— 2023 —

a year in review

ClimateAction.tech

Theory of change

1. Reflecting on 2023�CAT structure, projects, and learnings
2. CAT Member PAWS�Projects, actions, wins & stuff we learned at CAT
3. Goals for 2024

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Reflecting on 2023

CAT structure, projects, learnings

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Checking in on our 2023 goals

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CAT structure

Forming a Community-Interest Company

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CAT structure�Forming a Community-Interest Company (CIC)

Purpose: Ensure CAT’s future as a mission-driven, independent community

On June 14th 2023 CAT became a legal not-for-profit entity in the form of a Community-Interest Company (CIC). This enables CAT to raise funds to pay for events, people, and programs and it provides structure for decision-making and leadership roles. The CAT organizers (Melissa, Chris, Heather, Sandra) are currently forming the Board of Directors.

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Next steps: Build on this to get more community participation and governance (see goals for 2024)

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CAT projects

Supporting our Theory of Change

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CAT project highlight�Mini grants

Purpose: Mini grants allow us to give small amounts of money to community projects that align with our Theory of Change.

We kicked off the pilot over the summer and �the first project is funded!

Learn more | Apply

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💰

💰

💶

💵

Next steps: Continue to evaluate applications at the end of every quarter (Mar, Jun, Sep, Dec)

💰

💷

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CAT project highlight�#EcoWeb

Purpose: Our aim is to raise awareness and motivate collaboration between departments to ultimately contribute to a greener internet and drive sustainable change in website design and development.

By examining these 500 websites and evaluating their carbon emissions, we aim to create an industry benchmark that highlights the importance of sustainable digital practices.

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400

Organisations already analysed

💪

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CAT project highlight�#EcoWeb

📋 How

• Analyse the digital footprint of 500 websites of climate action businesses
• Send surveys to assess their efforts and Net-Zero strategies
• Create case studies of proactive companies

💗 Team

• Diverse team: 70 volunteers from all over the world and with different backgrounds (technicians, marketers, researchers, students, etc.)
• 5 core teams which meet regularly
• Rich exchange between the volunteers

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Next steps: Sending surveys to the organisations

ClimateAction.tech

CAT project highlight�Branch Magazine

Purpose: Written by and for people who dream of a sustainable and just internet for all, Branch offers a space for personal reflection, critical engagement, as well as experimentation and storytelling.

In collaboration with others, we published issue 5 and issue 6 of Branch magazine. Issue 7 also went live earlier this month 🙌

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Other CAT projects & resources in 2023

How we developed a shared understanding

• Newsletter: Our weekly newsletters this year were sent to over 200K people and included community news, external events, podcasts, news highlights, and job listings.
• ClimateAction.tech website & blog posts: Started publishing blog posts regularly (16 so far!) to celebrate the community and member projects. Blog post ideas welcome in #cat-blog. We also continued improving the usability of our website.
• Outline knowledge base: We moved away from Google Docs and continued using Outline to support activities and capture knowledge shared in the community. Next we’re planning to clean up #greener channels content and make public. Seeking Outline maintainers!

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Other CAT projects & resources in 2023

How we enabled connections

• Slack channels: Our channel hosts are focussed on enabling connections in our Slack channels through summarising activity, responding in threads, and moderation
• #cat-roulette: Our donut integration matched 143 CATs in pairs or trios so they were able to connect and meet
• CAT directory: Our member directory helps CATs browse and see who’s in the community and 172 new CATs added themselves to the directory
• Events: We ran 27 online events including 8 watch parties and 3 book club discussion groups (notes) and CAT members self-organised on Slack to meet in various cities across the globe
• Climate justice squads: CAT collaborated with Work on Climate and coordinated 5 small, themed groups that met over multiple weeks on the topic of Climate Justice

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Get involved

Where we need help most urgently:

• Lead a project or program (like our mini grants, newsletter, or online events)
• Content & Outline editing (Trello card)
• Prep and/or host one of our events
• Moderate Slack channels

View all open volunteering roles & tasks

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All CAT projects are run �by volunteers, and you �can get involved too!

How to get involved

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CAT learnings

Insights from running the community

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Member survey highlights

In 2022 we started our Member Survey which we now send out 2x per year.

📝~40 responses per survey. Please help complete the next survey. We want to hear from you! Next survey is open now.

👨‍💻CAT members rate themselves a 3 of our 4 in their understanding of climate and tech. Lots of expertise here.

🙌The top ways that CAT has helped members are:

• Learned more about the intersection of the tech industry and climate
• Made meaningful relationships
• Answered my questions

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“I've met a lot of cool people through Slack and it's a community I look forward to continue to have moving forward.”

“CAT is my primary community/go-to space to get resources & support on the intersectionality of climate and tech.”

“I found CAT through their Climate Justice Squads, which has been life changing for me.”

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Stats and what they might tell us

#️⃣ Slack: We had between 600-700 weekly active members on Slack. Most CATs read posts and we had a steady 100-200 members who posted weekly. We believe our most active channels were #4-share-your-work, #3-ask-anything, and #greener-webdev. �Learn more about our channels

📅 Events: Organising events takes a lot of time and effort and because we’ve seen a drop-off in attendance for our online events over the past year, we’ve adjusted our events strategy and will be running fewer, more intentional online events in the future. More CATs are using our #local Slack channels to organise meetings in-person!

📰 Newsletter: Our weekly newsletters have a pretty regular open rate of about 40% and from an increase in page views over the second half of the year, we can also deduce that folks are returning to the newsletter archive regularly.

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Self-organizing can't be rushed

We set out to form a legal entity in 2021 and it took us about two years to finish this process (Timeline & background doc).

Now that we’ve made it, the work is far from over. See our Community Structure goals for 2024 to learn about next steps.

Our initial goal: Establish a democratic, self-organizing organization

The reality: Our core community is small and at capacity

The adjustment: Establish a simple director-led organization and slowly develop the community's ability to self-organize

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CAT Member PAWS

Projects, Actions, Wins & Stuff we learned at CAT

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Highlight: Taking action in the industry

3 projects that support different tech roles

A collection of 34 nature-positive best practices to enhance your product management skills and contribute to the fight against climate change and biodiversity crises: Climate Product Leaders

My CAT handle: @François Burra

A proposal for the next version of carbon-aware software, called grid-aware computing.

My CAT handle: @Hannah and @Ismael

Season 2 of the Green the Web podcast discusses sustainable digital design best practices, ecological and social User Research, Information Architecture, User Interface Design, personal stories, business talk and more.

My CAT handle: @Sandy Dähnert

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Product management

Climate Product Management Playbook

Software engineering

Grid-aware computing

Design

Green the Web podcast

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Highlight: Taking action in the industry�Exploring env. impact of ChatGPT

Launched the Responsible AI Pledge Challenge with @Daniel Hartley to encourage people to learn and contribute to more responsible AI.

Made a pledge to learn about the env. impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, shared resources in CAT, wrote a blog post about the topic, and I now continue to raise awareness about the worrying lack of transparency in various conversations.

My CAT handle: @Alja Isaković

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Your ChatGPT usage is worrying polar bears. Image generated by DALL·E

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Highlight: Taking action at work

Torchbox carbon footprint report

My CAT handle: @Thibaud Colas; @Olly Willans

A carbon footprint report for a digital agency, put together based on learnings shared by other CAT members.��View the report:�torchbox.com/impact-report-2022/

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More PAWS

But wait! There’s more! �Have a look at the full presentation of CAT projects, actions, wins & stuff folks learned at CAT in 2023.

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Goals for 2024

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Goals for 2024

CAT structure & what we do

1 · Take care of organizational needs

• New organizers and leaders
• Grow core community (folks who actively participate and give back to the community)
• Build on Community Interest Company progress and increase community participation in decision-making

2 · Align �mission needs with member needs

Member needs

1 · Leadership & professional development opportunities�2 · Resources for climate advocacy�3 · Job search assistance

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Mission needs

1 · Climate advocates in tech�2 · Well-defined green software practices

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Goals for 2024

Community projects

3 · Creating identity

• CAT badges
• CAT member profiles

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1 · Enabling connection

• Community guidelines
• Slack moderation
• Slack channel hosting
• #cat-roulette
• Events
• New: Member directory revamp

2 · Developing a shared understanding

• Newsletter
• ClimateAction.tech website & blog posts
• Outline maintenance
• New: Outline publishing

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…and other CAT member-led projects (e.g. volunteer-run or funded through our mini grants)

We need your help to do this. Join us as a volunteer or lead!�How to get involved

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Thanks go out to…

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Thanks to our volunteers!

Hannah Smith, Siôn Elis Williams, Alja Isaković, Andrea Magnorsky, Brett Duboff, Elisa E, Łukasz Mastalerz, Claire Thornewill, Owen Rogers, Tom Kennes, Aïda Cissé, Caroline Schneider, Nat Darke, Clare Tomassian, Ben Tongue, Dan Robinson, Matt Sirkis, Gaël Duez, Poppe Guthrie, Evan Hahn, Mary Ma, Marwa Eltaib, Richard Kim, Yang Hong

✨

🙏

✨

✨

🙏

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Thanks to active CAT members…

…for starting conversations and reaching out to each other for meaningful dialogue or collaboration. And thanks for contributing to conversations, sharing your knowledge, showing up at events, staying curious, learning with us, and for making this community �as humble and friendly as it is.

😌

❤️

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Thanks

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Current CAT Organizers

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Sandra Pallier

@Sandra

Melissa Hsiung

@Melissa

Heather Baden

@Heather Baden

Chris

Adams

@mrchrisadams

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