate it to something that actually matters.
One of the key things is understanding what you’re looking for. In many cases, the most effective thing you might be able to do is just donate money , especially if you are paid well:
Elsewhere, it’s useful to understand where the biggest gains might be, as generally speaking climate literacy among the public is abysmal.
The Project Drawdown book gives a good idea where some of the bigger levers are.
There are also movements like Effective Altruism who try to quantify this, and public health a metric known as Quality Adjusted Lifetime Years, are used to support policy decisions that would have a diffuse effect on a population.
When it comes to working who to help, Datakind UK, have discussed using the following criteria to decide who to work with:
- Impact on org — will our intervention create a measurable, lasting change in the org we’re helping?
- Impact on sector — are we place to effect change in the sector that might be used by similar groups?
- Impact on world — is this an issue that we could draw attention to, to galvanise action elsewhere, in the form of policty interventions or similar?
Topic 3: The climate-active people I’m working with do not come from Tech. We have mismatched expectations (ex: Minimum-Viable-Product-and-iterate versus Why-Don’t-You-Just-Finish-a-Polished-App-Immediately). Suggestions on how to handle?
For this we ended up covering the issues of working with groups who are used to large up front planning of projects, compared to smaller projects, more iterative projects.
In many cases here, when stakeholders aren’t used to working in an more iterative, agile fashion it’s worth looking at how other places who had to solve this problem approached it.
There are patterns in traditionally more conservative organisations, where teams have taken to deliberately sharing practices, to make it easier to understand how they work — in the UK with the digital service manual, in the US with the 18F playbooks, and guides, and in Australia with the DTO service Standard.
Topic 4: Is buying carbon credits actually a net positive, or does it just provide a feel-good escape valve while diverting resources to far-off goals? Are there better directions to encourage people to focus their $ first?
If you’re interested in this, there’s some really good analysis from the ACM’s own research into the use of offsets for their conferences.
It’s also worth looking what other organisations are doing — an increasing number have internal prices for carbon. Microsoft has a good report on the using an internal carbon fee, as an example.
The short answer is —they can be , but they’re not without problems, and they should be used as a last resort, after you’ve changed behaviour in an organisation. The problem is, in many cases offsets are still cheaper than changing behaviour so they’re often seen as a panacea.
Okay, that’s another Clean Coffee out the way! Follow this publication to find out when new ones are on, or check the #cleancoffee hashtag.
