Sustainability Chat Agenda, February 9, 2024

Welcome to the home of the WordPress Sustainability Team!

We seek to embed sustainable practices into WordPress to ensure the longevity of the project.

To do so, we focus our efforts on the 3 pillars of sustainability:

Social: Finding ways to increase the diversity and wellbeing of the WordPress community.

Environmental: Reducing energy and waste consumption in the development and usage of the WordPress software and its community activities.

Economical: Finding ways to economically support contributions to the WordPress Project, for those who need it.

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

At #sustainabilty channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.

We will continue the projects we are currently working on as a priority:

WordPress Sustainability PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party supported by the WP Sustainability Team. Follow up on this project here and the last meeting’s comments here. There’re some questions proposed in the last agenda post to discuss about:
- The WordPress Sustainability Plugin is an interesting initiative, but how do you plan to address the objections made to existing tools for estimating CO2eq emissions, especially as there is as yet no consensus? Wouldn’t it be more responsible not to use figures that, while satisfactory, are necessarily misleading and potentially detrimental to the original goal? See: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/website-carbon-emissions
WordCamp Handbook with sustainability ideas/guidelines. Learn how to contribute to this here and follow up on this project here.
Welcome Box. Let’s wrap up the content of the welcome box, issue 6, text in this Google Doc.

There are other issues that may require our attention right now:

Sustainability Team self-approval system. Announcement of the post with the guidelines for this suggestion made at the previous meeting.
Attract new contributors and engage the existing ones. You can follow up the topic and leave your thoughts here.
- We can discuss about onboarding, mentoring, define a common discourse (for events, talks, contribution tables…), documentation, etc.
- We can also try to answer some of these questions (and any other related suggested):
  - How could we attract and guide the new contributors?
  - What can we do?
  - How can we explain them what we do and how can they help the team?
Sustainability Team Badges. Which ones we should have and how they would be obtained.
Open Website Alliance. Reflect on the formation of the Open Website Alliance which was the result of the collaboration between the Drupal Association, Open Source Matters (Joomla), the TYPO3 Association, and the WordPress Project around an open letter to the European Union. More info here.

If you have any updates on issues or projects that we have previously discussed, you are free to bring them up during the meeting.

Anything else? Please leave a comment if you want some topic to be discussed at the meeting that is not listed above.