Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG)

The following page describes HowlRound Theatre Commons’ first technology evaluation under the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG). Updated 26 August 2024.

About

At the core of the WSG is a list of more than ninety guidelines towards producing digital products and services that put people and the planet first. The six principles of web sustainability provide a useful throughline for understanding what animates the web sustainability movement—an internet that is clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient.

As the hosts and stewards of a digital publication for the performing arts, we imagined the WSG to be an important catalyst for the arts sector to become aware of its participation in overshooting planetary limits and the necessity of resource restraint and intentional degrowth–even in the realm of digital. So, in collaboration with the software developers and digital strategists at Giant Rabbit who share responsibility for key elements of our technology stack, we reviewed each of the success criteria (available in the pre-release v1.0-D3 revision of the WSG) and gave a preliminary evaluation of our current posture with regards to each criterion.

You can find the details in our WSG Conformance Tracker, a table that incorporates each of the WSG criteria and allows for specific reflections on each. Aligning with the WSG’s ethos of “progress over perfection,” each criterion was assigned a status of “Passing,” “In progress,” or “Excluded from baseline.”

What follows in this post is a summary of the findings across the four major sections of the WSG: User Experience Design; Web Development; Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems; and Business Strategy and Product Management.

Tracking Our Progress with the Guidelines

User Experience Design Guidelines

HowlRound was marked as passing for seventy of seventy-two baseline-eligible success criteria. Many of our successes in this category stem from being a commons-oriented organization with a digital ethic that has sought usability improvements while also resisting unsustainable, anti-user practices. Meeting these criteria required no changes. There are a couple of technical improvements we're pursuing in this section, namely to produce sitemaps and to better support lazy loading of image assets.

Web Development Guidelines

HowlRound was marked as passing for forty-seven of the fifty-two baseline-eligible success criteria. Here, we benefit from using Drupal 10, an established, modern content management system (CMS) and conducting rigorous accessibility testing with the help of seasoned digital accessibility consultants at Axess Lab. The handful of success criteria that require changes are focused on newer development patterns/paradigms (like using resource hints for external assets) that can be usefully prioritized on our longer-term roadmap that includes both maintenance and incremental, substantive improvements.

Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems

HowlRound was marked as passing for twenty-seven of the twenty-eight baseline-eligible success criteria. For many of these factors, we rely on the published commitments of major providers, like our hosting platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Customers of AWS choose a geographic region for hosting services, and in 2018, we chose the region with the most aggressive renewable energy commitments. After undertaking a review of sustainable hosting options in 2023, it was plain that the largest providers, like AWS, had broad social and financial incentives to use renewable energy while improving efficiency and predictability for every aspect of their service. However, accountability for these businesses cannot be left solely to individual customers—the social and financial rewards they seek require a robust regulatory apparatus to complement careful decision-making by small-scale technology customers.

Business Strategy and Product Management

HowlRound was marked as passing for thirty-eight of fifty-two baseline-eligible success criteria. This was a section that seemed broadly less applicable to the kinds of sustainability interventions available to nonprofit arts and community organizations like HowlRound. Guidelines like "5.26 Include E-Waste, Right-To-Repair, and Recycling Policies" seem most useful aimed at the operational patterns of large-scale, commercial enterprises where sustainability efforts require robust internal policy-making, governance, and training to survive the inherent tension with an overriding profit motive. As mismatched as this collection of guidelines seemed, they could provide a starting point for recognizing what is unique about nonprofit organizations and smaller organizations and developing approaches to strengthen sustainability efforts under non-profit governance models and methods.

Project Roadmap

Looking ahead, we anticipate at least three follow-up outcomes from this exercise:

(1) The WSG review will influence our platform development priorities in the upcoming years. We have always sought to incorporate as much context as possible in our decision-making around what to develop, maintain, and deprecate—the WSG gives us another useful, human-centered signal to integrate into our decision-making.

(2) The WSG and associated supplemental material will evolve to incorporate more concrete guidance. The WSG's most up-to-date pre-release version includes a much more detailed guide to evaluation, the "Sustainable Tooling and Reporting (STAR) 1.0" supplement, which was not yet available at the time of our initial analysis. The supplement seeks to concretize approaches towards testing each of the guidelines, and while most of the testing guidance is considered advisory, the move towards material specificity should make future evaluations (and improvements) easier to identify.

(3) The tools for approximating energy intensity and greenhouse gas emissions will become more robust, and the benefits of using them will become more clear, particularly when paired with specific WSG criteria. The earliest efforts to quantify the climate impacts of software development choices, while seemingly earnest, were difficult to separate from greenwashing or greenwashing-adjacent patterns. However, the climate emergency is drawing collaborators together, and useful approximations are making their way into tools that can guide the more marginal decisions in web and software development. We found ourselves "in progress" for a handful of measurement-oriented WSG criteria, and we expect the improvement in tooling will make these outcomes more achievable by requiring less independent intervention.

Applying this Work to Your Own Organization

Finally, if you're a technology decision-maker and would like to pilot a similar inquiry, please consider making a copy of our Blank WSG Conformance Tracker and reviewing it independently or in collaboration with a developer or technology strategist. We found it to be very insightful and would be happy to see others benefit from engaging with the concepts embedded in the WSG.