Re: Bringing the Green Web to WordPress [via Sustainable Web Design Community Group]

Hey Mike,

Thanks for your message, and thanks everyone else for your replies. I'm
replying to each one individually in an effort for things not to get too
nested, and hopefully be easier to follow.
On Fri, 4 May 2018, at 9:39 PM, Mike Gifford wrote:
> Hey Jack,
> 
> Thanks for posting this. 
> 
>> On May 4, 2018, at 1:59 PM, W3C Community Development Team <team-community-
>> process@w3.org> wrote:>> With Mozilla's 2018 Internet Health Report finally shining a light on
>> sustainability, and thanks to Chris Adams' presentation at MozFest
>> last year, I've been inspired to seriously up my game in terms of
>> helping wherever I can in this field.> 
> Mozilla’s been such a great force looking at the health of the
> Open Web.> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Internet_Health_Report
> 
> Is there a link to  Chris Adams’ presentation?

Unfortunately Chris' exact presentation isn't available. Though I think
his slide deck was very close to, if not the same as, this one:
https://speakerdeck.com/mrchrisadams/planet-friendly-digital-design
(feel free to correct this if I'm wrong Chris!)
> 
>> As a first step, I've put together a very simple WordPress widget
>> that allows users to easily add The Green Web Foundation's badge to
>> their website. I think of the widget more as a marketing tool than
>> anything else – i.e. it gets The Green Web Foundation into WordPress'
>> shop window.> 
> I like the The Green Web Foundation, but it isn’t being well
> supported.  I’ve been trying to get Amazon’s new green hosting listed:> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/
> 
> But as I understand it the GWF has  “a self-service account
> environment where - normally - owners register their details and keep
> them up to date."> 
> So far Amazon hasn’t stepped forward to do this.

Hmm, yes that's a pain. I've successfully encouraged a few UK-based
hosts to list themselves. The GWF does seem to have listed Facebook and
Google hosted products as green. So presumably there is a way of adding
big hosts that haven't yet got round to the self-service approach. I'll
email René about this.
> 
>> You can see the widget in action on my blog (bottom of the sidebar).> 
> Cool.
> 
>> My next steps within WordPress are to create a theme that
>> incorporates all of the sustainable web design techniques. My goal is
>> to make a theme that can theoretically score 100 with Ecograder. I
>> say theoretically because some things are dependent on the host,
>> MozRank etc. But if, for example, I could get the demo site for the
>> theme near to 100, that'd be awesome. And I could also centre all of
>> the content on the demo site around Internet sustainability.> 
> You know about these past talks about Sustainable UX:
> http://www.sustainableux.com/talks/

Yes, thank you. I've been gradually working my way through them.

> 
> I like to look at this from a systems point of view, I wrote up this
> for Drupal:> http://openconcept.ca/blog/mike/tips-sustainable-drupal-7-8-website
> 
> Similar stuff could be done for WordPress. 

That's a great post! I'm going to write an equivalent one for WP.

> 
>> Also, hello everyone! I'm Jack and I work as an engineer on the
>> WordPress.com VIP team. I'm rather passionate about environmental
>> issues. :) I was the Green Party candidate in a UK parliamentary by-
>> election last year which meant I appeared on TV a bit!> 
> Most performance issues will have a sustainability impact:
> https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search?status%5B%5D=Open&issue_tags=performance> 
> Also building in mechanisms like:
> https://www.drupal.org/project/imageapi_optimize
> 
> But generally with Drupal I try to ask myself, what could be fixed in
> core so that we don’t just fix the 1% of the users that actually add
> the extension, but that we are able to shift the whole community.
> We’ve done this with accessibility. Sustainability not so much.> 
> Imagine if we could save 1% of the power used in all of the WordPress
> sites out there?  What if we could make incremental gains so that it
> was easier for everyone to understand how their users will have better
> experiences (and use less power) if sustainability wasn’t just an
> afterthought.
I totally agree. WordPress is in a similar place I think. Though sadly I
think we're currently missing folks like you, so I'll try to get that
going. It may be that there are efforts going on that I've missed, but I
haven't yet encountered anything beyond a couple of WordCamp talks. A
notable talk was by Tom Greenwood at WordCamp Europe:
https://wordpress.tv/2017/06/22/tom-greenwood-zero-carbon-wordpress/
He runs a London-based agency which is a B Corp. I'm in touch with him
and am hoping we can do some work together on sustainability and
WordPress.
I'm very keen to get some of this thinking into core. A lot of core
WordPress development is centred around feature plugins that can be
merged. I'll try to carve out some time to start putting together a
plugin that makes sustainability improvements and could potentially
be merged.
Best,
Jack