Green IO #52 Sustainability at WordPress: an update with Csaba Varszegi, Nahuai Badiola, and Nora Ferreiros
Feb 11, 2025
47:46
“Today I learned that we have a sustainability team.Thank you for your effort in this area, looking at results of the team so far, and the ROI of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely”.
In 3 sentences, almost 3 years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel archived on the spot. To get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of her digital services, Gaël Duez welcomes 3 of the 4 founders of the original sustainability team: Csaba Varszegi, Nahuai Badiola, and Nora Ferreiros.
In their much more nuanced exchange that could have been expected due to the current situation, they covered many topics including:
👏 The power of applause to kick start a sustainability team
🔧 How changing HTTPS check made WordPress save 471 kWh / month
🌱 The importance of having sustainability tools as close as possible to software practitioners tools
🏛️ The subtle art of creating a foundation while keeping control over it via intellectual property
🎁 How to “enforce” contribution in an open source community
And much more!
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Learn more about our guest and connect:
- Csaba Varszeg LinkedIn
- Nahuai Badiola LinkedIn
- Nora Ferreirós LinkedIn
- Green IO website
- Gaël Duez's website
📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.
Our guests's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:
- WordPress Sustainability Handbook
- The limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress created by Nahuai Badiola
- The Sustainability WordPress plugin
- WordPress Sustainability Team
- WordPress Foundation
- The W3C sustainability guidelines presented by Sustainable Web Design
- ClimateAction.Tech
- The grid-aware websites program of the Green Web Foundation
Transcript (auto-generated)
Csaba (00:00)
So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact
Gaël Duez (00:15)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez, and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech.
Today, I learned that we have a sustainability team. Thank you for your effort in this area. Looking at results of the team so far and the return on investment of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely. In three sentences, almost three years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel was archived on the spot. It reminds me of the Elon Musk style when he arrived at Twitter, except that WordPress CMS still powers almost 40 % of all the websites around the globe, with many being heavy traffic websites. And with heavy traffic comes significant environmental impacts. So to get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of digital services now that the sustainability team is gone, I'm glad to welcome today three people who are active members of the WordPress community, especially on sustainability topics. Actually, they were part of the four founders of the original sustainability team.
Csaba is a sustainable web designer based in Antwerp, Belgium. Nahuai is a freelance WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator. And Nora Ferreiros is a freelance UX UI designer.
and both Nahuai and Nora are based in Barcelona. So welcome Csaba, Nahuai and Nora. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.
Nahuai (02:49)
Hello.
Nora (02:49)
Thank you.
Csaba (02:50)
Hello, hi.
Nora (02:51)
Thank you for
Nahuai (02:51)
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Csaba (02:52)
Hi, hello.
Gaël Duez (02:53)
You're
more than welcome. So maybe before we start, could each of you share what is the main fact or figure that leads you to care about sustainability as a WordPress practitioner?
Nora (03:09)
Well, actually, Nahuai is the person who led me to care about sustainability in WordPress and in the details sustainability and life in general,
Nahuai (03:20)
That was super nice to hear, Nora. In my case, the eye-opening moment was a lightning talk by Roberto Vázquez in a work camp that just putting together the energy consumed by data centers and the environmental impact. It's pretty straightforward, but it was the first time that I it was like, okay, this makes sense.
Gaël Duez (03:22)
Now you have to deal with this.
Nora (03:24)
It's true.
Nahuai (03:48)
and I started to go down the rabbit hole. And short after that, I started to talk with Hannah Smith, who has been a key person in my sustainability journey. And yeah, pretty much in that point, I started to research and start giving talks about it. And yeah, probably.
Nora (04:06)
Yeah, have to say that I was in this talk also, but for me it was later. Nahuai was the one that said to me, look at this, sustainability is important, but I also was in this talk and it was important to me to think about internet consumes energy.
Csaba (04:23)
For me, it's a bit similar, just like you mentioned, and as you mentioned in the intro, like WordPress having a large market share. So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact and maybe a lot more interesting for other people to...
profit from as well.
Gaël Duez (04:50)
you're right, Shaba, that WordPress is just huge in terms of CMS share and I was delighted to hear about the creation of a sustainability team at WordPress. I've heard, but maybe I'm wrong, that it all started at a WordPress convention with Nora speaking up on these aspects, but maybe I'm completely wrong. Could you enlighten me a bit on this?
Nora (05:16)
Yeah, it was kind of this way and honestly it was kind of around the situation, it wasn't something planned because it all started at the WordCamp Europe in 2022. This is the annual big WordPress event in Europe and it was also my first international event and I was super excited and nervous because I was about to spend...
four whole people who I only could communicate in English. I'm in Spanish, so you can imagine it is a little tricky. So I was talking one day, I was talking with Rocio Valdivia. She's a lead of global WordPress community programs. I had to read this because I have not been able to remember it. So she...
Nahuai (05:49)
you
Nora (06:03)
blindly believing my newly acquired language skills. And she encouraged me to ask a question during this Q &A session with Matt Mullenberg and Joseph Heiden-Champonsy, who was the executive director of WordPress at the moment. So basically two of the most important people involved in the project at the time. And for some reason I said, yeah, sure, why not? But the thing is, as time passed,
I started to panic because I had no idea what to ask about. So I turned to Nahuai and I asked him for help and he rightly suggests sustainability as a topic. So with this in mind, I knew, I yeah, I knew if I ask a general question like, what about sustainability? I would just...
Nahuai (06:35)
You
Gaël Duez (06:36)
Ha ha ha ha.
Nora (06:56)
get a polite non-committal answer like, cool that's interesting we will think about it, thank you. So I decided to directly ask them for a team or at least for a Slack channel and for whatever reason they went for the latter. So I did it and when I returned to my seat 18 people had already joined the channel and are rising but the funny thing is I never intended to.
achieve this. My goal was just to, I don't know, get sustainability on the table or maybe use this visibility to draw some attention of some attendees interested in the topic and then maybe connect with them after the event or whatever. But things went unspectral differently and I'm very happy about it.
After that, the four people that finally make the team work as a working group for a year and the next WordCamp Europe, we have the support of some amazing people and we could officially became a team. And this is the story. And I would clarify something. I think it's really important. I voiced the demand, but I'm pretty sure that
was the people who cheer and applaud the thing, my suggestion. That main matter, and Joseph said, okay, let's create the channel because the people want something and we have to do something. So if any of the personnel listening to this, thank you very much for making it possible. And remember that voices lead, but it's the community that moves things forward.
Gaël Duez (08:34)
Power of applause
Nora (08:36)
Yeah.
Csaba (08:36)
Hehehe.
Gaël Duez (08:37)
so you wanted to put sustainability on the table. You actually managed to put sustainability within the Slack workspace of WordPress. Csaba, were you one of these people jumping on this newly created Slack channel?
Csaba (08:55)
I think I was actually one of the first people to join because I remember, I remember Nora asking this question, but the funny thing is that I was like kind of falling asleep during the question and answer, not because it wasn't interesting, but then I just heard the word sustainability. I was, what, what? So I started listening and then I heard that the channel was created. I think I was one of the first and I remember.
Gaël Duez (08:59)
Ha ha ha ha.
Nahuai (09:06)
Thank
Csaba (09:21)
Thijs was there as well and we already arranged something to meet during the conference, the after party, let's say, which we did as well. And the other funny thing is that I ran into Nora and Nahuai as well somewhere during a walk. So we actually really met in Porto and yeah, that's where things probably started up. still we had a long way to go.
Gaël Duez (09:46)
Yeah, the stars were aligned. And maybe for the non-adverted listeners, we talk a lot about the WordPress community at WordPress, but as far as I've understood, WordPress is an open source software, but there is also a company called WordPress. And when we talk about a sustainability team, a lot of people could believe maybe that you're employees at
WordPress or some sort of WordPress company. could you maybe Nahuai you clarify a bit this ecosystem
Nahuai (10:16)
Yeah.
It is kind of tricky to make sense of it because of the naming. So I will try to keep it simple. you said, WordPress, the thing that we've been talking till now is the CMS, it's open source. And it has a vibrant community doing things because they believe on that open source and democratizing the publishing and everything that is behind the motto or the meaning of WordPress. But then after, and this was...
co-founded by Matt Mullenberg and Mike Little. Shortly after this creation, Matt Mullenberg created the company Automatic. And Automatic owns WordPress.com, which is a huge confusion for a lot of people. So WordPress.com is just a hosting company using the CMS WordPress. And that's pretty much all the resemblance between the two of them.
Gaël Duez (10:54)
Mm-hmm.
Nahuai (11:10)
And the tricky part to make it a bit more difficult to understand is to the community, we are all volunteers. This is an open source, but some companies are putting people, sponsoring people to contribute. And Automatic was until one month ago, the one that was putting more people and time on it. It was around 4,000 hours in people, the sponsor, to move forward.
So some of the teams that are in Make WordPress, that is how it's leader by people on automatic. Okay, because since they have a lot of people contributing, it's more than a hundred people. A lot of teams had someone from automatic having 40 hours week to put into there, which is super cool. The sustainability team...
Gaël Duez (11:44)
Hmm.
Nahuai (11:58)
we were a bit different in that sense because we were created in this special way as Nora explained. And the 14 reps were self-sponsored, meaning that we were putting our time because we believe in the CMS and in sustainability and then more people of course joined to the Slack and the meetings. But we were mainly people self-sponsored. There were also some sponsored by companies, but
the sustainability team was quite diverse in that sense. it was not run by, none of the teams are run by automatic, okay, just to be clear, but some teams have a lot of, or had a lot of people from automatic because one month ago, more or less, Matt decided to reduce the time that are putting back into the project. But this is because our legal,
battle that we didn't discuss yet, so I don't want to go down there. I hope I made sense a bit of how it's organized.
Gaël Duez (12:55)
Okay.
actually, thanks a lot because it's crystal clear. I didn't really understand what was automatic. And this is not the first time in the open source community that you have actually a software that is sort of maintained by a company, even if it's an open source software. you think about Red
but usually it's a bit clearer because they share the same name and sometimes the intellectual property is even clarified in that sense. Okay, got it. Thanks a lot. What did you do,
Nora (13:31)
Great question. when we make the team, they ask us to work on sustainability, not just on environmental
Csaba (13:31)
Mm-hmm.
Nora (13:39)
sustainability but also in social and economic part of sustainability. So
We have been working together with other working groups like Fight for the Future, for example, or the V Groups for Diversity. So we can together cover all the things because it was a big thing. And the original founders, we were more into environmental sustainability and it is the part we work more on. For example,
we worked in a handbook for making WordPress events more sustainable. We published it. We were able to translate it to Spanish and to French.
And we were actually working on making guidelines for creating a WordPress website in a more sustainable way. It was, for me, the more exciting project because we were making something similar to what W3C guidelines were making, but applied to WordPress.
And we were also working in a plugin that I think Csaba and Nahuai can explain better about how it works to help on this about creating more sustainable WordPress websites.
Csaba (14:57)
Yes, we
were working on a plugin. Yes, plugins are like kind of extensions of WordPress, functional extensions of WordPress. And the plan was to create a canonical plugin, which means that it's supported by the community or even maybe on the long-term be included in core WordPress. So the WordPress software itself. And the idea was to spread awareness about digital sustainability to give people an idea about their websites in the sense of carbon footprints.
And the two basic ideas were to surface whether the website was hosted on renewable energy and to measure the home page's weight and carbon footprint and to compare it with data from the website's carbon API, like compare it to other websites, other webpages measured and warn people if their homepage has a too large footprint. And of course give them
feedback or assist them how to improve it. And that's where the guidance part would come
Nahuai (15:57)
I wanted to point out as Nora said, we were collaborating with working groups, because this is the naming we are using in WordPress. And one of them was with the performance team, which are also working and job, by the way, reducing
the energy that is needed. And one of the things they did because of somehow the synergy between us was a saving, changing some technical part of how to check the HTTPS. But the number was like 471 kilowatts hour a month was saved because of the large market share of WordPress.
our idea in the sustainability was to raise awareness. So maybe in the performance team, they are already doing great work to reduce the emissions.
But our team, sorry, I have to laugh because our team is no longer alive. it's strange to phrase it this way, but I'm going to continue this way. So our team, the idea was to raise awareness of what the performance team was doing or create guidelines as Nora said. So it was not only reducing the CO2 or whatever, but...
Nora (16:56)
Yeah.
Nahuai (17:15)
is spreading the word of the impact that a website has.
Gaël Duez (17:19)
That's an important point because I was about to ask, but what about other environmental variables or what about using other proxy than just the web page weight? For instance, know, some other tool, they check the DOM size or they check the number of API call, et cetera. But I think if the main idea was really to raise awareness, the simpler you keep it, the better it is.
correct to assume things that way.
Csaba (17:50)
Yes, I think so. funny enough, it's sometimes very hard to keep things simple or just give a quiet, good estimation on what's, what's wrong and what can, what people can do about it. so it wasn't a simple task.
And I also have to note maybe that there is a site help feature of WordPress, which is quite a cool tool, which actually gives you information. does a couple of tests on your environment and gives you a couple of things you can improve for your website. And the idea was to include this.
into that tool, is a native tool of WordPress Core itself,
Gaël Duez (18:27)
And today, the plugin that you developed, is it still available somewhere? even if it's not included in the core WordPress, but can anyone still use it?
Csaba (18:39)
Yes, it's not in the plugin repository, but you can download from GitHub. it probably should undergo a couple of refactoring, but you can try it and use it as it is now.
Gaël Duez (18:50)
and what were the feedback from the community?
Nora (18:54)
The feedback from the community, I was thinking about this thing you said about keep things simple. And it was really hard to keep things simple because people were to use two numbers, like what have you achieved? Numbers. And sustainability is kind of difficult to do that if you don't want to stay in the tunnel carbon.
Gaël Duez (19:08)
Hmm.
Nora (19:18)
so there were many people interested in I want to do something to make WordPress more sustainable but they were feeling really confused because the team didn't have many resources to make practical things so we were in a theoretical place most of the time creating awareness and so and
I think people were interested, motivated, excited maybe, but confused about what they should do to make things more sustainable in a practical way.
Nahuai (19:58)
and having the aim of touching the three pillars of sustainability, the environmental, the social and the economic, made that even more difficult. Not that I didn't like it because I like the holistic point of view, but it was more difficult to communicate sometimes. So yeah, that didn't help to simplify. as Nora was stressing out, we moved
slowly because we were self-sponsored people and that was also something to take into account. And we could just allocate maybe two, four hours a week, but not more because we are mostly freelancers and trying to make our own living. So that was also part of the thing that was not easy to balance, let's say.
Csaba (20:42)
Also, I think it's important to add that you're also spending a lot of time in searching for how to get things done within the community, how the procedures were, which is not always clear, let's say not clear. so you have to, yeah, you have to dig in and then it takes a lot of time to find that out.
Nahuai (20:49)
Yep, the bureaucracy.
Gaël Duez (21:00)
maybe before we move to what happened in the dismantling quite abrupt as I mentioned in the introduction, I'd like and I'm very sorry for this to play a bit the devil advocates here and ask you a naive question. Why do we need WordPress guidelines when we start having W3C guidelines?
Nora (21:24)
Well, from a point of view as a designer, I am always in the side of the user. So for me, the WordPress guidelines were important to specifically explain people who is not into sustainability What they specifically have to do with their WordPress
website in the WordPress world. I suppose all the CMS works this way. There are many users, I think the most of the users making their own websites. So I thought it was important to explain these people are non-developer people, how to specifically set in their WordPress or use their WordPress.
to make things more sustainable.
from the WordPress perspective alone
Nahuai (22:11)
I couldn't agree more. I'm part of the group of the sustainable web of the W3C and it's an amazing work. What we are doing, mainly other colleagues, I have to say I have limited time to put into it, but I love it. And I try to do my best on that regard, but it's a very technical and long document. So even if sustainable web design did a great job filtering, because there is an open API, so you can go and grab the
different criteria and filter it. It's really nicely done, technically. Even if you go to the Sustainable Web Design, It's website in general, which is super cool, but I think that people that is working every day with WordPress, having something more linked with visuals and things that they say, okay, I know where I can do this or this other, I think
Nora (22:53)
you
Nahuai (23:01)
this really helps because it's more familiar. So I think everything we can do to make it easier for people that is interested on doing something, it's a move in a good direction.
Gaël Duez (23:13)
Fair point.
I was expecting that kind of answers
but I wanted to understand how much overlapped was possible there because actually I was wondering if it was one of the reasons why the WordPress SustainB group was dismantled. And maybe now it's time for the three of you to explain what you feel and how you analyzed the, let's be honest, of
brutal dismantling of the sustainability group as I described in the introduction. hypothesis number one, we've got W3C guidelines, no need for anything specific WordPress. I think you already answered this point, but hypothesis number two was like, is it some kind of a Trump-fueled backlash against everything which is sustainable and...
you want to look nice to the new leader of the United States and as some other big tech behemoths just did recently kissing their new ring. So was it like a political move? Was it more maybe some sort of internal feud? What led to such abrupt end of your working group?
Csaba (24:24)
I have been thinking about it and to be honest, I don't think there was really that much of thinking behind the decision. It was a bit of a one-sided decision without any discussion questions asked. So it happened also very quickly after Thijs has resigned, let's say between quotes. Maybe what strikes me the most about this is that we were a group of individuals, contributors, not sponsored.
most of us who were just contributing to WordPress and trying to make it better or at least environmentally, socially and so on better. yeah, it's kind of somewhere surprising, but also not regarding the current situation of WordPress.
Nora (25:06)
I don't have a clear picture of the whole thing because I wasn't into WordPress drama until it affected me and some community fellows I don't know Madd or his circumstances well enough to have a solid opinion about the why I think it is a personal thing it's not something bigger
Nahuai (25:20)
Thank
Nora (25:27)
I mean, I don't have an explanation, but it's pretty obvious to me that we can draw up parallel between his attitude and that of attitude of other big tech founders also at the moment. But I don't know.
Nahuai (25:42)
I have an hypothesis trying to be a bit more specific maybe for the people that is not inside the community and the WP drama and everything. So I think we cannot understand this decision without talking about the legal battle between automatic math because both are and WP engine. And this started in September of the last year and
The main reason to keep it simple was that Matt went into the stage in the keynote and publicly said that WP Engine, which is a WordPress hosting that is making a lot of money from WordPress, was not contributing enough. In that moment, they were contributing like 40 hours a week, something like that. And Automatic was contributing around 4,000. Okay. So he felt that it wasn't fair.
if every company went this route, WordPress would probably die because there wouldn't be enough resources. So fair point till here. At least all I'm going to say is my vision. Okay. So don't take it as a representation of the sustainability team or anything. It's just now I took it. So after Engine started a legal battle against Matt.
basically damaging the brand. Okay, let's say, let's put it that way. And there is more things that Matt say and everything, but I don't want to go down that road. And from this moment to the, probably the sustainability closing, team closing, it has been a different Matt.
for us at least, maybe Matt was always like that. But what happened is that Matt asked to the community to take part on this. So he wanted to know if you were behind him or if you were not behind him and his...
opinions and the things he was doing, you were against, pretty much, just to keep it simple. So the people that were vocal and going against Matt or his opinions, some of them were banned from Slack or from WordPress.org and things like that. again, my hypothesis is that Matt is...
kind of in a battle mode because it's in a legal battle and he needs the community to be behind him. And I think the trigger point in our case, was Thais stepping down as a team rep of the sustainability team because he was not aligned with the new direction that Matt was giving to WordPress okay?
And he made it public and he made it clear to Matt directly. And I think this was the trigger point. as I say, don't think there is much thinking about it. I think it was like, okay, these people were doing something. I don't recall knowing about it. Oh yes. I don't know. He said he didn't. And he was another power move. He made other power moves before. So this is my...
vision. Of course, it's subjective and maybe it's wrong, but I felt like Matt took it as a little attack somehow. And he said, okay, this is not very dear to my heart either. And so we can close it. Well, he can close it. That's probably the more frightening part is that Matt can do a lot of things
without anybody saying nothing and that's the part that is yeah more difficult to swallow.
Gaël Duez (29:11)
you're actually reading my mind because I was about to say that sort of reassuring that very bad decisions are still taken not because of a grand schema to change the world in my humble opinion for the worst and having like this kind of a techno crazy agenda and all this, you know.
movement that we see since the beginning of the year in the US within the tech sector, but just because of good old internal dilemma, feuds and the it should question
any source of open source or community of goodwill trying to achieve something about the governance model? Because how come that so many unilateral decisions were able to be made at WordPress? I mean, maybe the decision to close the sustainability was the right one. don't know. mean, obviously, I believe no, but I was not part of this community. So, you know, from an external perspective, I don't know. But what I do know for sure is that
Nora (29:46)
you
Gaël Duez (30:14)
when as a manager you take such a big decisions, literally firing people, there is a way to do things, even if different cultures, you do things differently. Usually you don't do it the way I've just presented in the introduction. And you must get all people's opinions and you absolutely need to get all the insights, starting with the people who are obviously the most involved in the situation, who are the members of the teams.
and in your case, the sustainability team. that really strikes me. what would you do differently?
from a governance perspective to prevent this to happen if you were to work again in a very engaged and good-willing community as the WordPress one.
Nora (30:56)
Well, for me,
as I have seen the community from external perspective is we trust too much in a voice, in a lead or in the vision one person had.
But as I said before, the voice is not the community. Contributors are the community. I think sometimes we forget this. I think we have to do the effort to step up the inertia in the communities, not just WordPress, but any other.
open source community and reflect on the continuity of the project
And I personally think we should go more into a democratic way of managing the thing, as many other people have said, like a governance with few people, not just one people, not because it is mad. I think a huge community or any other community should not be led by
just one person, but for a group of person choose or representative of the community itself. I don't know, for me it's kind of obvious, but when I get into this community, things were this way. So I was like, okay, if you are happy with this, I'm here just for working. So let's go for it.
Gaël Duez (32:09)
Hmm.
So I got your point that even the most powerful voice is powerful because of
the the community behind But there is something that I still don't understand is what is a governance structure? Actually, what is WordPress? what is the legal even structure of WordPress? Is it a foundation? Is it an association, an NGO? And how come that one person has
all the power
Nahuai (32:39)
It's tricky because there is a foundation, there is a WordPress foundation, okay? And Automatic gave the trademark. So this trademark, which is a huge trademark, was moved to the WordPress foundation, which is good, okay?
Gaël Duez (32:43)
Okay.
Okay.
Nahuai (32:56)
And the WordPress foundation, it has a board of three people, Matt and another two members. But even if there is a foundation, the more important part of the community is probably the WordPress.org, which is the domain and everything make and everything and the plugins and everything is behind.
Gaël Duez (33:10)
Mm-hmm.
Csaba (33:15)
you
Nahuai (33:16)
that domain and Matt is the owner of that. That's why he has quite a lot of power. Indeed, one of the moves he did was blocking the possibility of WP Engine to access to the repository of plugins, which is a kind of a big deal. Okay. And he can do it because he is the owner of the domain. So that part is not in the foundation. That's why it's tricky. And we discovered this lately because of...
Gaël Duez (33:35)
working.
Okay.
Nahuai (33:45)
these things that didn't happen before. Because I have to say, I've been following Matt's path and I was pretty happy with the direction that WordPress was going. Mainly because of the community, but also because Matt was going in the same direction
Gaël Duez (34:00)
that's very interesting what you're saying,
because you can create a foundation, put some intellectual property within it, even the brands.
But if you withhold some strategic assets, such as a domain name or some small pieces of intellectual property, actually, your foundation is still some sort of 100 % under your control. Am I right rephrasing a bit what you say that way?
Nahuai (34:25)
I think so. Sometimes I have doubts if we understand well enough the structure, because it wasn't clear enough before this storm came. Not the team closure, but the legal battle against WP. So I'm pretty sure that this is the way I described minutes ago. And I think if it is like that, it's not optimal, because
Gaël Duez (34:37)
Hmm.
Nahuai (34:50)
As Nora said, I think these big things like the domain of WordPress.org and this kind of decision should be taken by more than one person. And till now there was no problem because Matt was being quite generous with the time he was putting with automaticians into the, in the community and with the trademark and everything. So till not that much time, it was pretty okay, everything.
Gaël Duez (34:59)
Hmm.
Nahuai (35:16)
And this battle kind of put into perspective how much power Matt has.
Csaba (35:21)
I very much agree upon how Nahuai has explained it. And also I think the bottom line we have learned, we learned a lot of things the last couple of months, but the bottom line is that we are very much dependent on WordPress.org for plugin updates, for team updates, everything that is very much hard-coded in WordPress. And that's something that we should, yeah.
Gaël Duez (35:25)
Hmm.
Csaba (35:44)
Think about a bit more if that's the way to go and probably not so.
Nahuai (35:47)
Yeah.
I think Drupal has a pretty interesting structure of how they have the governance structure. And it would be super cool if we moved to something more closer to Drupal or other CMSs or other open source products for that sake. I'm not sure if right now it's going to happen. I still feel like...
we are in a battle somehow, kind of in a battle. So I'm really hoping for the legal battle to finish and maybe the dust settle a bit and maybe some of the proposals can be look more calmly because there are some proposals right now. But I think Matt still sees them as a kind of an attack or power takeover or something like that again.
My opinion, I'm not sure I don't usually talk with Matt about this, but hopefully if this goes, this inflammation, let's call it, goes down, maybe we can talk more calmly about how we want to move forward. That's my hope.
Nora (36:42)
Yeah.
Gaël Duez (36:56)
Nahuai you are a perfect guest because I was about asked what were the repercussions of this battle mode in the WordPress community, quoting you for other CMS providers. And if we could get lessons from other open source projects and you mentioned Drupal. So maybe
Could you elaborate a bit on how Drupal is organized
Nahuai (37:19)
Yeah, probably I'm not the best person to talk about Drupal because I'm not inside it, but
I really recall well is a post from the founder of Drupal, which was explaining how they try to reward the companies that are giving back to the Drupal project. Okay. And there is a system of credits on how if you give more back, you can...
take some advantages, like being, I don't recall exactly, but maybe being highlighted as a plug-in maker or as a company or whatever. So that was one of the ideas that I found interesting because at the end, the main problem that we started this is that WP Engine was making a lot of money without giving anything back or very little back.
But maybe if we put some kind of rewards on people that is giving back, we could solve that part.
Gaël Duez (38:15)
thanks, Nehru, to clarify this Drupal governance Did you get some feedback on how did people react to the closing of the sustainability teams and what do they want to do now to keep on moving on their sustainability journey?
Nora (38:31)
Well, something I'm happy this all brings is many people ask, or at least ask me, the question why technology thing, why WordPress, why any other project like that need a sustainability team or a sustainability group working on this. And many people were asking,
in a bad way, like, we don't need this, but I think this question is important because many people, like Hannah Smith, for example, were answering this question, or even many people were just thinking about it, like, we don't need this, maybe we do. So I'm quite happy taking into account the situation because this situation with the sustainability team, I think, made people reflect on...
If we need in technology groups for working towards sustainability
Gaël Duez (39:28)
Thanks a lot. Nora, about the guidelines, are they still maintained somewhere? Did you migrate the working group on climate action tech or any other thought of a welcoming Slack community where you can keep on working or everything has been paused for the moment?
Nora (39:46)
Everything has been posted for a moment, but some people have asked us like, where are you going to work now on this? I don't have an answer for that because I didn't decide the thing, but we are still open to work on this. So if anybody listen to this says, okay, I'm into this and I want to collaborate, we can create something, but there is nothing at this moment.
Gaël Duez (39:48)
Okay.
Hmm. So it's a hard stop. OK.
Nahuai (40:17)
same for me. My
main idea is to keep contributing to the W3C group as far as I can. We are also in a very, very nice project from the GreenWeb Foundation that maybe later Nora can touch on it. And I will also continue to talk about sustainability in my podcast and in WordPress events. And as a plugin and theme maker, I have it.
embedded in my workflow and I try to also explain it as one of the key features of the plugin or the theme. So I will continue to be interested and talking about it but as Anora said there is since we don't have an official channel and way of working right now we just paused and let's see where it goes but for now it's paused.
Gaël Duez (41:06)
And actually, before talking about this GreenWeb Foundation project, which I believe is very closely related to what you've tried to achieve at WordPress. That's true Nahuai I should have mentioned that we are colleagues because you've also got your own podcast. And can you maybe just pitch us for one minute? Because I reckon that they are very valuable resources for anyone working with WordPress tool to become more sustainable. Am I right?
Nahuai (41:32)
Yeah, yeah, I was lucky enough to be selected by the GreenWeb Foundation the fellowship they have. So as a project, I created a podcast. It's a limited series podcast. So it's just eight episodes and it's about WordPress and sustainability. And I was also lucky enough to have very nice and interesting people like Nora, Csaba Thjis, the team reps, but also Tim Frick, Tom Greenwood.
people from the data sustainability and also for WordPress sphere. So I think if you're interested in the topic, could be a nice resource.
Gaël Duez (42:05)
Got it. And so because the GreenWide Foundation seems to be everywhere with the usual suspects that many of them were and surely will be again in the future, guests or speakers in Green IO or events. Maybe, Nora, to close on a more positive note this podcast, because
Nahuai (42:10)
Thank you.
Gaël Duez (42:26)
just as a side note, I was expecting a bit more of a happy ending, that you've already some sort of bounce back and found an agreement that Matt realized that, okay, maybe I shouldn't close or that abruptly, or you've been welcomed by the performance team or you created already some something else. So it's really a bit of a runes at the moment and I feel...
I'm kind of terribly sorry for all the hard work that you put you and hundreds of people, if I just count the numbers on the Slack channel. So yeah, it's a very disturbing thought that so much hard work that aim to go in the right direction with the pro and the con of every project, obviously, is, yeah, cancelled, I would say. But anyway, so to finish on a more optimistic note, Nora, you wanted also to talk about the
project that you are heavily involved within the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's all about carbon aware computing or am I misunderstanding something here?
Nora (43:31)
yeah, I'm super happy being part of this advisory group because we are working on making grid aware websites. We are trying to find a way to help developers to build websites without compromising user experience.
So that's it. We are working on this and I hope this project achieves their objectives.
Gaël Duez (43:56)
So it's a grid aware computing and not a carbon aware computing. I should have known and sorry, but that's interesting to put it from a user rather than a purely technical perspective. I really like it. Okay. That was quite a long episode for you talking about things that are still obviously quite emotional. So I would like to thank you again a lot for joining and taking the time to
Nora (44:00)
Yeah.
Gaël Duez (44:21)
pose and reflect on what happened and also share other projects and other potential resources for WordPress developer and designers. Is there any final positive piece of news that you'd like to share about sustainability at large or digital sustainability more specifically?
Nahuai (44:43)
I would say a general one. Even if the team is closed, I still feel like the people care about the sustainability. for the moment is enough for me to keep going and being somehow rewarded
And they usually are willing to change something. So yeah, let's keep that as a positive note if we can.
Gaël Duez (45:07)
No, but the buzz is-
Nora (45:07)
Yeah, you can
shoot down the team but you cannot make people disappear.
Gaël Duez (45:12)
Yeah.
Csaba (45:13)
hmm, hmm, hmm.
Gaël Duez (45:17)
Excellent. I guess that, there is no bad publicity as the marketers love to say. So I guess this buzz will at least help some of us to reach out new people or to highlight how strategic is sustainably within the digital sector. So thanks a lot for joining. I hope this episode will contribute a bit to this.
noble task. once again, I'm sorry about what happened. And I feel very honored that you've chosen the Green Eye Podcast to share a bit more in details the story of the WordPress sustainability Team version one. And I hope that we will hear soon about version two.
Nahuai (45:59)
Thank you for having us, Gael.
Csaba (46:00)
Thank for having us, yes.
Nora (45:59)
Thank you.
Gaël Duez (46:02)
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us 5 stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know it's not easy to find a feature on these apps, but I trust you to succeed.
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To tell us more about some radical choices she made in the green ops field. And yes, it involves her cloud provider.
One last thing, GreenIo is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter. The last one has a great paper from Frédéric Bordage, who founded the greenit.fr community 20 years ago. And check also the conferences we organize across the globe. We opened the call for speakers for all five planned conferences this year in Singapore, New York, Munich, London and Paris.
So if you want to share your experience in green software, sustainable design, green ops, responsible AI, you name it, please fill in the form. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to build with you fellow responsible technologists a greener digital world,
So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact
Gaël Duez (00:15)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez, and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech.
Today, I learned that we have a sustainability team. Thank you for your effort in this area. Looking at results of the team so far and the return on investment of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely. In three sentences, almost three years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel was archived on the spot. It reminds me of the Elon Musk style when he arrived at Twitter, except that WordPress CMS still powers almost 40 % of all the websites around the globe, with many being heavy traffic websites. And with heavy traffic comes significant environmental impacts. So to get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of digital services now that the sustainability team is gone, I'm glad to welcome today three people who are active members of the WordPress community, especially on sustainability topics. Actually, they were part of the four founders of the original sustainability team.
Csaba is a sustainable web designer based in Antwerp, Belgium. Nahuai is a freelance WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator. And Nora Ferreiros is a freelance UX UI designer.
and both Nahuai and Nora are based in Barcelona. So welcome Csaba, Nahuai and Nora. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.
Nahuai (02:49)
Hello.
Nora (02:49)
Thank you.
Csaba (02:50)
Hello, hi.
Nora (02:51)
Thank you for
Nahuai (02:51)
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Csaba (02:52)
Hi, hello.
Gaël Duez (02:53)
You're
more than welcome. So maybe before we start, could each of you share what is the main fact or figure that leads you to care about sustainability as a WordPress practitioner?
Nora (03:09)
Well, actually, Nahuai is the person who led me to care about sustainability in WordPress and in the details sustainability and life in general,
Nahuai (03:20)
That was super nice to hear, Nora. In my case, the eye-opening moment was a lightning talk by Roberto Vázquez in a work camp that just putting together the energy consumed by data centers and the environmental impact. It's pretty straightforward, but it was the first time that I it was like, okay, this makes sense.
Gaël Duez (03:22)
Now you have to deal with this.
Nora (03:24)
It's true.
Nahuai (03:48)
and I started to go down the rabbit hole. And short after that, I started to talk with Hannah Smith, who has been a key person in my sustainability journey. And yeah, pretty much in that point, I started to research and start giving talks about it. And yeah, probably.
Nora (04:06)
Yeah, have to say that I was in this talk also, but for me it was later. Nahuai was the one that said to me, look at this, sustainability is important, but I also was in this talk and it was important to me to think about internet consumes energy.
Csaba (04:23)
For me, it's a bit similar, just like you mentioned, and as you mentioned in the intro, like WordPress having a large market share. So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact and maybe a lot more interesting for other people to...
profit from as well.
Gaël Duez (04:50)
you're right, Shaba, that WordPress is just huge in terms of CMS share and I was delighted to hear about the creation of a sustainability team at WordPress. I've heard, but maybe I'm wrong, that it all started at a WordPress convention with Nora speaking up on these aspects, but maybe I'm completely wrong. Could you enlighten me a bit on this?
Nora (05:16)
Yeah, it was kind of this way and honestly it was kind of around the situation, it wasn't something planned because it all started at the WordCamp Europe in 2022. This is the annual big WordPress event in Europe and it was also my first international event and I was super excited and nervous because I was about to spend...
four whole people who I only could communicate in English. I'm in Spanish, so you can imagine it is a little tricky. So I was talking one day, I was talking with Rocio Valdivia. She's a lead of global WordPress community programs. I had to read this because I have not been able to remember it. So she...
Nahuai (05:49)
you
Nora (06:03)
blindly believing my newly acquired language skills. And she encouraged me to ask a question during this Q &A session with Matt Mullenberg and Joseph Heiden-Champonsy, who was the executive director of WordPress at the moment. So basically two of the most important people involved in the project at the time. And for some reason I said, yeah, sure, why not? But the thing is, as time passed,
I started to panic because I had no idea what to ask about. So I turned to Nahuai and I asked him for help and he rightly suggests sustainability as a topic. So with this in mind, I knew, I yeah, I knew if I ask a general question like, what about sustainability? I would just...
Nahuai (06:35)
You
Gaël Duez (06:36)
Ha ha ha ha.
Nora (06:56)
get a polite non-committal answer like, cool that's interesting we will think about it, thank you. So I decided to directly ask them for a team or at least for a Slack channel and for whatever reason they went for the latter. So I did it and when I returned to my seat 18 people had already joined the channel and are rising but the funny thing is I never intended to.
achieve this. My goal was just to, I don't know, get sustainability on the table or maybe use this visibility to draw some attention of some attendees interested in the topic and then maybe connect with them after the event or whatever. But things went unspectral differently and I'm very happy about it.
After that, the four people that finally make the team work as a working group for a year and the next WordCamp Europe, we have the support of some amazing people and we could officially became a team. And this is the story. And I would clarify something. I think it's really important. I voiced the demand, but I'm pretty sure that
was the people who cheer and applaud the thing, my suggestion. That main matter, and Joseph said, okay, let's create the channel because the people want something and we have to do something. So if any of the personnel listening to this, thank you very much for making it possible. And remember that voices lead, but it's the community that moves things forward.
Gaël Duez (08:34)
Power of applause
Nora (08:36)
Yeah.
Csaba (08:36)
Hehehe.
Gaël Duez (08:37)
so you wanted to put sustainability on the table. You actually managed to put sustainability within the Slack workspace of WordPress. Csaba, were you one of these people jumping on this newly created Slack channel?
Csaba (08:55)
I think I was actually one of the first people to join because I remember, I remember Nora asking this question, but the funny thing is that I was like kind of falling asleep during the question and answer, not because it wasn't interesting, but then I just heard the word sustainability. I was, what, what? So I started listening and then I heard that the channel was created. I think I was one of the first and I remember.
Gaël Duez (08:59)
Ha ha ha ha.
Nahuai (09:06)
Thank
Csaba (09:21)
Thijs was there as well and we already arranged something to meet during the conference, the after party, let's say, which we did as well. And the other funny thing is that I ran into Nora and Nahuai as well somewhere during a walk. So we actually really met in Porto and yeah, that's where things probably started up. still we had a long way to go.
Gaël Duez (09:46)
Yeah, the stars were aligned. And maybe for the non-adverted listeners, we talk a lot about the WordPress community at WordPress, but as far as I've understood, WordPress is an open source software, but there is also a company called WordPress. And when we talk about a sustainability team, a lot of people could believe maybe that you're employees at
WordPress or some sort of WordPress company. could you maybe Nahuai you clarify a bit this ecosystem
Nahuai (10:16)
Yeah.
It is kind of tricky to make sense of it because of the naming. So I will try to keep it simple. you said, WordPress, the thing that we've been talking till now is the CMS, it's open source. And it has a vibrant community doing things because they believe on that open source and democratizing the publishing and everything that is behind the motto or the meaning of WordPress. But then after, and this was...
co-founded by Matt Mullenberg and Mike Little. Shortly after this creation, Matt Mullenberg created the company Automatic. And Automatic owns WordPress.com, which is a huge confusion for a lot of people. So WordPress.com is just a hosting company using the CMS WordPress. And that's pretty much all the resemblance between the two of them.
Gaël Duez (10:54)
Mm-hmm.
Nahuai (11:10)
And the tricky part to make it a bit more difficult to understand is to the community, we are all volunteers. This is an open source, but some companies are putting people, sponsoring people to contribute. And Automatic was until one month ago, the one that was putting more people and time on it. It was around 4,000 hours in people, the sponsor, to move forward.
So some of the teams that are in Make WordPress, that is how it's leader by people on automatic. Okay, because since they have a lot of people contributing, it's more than a hundred people. A lot of teams had someone from automatic having 40 hours week to put into there, which is super cool. The sustainability team...
Gaël Duez (11:44)
Hmm.
Nahuai (11:58)
we were a bit different in that sense because we were created in this special way as Nora explained. And the 14 reps were self-sponsored, meaning that we were putting our time because we believe in the CMS and in sustainability and then more people of course joined to the Slack and the meetings. But we were mainly people self-sponsored. There were also some sponsored by companies, but
the sustainability team was quite diverse in that sense. it was not run by, none of the teams are run by automatic, okay, just to be clear, but some teams have a lot of, or had a lot of people from automatic because one month ago, more or less, Matt decided to reduce the time that are putting back into the project. But this is because our legal,
battle that we didn't discuss yet, so I don't want to go down there. I hope I made sense a bit of how it's organized.
Gaël Duez (12:55)
Okay.
actually, thanks a lot because it's crystal clear. I didn't really understand what was automatic. And this is not the first time in the open source community that you have actually a software that is sort of maintained by a company, even if it's an open source software. you think about Red
but usually it's a bit clearer because they share the same name and sometimes the intellectual property is even clarified in that sense. Okay, got it. Thanks a lot. What did you do,
Nora (13:31)
Great question. when we make the team, they ask us to work on sustainability, not just on environmental
Csaba (13:31)
Mm-hmm.
Nora (13:39)
sustainability but also in social and economic part of sustainability. So
We have been working together with other working groups like Fight for the Future, for example, or the V Groups for Diversity. So we can together cover all the things because it was a big thing. And the original founders, we were more into environmental sustainability and it is the part we work more on. For example,
we worked in a handbook for making WordPress events more sustainable. We published it. We were able to translate it to Spanish and to French.
And we were actually working on making guidelines for creating a WordPress website in a more sustainable way. It was, for me, the more exciting project because we were making something similar to what W3C guidelines were making, but applied to WordPress.
And we were also working in a plugin that I think Csaba and Nahuai can explain better about how it works to help on this about creating more sustainable WordPress websites.
Csaba (14:57)
Yes, we
were working on a plugin. Yes, plugins are like kind of extensions of WordPress, functional extensions of WordPress. And the plan was to create a canonical plugin, which means that it's supported by the community or even maybe on the long-term be included in core WordPress. So the WordPress software itself. And the idea was to spread awareness about digital sustainability to give people an idea about their websites in the sense of carbon footprints.
And the two basic ideas were to surface whether the website was hosted on renewable energy and to measure the home page's weight and carbon footprint and to compare it with data from the website's carbon API, like compare it to other websites, other webpages measured and warn people if their homepage has a too large footprint. And of course give them
feedback or assist them how to improve it. And that's where the guidance part would come
Nahuai (15:57)
I wanted to point out as Nora said, we were collaborating with working groups, because this is the naming we are using in WordPress. And one of them was with the performance team, which are also working and job, by the way, reducing
the energy that is needed. And one of the things they did because of somehow the synergy between us was a saving, changing some technical part of how to check the HTTPS. But the number was like 471 kilowatts hour a month was saved because of the large market share of WordPress.
our idea in the sustainability was to raise awareness. So maybe in the performance team, they are already doing great work to reduce the emissions.
But our team, sorry, I have to laugh because our team is no longer alive. it's strange to phrase it this way, but I'm going to continue this way. So our team, the idea was to raise awareness of what the performance team was doing or create guidelines as Nora said. So it was not only reducing the CO2 or whatever, but...
Nora (16:56)
Yeah.
Nahuai (17:15)
is spreading the word of the impact that a website has.
Gaël Duez (17:19)
That's an important point because I was about to ask, but what about other environmental variables or what about using other proxy than just the web page weight? For instance, know, some other tool, they check the DOM size or they check the number of API call, et cetera. But I think if the main idea was really to raise awareness, the simpler you keep it, the better it is.
correct to assume things that way.
Csaba (17:50)
Yes, I think so. funny enough, it's sometimes very hard to keep things simple or just give a quiet, good estimation on what's, what's wrong and what can, what people can do about it. so it wasn't a simple task.
And I also have to note maybe that there is a site help feature of WordPress, which is quite a cool tool, which actually gives you information. does a couple of tests on your environment and gives you a couple of things you can improve for your website. And the idea was to include this.
into that tool, is a native tool of WordPress Core itself,
Gaël Duez (18:27)
And today, the plugin that you developed, is it still available somewhere? even if it's not included in the core WordPress, but can anyone still use it?
Csaba (18:39)
Yes, it's not in the plugin repository, but you can download from GitHub. it probably should undergo a couple of refactoring, but you can try it and use it as it is now.
Gaël Duez (18:50)
and what were the feedback from the community?
Nora (18:54)
The feedback from the community, I was thinking about this thing you said about keep things simple. And it was really hard to keep things simple because people were to use two numbers, like what have you achieved? Numbers. And sustainability is kind of difficult to do that if you don't want to stay in the tunnel carbon.
Gaël Duez (19:08)
Hmm.
Nora (19:18)
so there were many people interested in I want to do something to make WordPress more sustainable but they were feeling really confused because the team didn't have many resources to make practical things so we were in a theoretical place most of the time creating awareness and so and
I think people were interested, motivated, excited maybe, but confused about what they should do to make things more sustainable in a practical way.
Nahuai (19:58)
and having the aim of touching the three pillars of sustainability, the environmental, the social and the economic, made that even more difficult. Not that I didn't like it because I like the holistic point of view, but it was more difficult to communicate sometimes. So yeah, that didn't help to simplify. as Nora was stressing out, we moved
slowly because we were self-sponsored people and that was also something to take into account. And we could just allocate maybe two, four hours a week, but not more because we are mostly freelancers and trying to make our own living. So that was also part of the thing that was not easy to balance, let's say.
Csaba (20:42)
Also, I think it's important to add that you're also spending a lot of time in searching for how to get things done within the community, how the procedures were, which is not always clear, let's say not clear. so you have to, yeah, you have to dig in and then it takes a lot of time to find that out.
Nahuai (20:49)
Yep, the bureaucracy.
Gaël Duez (21:00)
maybe before we move to what happened in the dismantling quite abrupt as I mentioned in the introduction, I'd like and I'm very sorry for this to play a bit the devil advocates here and ask you a naive question. Why do we need WordPress guidelines when we start having W3C guidelines?
Nora (21:24)
Well, from a point of view as a designer, I am always in the side of the user. So for me, the WordPress guidelines were important to specifically explain people who is not into sustainability What they specifically have to do with their WordPress
website in the WordPress world. I suppose all the CMS works this way. There are many users, I think the most of the users making their own websites. So I thought it was important to explain these people are non-developer people, how to specifically set in their WordPress or use their WordPress.
to make things more sustainable.
from the WordPress perspective alone
Nahuai (22:11)
I couldn't agree more. I'm part of the group of the sustainable web of the W3C and it's an amazing work. What we are doing, mainly other colleagues, I have to say I have limited time to put into it, but I love it. And I try to do my best on that regard, but it's a very technical and long document. So even if sustainable web design did a great job filtering, because there is an open API, so you can go and grab the
different criteria and filter it. It's really nicely done, technically. Even if you go to the Sustainable Web Design, It's website in general, which is super cool, but I think that people that is working every day with WordPress, having something more linked with visuals and things that they say, okay, I know where I can do this or this other, I think
Nora (22:53)
you
Nahuai (23:01)
this really helps because it's more familiar. So I think everything we can do to make it easier for people that is interested on doing something, it's a move in a good direction.
Gaël Duez (23:13)
Fair point.
I was expecting that kind of answers
but I wanted to understand how much overlapped was possible there because actually I was wondering if it was one of the reasons why the WordPress SustainB group was dismantled. And maybe now it's time for the three of you to explain what you feel and how you analyzed the, let's be honest, of
brutal dismantling of the sustainability group as I described in the introduction. hypothesis number one, we've got W3C guidelines, no need for anything specific WordPress. I think you already answered this point, but hypothesis number two was like, is it some kind of a Trump-fueled backlash against everything which is sustainable and...
you want to look nice to the new leader of the United States and as some other big tech behemoths just did recently kissing their new ring. So was it like a political move? Was it more maybe some sort of internal feud? What led to such abrupt end of your working group?
Csaba (24:24)
I have been thinking about it and to be honest, I don't think there was really that much of thinking behind the decision. It was a bit of a one-sided decision without any discussion questions asked. So it happened also very quickly after Thijs has resigned, let's say between quotes. Maybe what strikes me the most about this is that we were a group of individuals, contributors, not sponsored.
most of us who were just contributing to WordPress and trying to make it better or at least environmentally, socially and so on better. yeah, it's kind of somewhere surprising, but also not regarding the current situation of WordPress.
Nora (25:06)
I don't have a clear picture of the whole thing because I wasn't into WordPress drama until it affected me and some community fellows I don't know Madd or his circumstances well enough to have a solid opinion about the why I think it is a personal thing it's not something bigger
Nahuai (25:20)
Thank
Nora (25:27)
I mean, I don't have an explanation, but it's pretty obvious to me that we can draw up parallel between his attitude and that of attitude of other big tech founders also at the moment. But I don't know.
Nahuai (25:42)
I have an hypothesis trying to be a bit more specific maybe for the people that is not inside the community and the WP drama and everything. So I think we cannot understand this decision without talking about the legal battle between automatic math because both are and WP engine. And this started in September of the last year and
The main reason to keep it simple was that Matt went into the stage in the keynote and publicly said that WP Engine, which is a WordPress hosting that is making a lot of money from WordPress, was not contributing enough. In that moment, they were contributing like 40 hours a week, something like that. And Automatic was contributing around 4,000. Okay. So he felt that it wasn't fair.
if every company went this route, WordPress would probably die because there wouldn't be enough resources. So fair point till here. At least all I'm going to say is my vision. Okay. So don't take it as a representation of the sustainability team or anything. It's just now I took it. So after Engine started a legal battle against Matt.
basically damaging the brand. Okay, let's say, let's put it that way. And there is more things that Matt say and everything, but I don't want to go down that road. And from this moment to the, probably the sustainability closing, team closing, it has been a different Matt.
for us at least, maybe Matt was always like that. But what happened is that Matt asked to the community to take part on this. So he wanted to know if you were behind him or if you were not behind him and his...
opinions and the things he was doing, you were against, pretty much, just to keep it simple. So the people that were vocal and going against Matt or his opinions, some of them were banned from Slack or from WordPress.org and things like that. again, my hypothesis is that Matt is...
kind of in a battle mode because it's in a legal battle and he needs the community to be behind him. And I think the trigger point in our case, was Thais stepping down as a team rep of the sustainability team because he was not aligned with the new direction that Matt was giving to WordPress okay?
And he made it public and he made it clear to Matt directly. And I think this was the trigger point. as I say, don't think there is much thinking about it. I think it was like, okay, these people were doing something. I don't recall knowing about it. Oh yes. I don't know. He said he didn't. And he was another power move. He made other power moves before. So this is my...
vision. Of course, it's subjective and maybe it's wrong, but I felt like Matt took it as a little attack somehow. And he said, okay, this is not very dear to my heart either. And so we can close it. Well, he can close it. That's probably the more frightening part is that Matt can do a lot of things
without anybody saying nothing and that's the part that is yeah more difficult to swallow.
Gaël Duez (29:11)
you're actually reading my mind because I was about to say that sort of reassuring that very bad decisions are still taken not because of a grand schema to change the world in my humble opinion for the worst and having like this kind of a techno crazy agenda and all this, you know.
movement that we see since the beginning of the year in the US within the tech sector, but just because of good old internal dilemma, feuds and the it should question
any source of open source or community of goodwill trying to achieve something about the governance model? Because how come that so many unilateral decisions were able to be made at WordPress? I mean, maybe the decision to close the sustainability was the right one. don't know. mean, obviously, I believe no, but I was not part of this community. So, you know, from an external perspective, I don't know. But what I do know for sure is that
Nora (29:46)
you
Gaël Duez (30:14)
when as a manager you take such a big decisions, literally firing people, there is a way to do things, even if different cultures, you do things differently. Usually you don't do it the way I've just presented in the introduction. And you must get all people's opinions and you absolutely need to get all the insights, starting with the people who are obviously the most involved in the situation, who are the members of the teams.
and in your case, the sustainability team. that really strikes me. what would you do differently?
from a governance perspective to prevent this to happen if you were to work again in a very engaged and good-willing community as the WordPress one.
Nora (30:56)
Well, for me,
as I have seen the community from external perspective is we trust too much in a voice, in a lead or in the vision one person had.
But as I said before, the voice is not the community. Contributors are the community. I think sometimes we forget this. I think we have to do the effort to step up the inertia in the communities, not just WordPress, but any other.
open source community and reflect on the continuity of the project
And I personally think we should go more into a democratic way of managing the thing, as many other people have said, like a governance with few people, not just one people, not because it is mad. I think a huge community or any other community should not be led by
just one person, but for a group of person choose or representative of the community itself. I don't know, for me it's kind of obvious, but when I get into this community, things were this way. So I was like, okay, if you are happy with this, I'm here just for working. So let's go for it.
Gaël Duez (32:09)
Hmm.
So I got your point that even the most powerful voice is powerful because of
the the community behind But there is something that I still don't understand is what is a governance structure? Actually, what is WordPress? what is the legal even structure of WordPress? Is it a foundation? Is it an association, an NGO? And how come that one person has
all the power
Nahuai (32:39)
It's tricky because there is a foundation, there is a WordPress foundation, okay? And Automatic gave the trademark. So this trademark, which is a huge trademark, was moved to the WordPress foundation, which is good, okay?
Gaël Duez (32:43)
Okay.
Okay.
Nahuai (32:56)
And the WordPress foundation, it has a board of three people, Matt and another two members. But even if there is a foundation, the more important part of the community is probably the WordPress.org, which is the domain and everything make and everything and the plugins and everything is behind.
Gaël Duez (33:10)
Mm-hmm.
Csaba (33:15)
you
Nahuai (33:16)
that domain and Matt is the owner of that. That's why he has quite a lot of power. Indeed, one of the moves he did was blocking the possibility of WP Engine to access to the repository of plugins, which is a kind of a big deal. Okay. And he can do it because he is the owner of the domain. So that part is not in the foundation. That's why it's tricky. And we discovered this lately because of...
Gaël Duez (33:35)
working.
Okay.
Nahuai (33:45)
these things that didn't happen before. Because I have to say, I've been following Matt's path and I was pretty happy with the direction that WordPress was going. Mainly because of the community, but also because Matt was going in the same direction
Gaël Duez (34:00)
that's very interesting what you're saying,
because you can create a foundation, put some intellectual property within it, even the brands.
But if you withhold some strategic assets, such as a domain name or some small pieces of intellectual property, actually, your foundation is still some sort of 100 % under your control. Am I right rephrasing a bit what you say that way?
Nahuai (34:25)
I think so. Sometimes I have doubts if we understand well enough the structure, because it wasn't clear enough before this storm came. Not the team closure, but the legal battle against WP. So I'm pretty sure that this is the way I described minutes ago. And I think if it is like that, it's not optimal, because
Gaël Duez (34:37)
Hmm.
Nahuai (34:50)
As Nora said, I think these big things like the domain of WordPress.org and this kind of decision should be taken by more than one person. And till now there was no problem because Matt was being quite generous with the time he was putting with automaticians into the, in the community and with the trademark and everything. So till not that much time, it was pretty okay, everything.
Gaël Duez (34:59)
Hmm.
Nahuai (35:16)
And this battle kind of put into perspective how much power Matt has.
Csaba (35:21)
I very much agree upon how Nahuai has explained it. And also I think the bottom line we have learned, we learned a lot of things the last couple of months, but the bottom line is that we are very much dependent on WordPress.org for plugin updates, for team updates, everything that is very much hard-coded in WordPress. And that's something that we should, yeah.
Gaël Duez (35:25)
Hmm.
Csaba (35:44)
Think about a bit more if that's the way to go and probably not so.
Nahuai (35:47)
Yeah.
I think Drupal has a pretty interesting structure of how they have the governance structure. And it would be super cool if we moved to something more closer to Drupal or other CMSs or other open source products for that sake. I'm not sure if right now it's going to happen. I still feel like...
we are in a battle somehow, kind of in a battle. So I'm really hoping for the legal battle to finish and maybe the dust settle a bit and maybe some of the proposals can be look more calmly because there are some proposals right now. But I think Matt still sees them as a kind of an attack or power takeover or something like that again.
My opinion, I'm not sure I don't usually talk with Matt about this, but hopefully if this goes, this inflammation, let's call it, goes down, maybe we can talk more calmly about how we want to move forward. That's my hope.
Nora (36:42)
Yeah.
Gaël Duez (36:56)
Nahuai you are a perfect guest because I was about asked what were the repercussions of this battle mode in the WordPress community, quoting you for other CMS providers. And if we could get lessons from other open source projects and you mentioned Drupal. So maybe
Could you elaborate a bit on how Drupal is organized
Nahuai (37:19)
Yeah, probably I'm not the best person to talk about Drupal because I'm not inside it, but
I really recall well is a post from the founder of Drupal, which was explaining how they try to reward the companies that are giving back to the Drupal project. Okay. And there is a system of credits on how if you give more back, you can...
take some advantages, like being, I don't recall exactly, but maybe being highlighted as a plug-in maker or as a company or whatever. So that was one of the ideas that I found interesting because at the end, the main problem that we started this is that WP Engine was making a lot of money without giving anything back or very little back.
But maybe if we put some kind of rewards on people that is giving back, we could solve that part.
Gaël Duez (38:15)
thanks, Nehru, to clarify this Drupal governance Did you get some feedback on how did people react to the closing of the sustainability teams and what do they want to do now to keep on moving on their sustainability journey?
Nora (38:31)
Well, something I'm happy this all brings is many people ask, or at least ask me, the question why technology thing, why WordPress, why any other project like that need a sustainability team or a sustainability group working on this. And many people were asking,
in a bad way, like, we don't need this, but I think this question is important because many people, like Hannah Smith, for example, were answering this question, or even many people were just thinking about it, like, we don't need this, maybe we do. So I'm quite happy taking into account the situation because this situation with the sustainability team, I think, made people reflect on...
If we need in technology groups for working towards sustainability
Gaël Duez (39:28)
Thanks a lot. Nora, about the guidelines, are they still maintained somewhere? Did you migrate the working group on climate action tech or any other thought of a welcoming Slack community where you can keep on working or everything has been paused for the moment?
Nora (39:46)
Everything has been posted for a moment, but some people have asked us like, where are you going to work now on this? I don't have an answer for that because I didn't decide the thing, but we are still open to work on this. So if anybody listen to this says, okay, I'm into this and I want to collaborate, we can create something, but there is nothing at this moment.
Gaël Duez (39:48)
Okay.
Hmm. So it's a hard stop. OK.
Nahuai (40:17)
same for me. My
main idea is to keep contributing to the W3C group as far as I can. We are also in a very, very nice project from the GreenWeb Foundation that maybe later Nora can touch on it. And I will also continue to talk about sustainability in my podcast and in WordPress events. And as a plugin and theme maker, I have it.
embedded in my workflow and I try to also explain it as one of the key features of the plugin or the theme. So I will continue to be interested and talking about it but as Anora said there is since we don't have an official channel and way of working right now we just paused and let's see where it goes but for now it's paused.
Gaël Duez (41:06)
And actually, before talking about this GreenWeb Foundation project, which I believe is very closely related to what you've tried to achieve at WordPress. That's true Nahuai I should have mentioned that we are colleagues because you've also got your own podcast. And can you maybe just pitch us for one minute? Because I reckon that they are very valuable resources for anyone working with WordPress tool to become more sustainable. Am I right?
Nahuai (41:32)
Yeah, yeah, I was lucky enough to be selected by the GreenWeb Foundation the fellowship they have. So as a project, I created a podcast. It's a limited series podcast. So it's just eight episodes and it's about WordPress and sustainability. And I was also lucky enough to have very nice and interesting people like Nora, Csaba Thjis, the team reps, but also Tim Frick, Tom Greenwood.
people from the data sustainability and also for WordPress sphere. So I think if you're interested in the topic, could be a nice resource.
Gaël Duez (42:05)
Got it. And so because the GreenWide Foundation seems to be everywhere with the usual suspects that many of them were and surely will be again in the future, guests or speakers in Green IO or events. Maybe, Nora, to close on a more positive note this podcast, because
Nahuai (42:10)
Thank you.
Gaël Duez (42:26)
just as a side note, I was expecting a bit more of a happy ending, that you've already some sort of bounce back and found an agreement that Matt realized that, okay, maybe I shouldn't close or that abruptly, or you've been welcomed by the performance team or you created already some something else. So it's really a bit of a runes at the moment and I feel...
I'm kind of terribly sorry for all the hard work that you put you and hundreds of people, if I just count the numbers on the Slack channel. So yeah, it's a very disturbing thought that so much hard work that aim to go in the right direction with the pro and the con of every project, obviously, is, yeah, cancelled, I would say. But anyway, so to finish on a more optimistic note, Nora, you wanted also to talk about the
project that you are heavily involved within the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's all about carbon aware computing or am I misunderstanding something here?
Nora (43:31)
yeah, I'm super happy being part of this advisory group because we are working on making grid aware websites. We are trying to find a way to help developers to build websites without compromising user experience.
So that's it. We are working on this and I hope this project achieves their objectives.
Gaël Duez (43:56)
So it's a grid aware computing and not a carbon aware computing. I should have known and sorry, but that's interesting to put it from a user rather than a purely technical perspective. I really like it. Okay. That was quite a long episode for you talking about things that are still obviously quite emotional. So I would like to thank you again a lot for joining and taking the time to
Nora (44:00)
Yeah.
Gaël Duez (44:21)
pose and reflect on what happened and also share other projects and other potential resources for WordPress developer and designers. Is there any final positive piece of news that you'd like to share about sustainability at large or digital sustainability more specifically?
Nahuai (44:43)
I would say a general one. Even if the team is closed, I still feel like the people care about the sustainability. for the moment is enough for me to keep going and being somehow rewarded
And they usually are willing to change something. So yeah, let's keep that as a positive note if we can.
Gaël Duez (45:07)
No, but the buzz is-
Nora (45:07)
Yeah, you can
shoot down the team but you cannot make people disappear.
Gaël Duez (45:12)
Yeah.
Csaba (45:13)
hmm, hmm, hmm.
Gaël Duez (45:17)
Excellent. I guess that, there is no bad publicity as the marketers love to say. So I guess this buzz will at least help some of us to reach out new people or to highlight how strategic is sustainably within the digital sector. So thanks a lot for joining. I hope this episode will contribute a bit to this.
noble task. once again, I'm sorry about what happened. And I feel very honored that you've chosen the Green Eye Podcast to share a bit more in details the story of the WordPress sustainability Team version one. And I hope that we will hear soon about version two.
Nahuai (45:59)
Thank you for having us, Gael.
Csaba (46:00)
Thank for having us, yes.
Nora (45:59)
Thank you.
Gaël Duez (46:02)
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