On the spot: clean the cloud

Hands-on digital sustainability workshop

Does your inbox have hundreds, maybe thousands, of emails you will never open again? Is your Drive full of files from projects you have long finished, or that you do not even know why they are there? It all costs energy, and it is adding up faster than you might think.

The time has come to finally clean it up. In Clean the Cloud workshop, we tackle it together. During this hands-on workshop, you will work directly in your own Gmail and Google Drive, with practical guidance on what to delete, what to organise, and what might need to be archived.

We will introduce tools that make this process easier, including filters, labels, and list views, and help you decide what belongs in the cloud, in Corsa, on the Y drive, or nowhere at all.

Beyond the practical clean up, we will explore why this matters beyond your own workflow and sanity. Digital storage and email traffic contribute to carbon emissions, and good digital hygiene supports transparency, accountability, and collaboration within organisations. As a reference, the average email emits around 4 grams of CO2, and most of us have thousands we will never read again.

You will leave the workshop with a lighter inbox, a Drive that makes sense to you, and habits that are easier to maintain.

_{This is a Research Support Hub workshop. The Research Support Hub is a CIT initiative to support all researchers and PhD-candidates throughout the University of Groningen on data management, geo-services, statistics, machine Learning, AI-tools and high performance computing.}