Sustainability of swag items and the environmental impact of air travel at WordPress events

Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about what we can do to make WordPress events more sustainable with 5 amazing guests.

In the first episodes we introduced the 3 pillars of sustainability and in this episode we will use those lenses to explore what we can do better on WordPress events.

All the guests were already introduced on previous episodes so I'll just mention their name. Remember that you can see more info about them in the show notes.

First I talk with 3 WordCamp organizers. During the conversation with them I mention the document with guidelines to create more sustainable events that we are creating at the Sustainability Team.

I start asking Juan Hernando, lead organizer of WordCamp Europe 2024, what they have in mind to make the event as sustainable as posible. He mentions quite a lot of interesting things, like promote traveling by train, prioritize local companies to have a positive impact in the local community and economy. In other hand, also try to avoid plastic and reduce waste, and all this also been economically sustainable since this events usually have a tight budget. 

Birgit Olzem, organizer of WordCamp Germany, also talks about the compromises that you have to do sometimes to meet sustainability requirements. Also how they try to promote reusable utilities, avoid plastic, reduce printing and swag, reducing the waste as much as possible.

We also talk about promoting traveling by train, for the upcoming WordCamp Europe in Torino. Related to this, this is the link with information of train routes already put in place by Choo-choo travel company for the upcoming WordCamp Europe.

We travel from Europe to US to hear from Julia Golomb, who has been one of the lead organizers of the WordCamp US and Community Summit. She reflects on the importance of embedding sustainability from the beginning.

She also thinks that some token sustainability actions may be don't have as much impact as we would expect.

We also talked about the interest of some sponsors to do better in terms of sustainability.

Nora Ferreirós talks about the importance of in person events and how we can improve them, environmentally, doing small changes. For example, changing the event register form to use opt-out by default, for t-shirts or even the swag or make the merchandising more reusable by design.  

Courtney Robertson mentions the cultural differences of what eco-friendly means, also suggest to reduce the swag and mentions that the CHAOSS community have metrics on DEIB to ensure that events are meeting some social standards.

Talking about the social part of creating a community, Julia Golomb shares her experience with WordCamp and Meetup organizers in Uganda. They created an event focused on students with the aim of creating job opportunities. We also reflect on how the community it's getting older, that we should attract new generations and WordPress events are a great opportunity.

To end the guests interventions Julia shares how talking about this topics helps to start thinking more proactively and can plant seeds for future events. 

I hope you also find these conversations thought provoking.

Summary

As usual the guests shared a lot of good ideas, covering a lot of ground and the 3 pillars, so I'll try to summarize the main points.

In the environmental part there were common points that all the guest mentioned, like promote traveling by train, avoiding single-use plastics or reducing waste. Inside later there are a lot of things we can do, from opting-out items on the event register form (like the t-shirts or the swag) to reducing printed items or minimize the physical swag from sponsors.

In this sense, we talked about the importance of finding a balance between sponsors been more sustainable but still have an impact on event attendants and how there is a lot of room to innovate in this area.

Overall, new ideas can have a big impact on future events and applying them on flagship events could serve as example to smaller events. All this without forgetting about the fact that all the events are organized by volunteers and have a tight budget. We should keep it in mind and try to improve things with time but without burden ourselves with unrealistic objectives.

Also, the main objective of WordPress events it's to strengthen the links between the community. For that reason we should promote having a diverse group of people and having some metrics on DEIB can help to meet some objetives.

In this sense, we also reflected on how the community it's getting older, the fact that we should attract new generations and how WordPress events are a great opportunity to do it.

Finally, talking about how we can make WordPress events more sustainable helps to, raise awareness, bring new ideas and move them forward.

Here we only mentioned some of the ideas that are in the guidelines we are working on. So if you want to see all of them or you want to share a new one you can do it going the collaborative document.

Resources

• Guidelines to make WordPress events more sustainable (Collaborative GDoc - WP Sustainability Team)
• Roadmap for the WordPress Sustainability Team
• CHAOSS community
• CHAOSS community podcast
• CHAOSS community metrics
• WordCamp Europe 2024
• WordCamp Europe 2024 train routes (Choo-Choo travel agency)

Transcript

Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability.

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Guests