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… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the conference organizers)
• 7 days spent related to the events (time preparing + time traveling+ time attending + time following up)
• ~4 metric tons of CO₂ (mostly emitted by the flights)

Particularly troubling was the amount of CO₂. In most areas of my life, I have a small environmental footprint (at least by North American standards) ? my household has no car, eats a low-meat diet centered around local organic foods, works from home, etc. ? unfortunately, all of that pales next to how much I fly. In 2007 alone, I traveled to Australia, Boston, D.C., Finland, Germany, Mountain View, Norway, Portland, Romania, San Francisco, Slovenia and a few other places I can’t immediately recall.

After spending a few weeks in a deep blue funk about the whole business, I started working out a plan for reducing the impact of my travel. The axiomatic version of the plan is, “Do plan. Don’t fly.” The more verbose and practical draft version of the plan follows:

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Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a run

Programming Methods Laboratory

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