PROPOSED Sustainable Web Working Group Charter
The mission of the Sustainable Web Working Group is to improve sustainability so the Web works better for all people and the planet.
This proposed charter is available on GitHub. Feel free to raise issues.
| Charter Status | Initial Charter |
|---|---|
| Start date | DD Month YYYY |
| End date | DD Month YYYY |
| Chairs | Ines Akrap (Storyblok) Tim Frick (Mightybytes) Mike Gifford (CivicActions) |
| Team Contacts | Carine Bournez (.25 FTE) |
| Meeting Schedule | Teleconferences: Approximately monthly. Face-to-face: The environmental impact of travel will be considered when scheduling in-person meetings with accommodations made for virtual attendance. The group expects to meet during the W3C's annual Technical Plenary week; additional face-to-face meetings may be scheduled by consent of the participants. |
Motivation and Background
The vision of the Sustainable Web Working Group is to provide evidence-led guidance alongside methods to observe, measure, and improve the sustainability of digital products and services. Through this guidance created by web developers, implementers, and other stakeholders of the Internet economy, they may better understand the internet's impact on various forms of sustainability reporting and evolving ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) practices. This not only includes digital emissions, but also interconnecting variables which can additionally impact digital sustainability. To address these challenges, designers, developers, and product teams can apply stewardship principles to digital products, services, and data delivered via the internet.
Scope
This group pursues the following sustainability goals:
- Reducing global carbon emissions.
- Reducing consumption of energy and material resources.
- Improving resilience of digital products and businesses.
The Working Group discusses many use cases to determine how standards - both those focused on (and shaped by) sustainability can benefit the industry, including:
- Wider adoption of guidelines to reduce carbon emissions and resource use.
- Existing regulatory (CSRD etc) and standards (GRI) compliance to reach a wider global audience.
- Methods to reduce emissions reinforce (but don't replace) existing beneficial practices (Accessibility, Performance, Privacy, Security, etc).
- Broader interoperability, compatibility, and stability within the Web ecosystem.
The Sustainable Web Working Group develops guidelines and supporting materials that address how the following topics relate to the above sustainability goals:
- Websites & Web Applications: User-facing digital products, services, and websites.
- Authoring Tools & User Agents: Tools which directly interact with the Internet.
- User Experience Design: Processes by which digital products or services are designed and created.
- Metrics Data: Sustainability research analytics, ratings, and emissions or resource calculations.
- Hosting & Infrastructure: Within the remit of transmitting, delivering, or managing digital assets.
- Business: In relation to the creation or management of digital teams and assets.
Out of Scope
The following features are out of scope, and will not be addressed by this group.
- Non-web aspects of native applications in both mobile & desktop environments: However, Web applications remain in scope.
- Hardware: Unless denoted through in-scope section on Hosting & Infrastructure, we will not provide coverage of the manufacturing or usage of products beyond the remit of Internet-usage.
- Horizontal Reviews: This working group will not conduct horizontal reviews of other groups' specifications.
Deliverables
Updated document status is available on the group publication status page.
Draft state indicates the state of the deliverable at the time of the charter approval. Expected completion indicates when the deliverable is projected to become a Recommendation, or otherwise reach a stable state.
Normative Specifications
The Working Group will deliver the following W3C normative specifications:
- Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0
-
This specification explains how to design and implement digital products and services that put people and the planet first. The guidelines are best practices based on measurable, evidence-based research; aimed at end-users, web workers, stakeholders, tool authors, educators, and policymakers.
Draft state: Adopted from Draft CG Report
Expected completion: [Q1-4 yyyy]
Note: The Sustainable Web Design Community Group has taken a holistic approach to sustainability, encompassing environmental, social, and economic (ESG) considerations (see, for example United Nations, US Gov [Sustainability], NYPA, UK Gov [Defra]). This broad approach has the advantage of aligning with some regulatory expectations (Laws & Policies) and creating a framework that is more likely to achieve success by extending beyond code and hardware to people and practices. The scope of the Working Group charter is narrower than that of the Community Group, and as a result, the Community Group anticipates that some of the guidelines of the Community Group's initial report will not be part of a future Recommendation. The Community Group may continue to leverage some of the material not taken up by the Working Group in order to support the future Recommendation, for example through good practice documentation.
Other Deliverables
The Working Group will publish additional resources, not on the Recommendation Track:
- At-A-Glance & Introductory documents offering signposting to the group's work.
- Quick Reference & Checklist which provide a compact list of the WSG's.
- STAR evaluation methodologies, techniques (case studies), and test suite (metrics).
- JSON API that actively encourages third-party implementation of our work.
The Working Group may publish additional supporting resources not on the Recommendation Track:
- Educational materials to promote adoption.
- Translations.
Note: While limited support for browser developers (user-agents) and authoring tools currently exists, the inclusion of materials for such groups in the future is within the scope of this Working Group.
Success Criteria
In order to advance to Proposed Recommendation, each normative specification is expected to have at least two independent interoperable implementations of every feature defined in the specification, where interoperability can be verified by passing open test suites, and two or more implementations interoperating with each other. In order to advance to Proposed Recommendation, each normative specification must have an open test suite of every feature defined in the specification.
There should be testing plans for each specification, starting from the earliest drafts.
To promote interoperability, all changes made to specifications in Candidate Recommendation or to features that have deployed implementations should have tests. Testing efforts should be conducted via the Web Platform Tests project.
Each specification should contain sections detailing all known security and privacy implications for implementers, Web authors, and end users.
Each specification should contain a section on accessibility that describes the benefits and impacts, including ways specification features can be used to address them, and recommendations for maximising accessibility in implementations.
This Working Group expects to follow the TAG Web Platform Design Principles.
Coordination
For all specifications, this Working Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG. Invitation for review must be issued during each major standards-track document transition, including FPWD. The Working Group is encouraged to engage collaboratively with the horizontal review groups throughout development of each specification. The Working Group is advised to seek a review at least 3 months before first entering CR and is encouraged to proactively notify the horizontal review groups when major changes occur in a specification following a review.
Additional technical coordination with the following Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document:
W3C Groups
- Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
- For specification guideline modeling and WSG interoperability.
- Web Performance Working Group
- For guideline interoperability with reducing resource waste.
- Sustainable Web Design Community Group
- The Sustainable Web Working Group will maintain an ongoing, collaborative relationship with the current Sustainable Web Design community group in order to facilitate knowledge sharing and continuous learning for members of both groups. This will improve the quality of deliverables for both groups.
External Organizations
As an emerging and rapidly growing field of knowledge, digital sustainability expertise comes from many places. The Working Group recognizes that numerous organizations around the world focus on similar or adjacent topics. We have identified the three below as early partners whose expertise and willingness to collaborate will support our success.
- Green Software Foundation
- Help the WSGs meet sustainability targets.
- Green Web Foundation
- Help the WSGs meet sustainability targets.
- UNEP CODES
- Help the WSGs meet sustainability targets.
Participation
To be successful, this Working Group is expected to have 6 or more active participants for its duration, including representatives from the key implementors of this specification, and active Editors and Test Leads for each specification. The Chairs, specification Editors, and Test Leads are expected to contribute half of a working day per week towards the Working Group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.
The group encourages questions, comments and issues on its public mailing lists and document repositories, as described in Communication.
The group also welcomes non-Members to contribute technical submissions for consideration upon their agreement to the terms of the W3C Patent Policy.
Participants in the group are required (by the W3C Process) to follow the W3C Code of Conduct.
Communication
Technical discussions for this Working Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts of specifications will be developed in public repositories and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, however.
Information about the group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the Sustainable Web Working Group home page.
Most Sustainable Web Working Group teleconferences will focus on discussion of particular specifications, and will be conducted on an as-needed basis.
This group primarily conducts its technical work on GitHub issues. The public is invited to review, discuss and contribute to this work. This group also uses utilizes the public mailing list public-[email-list]@w3.org (archive) for event notifications and important announcements.
The group may use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.
Decision Policy
This group will seek to make decisions through consensus and due process, per the W3C Process Document (section 5.2.1, Consensus). Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.
However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress and consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a group vote and record a decision along with any objections.
To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. A call for consensus (CfC) will be issued for all resolutions (for example, via email, GitHub issue or web-based survey), with a response period from one week to 10 working days, depending on the chair's evaluation of the group consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Working Group.
All decisions made by the group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs.
This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 5.2.3, Deciding by Vote) and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.
Patent Policy
This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (Version of 15 September 2020). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Web specifications that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the licensing information.
Licensing
This Working Group will use the W3C Software and Document license for all its deliverables.
About this Charter
This charter has been created according to section 3.4 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.
Charter History
The following table lists details of all changes from the initial charter, per the W3C Process Document (section 4.3, Advisory Committee Review of a Charter):
| Charter Period | Start Date | End Date | Changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial Charter | [dd monthname yyyy] | [dd monthname yyyy] | none |
Change log
Changes to this document are documented in this section.