Your content has a carbon footprint

Thursday 21 March 2024, 02:35 UTC, Stage 1

Digital content and the tools we use to distribute and consume it demand high energy, impacting the environment. This talk explores balancing user relevance with environmental sustainability.

The content we create and the tools that we use to create it are increasingly digital. Those bits and bytes are nothing more than energy, and energy - at least for the foreseeable future - almost always has a carbon footprint. 

The rise in techniques that also demand even greater computational power - and thus, energy - such as machine learning and AI also contribute to this. On the one hand we might strive to create more relevance to the user experience through content personalisation, but on the other hand we do so at the cost of the environment. How do we strike the optimal balance?

This talk will examine how we can deliver the best information with the least harm.

Session takeaway

Know how to balance audience needs and environmental impact.

Meet your session facilitator

Alisa Bonsignore (USA)
Founder & Strategist, Clarifying Complex Ideas, LLC

Alisa develops sustainable content strategies for global clients who use her pioneering metrics to measure and mitigate the carbon footprint of their digital information. Her peer-reviewed published research is the result of asking questions, connecting dots, and coming to inconvenient conclusions about the impact of the work that she’d been doing since the dawn of the internet.

She is an Associate Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication, a Certified Master Gardener specializing in xeriscaping, and a keynote speaker. She is a research nerd, an avid reader, and a crochet enthusiast who is taller than she appears on Zoom.

Languages spoken: English

A global problem they’d love to solve: The carbon footprint of digital content (but I’m working on it!)

Something they can’t be without: Pen and paper