The trello board is busy and we have an internal moniker, imaginatively, ‘Project Carbon’. For each element, in an ideal world, we want to know:

  • What was the impact on this for 2019
  • What are the best ways to tackle it in 2020

The spectre of travel is still looming large, and there has since been some noise on Twitter calling this out. There is also a Climate Code of Conduct for tech conferences being produced.

We have several strands of thought about how to tackle the travel issue. First, we’d like to encourage people to travel to Devoxx in as environmentally friendly way as possible. For example, taking the train for the bulk of the journey instead of driving. One way to do this is to include a personalised message in the ticket confirmation email, based on addresses. We started working with Celestino Bellone the CEO of Swicket and Alf.io.

What we don’t want to do is discourage anyone from attending – this is a conference for the community. Therefore despite the tricky nature of offsetting, we would like to offset the carbon emissions for travel. That means collecting data from attendees, sponsors and speakers about how they intend to travel and creating estimates. It also means deciding on a responsible amount of offsetting, vis-a-vis the price per tonne of carbon: looking at different options and being realistic about the best one.

A great thing about being part of the Devoxx brand is that, as there are several Devoxxes, there are several options for developers. Moroccan developers can attend Devoxx MA. Ukrainian developers can attend Devoxx Ukraine. There isn’t one-per-country, but it allows for a degree of localisation.

The next step was to take Project Carbon to the Devoxx Summit and present the idea to the other Devoxx conferences.

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