Speaker Introduction – Hannah Smith
Beginning 2025 I had a video call with Hannah Smith to talk about her and her work at the Green Web Foundation. I announced her for Berlin that November and then the year had other plans. So I am particularly glad to say this one properly: Hannah is our next speaker to be revealed for Düsseldorf 2027.
Most of the times I meet a person, before I invite them to come and speak. Sometimes, though, you don’t meet and the least I try then is to jump on one or a few video calls to see who that person is, if they fit into the idea of beyond tellerrand and, well, to simply get a feeling for that person. During my call with Hannah it pretty quickly was clear, that she’d fit my idea of the event and her topic surely is more important that ever.
Who is Hannah
Hannah is Director of Operations at the Green Web Foundation, the not-for-profit working towards a fossil-free internet by 2030. If you have ever checked whether a site runs on green hosting, used CO2.js or read Branch magazine, you most likely have used something her team built. She arrived there by way of a computer science degree, years as a freelance WordPress developer in Bristol, teaching on a developer bootcamp and seven years at the Environment Agency managing large change projects. In 2020 she started Green Tech South West, which is still running and still free. She lives deep in Exmoor National Park, in one of Britain’s few remaining temperate rainforests and has written about watching a month of rain fall there in a few hours.
Why Hannah is Taking The beyond tellerrand Stage
Well, what made me want her on this stage, though, is not the tooling. In a talk called “Start at the end” she argued that our industry is rubbing humanity away one click at a time in the name of efficiency and that digital sustainability is quietly picking up the same habit. Her answer is not a better metric. It is better stories about the future we are supposedly building, because beliefs come from stories rather than from charts and far more time spent playing, because play is where imagination comes from. She closed by demanding more play in one of the most relentlessly rational industries there is.
She describes her own job as enabling joyful and effective delivery. Not as a perk. As the work.
beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2027 takes place on 19 and 20 April.