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

Hey Jack,

> On May 7, 2018, at 7:54 AM, Jack Lenox <jacklenox@fastmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Not easy.  I’ll try to trim this a bit. 

> On Fri, 4 May 2018, at 9:39 PM, Mike Gifford wrote:
>>> On May 4, 2018, at 1:59 PM, W3C Community Development Team <team-community-process@w3.org <mailto: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 <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 <https://speakerdeck.com/mrchrisadams/planet-friendly-digital-design> (feel free to correct this if I'm wrong Chris!)

Great.

>>> 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/ <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.

I think it comes down to capacity. This is currently run by volunteers, but it needs some $$ or resources to see it gets properly maintained.  What can be done to ensure that this happens? Ideally Google would fund this!

>> 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 <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.

Perfect. Let me know when it’s up.  I’m happy to tweet about it.

Also, there’s the WP Slack group. I’ve joined recently.  Might be interesting to get some ideas there. Not sure that there is a channel for them. 

>>> Also, hello everyone! I'm Jack and I work as an engineer on the WordPress.com <http://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 <https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search?status[]=Open&issue_tags=performance>
>> Also building in mechanisms like:
>> https://www.drupal.org/project/imageapi_optimize <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/ <https://wordpress.tv/2017/06/22/tom-greenwood-zero-carbon-wordpress/>
Nice challenge.  There are some things that are optional issues that should remain as an optional issue.  CO2 emissions aren’t one of those. 

I’ve lead a lot of work in Drupal on accessibility.  By building accessibility into Core we were able to move ahead 3% of the internet to be more accessible for people with disabilities by default.  You can make things less accessible easy enough, but the default options are for more accessible content. 

> 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.

These folks here, right:
https://www.wholegraindigital.com/

Tim Frick’s on this thread and runs a BCorp too.  

> 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.

The WP ecosystem is a bit more feudalist (from what I can see) than the Drupal one.  It is a slightly different challenge, but still a winnable one I think. 

Mike
-- 
Mike Gifford, President, OpenConcept Consulting Inc. 
Drupal 8 Core Accessibility Maintainer - https://drupal.org/user/27930
Twitter: @mgifford @openconcept_ca

Open source web development for social change - http://openconcept.ca
Drupal Association Member | Acquia Partner | Certified B Corporation