Speeches/Geertivp/Wikicheese Brussels
Speech by Geertivp at the Wikicheese Brussels event on 11 May 2022.
I would like to share a few words with you about collaboration and energy.
Wikipedia has always been international and multilingual. The same is true for other important and large projects like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. The worldwide Wikimedia Strategy 2030 aims to establish regional hubs; continents are becoming more important and visible; building a distributed and decentralised worldwide organisation becomes increasingly important.
So we do want more, and more international collaboration between Wikimedia Entities: the EU Policy Group, Wikimedia Belgium, Wikimedia France, and other chapters. Wikimedia Europe, WikiFranca, including all French speaking countries, are recent examples. We also want more collaboration amongst national cultural and humanity organisations. Local chapters can fund micro-grants to allow volunteers to develop better content.
International travel by air plane is discouraged, due to climate change preventive actions. On the other side, video is estimated to consume up to 40% of all internet related electricity capacity. 40% of the internet traffic growth in 2020 is due to video streaming and video conferencing.[1] ICT causes 2% of all carbon emissions.[2]
Watching a YouTube video would consume 800 W? (Shift Project analysis) for which the largest part is consumed by data transmission. Only a fraction is for the data centers and the end user devices. Did you ever think about this? My laptop is consuming 8% CPU when idle… 80 W would be only 10% of the total power when watching a video stream…[3] Remember that the data centers also consume electricity when inactive.[4] Also user devices, including routers, consume power when not actively used.[5]
Mobile networks currently consume considerably more kWh/GB than fixed networks. And more mobile data is consumed… room for drastic improvement…
So, let us network, also amongst humans and organisations; maybe this would consume less energy?