I’ve just finished estimating the carbon emissions from GUADEC 2022, and have a few interesting highlights from the report. The report is based on data collected from the streaming servers, registration data, and the post-conference survey.

• Having an online component to the conference increased the audience by a factor of 10: there were around 120 in-person attendees in Mexico, but there were an average of 1300 people using Big Blue Button.
• The carbon emissions from providing the remote infrastructure were around 2.8tCO₂e, or about 2kgCO₂e per remote attendee.
• Having a remote attendance party in Berlin allowed around one tenth of the attendees to attend with a factor of 10 lower transport emissions than those who attended in-person in Mexico. The average transport emissions for those who went to Berlin were 88kgCO₂e, whereas they were around 1tCO₂e for those going to Mexico.
• For context, the annual emissions per person can be at most 2.3tCO₂e by 2030 in order to limit global warming to 1.5C by the end of the century. That covers all food, travel, heating, purchases, etc. So travel to Mexico was 40% of the average attendee’s annual target.
• Half of the in-person attendees travelled from within Mexico, which will have skewed the mean transport emissions downwards. The distribution is more likely bimodal between around 50kgCO₂e for locals and more like 2-3tCO₂e for those coming from outside Mexico.
• As I wrote at the time, the remote attendance party was fun to attend and felt like it worked as a way to attend the conference (there were no A/V problems, we had some nice local socials, etc.). I would do it again.
• The post-conference survey had a low response rate of about 19% of registered attendees, which made some of this analysis hard. Please always fill in the post-conference survey! It doesn’t take long, and aside from any of this analysis, it helps the organisers plan conferences better in future.
• Many thanks to Kristi, Caroline and Bartłomiej for collecting the data needed for this analysis.
• If anyone spots problems in the analysis please say! This is not the kind of thing I practice doing very often and I’ve had to make a number of assumptions.

Other conferences

A post-conference survey has been done for other big GNOME events, such as GNOME.Asia and LAS. Would anyone be interested in doing a similar analysis for those events? Perhaps we can get a semi-automated pipeline in place for it.