Sustain WP

Nahuai Badiola
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Sustain WP is a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress created by Nahuai Badiola. In this series he will share his journey learning about digital sustainability and WordPress. To do so, in each episode he will talk with members of WordPress community, with different backgrounds, to discuss sustainability in the context of the WordPress project, to better understand where we are now and what we can do to make WordPress more sustainable.

Episodes

  1. 10/09/2023

    Episode 0: What to expect from this limited podcast series

    Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress.  I'm your host Nahuai Badiola, a freelance WordPress Developer based in Barcelona, active WP community member, indeed I'm part of the Sustainability Team and also a Green Web Foundation fellow (more on this later).  I'll introduce myself a bit better in the next episode. In this series I'll share my journey learning about digital sustainability and WordPress. To do so, in each episode I'll be taking with members of WordPress community, with different backgrounds, to discuss sustainability in the context of the WordPress project, to better understand where we are now and what we can do to make WordPress more sustainable. The Why So why I'm I doing this? First because I care about the topic and second this limited podcast series is the project I developed under the TGWF fellowship.  When I was preparing my proposal I based it on the pain points I had identified during the last years where I was learning and talking about digital sustainability in WordPress (I'll talk more about this in the next episode). These pain points are: The lack of awareness on digital sustainability on WordPress users (and community). I know, if you are listening to this probably you are somehow aware, but there are a lot of people out there using WordPress that never heard about it. The existing awareness it's tie to a carbon tunnel vision, meaning that the general view equals sustainability to CO2 emissions, which is not the whole picture, at all. Indeed It's difficult to talk about digital sustainability and not to focus, almost exclusively, on strategies that aim to reduce carbon footprint. That's why we have to bring other areas of the sustainability to the conversation. Not everyone is on the same page when talking about sustainability. It can mean different things to different people. Indeed I wrote about "sustainability as umbrella term" on TGWF blog. I'll leave the link on the show notes together with other resources. The aim So the aim of this podcast series is: Raise awareness around sustainability on WordPress. Bring a more holistic view of sustainability. Hear from different voices. Share my learning journey in case you can extract something useful for you. Invite people to join the conversation and, why not, to join the WordPress Sustainability Team. The series structure With this in mind this is how this series is going be structure: In the next episode I'll explain how I got started on WordPress and digital sustainability and I'll have a special guest who has been key to my digital sustainability journey. With her we will introduce the 3 pillars of sustainability, which are environmental, social and economical. In the next 3 episodes I'll talk about these 3 pillars, one pilar per episode, with members of the WordPress community. The goal is to understand what they mean to different people. With this in mind, in the following 2 episodes (episodes 4 and 5) we will explore how can we improve WordPress sustainability. Next we will talk about the WordPress Sustainability Team creation, what we are doing and what we would like to do. The final episode will be a conclusion, in it I'll try to summarise everything I learned during this journey. The release schedule, this is only relevant if you are listening to it close to this episode release, but if that's the case, you will find the first episode also published. Then I'll release one episode per week. This serves a double purpose, in one hand it gives space to have a conversation around the topics treated in the episodes, I'm aware that's an optimistic view, but giving space to things to happen it's always good. And the second one is that it gives me time to finish editing the rest of the episodes. Which if you ask me it's also a good thing. Acknowledgements and disclaimer Before I go, I'd like to thank every guest for been so generous to share a bit of their time with me and also TGWF for creating the space and opportunity for this to happen. Disclaimer, this is a limited (emphasis on limited) series and as you could guess I won't be able to cover EVERYTHING regarding sustainability and WordPress, I did my best to summarize what I learned so far on this amazing and polyhedric/nuanced topic. This disclaimer may be more for me than for you but I really want to apply the saying of "the perfect is the enemy of the good". I hope you find this premise enticing enough to hit play on the next episode. Resources The Green Web Foundation Sustainability as an umbrella term post (GWF) Learning about digital sustainability interview (GWF) Call for applications Green Web Fellowship 2023/24 Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon

    6 min

  2. 10/11/2023

    Episode 1: How I learned what sustainability is

    Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited series podcast about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will explain how I got into WordPress and sustainability, and more importantly how I learned what sustainability is. For this part I'll be joined by Hannah Smith who had a key role on how I approach the topic nowadays. In the previous episode I promised you to tell you who the hell I I'm, and since you will be experiencing this journey through my lens I think it makes sense to know, at least, how I got into WordPress and sustainability. I have a degree on biology, so you could think, aha! that's where environmental care/interest come from. I'm no saying no but my PhD was on neuroscience, so the link it's not that obvious. I also did some post-docs but even if I loved doing research the scientist lifestyle was not align with how I wanted to live. So I decided to become a freelance to have more time and freedom. You can laugh, I'm aware that I'm an optimist, grounded, but an optimist nevertheless. Long story short, around 2014 I found WordPress and I fell in love with it's community. Don't get me wrong, the software was great (it's even better now) but the people involved with the project tops that. I took me some time to learn the ropes of been a freelance and become a WordPress developer, but I could say I managed to do it. I also started to get involved with the community, been a Meetup and WordCamp speaker, a volunteer or organizing a Meetup in my town. Ok that covers pretty much the WordPress part, but what about the sustainability?  The inflexion point was when I attended to a talk on WordCamp Pontevedra 2019 by Roberto Vazquez who talked about the environmental impact of websites. The rationale behind it's quite simple and obvious, the websites are hosted in servers that need energy and most of it comes from fossil fuels, but I never thought about it before. So in that moment I decided to investigate more about it. During the last years I've been sharing my learnings through my blog, newsletter and podcast. I also gave some talks on Meetups and WordCamps about the topic. The second tipping point During this learning I participated in two workshops that impacted me and made me change the perspective on digital sustainability. One of them was the Digital Collage, I did the online version before conducted by Gäel Duez, it was great and then the in person one conducted by Margaux Maugeais on Barcelona. I highly recommend attending to it in the format that is easier for you. And the other workshop was  Doing the Doughnut Tech created by Hannah Smith and facilitated by her and Alistair Alexander. This was created on the frame of the Green Web Foundation fellowship. But I think it's best if Hannah explains her experience creating and conducting it. You can find the audio transcript of the talk with Hannah Smith below. Resources Our Sustainable WP Doing the doughnut website Doughnut Economics website Now we have a sustainability channel in Making WordPress Slack, what should we do? Digital Collage https://wordpress.tv/2019/09/22/roberto-vazquez-desarrollo-sostenible/ Hannah Smith's posts on the Green Web Foundation Call for applications Green Web Fellowship 2023/24 Sustainability definition in Wikipedia Sustainability as an umbrella term post (GWF) Green IO (podcast) Environmental variables (podcast) Transcript Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon Guest

    57 min

  3. 10/19/2023

    Episode 2: Introduction to the environmental pillar of sustainability

    Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about the environmental pillar of sustainability with 6 amazing guests. In the previous episode Hannah and I introduced the concept of three pillars (or strands) of sustainability. And in the next 3 episodes we will dedicate one to each pillar. I had my reservations to start with the environmental pillar because it's usually the one it's more known and part of the aim of this podcast it's to broaden the view of sustainability. But in other hand, the environmental part was the entry point for almost every guest I interview and it was also for me. That reason, together with the tight relationship between the social and economical part, which I wanted to keep together (one after another), were the reasons to finally maintain this "more traditional" structure of episodes. So during this episode we'll have 6 different points of view on how they see the environmental pillar on digital sustainability. I start talking with Tom Greenwood, co-founder of Wholegrain Digital a UK based WordPress agency, author of the book "Sustainable Web Design" and one of the creators of Website Carbon Calculator tool. Let's hear what he has to say on how he would explain the importance of the  environmental part on digital sustainability to someone new to the topic. During the conversation with Tom we mentioned Tim Frick several times since his been involved with digital sustainability since early 2000's. He has a WordPress agency called Mightybytes and it's been one of the leaders behind the new web sustainability guidelines that a W3C community group released recently. He, and his team at Mightybytes, also created Ecograder another great tool that gives you digital sustainability recommendations.  Indeed I started asking about the aim this tool and then we moved on to the W3C guidelines.   Then we move to someone that contributes directly on making WordPress more environmentally sustainable. We listen to Adam Silverstein, who is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google, WordPress core committer and part of the WordPress Performance Team. He reflects on how we always want more and the impact that it could have. He also touches on servers, green hosting, energy needed to power every device and some examples on how a change on WordPress can have a significant environmental impact. In this podcast series I also wanted to know other opinions about sustainability, beyond WordPress community, so I invited Richard Littauer, who is organizer of Sustain OSS community and host of the Sustain podcast. He has an interesting point of view regarding the reasons behind the environmental issues on digital sustainability.   Then we also talk, not only about digital sustainability but also events with Julia Golomb. She is a full-time contributor to the WordPress Community Team, sponsored by Automattic, and she was an organizer on WCUS 2023. The last guest of this episode it's, Juan Hernando, dear friend and Community Team Program Manager and WordCamp Europe 2024 lead organiser, who is  sponsored by Weglot. I really liked his answer on how we could use some of the learnings on the environmental area and try to apply them to the other two pillars.  That was pretty interesting, wasn't it? You will be hearing more opinions of these guests and some others in the next episodes. Summary Taking about the guests, I feel like they were really on point. So I even doubted if a summary, from my part, was really necessary. But I guess someone could benefit from it. So, the first point could be that when we communicate about environmental impact of, let's say, internet, it's important to know who are you talking to. Knowing that, you can use web performance and conversion as "selling point", for example. We have nice tools like Website Carbon Calculator and Ecograder that were created to help raising awareness about digital sustainability and they could be a good entry point for some users or customers. Also having the first draft of the sustainability web design guidelines, created under the umbrella of W3C, it's a really nice starting point. In other hand, we mentioned how using a green hosting can help to mitigate some of the problems, but also how making a small changes on the CMS can have significant environmental impact. We'll talk more about this in episode 5. Event's it's another thing that we have to add to the mix aside from digital sustainability. Indeed we will dedicate the whole episode 6 to explore how we can make WordPress events more sustainable, not only environmentally but also socially and economically. Outro Thanks for listening, I hope you found the episode and our guest opinions as interesting as I did.  You can find all the resources mentioned during the episode in the show notes. If you want to share your take on this topic you can do it leaving a comment on the website (you can go to sustainwp.com/2) and if you think that the episode could be interesting to a WordPress colleague please share it. In the next episode we will be talking about the social pillar. I'm really looking forward to it. Bye bye! Resources Sustainable Web Design Website Carbon Calculator Ecograder Web Sustainability Guidelines (W3C) Web Sustainability Guidelines at glance (W3C) Tom Greenwood's book on digital sustainability Tim Fricks' book on digital sustainability Sustain OSS Sustain podcast Sustain podcast episode with Nahuai Call for applications Green Web Fellowship 2023/24 Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon Guest

    40 min

  4. 10/26/2023

    Episode 3: Introduction to the social pillar of sustainability

    Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about the social pillar of sustainability with 8 amazing guests. In the previous episode we introduced the environmental pillar of sustainability from different points of view and we will do something similar for the social part. Some of the guests were already introduced on the previous episode so I'll just mention their name and I will give a bit more of context to the ones that are new for the podcast series. I start talking with Hari Shanker, who is Open Source Program Manager at Automattic, Full-time WordPress Contributor, currently leads the WordPress Contributor Working Group and works on improving Five for the Future. He uses a nice example to explain what social sustainability means to him. He also mentions the importance accessibility, privacy and DEIB. I was nice to see how Tim Frick also touched on accessibility, inclusion and privacy. He also reflects on how digital products impact people, so if we are creators we should have it in mind. Continuing with things that people don't usually link to sustainability, Tom Greenwood talks about creating a humane web and share some ideas, that could go against the mainstream trends, but that could help to make meaningful connections. The next guest, Nora Ferreirós, who is a responsible UX/UI Designer, also   thinks we should keep humans in the center. She talks about using best practices (like avoiding deceptive patterns), thinking about humans instead of users, so we create digital products that find a balance between business success and social sustainability. Then Nora goes an extra mile to explain why the social part is so relevant inside the sustainability. In the same direction Juan Hernando also mentions the importance of having a diverse group of people in all the positions. He also reflects on the convenience to stop sometimes so you can  re-think some processes.  We also talk about how to improve process with our next guest, Courtney Robertson. She is Open Source Developer Advocate and WP Training Team Faculty Member, sponsored by GoDaddy. She talks about the importance of the project health and what we can learn from the CHAOSS community. Then I ask her about the metrics dashboard proposal, which can help improving, among other things, the accountability of the people that pledge their time on the 5 for the future project. Now we go back to Tim Frick so he can explain what a B Corp is and also how going through the B impact assessment, even if you don't end up certified, can be an eye opener experience. In the last part of the episode we will see more clear than ever how the 3 pillars are intertwined, specially the social and economic parts.  We start this last part with, Birgit Olzem, WordPress Professional and DEIB advocate. She mentions how the 3 pillars are vital, the importance of DEIB, how intertwined are the social and economical parts and the importance of getting underrepresented groups founded. She talks about some bottle necks on key parts of the project, which have few people maintaining them and the importance of having the maintainers well supported. Next we hear Courtney referring to the same topic and talking about a recent example.  We close the guest participation with Julia Golomb who stresses out how intertwined are the 3 pillars.   Those we pretty interesting ideas, don't you think? You will be hearing more opinions of these guests and some others in the next episodes. Summary Taking about the guests, I feel like they were, again, really on point. They covered a lot of ground so I'll try to summarize the main points. A common point was the importance of paying attention to accessibility, privacy and inclusion. Expanding in this last point we talked about DEIB, that stands for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. All of them are important specially if we want to have a healthy WordPress community.  We should treat each other with respect and create a culture were everybody feels welcome and part of it.  I guess this is common sense, but sometimes we have to say obvious things, that happens quite a lot on sustainability area too. There were also some reflections on how software transforms society and how, as creators, we should build digital products to serve humans using best practices. And ideally strike the balance between profit and been ethical. We also touched on how having community health metrics could help us with the sustainability of the project and a new proposal on WordPress that aims to bring more transparency. We ended up reflecting on how intertwined are the social and economical parts and the importance of having the maintainers of the project well supported. I'm sure that we will continue talking about this topic in the next episode. Resources CHAOSS community CHAOSS community podcast Bus factor (Wikipedia) (CHAOSS) Elephant factor (CHAOSS) Pony factor (Bitergia) WordPress Make/Teams dashboard proposal Proposal for establishing a DEIB Team on WordPress community Transcript Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon Guests

    42 min

  5. 11/02/2023

    Episode 4: Introduction to the economic pillar of sustainability

    Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about the economic pillar of sustainability with 6 amazing guests. In the previous episode we introduced the social pillar of sustainability from different points of view and we will do something similar for the economic part.  As it was highlighted on the the previous episode the social and economic pillars are tightly intertwined so we will touch some common ground and but also add some new ideas. All the guests were already introduced on previous episodes so I'll just mention their name. Remember that you can see more info about them below. I start talking with Tim Frick who links the economic sustainability to having a fair living wages, sharing the benefits of digital products or having access to internet and how these things go hand by hand with the social aspect. Hari Shanker also mentions how closely related are the economic and social pillars, highlights that we should keep in mind that there are limited resources and suggest to have an economic support that allows the things to keep going.  After these more general views the nexts guests reflections are more focused the role of the economic part on Open Source projects. Juan Hernando mentions the importance of volunteer work and how the "work for free" it's not always sustainable, specially when the contribution goes above a significant number of hours. Adam Silverstein also talks about Open Source maintainers and how some of them are not properly funded. In other hand, Nora Ferreirós reflects on how she has been lucky enough so the economic pillar it's fairly new to her but she thinks it's important to lower the entrance barrier for other people so they can have a voice in the conversation.  In the last part of the episode we will hear from Richard Littauer who it's  not part of WordPress community but he is in contact with other Open Source Software projects, so I think we can learn a lot from his experience. I started asking about the main struggles for Open Source Software projects in his experience. I continued asking him about how we can get more companies to give back to the WordPress project. I ask if visibility it's one of the benefits we could "sell" to companies. Lastly I asked Richard for things we should take into account if we want to ensure an Open Source project longevity. That was pretty interesting, wasn't it? Summary Once again, the guests opinions were really interesting and covered several points so I'll try to summarize the main points. We started talking about the basics of economic sustainability like promoting fair living wages, sharing the benefits or having access to internet to everyone. Then we focused more specifically on Open Source projects. A common point mentioned by the guests was the importance of supporting economically contributors and maintainers. Which if you remember it's how the previous episode ended. That's because the social and economic pillars really go together in this case. Also, removing (or lowering) the socio-economic barriers could allow more people to join Open Source projects which can be highly beneficial both for the individuals and for the project.   As we mentioned on the previous episode, having a diverse group of people contributing it's key for ensuring the longevity of WordPress project and any other Open Source project for that matter. We also talked about how we could increase the involvement of companies. Some ideas went in a direction of changing a bit usual the narrative. Maybe we could change or complement the arguments of "giving back" or "having visibility" with others like "increase talent retainment" or "or increase the profit". In this last case, the argument would be that the project could gain market share thanks to a well economically maintained contributors. We will talk more about closing the gap between contributors and WordPress centred companies in the next episode. Resources CHAOSS community Five for the future initiative (WordPress) Transcript Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon Guests

    24 min

  6. 11/09/2023

    Episode 5: WordPress CMS: How can we make it more sustainable?

    Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about what we can do to make WordPress more sustainable with 8 amazing guests. In the previous episodes we introduced the 3 pillars of sustainability and in this episode we will use these lenses to explore what we can do better on WordPress, specifically in the CMS and community, since in the next episode we will talk about events. This has been the most challenging episode to edit, by far. There were to many good ideas from a lot of people, but I didn't want to make an episode too long and I wanted to have a balance between the 3 pillars. I manage to keep the episode a bit over an hour, maintaining the essence of all the ideas. I hope that sounds reasonable to you and your podcast listening schedule. Luckily all the guests were already introduced on previous episodes so I'll just mention their name. Remember that you can see more info about them in the show notes. Environmental I start asking about how we could improve the environmental sustainability. Juan Hernando says that every byte counts and it's important to raise awareness about it. Nora Ferreirós would like to see guidelines, even rules, to help designers and developers to create more sustainable websites. In other hand, Birgit Olzem would like to see improvements in the CMS performance so we can save energy both at server-side and in end-user devices. Tom Greenwood mentions that it's not easy to balance between simplicity and flexibility or to improve code taking into account the backward compatibility. He also thinks that there are some things in the CMS that could potentially be removed and add some improvements on caching.  Since the performance team has been going a great work improving cache (specially in the last 3 major releases) I asked Adam Silverstein about some of the cool things the team has done to improve the CMS. Then I asked him about the improvements on block themes performance. Continuing with ideas that could improve WordPress sustainability, Tim Frick suggest to use W3C guidelines to create some kind of guide inside the CMS (or as a plugin) to raise awareness. Social and economic Continuing with Tim, but switching to the social part, when I asked him what we could improve in social sustainability he mentioned how there is always room to improve accessibility. He also talked about inclusive language and privacy guidelines for plugin and theme authors. In other hand, Tom Greenwood highlights how WordPress it's doing some things quite well in several areas but may be it could use a revamp on the backend to be more intuitive.  Talking about how we could improve the social part I asked Birgit Olzem about the WordPress DEIB working group.  Then I ask her about what we could improve and we talk about the 3 funding methods for contributors that exist right now. In the conversation with Birgit we mentioned the WP Community Collective. To give you a better context on how (and why) was created and what it is you can now hear Courtney Robertson, one of the cofounders.  In this direction Nora Ferreirós talk about the possibility to pay freelance for specific tasks and the benefits she see on of having an alternative like WP Community Collective as complement to five for the future program.   Another of the funding methods we mentioned before is five for the future, so I asked Hari Shanker to explain what it is and how we could improve it. Continuing talking about companies Juan Hernando suggest we communicate better the big impact that could make sponsoring a contributor. He also realizes that it's also important to to display the results, measuring somehow the impact. That brought us to talk about the metrics dashboard proposal. In the episode 3, Courtney Robertson already gave an overview about the dashboard proposal but I also asked Hari Shanker about it so you can have a bit more of context in this episode. Very related to the dashboards topic Birgit mention that we could learn from CHAOSS community, as Courtney also suggested on episode 3. To end with the guest interventions I leave you the reflexion of Juan Hernando about the importance of raising awareness and the idea of adding sustainability as a core value of WordPress. I think that was a nice way to finish, but I might be biased since one of the objective we envisioned when started the WordPress sustainability initiative was to make WordPress a CMS that leads on sustainability. Summary As I said at the beginning the guests shared a lot of good ideas, covering a lot of ground and the 3 pillars, so I'll try to summarize the main points. Starting with the environmental part, having a big market share give WordPress the opportunity to have a huge impact even with small actions or changes. In that sense it's nice to see the work of the performance team that it's bringing improvements in every WordPress update. Improve end user experience it's part of inclusivity and accessibility. Also, creating guidelines, that have sustainability in mind, for plugin and theme creators could have a positive impact. And thinking about end users, surfacing information the environmental impact of the website and adding some educational content or links inside WordPress could help raise awareness. Indeed this is one of the projects that it's ongoing in the Sustainability Team. Moving to the social and economic part, we talked about the importance of having a diverse group of people contributing that also includes attracting new generations, something we forget sometimes. In the area where social and economic part intertwined, we talked about the 3 ways to fund contributors that are ongoing right now:  Five for the future WP Community Collective Github sponsors We also mentioned the idea of creating a portal to connect active contributors and companies willing to support WordPress. The idea behind would be to close the gap between contributors and companies and make easier to sponsor part-time contributors. This is not a new interest but I really think that it has gained some momentum and we could use it to move it forward. As we mentioned on the previous episode we have to take care both the economic and social part so the new contributors feel welcomed and we don't loose more active ones because of a burnout.  We also talked about measuring the health of the project and the proposal for Make teams dashboards and how this metrics could also help to measure the return of investment of companies. Choosing which metrics to use it's not an easy task, since some of them could be easier to surface than other (Github activity for example) but we should try to find the best way of doing it. As always feedback from the community is going to be key to move it forward.  After hearing all the guests I really think that we have the ideas and the willingness to position WordPress as the CMS that leads on sustainability. Resources CHAOSS community CHAOSS community podcast WordPress Make/Teams dashboard proposal Proposal for establishing a DEIB Team on WordPress community Five for the future initiative (WordPress) The WP Community Collective Github sponsors Github sponsor wp contributors (arooba) Web Sustainability Guidelines (W3C) Our Sustainable WP Transcript Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon Guests

    1h 12m

  7. 11/16/2023

    Episode 6: WordPress events: How can we make them more sustainable?

    Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about what we can do to make WordPress events more sustainable with 5 amazing guests. In the first episodes we introduced the 3 pillars of sustainability and in this episode we will use those lenses to explore what we can do better on WordPress events. All the guests were already introduced on previous episodes so I'll just mention their name. Remember that you can see more info about them in the show notes. First I talk with 3 WordCamp organizers. During the conversation with them I mention the document with guidelines to create more sustainable events that we are creating at the Sustainability Team. I start asking Juan Hernando, lead organizer of WordCamp Europe 2024, what they have in mind to make the event as sustainable as posible. He mentions quite a lot of interesting things, like promote traveling by train, prioritize local companies to have a positive impact in the local community and economy. In other hand, also try to avoid plastic and reduce waste, and all this also been economically sustainable since this events usually have a tight budget.  Birgit Olzem, organizer of WordCamp Germany, also talks about the compromises that you have to do sometimes to meet sustainability requirements. Also how they try to promote reusable utilities, avoid plastic, reduce printing and swag, reducing the waste as much as possible. We also talk about promoting traveling by train, for the upcoming WordCamp Europe in Torino. Related to this, this is the link with information of train routes already put in place by Choo-choo travel company for the upcoming WordCamp Europe. We travel from Europe to US to hear from Julia Golomb, who has been one of the lead organizers of the WordCamp US and Community Summit. She reflects on the importance of embedding sustainability from the beginning. She also thinks that some token sustainability actions may be don't have as much impact as we would expect. We also talked about the interest of some sponsors to do better in terms of sustainability. Nora Ferreirós talks about the importance of in person events and how we can improve them, environmentally, doing small changes. For example, changing the event register form to use opt-out by default, for t-shirts or even the swag or make the merchandising more reusable by design.   Courtney Robertson mentions the cultural differences of what eco-friendly means, also suggest to reduce the swag and mentions that the CHAOSS community have metrics on DEIB to ensure that events are meeting some social standards. Talking about the social part of creating a community, Julia Golomb shares her experience with WordCamp and Meetup organizers in Uganda. They created an event focused on students with the aim of creating job opportunities. We also reflect on how the community it's getting older, that we should attract new generations and WordPress events are a great opportunity. To end the guests interventions Julia shares how talking about this topics helps to start thinking more proactively and can plant seeds for future events.  I hope you also find these conversations thought provoking. Summary As usual the guests shared a lot of good ideas, covering a lot of ground and the 3 pillars, so I'll try to summarize the main points. In the environmental part there were common points that all the guest mentioned, like promote traveling by train, avoiding single-use plastics or reducing waste. Inside later there are a lot of things we can do, from opting-out items on the event register form (like the t-shirts or the swag) to reducing printed items or minimize the physical swag from sponsors. In this sense, we talked about the importance of finding a balance between sponsors been more sustainable but still have an impact on event attendants and how there is a lot of room to innovate in this area. Overall, new ideas can have a big impact on future events and applying them on flagship events could serve as example to smaller events. All this without forgetting about the fact that all the events are organized by volunteers and have a tight budget. We should keep it in mind and try to improve things with time but without burden ourselves with unrealistic objectives. Also, the main objective of WordPress events it's to strengthen the links between the community. For that reason we should promote having a diverse group of people and having some metrics on DEIB can help to meet some objetives. In this sense, we also reflected on how the community it's getting older, the fact that we should attract new generations and how WordPress events are a great opportunity to do it. Finally, talking about how we can make WordPress events more sustainable helps to, raise awareness, bring new ideas and move them forward. Here we only mentioned some of the ideas that are in the guidelines we are working on. So if you want to see all of them or you want to share a new one you can do it going the collaborative document. Resources Guidelines to make WordPress events more sustainable (Collaborative GDoc - WP Sustainability Team) Roadmap for the WordPress Sustainability Team CHAOSS community CHAOSS community podcast CHAOSS community metrics WordCamp Europe 2024 WordCamp Europe 2024 train routes (Choo-Choo travel agency) Transcript Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon Guests

    44 min

  8. 11/23/2023

    Episode 7: WordPress Sustainability Team

    Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about how the sustainability initiative was created and then become into an official team. In the episode 1, I talked briefly about it with Hannah Hannah but in this episode I wanted to look back to the process of how we arrived to have an official WordPress Sustainability Team, what we have done so far and what are we planning to do. For that I'm joined by Nora Ferreirós, Thijs Buijs and Csaba Varszegi which have been behind the WordPress Sustainability initiative from the beginning. Some of the points we talked about are: Nora’s question in WordCamp Europe 2022 WordPress Sustainability Slack channel creation The first time we got in contact with the Sustainability initiative First post on Make WordPress on November 2022 What we did as initiative: Weekly Slack Meetings (starting in November 2022) Write the document with guidelines for more sustainable WP events Work on a plugin to display environmental data on WordPress Proposal to establish a WordPress Sustainability Team. Share the vision https://oursustainablewp.org/ WordPress Sustainability Team creation WordCamp Europe 2023(June 2023) What are we doing right now? Brief review of the voting process. The team has official Team Reps now. Set workflows in place What are we planning to do Decide which projects from the roadmap we move forward Consolidate the guidelines for more sustainable WP events Open to new contributors and ideas Join the WordPress Sustainability Slack channel If you are interested on contributing on any of the topics we mentioned, or you want to bring a new one, you can start by joining the Sustainability Slack channel. Resources WordPress Sustainability Slack channel Now we have a sustainability channel in Making WordPress Slack, what should we do? (Make WordPress) Proposal: establishment of a formal WordPress Sustainability Team (Make WordPress) Our Sustainable WP How the WordPress Sustainability Team was born during WordCamp Europe 2023 (Make WordPress) Guidelines to make WordPress events more sustainable (Collaborative GDoc - WP Sustainability Team) Roadmap for the WordPress Sustainability Team (Collaborative GDoc) Roadmap for the WordPress Sustainability Team (Github) WordCamp Europe 2024 WordCamp Europe 2024 train routes (Choo-Choo travel agency) Sustainability as an umbrella term post (GWF) Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon Guests

    53 min

  9. 11/30/2023

    Episode 8: The journey so far

    Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and this is the last episode of the podcast series. In it I will summarize, very briefly, what we've been talking about during the podcast and also share some wishes from part of our guests to make WordPress more sustainable.  In the first two episodes I shared my journey on how I got into WordPress and digital sustainability and how the Green Web Foundation Fellowship has been the perfect opportunity to to expand on those topics. Then we have had 3 episodes where we explored each pillar of sustainability, the environmental, economic and social, in the digital context. The 3 pillars are really intertwined, so much so that we could start calling them strands. I have the feeling that we covered most of the important areas on digital sustainability. But may be we didn't mention much about the impact of hardware creation on the 3 pillars of digital sustainability. So I wanted to acknowledge that and I'll leave a couple of links on the show notes to complement it. Then we moved more specifically to WordPress and talked about how we could apply these 3 lenses to make WordPress more sustainable. We did it covering the CMS, the community and the events. Related with this we also had an episode where we talked about the WordPress Sustainability Team creation, what we are doing and what we would like to do. And of course, highlighted how everybody is welcome to join the discussion. That's a quick recap of what we have talk about until this point. So, if you've been waiting to have all the episodes to have the immersive experience of binge listening them you can do it now.  Wishes to make WordPress mor sustainable During the interviews I also ask the guests about one wish that they could ask and it would come true (like having a magic wand) in terms of WordPress sustainability.  We start with Birgit Olzem who would like to see WordPress been a sustainability leader so it's a reference to other projects. Talking about WordPress been a leader, Tom Greenwood would like to see Automattic being a leader on sustainability so it's a reference to other companies. In the same direction, Tim Frick would like to see organizations that use WordPress to undertand how to run them in a sustainable way. Regarding a more technical aspects, Adam Silverstein would like to see a restructuring of the database to be more efficient. In the context of events, Julia Golomb would like to see online events that are able to capture the essence of the physical ones. Continuing with the social part Hari Shanker says that he would use the magical wand to make WordPress a DEIB first project and get more contributors that are properly onboarded and supported. keep users in mind. With the magic wand still on his hand, and regarding the economic part he would like to see all people get funded so no contributor has to suffer.  In the same direction Hannah Smith would like to see funding arriving to a divers group of people. Courtney Robertson would also like to fund a lot of people and adds that she would like to see a successfully implementation of metrics that help to improve the health of the project.  I left Juan Hernando's wish to finish because it captures part of the aim of this podcast series. He would like to see more contributors in the sustainability team and having people from other teams collaborating with it. I'd love to see all the wishes become true, but I'll be happy if we can achieve some of them. Acknowledgements I'd like to thank to the 13 guests of the podcast series for been so generous with their time and share their points of view. Needless to say that I would have liked to interview more people but it was already a challenge to do it as it has been, as I mentioned before. May be in a second season? Who knows. Join the WordPress Sustainability Slack channel If you are interested on contributing on any of the topics we mentioned during the podcast series, or you want to bring a new one, you can start by joining the Sustainability Slack channel. Resources Grimoire Lab (CHAOSS community tool) Five for the future initiative (WordPress) Digital Collage Doing the doughnut website Where do Digital Emissions Come From? (Mightybytes blog) Transcript Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon Guests

    25 min

  10. NOV 19

    Bonus episode: Grid-aware Websites Project

    Welcome back to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola, a freelance WordPress Developer based in Barcelona and active WordPress community member. In the original intro I also said that I was part of the Sustainability Team and a Green Web Foundation fellow. But now I'm former Sustainability Team Rep, since the team was closed, and also finished my Green Web Foundation fellow, this was expected and indeed I kept a relationship with the Green Web Foundation, as you'll see soon enough. As you can see things have changed from the last episode back on November of 2023. I'm not going to expand here why or how the WordPress Sustainability was closed. If you are interested on knowing more about it I recommend you to listen to the Green IO podcast episode where Gael interviewed Nora, Csaba and I, the former team reps about how all the events went down. This podcast series has been always about sharing my journey learning about digital sustainability and WordPress. And I've been involved on a project where I learned a lot and has some potential so I wanted to share it with you. By the way, I was really happy to see that the podcast have had more than 15.000 listens. Pretty cool. So, the project I'm refering to it's the grid-aware websites proposed by, yes you guessed it, the Green Web Foundation. The project run for almost a year, I was part of the advisory board and as a result of it I created, together with Nora Ferreirós, a grid-aware WordPress plugin. But I thought that better than listen to me rambling about this amazing project I could bring back Hannah Smith who is the Director of Operations of the Green Web Foundation and one of the people behind the project to talk about it. You can find the audio transcript of the talk with Hannah Smith below. Resources Grid-aware Websites Project Branch Magazine Issue 9 Adapting WordPress to Grid-Aware Web Experiences (Nahuai's and Nora's article on Branch Magazine) Grid Aware WordPress plugin Github repository  Grid Aware example page on Sustain WP Tools for creating grid-aware websites (Green Web Foundation) What software engineers need to know about how energy grids work Transcript Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability. WordPress Twitter Mastodon Guest

    53 min
  • 10 Episodes

About

Sustain WP is a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress created by Nahuai Badiola. In this series he will share his journey learning about digital sustainability and WordPress. To do so, in each episode he will talk with members of WordPress community, with different backgrounds, to discuss sustainability in the context of the WordPress project, to better understand where we are now and what we can do to make WordPress more sustainable.

Information

  • Creator
    Nahuai Badiola
  • Episodes
    10
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Sustain WP
  • Show Website
    Sustain WP