Exploring Digital Sustainability in WordPress

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. With this in mind, in the following 2 episodes (episodes 4 and 5) we will explore how can we improve WordPress sustainability.
4. Next we will talk about the WordPress Sustainability Team creation, what we are doing and what we would like to do.
5. 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.

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