The internet is a global, public resource and should be fossil-free by 2030.
Meet our Green Web Fellows 2023
Green Web Fellows 2022-2023
The Green Web Foundation has selected five practitioners for a paid part-time fellowship of 10 months for our 2023 cohort. Learn more about the fellows in this blog post.
These fellows will deliver a project that contributes to the digital rights and climate justice movements. They will also learn together and from experienced practitioners about what powers control the internet, how it is fueled, and what we can do about it.
How the Fellowship Works
Learn in the Open
Openness is a tool to shift power. We document our learning processes so that others can build on these experiences and our own learning can be strengthen through reflection.
Collaborative Ethos
Fellows support each other’s learning and participate in workshops on decolonizing the digital rights movement, effective climate communication, digital sustainability and more.
Bridge Movements
Each fellow designs and delivers a project that solidifies their learning and contributes to their community. Fellows are supported in facilitative leadership, capacity building and strategic narratives.
Benefits
Fellows receive:
- stipend of €8,400 to compensate your time
- project budget of €2,500 to pay your collaborators, materials, travel and other expenses for your proposed project
- mentorship from experienced practitioners in greening the internet, climate justice, digital rights and facilitative leadership
Responsibilities
Fellows will:
- dedicate half a day a week to their fellowship for 10 months
- design and deliver a fellowship project that contributes to digital rights and climate justice
- participate in weekly cohort calls and monthly online workshops while documenting their learning in the open
Timeline
- October 19: Final presentations fellowship cohort 2023
- Q3 2023: Applications open for fellowship cohort 2024
Advisory Committee
Our Green Web Fellowship advisory committee for 2022-23 had the tough task of helping us read through the 800+ applications we received for the fellowship and make our selection.
Andres Colmenares
Co-founder of IAM and the Billion Seconds Institute and Coordinator of Open Climate
Persephone Lewis
Professor of Practice and Tribal Liaison at the University of San Diego and Honouring Our Guardians Coordinator at Whose Knowledge?
Fieke Jansen
Postdoc researcher at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University and Coordinator of Digital Rights and Climate Justice Funder Collective
Why this Fellowship
With COP27 underway, we are clearly seeing the gap between the need for systemic change and the dominant narratives that “technology will save us.”
The internet is the world’s largest coal-powered machine. By burning fossil fuels to power digital infrastructure, the internet is responsible for over 3% of the globe’s annual carbon emissions.
Control over the internet is also increasingly consolidated. The open internet ecosystem—one of humanity’s greatest public resources—is turning into a brittle and polluting monoculture.
The digital rights movement has long advocated for people’s safe access, participation and empowerment online. It has developed successful campaigns and alternative services to challenge the centralization of power. However, many digital rights practitioners lack the knowledge and resources to tackle technology’s environmental impact, let alone team up with climate justice activists for mutual support and to build a shared agenda.
Conversely, climate justice organizers have identified that tech companies and governments are pushing problematic technical “solutions” to climate change. Climate justice organizers are calling for a digital rights perspective in how technologies are developed and deployed—and to challenge who is in control of them and to whose benefit.
With support from the Ford Foundation, the Green Web Foundation is offering a fellowship program to help bridge the digital rights and climate justice movements.
We’re calling for practitioners who share this vision and dream of a fossil-free internet—one that serves people and contributes to a more just and sustainable world!
Our Values
Our fellowship program is based on the beliefs that:
- The internet is a global, public resource that should serve our collective liberation and ecological sustainability.
- We must go beyond tech solutionism and towards intersectional climate justice work.
- There is no “right way” to learn about and address these issues. Instead, we embrace vulnerability and care while committing to transforming ourselves and our field.
- Openness is a strategy to shift power.
- We will learn better by learning together and from a wide, diverse set of voices.
We are embarking on this program so that we and other practitioners can better connect sustainability to root causes and inequities experienced at different intersections—gender, race, class, ability, and so on. We acknowledge that these issues require many voices and that our work will inevitably be incomplete, yet we believe it is an essential first step.
Shifts in Thinking
Our program is oriented towards these five shifts in thinking:
- Individual blame and shame → Analyze power structures and challenge destructive defaults
- Carbon tunnel vision → Center human rights and operate within planetary boundaries
- Technology will save us → Foster an open and diverse internet and divest from Big Tech
- Just make technology more efficient → A just transition to a fossil-free internet with tech workers
- Quick fixes → Sustained transformative practice
Green Web Fellows 2021-2022
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Ford Foundation Tech & Society team for the core support to this program.
Thanks as well to the program advisory committee (Andres Colmenares, Persephone Lewis, and Fieke Jansen), to the first cohort of Green Web Fellows (Melissa Hsiung, Emilio Velis, Hannah Smith, Fieke Jansen and Slammer Musuta), the Internet Society Foundation and Mozilla Foundation for their support of the first cohort.