Green Software Practitioner Study Day at Sussex Innovation Centre

This event follows on from my lightning talk, at Green Software Brighton in July.

I conceived Green Practitioner Study Day as a collaboration between LTUX Brighton and Green Software Brighton. Having previously collaborated on an amazing hackathon in 2024, we knew this could work well.

The idea for the event came to me during a Green Software Brighton meetup evening. Folks at the event mentioned completing the Green Software Foundation and The Linux Foundation’s Green Software Practitioner certificate which is a free self-study module now available on the Green Software Foundation’s website.

I too wanted to complete the certificate, but I found myself wondering if others encountered the same issues I did when it comes to self-paced online learning.

• Time: it wasn’t that the motivation wasn’t there, but as a small business owner the time wasn’t.
• Relevance: in tech noone is an island, we are part of interdisciplinary teams. It seemed to me that the power of this learning could only be unlocked through collaboration.
• Momentum: on that point driving forward sustainability needs multiple champions to gain traction. As a contractor I needed other folks’ stories to help understand what more I could be doing.
• Journeys: I wanted to know that I wasn’t alone and that others were also encountering the same barriers that I was. We are on this journey together!

All of this, I felt called for an in-person experience, by tech folks for tech folks. Where the time was reserved and structured to allow for the completion of the certificate and interdisciplinary disucssion. So, I set about creating an interest page as an experiment, were other people interested in such a day?

I thought that I would get maybe 12 people to attend. To my surprise, we sold out 27 spaces with a healthy waiting list. We were also given a grant from Brighton & Hove Buses to help defray the costs of the event and provide some free spaces for students and those on limited incomes.

What an attendee said:

…being able to be in a friendly location with a group of people interested in the same subject matter especially was incredibly, encouraging and helped a lot…I would’ve otherwise just spoke about it for ages but not actually managed to execute.

Will you join us at the next Green Practitioner Study Day?

I have a longer blog post that I need to write about the sustainability of the Study Day itself (it truly was a sustainable workshop!).

There are two further events planned in 2026.

• Friday, 30th January at WRAP (next to Brighton Station). Details and tickets at the LTUX Brighton Ticket Tailor site.
• Friday, 13th March at Plus X. Details and tickets are coming soon.

Pledge cards from the end of the event - using the mini-reusable whiteboards that I created for the Study Day which have now become a fixture at almost all my workshops. The three cards read, “Start doing: At 1st stage, consider carbon impact of anythng I work on; Keep doing: expanding my knowledge, learn ways to improve practice; Stop doing: being thoughtless about consumption. Thank you to Deeksha Bhushan for giving me permission to use this photo.