Sustainability

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W3C has several ongoing environmental sustainability (s12y) related efforts, environmental sustainability is one of the TAG’s Ethical Web Principles, and there have been sustainability focused sessions at W3C meetings.

This page is also the home page for the overall W3C Sustainability Community Group, which you may join here:

• https://www.w3.org/community/sustainability

Discussion

Join discussion on sustainability on:

• #sustainability on W3C Community Slack
• #sustainability on W3C IRC

Work Areas

The following are active work areas of interest for sustainability related efforts at W3C.

Areas with more activity may have their own informal task forces for interested participants, or focused CGs (e.g. the sustyweb CG) for those specific areas.

Sustainable Web Design

The Sustainable Web Design (sustyweb) CG is the longest running sustainability-related group at W3C and is focused specifically on the sustainability area of best practices for sustainable web sites with existing web technologies.

Current documents:

• Web Sustainability Guidelines Draft Community Report (release notes)
  • 2023 blog post: https://www.w3.org/blog/2023/introducing-web-sustainability-guidelines/
• Draft Sustainable Web Design (sustyweb) CG charter
• PROPOSED Sustainable Web Interest Group Charter (Member-only poll due 2024-10-16 23:59 EDT)

Participants actively working on this:

• Tim Frick - co-chair
• Alexander Dawson - WSG editor
• ... add yourself!

Sustainability Horizontal Review

The Sustainability CG re-affirmed Sustainability (s12y) Horizontal Review as a work area and resolved on developing a self-questionnaire checklist 2024-09-25 at TPAC.

Based on the W3C TAG: Ethical Web Principles: The web must be an environmentally sustainable platform principle, we should develop s12y Horizontal Review akin to existing Horizontal Reviews for a11y, i18n, security, and privacy, to evaluate new and proposed web technologies.

• must be obtainable
• start with a checklist or questionnaire like the Security & Privacy Questionnaire
• make it lightweight

Participants who recently expressed interest in working on this:

• Tantek Çelik
• James Graham (jgraham)
• Don Marti (dmarti)
• timo
• Tristan Nitot (tnitot)
• Tzviya Siegman
• ... add yourself
• Valerie Young (2022)
• Nick Doty (2022)

Some next steps:

• Stub a Sustainability self-questionnaire checklist
• Consider lessons learned from a11y and i18n reviews
• Define "what is sustainability" for the scope of the checklist
• Draft questions for impacts on carbon (energy consumption), fresh water (cooling, manufacturing), e-waste (accelerated device obsolescence)
• Attempt answers to questionnaire with a few new specs and/or charter deliverables
• Iterate questionnaire based on experience

Related work areas:

• #System_Effects
• #Principles

Work Areas 2022

The following are additional work areas of interest for sustainability were identified at the 2022 s12y CG meeting / breakout session at TPAC 2022, listing participants interested in working on each.

Technologies to reduce energy usage

Focusing more on new technologies, or new adoption of technologies that could reduce internet use of energy. E.g.:

• multicast

Participants interested in working on this:

• Jake Holland
• Yoav Weiss

W3C meetings and operations

What are the impacts of W3C meetings and operations meetings on sustainability? E.g.

• W3C servers, hosting
• in-person meetings
  • flights to/from meetings
  • hotel overhead

Observations:

• We wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from flying here to help solve the sustainability problem, focus on what’s most important to the problem.
• We should not get distracted by it, focus on where we can have a bigger impact.

Areas of opportunity:

• scalability of a good hybrid meetings solution

Participants interested in working on this:

• Judy Brewer — Good hybrid meeting techniques, and sharing awesome research showing the scalable carbon savings from hybrid
• Nick Doty

Measurement

What can we measure and how can we communicate those measurements relating to energy usage? E.g. things to measure:

• servers could report how much energy, what kinds of energy going into producing this content
• what are the different variables, what are the blind spots
• data being presented to end users (W3C is not very good at exposing data to users to help make decisions)

Participants interested in working on this:

• Jake Holland — Akamai has a sustainability commitment, if I can get access to a good standard for reporting usage I will push measurement within akamai and return feedback on problems with applying the metrics if possible
• Mike Prorock
• Yoav Weiss
• Ivan Herman
• Aram Zucker-Scharff
• Phil Archer — by which I mean certified measurements against defined method
• Zoe Lopez-Latorre

System Effects

What are the system level effects, and systemic aspects that we can investigate, understand, and work to solve at higher level to have a greater impact overall?

• Any meaningful response has to be at the system effects
• Make it easy for people, users, consumers to see impacts of what they’re doing, so they can each take action in scalable distributed ways

Participants interested in working on this:

• Tantek Çelik
• James Graham
• Mike Prorock

Principles

• Principles document would be most useful
• Documents that can be shared with organizations for them to share internally and prioritize their own efforts accordingly

Participants interested in working on this:

• Tantek Çelik
• James Graham
• Max Gendler
• Tzviya Siegman
• Aram Zucker-Scharff
• Nick Doty

Groups

Sustainability CG

Created on Earth Day 2022 with the W3C #sustainability community on Slack!

The W3C Sustainability CG is focused on the sustainability of web technologies in general (rather than a specific use like a website), present & future (proposals etc.), and evaluating them from a horizontal review perspective.

Current primary goal: establish and help evaluate environmental sustainability of new web technology proposals, similar to the horizontal reviews of accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security.

• CG Join page: https://www.w3.org/community/sustainability
• CG Call for participation: https://www.w3.org/community/sustainability/2022/04/23/call-for-participation-in-sustainability-community-group/

Reference re: purposes of Sustainability efforts: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-council/2022Apr/0004.html

SustyWeb CG

The Sustainable Web Design Community Group (AKA SustyWeb CG) was established in 2013 as a community group dedicated to creating sustainable websites.

The CG has developed draft guidelines for UX design, hosting & infrastructure, product & business strategy, and web development for sustainable websites.

See the SustyWeb CG wiki for more details on these efforts, and join the CG to contribute!

Other community groups

• Web Ecology Community Group
• Web We Can Afford Community Group

Past (groups)

• https://www.w3.org/community/bde-food/

IETF

• Overview: https://www.ietf.org/sustainability/
• Environmental Impacts of Internet Technology (eimpact) group

Links to Media of Interest

Articles, podcasts and other media about sustainability that the W3C Sustainability CG has found of interest:

• 'Sustainable design: how UX design can help tackle climate change' by Cyber-Duck, 12/11/21
• 'Green I/O' podcast hosted by Gaël Duez
• 'Action Plan for Sustainable Planet in the Digital Age' by the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability, 2022
• The Green Web Foundation
• 'Towards a net zero IETF' by Jay Daley, 06/05/22
• 'What is sustainable web design?' by Tom Greenwood
• 'The Branch Magazine'
• 'Designing for Sustainability' by Tim Frick, 2016, ISBN: 9781491935774
• 'Sustainable Web Design' by Tom Greenwood, 09/02/21, ISBN: 9781952616037
• Sustainability research at Mozilla
• ISO GUIDE 84:2020 'Guidelines for addressing climate change in standards'
• 'HANDBOOK OF SUSTAINABLE DESIGN OF DIGITAL SERVICES'
• Greening of Streaming, an org working on a model to track the climate impact of streaming
• 7 critical conclusions from the major U.N. climate land report
• Carbon offsets, the popular climate change mitigation tactic, explained
• An (Even More) Inconvenient Truth: Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing

Potential External Collaborators

Folks outside of the W3C interested in sustainability (processes unvetted thus far)

• Ecosia
• Scope3

Past Sessions

• 2021 TPAC: “Environmental Concerns and Sustainability (s12y) of Web Technologies”
  • s12y session proposal: Environmental Concerns and Sustainability (s12y) of Web Technologies
  • s12y minutes & recording
• 2022 AC meeting
• 2022 TPAC: "Sustainability for the Web and W3C" (s12y CG meeting)
  • session proposal: Sustainability for the Web and W3C
  • minutes / IRC log

See Also

• sustainability/research
• AB
• TAG