Building a community for sustainability-oriented Clojure work

One possible reason to close in on the clojure/sustainability intersection is just the overwhelming scale of the problem. “Problem” actually seems like too small a word - more like a global convulsion. If we’re going to tackle this responsibility (and little so far suggests that we will), cooperation will have to happen at multiple scales (indeed at all scales). So just as it’s worth some people getting involved in their local communities with others operating internationally, some in the tech community will best serve in the specific language/tech/company-oriented communities, with others having a wider focus.

If you’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, you’ll recognise the theme: everything is going to have to happen at once, often even at cross-purposes.

@bmaddy Oh that’s definitely part of the intention. That’s part of what I meant by topics like “[Discussion] Given rebound effects, is it a good idea to work on optimizing Big Data hosting infrastructure and orchestration?”.

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In my mind, anonymity would be optional on a per-subject basis, but still critical. Hopefully optional anonymity is fine with you?

I’m really not in favour of giving a platform for companies to boast sustainability-orientation without a mechanism for detailing and challenging those claims. Failing that, I would be very worried of people being led astray - not that companies are inherently dishonest, but they’re usually too involved to have a cool-headed evaluation of their own impact, and the “unfair advantage” of claiming sustainability-orientation on the job market would give them even less incentive to do so.

And again, leaving aside subjective perception, I’d argue that the question of impact is inherently complex - much more so that a 1-dimensional scale from “bad” to “good” for sustainability.

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Good point, I would certainly not want to encourage people to restrict their sustainability efforts to the application of Clojure alone. (In the professional sphere, I’ve done 1 sustainability-oriented gig, and it was in Python, not Clojure.) Please do look for non-Clojure sustainability-oriented work, by all means.

But still, I know that Clojure is the probably the most effective way for me to contribute IT work, and so it makes sense to watch out for those sustainability-oriented opportunities which are in Clojure.

Yes, of course. Thanks for the suggestion. I do want to re-emphasize that the scope of this initiative is deliberately narrow, and certainly not at all exclusive of other contribution modes.

@colinfleming which drives me to wonder: what negative effects do you see to creating such a community? Do you think it will inhibit sustainability efforts people would otherwise do? That seems unlikely to me.

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Hi folks!

I’m one of the organisers of ClimateAction.tech (I’ll refer to as CAT), I gave this talk at Heart of Clojure back in 2018 about climate and tech, and I also worked in a company, Mastodon C, where a chunk of the company’s time and effort was spent figuring out how to use clojure to work on climate.

Here’s an interview with the then CEO, Francine Bennett from 2012. I’m also a big fan of clojure and it’s community, and it has changed how I think about programming, even if I don’t do any paid work in it.

I think it’s good to that this is being discussed, and I figured it might be useful to share some of what I’ve learned if you want to go down this route.

I think @otfrom might have something to share there too, as he has personal experiences in this field, and might be able to share some of his experiences.

Joining something existing and making it richer, vs starting something new

I actually joined CAT after running sustainability and tech meetups in London and Berlin, I felt that it made sense to join something that was already there, and contribute to it, rather than make my own thing.

For what it’s worth, we deliberately try to be cross disciplinary, and act as a place for both cross community and cross organisational discussions on these topics.

There’s a few reasons for this - very generally, one of the big problems in sustainability themed communities or movements is fragmentation. This a) keeps lots of the these conversations happening away from where there’s actual power and money being deployed with very real consequences and b) also means that the people who tend to make up the community tend to end up with pretty similar backgrounds.

We already wrestle with this in CAT where lots of programmers join, and basically say:

Hello there! I want to keep doing exactly what I’m doing, but also feel good about the climate and all my prior life choices validated. How do I do this?

I have hard time with this personally, because in many cases, the most effective thing a technologist can do on climate is actually get better at learning about the problem and levers there, rather than getting better at coding or clojure. It’s a different skillset.

TBH, even the effective altruism approach, I find problematic in some ways, because throwing money at a problem without engaging critically with it, generally results in avoiding necessary discussions about what we need to do differently as a society, in favour of what that lot over there need to do differently, and tends to favour maintaining a state of affairs where the altruists are the ones who get to say what altruisim is effective, and what isn’t.

Making it easier for clojurians to work on climate instead of in banks

(For what it’s worth, if there’s a mechanism for clojurians to find meaningful work that pays something close to fair rates, then I think that would be a good thing. The line above was a joke, BTW - I know it’s used in lots of cool places that aren’t finance, and anyway banks, because through their choise of who to finance can actually be pretty good lever for change on climate)

If the sustainability sector has history of being underfunded, the emergence of a very fast growing ‘climatetech’ sector means there is money pouring into this general area now.

And one thing that might be worth thinking of, that isn’t coupled to any decisions about what platform you use is simply to address the issue of there not being much meaningful climate focussed work in clojure out there yet.

I have looked and I haven’t been able to find any resources to explain to someone working on climate who isn’t already into clojure, why they might choose it for a new project, or even consider using it for part of their stack on their next climate project, or even point to other companies doing so.

Does this exist anywhere?

I would love to be able to point people to this, as the work I see in climate companies, tends towards python/django for web (sometimes php), and react on the front end.

This might help address the supply problem because if you want to clojurians to be hired, there needs to be someone agreeing to stump up some cash to hire them.

Setting up any climate project that could afford developers is hard enough, as devs are just so much more expensive than other members of staff already, so tools or resources to make it easier to get buy-in to start a new initiative in clojure, would really be a boon.

Hope that helps.

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@mrchrisadams I feel like you’re perceiving ClimateAction.tech as competing with the initiative I suggested here (perhaps my choice of “community” for naming it was unfortunate), but why not see it as complementary? In particular, I could imagine it acting as a gateway for ClimateAction.tech.

To be clear, I do not propose to create something like a meetup. The point is not to create “THE place of Clojure & Sustainability”. The goal is much narrower: mainly, making the job market efficient for those sustainability-oriented initiatives which are in Clojure.

FWIW I’ve created a #d-clojure channel on CAT slack https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdtvNeUkNkPybk9_Ln5klL1RUPHUCwfK4OfF-odRWnHME9d-g/viewform

There are lots of other good things going on there as well.

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hi @vvvvalvalval, thanks for clarifying - I definitely don’t see these as competitive, and I was trying to emphasise the idea of engaging with other groups - specially when in my experience, the people who tend to be active in one community then to be active in others.

There’s an internal wiki thing we use inside CAT (outline - it’s OSS and easy enough to deploy), and I’ve setup up a page there linking to this post, for folks there who use clojure to find this.

I’ll follow this topic, and if there’s new site or subreddit, I’d be happy to direct people to it.

Have a good weekend :+1:
Chris

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A different framing for this initiative might be ‘working within your existing (or closest, or most familiar) community’.

The thing is that there’s an opportunity cost to everything we do. All the time you spend setting up something new is time you could have spent enriching something existing (as @mrchrisadams discussed) or doing something more effective, if that existed. Here is an example of how fossil companies created the idea of a personal carbon footprint to essentially allow people to make changes that feel significant but really aren’t, which tends to make them not make changes which actually are significant such as working for regulation of companies like BP. Here is another example re: recycling. By getting people to spend effort and time on things that don’t actually matter it’s easy to use up all their time and effort budget.

Obviously in this case there’s no nefarious evil actor trying to make you waste your time, but recently I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this. I guess this is a somewhat personal topic for me because I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the things that I thought were an effective use of my time and/or money were not, and I did them mostly to make myself feel better - this has been a very hard realisation for me. I’m not saying that this is the case with you, but I guess I would like to encourage thinking around what is the most effective use of time since these problems are very urgent. If you think that this is a good use of your time then absolutely you should do it.

Anyway, this is getting pretty off-topic for Clojureverse, so I’ll leave it there.

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TBH, even the effective altruism approach, I find problematic in some ways, because throwing money at a problem without engaging critically with it, generally results in avoiding necessary discussions about what we need to do differently as a society, in favour of what that lot over there need to do differently, and tends to favour maintaining a state of affairs where the altruists are the ones who get to say what altruisim is effective, and what isn’t.

This is pretty different to how I think about it. Personally I’m coming to the conclusion that my skills are just not a great vehicle for solving these problems, and that what is needed is political and economic action. I’m singularly badly placed to actually become a politician or an economist with any influence, so my best option is probably to take advantage of the fact that tech is ridiculously overpaid and either:

  1. Donate to others directly to facilitate them doing work that I can’t do myself, or will be much worse at than they are.
  2. Donate to existing activist organisations to put pressure on them indirectly.

Rather than avoiding discussions about required change, it’s more about being honest with myself about whether I’m the best person to actually achieve the required change.

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Hey everyone, great to see this being discussed here.

If people want to try running this on ClojureVerse then I think we can try out enabling anonymous posting. I do have some concerns that this might be opening a pandora’s box, and that this will put more work on the mods, so I would appreciate it if one or more people would stand up in that case to strengthen the mod team. We can then try it out and evaluate after 3 to 6 months if a) we are actually seeing constructive, critical posting being done anonymously and b) we are not getting more troll posts and spam than we are willing to accept.

Hi @plexus , very happy to read that. I think indeed that embedding in ClojureVerse seems like the best option now.

In concrete details, I would propose:

  1. A new category called “Sustainability-oriented work”, or maybe just “Sustainability work” for short. (“Sustainability” alone would be a mistake IMO, too vague, as this thread has illustrated.) Maybe we could have it in blue? :grinning:
  2. with sub-categories: “Companies & Projects”, “Job offers”, “Open-Source”, “General discussion”.
  3. I can write up one or more Welcome / README post to pin in that category, detailing:
    1. What content is appropriate / encouraged in each sub-category
    2. Stressing that this should not be viewed as the exclusive and all-encompassing approach towards sustainability for a Clojurian, mentioning in particular the alternatives that have been evoked in this thread, such as CAT, considering non-Clojure or non-programming jobs, effective altruism, political action, volunteering, activism at the workplace etc.
  4. Populating the “Companies & Projects” sub-category with a few company introductions - several have responded to this thread already, and hopefully I can get them to introduce themselves.

I understand the concern. I’m willing to step up if needed.

So, I’ve sat with this for a few days now and remain unconvinced that the goals of a) fostering tools and community to help adapt to /mitigate our climate crisis (in clojure centric way, of course) and b) holding companies and policy makers accountable are orthogonal. For a) I think we’re uniquely positioned to make it happen. For b) I think there are other organizations that can do a better job - e.g. https://truthteller.life
I think it would be fair for people to refer to other whistleblower sites to help provide perspective and a degree of separation that would allow us to focus more on doing the best job of a).

@ivar you might feel confident discussing and questioning the impact of a potential employer without anonymity ; but other applicants might not be. Recruiters might be reluctant as well, and I wouldn’t blame them.

The main intent of anonymity here is not to allow for whisteblowing (which IMO should be considered a rare last-resort measure) but to create good conditions for a constructive albeit challenging discussions, which are typically much more effective for understanding and orienting impact.

It’s not only about holding companies accountable are orthogonal. It’s much more about understanding their (potential) impact and value system in a fine way. Again, sustainability-oriented action involves diverse and sophisticated plans and tradeoffs, and experience shows that these things cannot be assessed objectively and without challenging discussions.

I also still don’t see why you would be against opt-in anonymity. If you don’t want to comment anonymously, then don’t, but let’s not exclude others from important conversations they would not have without anonymity.

@vvvvalvalval - this is one of those few areas where making anonymity available could occasionally be of value. But it would be a shame to allow this to leak too far through Clojureverse. I don’t know much about Discourse - is it possible to limit this to a single category?

As to it being opt-in and therefore necessarily harmless - I think there’s enough water under the internet bridge alone (never mind many other areas like driving, limited liability investment etc) for us to be confident it can be socially poisonous. That’s a known known. A risk worth taking for this purpose, agreed. But I’m just wondering if that risk can be limited.

I thought that would not be possible because anonymous posting is a global setting, but actually it seems that it’s possible to code Discourse Plugin to restrict the behaviour to a category: a similar development was made in Always-Anonymous Categories Plugin - plugin - Discourse Meta.

@plexus if I wrote a Discourse plugin for category-specific anonymous posting, would the mods consider adding it to ClojureVerse?

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Eep. I had no idea. Thanks for opening my eyes to this.

I checked out of the corporate IT space 10 years ago in large part on account of the issues that kicked off this thread. I started a small business (a home-based bakery). It’s certainly been challenging, but still a very constructive way to make positive changes in my community. For instance, it would be hard for my family purchases to keep a local farm in business, but I’ve spent almost $50k buying from about a dozen farms and that can be very significant to their success. A small business gives you some reasonable tax treatment and the immediacy and control that is lacking in so many other areas. Most small businesses are a high labor and low profit venture and can really use the technology help - especially when it provides the appropriate amount of value for the cost. Tons of useful nonprofit work happens at this same small scale and would benefit from this same type of appropriate technology. I encourage people to think about this as an area to apply your talents. Also my business network includes almost no one with any amount of computer systems background so it would be good to find some other collaborators.

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