The Importance of the Social Pillar in 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