In 2008 anthropologist Dawn Nafus delivered a short talk at OSCON on rapid social change and how the tech industry can jump ahead and be the leader in this industry. While I see action by the environmentalists to use more open source tech, I don't see a lot of action within the open source community to look at environmental problems. Am I not looking hard enough?

Here are three challenges Dawn identified:

1. The world is awash with large data sets. In most cases we are not giving life to this information. At best we usually see an "add GPS and stir" treatment of information. But what does the data really tell us? Bright and shiny seduction of thinking that information is useful and applicable. Adding data is not the same thing as adding context. Mobile friend finders which tell you when people are nearby are not meaningful. It's just data.
2. We are in a global food and water crisis. The crisis not just for hippies. As techies the open source world is really good at decentralizing power. How can we help make food local too? In the US some farmers are now using mules instead of tractors to save on fuel costs. (Petrol was reaching record highs around the time of this talk.) Over half the world derives its income from agriculture. What can FOSS do to make it easier for locals to feed themselves?
3. We need to strengthen global growth in tech producers, not just consumers and we need to understand who those producers are. India is not China. We need new lenses for seeing growth.