Following through on the inaugural meeting on 9 July with associations, institutions, operators and digital industry companies who answered the call, today Arcep is publishing a detailed work programme (pdf - 259KB) for te workshops and discussions that will shape the work done by those participating in the “Achieving digital sustainability” collaboration platform, up to December 2020.
Assisting Arcep in the design and hosting of these workshops and discussions is Ouishare, – a collective devoted to challenging the status quo and societal dynamics through live encounters, studies and concrete experiments.
Five thematic workshops to identify potential courses of action on each link of the user experience chain
From buying a smartphone to the networks’ architecture, the aim of the five themes chosen for the workshops is to explore each of the links in the user experience chain, to identify best practices and potential courses of action, be it educating consumers or rethinking how the sector’s players do business. These workshops will provide an opportunity for everyone to share their views, practices, tools and skills, and so fuel this collective brainstorming.
- Workshop 1: Adapting business practices to achieve digital sustainability
- Workshop 2: Combating obsolescence to achieve digital sustainability
- Workshop 3: Choosing our networks to achieve digital sustainability
- Workshop 4: Rethinking digital content and services to achieve digital sustainability
- Workshop 5: Designing networks (architecture, sharing) to achieve digital sustainability
Additional work could also be done on inventorying available data and measuring digital tech’s carbon footprint, in concert with the concerned public authorities, notably France’s Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME).
Two “big discussions” to tackle the issue of digital sustainability in society
Environmental issues could open a new chapter in regulation, which would join the regulator’s other core responsibilities: regional development and safeguarding user freedoms. These “big discussions” will help to identify potential sticking points between digital sustainability and these other core issues, and to lay out the resulting challenges for public policymakers.
- How to achieve both connectivity for all and digital sustainability?
- How to safeguard both digital sustainability and user freedoms?
A co-authored report to be published before the end of the year
A report scheduled to be published before the end of this year will mark an important milestone for this work, and for the work that Arcep is doing on environmental issues. Co-authored with the stakeholders and designed to inform public policymakers, it will be composed of three parts:
- A scorecard from Arcep, which will include a beta version of the Green Barometer, whose purpose is to provide the public with the most relevant data on the environmental impact of networks, devices and usage, along with a preliminary inventory of the players’ best practices for rising to environmental challenges;
- Contributions from the participants, giving everyone a chance to voice their proposals;
- Arcep’s initial courses of action and proposals for going further in responding to environmental issues.
The dialogue between the participants during the series of workshops will therefore provide the input for this report.
Any stakeholders or experts who were unable to participate in the July 9th workshop but would like to contribute to the process, are invited to contact: numeriquesoutenable[a]arcep.fr.