Improving Social and Economic Sustainability, Funding, and Metrics Tools

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