2019:Environmental sustainability/The Wikis After Tomorrow: Overview of The Resilience Issues of The Wikimedia Sustainability Initiative From a Geography Standpoint

Environmental sustainability/The Wikis After Tomorrow: Overview of The Resilience Issues of The Wikimedia Sustainability Initiative From a Geography Standpoint

Description

The Wikimedia Movement launched the Sustainability Initiative to reduce its environmental footprint. But is it enough to protect it from the upcoming effects of Global Warming or cheap carboned energy shortage, and make it resilient from upcoming challenges the future could bring? Are Wikimedia servers and the rest of Internet ready to withstand natural and human disasters hinted by science and international agencies? Is the Free Knowdge goal threatened?

The session will begin, with the help of maps and other geographical tools, by a general overview (slideshow) of the most glaring geographical challenges the Wikimedia Movement will have to face in the future, and what the Sutainability Initiative currently address (or doesn't) to mitigate them and increase resilience of the movement (eg, server location, local communities). This will be followed by a time of exchange with the audience (more of less in the form of a workshop depending of how many people attends) to discuss existing and potential mitigation ideas, starting with the session leader.

*PS : This session having a focus on resilience, it's potentially complimentary with other sessions proposals for this theme I noticed after checking.*

Relationship to the theme

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

The Wikimedia Movement projets impact and rely on the current world to work. The issue is, anthropogenic global warming and the upcoming end of cheap oil are already impacting the world and their effects are going to get stronger with time, putting a strain on countries and technological infrastructures. Will the goal of sharing free knowledge to humanity thanks to the Wikimedia movement stay achievable with the decisions taken by the Movement thanks to the Sustainability Initiative?

The session is expected to focus on at least SDG 7 (Clean energy), 9 (Industry and infrastructures), 11 (Cities and communities), 12 (Consumption and production) and 13 (Climate action).

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:

• Suggesting minimal infrastructure requirements needed in the Wikimedia Movement to keep to share free knowledge
• Raising awareness on how resilient or not key infrastructures of the Wikimedia Movement are.
• Coming up with suggestions that could help the Wikimedia Foundation to find additional mitigation methods to increase resilience of the movement.
  

Session leader(s)

J. N. Squire (talk) is a student in Master of Geography at the University of Orléans, France, and an active Wikimedia contributor since 10 years. The master thesis he is currently working on is about environmental justice and resilience issues around the Houma Native Nation, an unrecognized native American nation in Lousiana living currently in the disappearing delta of the Mississippi River in the USA.

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

• Workshop to identify and try to solve problem
• Presentation lecture of the issue to work on
  

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

• Room:

Room with at least enough seats for the attendance and a board to write on. Projector+screen

• Audience:

30-40 people could be a manageable upper limit, depending of how much people are interested by the topic of the session. If there are more people interested, the workshop phase might be adapted by spliting the audience into groups focusing on more specific themes. Specialists with knowledge/skills in sciences and/or sustainability, environemental challenges, internet infrastructure and problem-solving would be great too.

• Recording:

Microphones will be probably needed for the exchange/talk time with the audience if the current form holds.