Why should there be a WordPress Sustainability Group?

chris

Why should there be a WordPress Sustainability Group?

Just like there is Umbraco Sustainability Group, and Wagtail Sustainability Group, and something related in the Drupal Community, I think it’s useful for there to be a WordPress sustainability group, who have an interest in understanding and reducing the climate impact of the project.

These are the arguments I would use for it to exist, and for there to be effort put into understanding how the use of digital services build around WordPress result in a measurable environmental impact.

TLDR:

You don’t need to care about climate to think it’s a good idea to have a group like this in your OSS community – you just need to care about reducing the perceived risk associated with an open source project you or your organisation relies on.

If you expect people to use your product or service, you might be expected to help people responsible for compliance when using it now.

It’s a bit like how you need to think about accessibility more these days too.

You should care about having a health OSS community too, but even if you don’t, you probably want to care about helping people comply with the laws they are bound by.

1. It’s increasingly required by the law in different parts of the world, as part of compliance

Here’s a snippet from the CSRD law in Europe:

If it is material for the undertaking’s Scope 3 emissions, it shall disclose the GHG emissions from purchased cloud computing and data centre services as a subset of the overarching Scope 3 category “upstream purchased goods and services”.

This law affects organisations that make up around 80% of Europe’s GDP. Many of them use WordPress, and a cloud service using WordPress will usually count as an org’s Scope 3 emissions now. More and more people trying to stay compliant will want to know this information, so they can disclose as the laws now require them to.

2. If WordPress doesn’t do it or provide guidance, it will be done poorly or in a way that exposes users to various organisational risks

When organisations try to work out the environmental impact of digital services they are responsible, in the absence of good data and guidance, they will often come up with analysis that is riddled with errors, and either wildly over-declare the environmental impact, or wildly under-declare it.

The first is a real PR headache, and can scare off users.

The second can result in significant fines – as in percentage of annual turnover fines – for under-declaring supply chain risks in documents that require external assurance from auditors.

3. Competitors are doing it, and if companies need this as part of compliance they will need to switch to compliant solutions that are not WordPress

Part of owning and managing a services relies on understanding it’s environmental impact, just like understanding what you can say about its accessibility, as a part of helping your users can customers comply with the laws binding them.

This is being done by a growing number of competing CMS options now. Umbraco CMS does this. The Wagtail CMS does this.

If it’s materially harder to do this with WordPress than alternatives, then it counts against the suitability of WordPress for projects who need to be able talk about this with confidence.

Ask some people famliar with the matter inside Automattic (or rather, who have since left it) and they will tell you that a condition winning work with some large financial services clients in regulated industries was that Automattic could give them some response about having processes or numbers available for their VIP product that satisfied them enough to close the deal.

Having this helps (helped?) for Automattic. Ddisbanding the project’s sustainability does not help it, and it likely helps competitors.

0. It’s something the community has already asked for it, and is dedicating time and energy to already

I guess should have led this this one, and this speaks to the increasingly erratic stewardship of the project. So, you might call number this point zero I guess, and I mention it here as it’s speaking to different kinds of risks to the kinds downstream customers/clients on WordPress projects care about in the shorter term.

As I understand it, the WordPress project is supposed to be a open source community project, with related but separate goals and interests to a single corporate sponsor.

The point of an actively maintained a open source project that presents itself as part of a community is that there is some expectation of community governance, beyond BDFL. I think it’s a sign of a mature software community that it eventually outgrows the awkward BDFL phase once there are enough diverse stakeholders.

Paolo Melchiorre

@chris it would be interesting to create a Django and/or Python Sustainability Groups.
CC @thibaudcolas

Chris Adams

@paulox @chris @thibaudcolas ahoy! Thanks for suggesting this! We’ve sort of been using the Wagtail project as a place to prototype how groups might work because we know there is definite interest there and buy-in at a board level.

However, I want to understand more how time and money is raised, and allocated first inside a larger project like Django (or even Python), so I’ve applied to join the Django fundraising WG as a first step.

Self nominating to join the fundraising WG by mrchrisadams · Pull Request #29 · django/dsf-working-groups

Hi there, I'm opening this pull request after some email conversations with @sabderemane in the second half of 2024, about joining the fundraising working group. My background: I currently work as ...

GitHub (github.com)

Paolo Melchiorre

@mrchrisadams @chris @thibaudcolas well done

Thibaud Colas

@paulox @mrchrisadams @chris yes please! We need more people, not sure where they are. My latest attempt: https://discuss.python.org/t/who-works-on-digital-sustainability-in-the-python-world/66890/