Just like there is Umbraco Sustainability Group, and Wagtail Sustainability Group, and something related in the Drupal Community, I think it’s useful for there to be a WordPress sustainability group, who have an interest in understanding and reducing the climate impact of the project.
These are the arguments I would use for it to exist, and for there to be effort put into understanding how the use of digital services build around WordPress result in a measurable environmental impact.
TLDR:
You don’t need to care about climate to think it’s a good idea to have a group like this in your OSS community – you just need to care about reducing the perceived risk associated with an open source project that you or your organisation relies on.
If you expect people to use your product or service, then it’s reasonable to think you might be expected to help people responsible for compliance, when they need to report on the environmental impact of using it. If they don’t come to you, then you need to ask yourself – who else would you be happy with them going to instead, and what happens, when the advice from that person is “use something else?”
It’s a bit like how you need to think about accessibility more these days too – you don’t need to care about accessibility yourself to recognise that ignoring it is exposing your project to various risks.
You should care about having a healthy OSS community too, but even if you don’t, you probably should care about helping people comply with the laws they are bound by if nothing else.
1. It’s increasingly required by the law in different parts of the world, as part of compliance
Here’s a snippet from the CSRD law in Europe:
If it is material for the undertaking’s Scope 3 emissions, it shall disclose the GHG emissions from purchased cloud computing and data centre services as a subset of the overarching Scope 3 category “upstream purchased goods and services”.
This law affects organisations that make up around 80% of Europe’s GDP. Many of them use WordPress, and a cloud service using WordPress will usually count as an org’s Scope 3 emissions now. More and more people trying to stay compliant will want to know this information, so they can disclose as the laws now require them to.
2. If WordPress doesn’t do it or provide guidance, it will be done poorly or in a way that exposes users to various organisational risks
When organisations try to work out the environmental impact of digital services they are responsible, in the absence of good data and guidance, they will often come up with analysis that is riddled with errors, and either wildly over-declare the environmental impact, or wildly under-declare it.
The first is a real PR headache, and can scare off users.
The second can result in significant fines – as in percentage of annual turnover fines – for under-declaring supply chain risks in documents that require external assurance from auditors.
3. Competitors are doing it, and if companies need this as part of compliance they will need to switch to compliant solutions that are not WordPress
Part of owning and managing a services relies on understanding it’s environmental impact, just like understanding what you can say about its accessibility, as a part of helping your users can customers comply with the laws binding them.
This is being done by a growing number of competing CMS options now. Umbraco CMS does this. The Wagtail CMS does this.
If it’s materially harder to do this with WordPress than alternatives, then it counts against the suitability of WordPress for projects who need to be able talk about this with confidence.
Ask some people famliar with the matter inside Automattic (or rather, who have since left it) and they will tell you that a condition of winning work with some large financial services clients in regulated industries was that Automattic had a sustainability report that they could produce when requests, and could give the buyer some response about having processes or numbers available for their VIP product.
Having this helps (helped?) for Automattic. Ddisbanding the project’s sustainability does not help it, and it likely helps competitors.
0. It’s something the community has already asked for it, and is dedicating time and energy to already
I guess should have led this this one, and this speaks to the increasingly erratic stewardship of the project. So, you might call number this point zero I guess.
I mention it here, as it speaks to different kinds of risks to the kinds downstream customers/clients on WordPress projects care about in the shorter term.
As I understand it, the WordPress project is supposed to be a open source community project, with related but separate goals and interests to any single corporate sponsor.
The point of an actively maintained a open source project that presents itself as part of a community is that there is some expectation of community governance, beyond BDFL. I think it’s a sign of a mature software community that it eventually outgrows the awkward BDFL phase once there are enough diverse stakeholders.
I’m not saying there are no successful OSS projects that rely on the BDFL model, but I think long term, I think graduating past the BDFL phase is a good idea for projects as they grow in size and scope.
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