– DRAFT –
W3C Sustainability meeting

tantek: this is the sustainability breakout session

tantek: how many of you had a chance to look at the projects and work areas of this group? show of hands?

[very few hands]

<tantek> event: https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/849a2a8e-07bc-4bca-9a8b-24995e3a15e1/

<tantek> projects and work areas: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Sustainability#Work_Areas

tantek: like I summarised in the description… it's been an eventful past year for sustainability at W3C

tantek: we have a Sustainability Interest Group charter that has gone to AC for vote

tantek: tzviya8 was hired by W3C to work on member related things as well as sustainability

tantek: the TAG put the ethical web principles forward to make it an official W3C statement

tantek: it received no objections

tantek: while the processing happens we can take it with fairly strong confidence that W3C will publish a statement that contains a strong wording re sustainability

tantek: the statement is one thing, the other is to put it into practice

tantek: the project that made most process is the sustainable web guidelines, that's the primary deliverable of the interest group

<tzviya8> SWIG Charter: https://www.w3.org/2024/09/sustyweb-charter-202409.html

tantek: that leaves us with what's next for sustainability at W3C

tantek: one of the harder and hopefully most valuable first… how do we establish a process of sustainability horizontal review

tantek: in the same way we have it for accessibility and other things at the W3C

<Ben_Tillyer_> 5 people on zoom

tzviya8: tantek mentioned it's part of my job now. I am hoping to work on developing horizontal review

tzviya8: another great news is that tnitot has joined the TAG

tzviya8: I don't think anyone has the time to review every single specification… so is it something like is this specification ruining the planet? it is mostly about the impact that the spec has, not the spec itself

tnitot: I am Tristan, have been involved with web standards for a while… spent 17 years at Mozilla, now for the past 5-6 years have been focusing mostly on sustainability

tnitot: have recently been appointed TAG member

tnitot: still trying to figure out how to help

tnitot: I think sustainability horizontal review is very promising

tnitot: if you have ideas on how I can help, come talk to me

addison: one thing to think about re horizontal reviews… there is reviewing spec, but one thing that worked well for us is to build a short checklist

addison: this helps focus the work

tnitot: do you think along the lines of privacy and security is it along those lines?

hdv: We have a11y checklist called FAST, and it might be useful as well

<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to ask what sustainability means

https://w3c.github.io/fast/

tzviya8: maybe we can talk about… what does sustainability mean?

tantek: I can link to the ethical web principles

<tantek> https://www.w3.org/TR/2024/NOTE-ethical-web-principles-20240813/#sustainable

tantek: it talks about environmental sustainability, there are a few examples, like carbon emissions and reducing electronic waste

tantek: I would personally also add water consumption, or, in general, natural resource consumption

https://w3c.github.io/sustyweb/intro.html#what-is-web-sustainability

tantek: if we don't have a good definition of what it means it makes it hard to make a checklist

tantek: as a sustainability enthusiast I know enough to be dangerous so glad to facilitate folks who know more as a chair

tantek: we could look at what new technology might do as opposed to what technology could do

tantek: it's hard to anticipate how things could go wrong

tantek: do certain technology patterns lead to certain harms in certain situations?

<Zakim> tantek, you wanted to strong +1 a checklist and see who here would be interested in drafting one in the Sustainability CG?

tantek: how could a new technology impact sustainability? probably requires a lot of collaboration including with other folks

tantek: to me a checklist is a great way to get horizontal review to start

<tantek> sees tzviya, tnitot, dmarti, timo, jgraham

<tantek> raises their hands

tantek: who would like to help with this?

tzviya8: and the to be fomed sustainability interest group would probably have great folks to help with this

tantek: is anyone particularly interesting in drafting or editing?

<alastairc> The CG put together a big list, it appears that starting with that and finding the ones applicable to horizontal review? https://w3c.github.io/sustyweb/#web-development

tzviya8: question for us to ask is if it would be based on web sustainability guidelines or not?

tantek: I think they're related but not the same

dmarti: wanted to ask about lifespan of devices, does that include right to repair or would that get us too far from web sustainability?

dmarti: and the right to repurpose, eg if your device is not updated you could at least get a web browsing station out of it

tzviya8: can't remember if these are in but seem important to include

Ben_Tillyer_: looking from an accessibility perspective, if we were to include a new standard that improves the equity on the web for certain disability groups, but then it also increases power consumption considerably, how do we balance that when we do horizontal review?

tnitot: if we want to think sustainability properly, we should start with lifecycle assessments, it's not just water or resources or manufacturing, it's all of them, it needs to be complete

tnitot: otherwise you could, say, decide to reduce carbon emission but then waste more water

<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to respond to balance of priorities

tzviya8: along those lines, it's going to be about lifecycles and finding the right balance… re Ben_Tillyer_'s question, if you're trying to find the balance between performance and future delivery, I can't answer that question, have to answer what customer wants or CEO wants

tzviya8: maybe it could be you give your users choices

tzviya8: can you give users a choice, eg ask users do you want the option that uses less carbon

<tantek> +1 to getting started

<Zakim> addison, you wanted to respond to the question about cross-horizontal

tzviya8: these are hard to measure, just like with accessibility, the checklist isn't going to cover all cases and therefore this isn't something that will be ready quickly

addison: there's got to be a tension. that we'll collectively navigate

addison: some don't want us to finerprint, others want us to have more personalised information

addison: we have to think meaningfully about the tradeoffs

addison: the more horizontal things we do, the more competing things we'll have too

addison: challenge for us collectively as W3C, going forward

jenstrickland: I think we need to remember, there should be informed consent, allow people the choice, as tzviya8 was saying

jenstrickland: because privacy and i18n concerns for historically targeted communities are more life impairing to some

jenstrickland: remember people who are not in the room

jenstrickland: we are impacting if they can survive or take care of their family

<Zakim> tantek, you wanted to also attempt an answer at Ben's question per existing set of horizontal reviews that could conflict

tantek: we already have 4 areas for horizontal review

tantek: I would offer the best thing we can do there is to be very direct and clear in each area of horizontal review

tantek: don't pre-do that tradeoff

tantek: I think the task of doing that tradeoff rests on the AC

tantek: shouldn't put the burden of responsibility on just one of those groups, we need broader stakeholder involvement to address those kinds of tradeoffs

<Ben_Tillyer_> Thanks

<jenstrickland> Feel free to consult us in the Equity CG, too.

tantek: the other point jenstrickland makes re inclusivity…  I think we should do most of this work in the CG

tantek: that's currently W3C's most accessible forum for participation

<tantek> Proposed: develop a draft sustainability checklist in the Sustainability CG

<hdv> +100

<addison> +1

<ioana> +1

<tantek> +1

<tnitot> +100

<ericaconnell> +1

<Ben_Tillyer_> +

<Daniel> +1

<jeroen> +1

<Rachael> +1

<tzviya8> +1 with explicit invitation to Sustainable Web CG team

<cwilso> +1

<jenstrickland> +1

<cwilso> +1 to Tzviya's addition, too

<jenstrickland> * note also to invite the Equity CG to provide input.

<jgraham> +1

RESOLUTION: develop a draft sustainability checklist in the Sustainability CG

<fbedora> +1

tantek: going beyond a checklist/self-questionaire… it's a good start, but not the end

hdv: Reviewing Specs is one thing, but will we review charters as well?

<Ben_Tillyer_> +1 to the idea of looking at charters

<tantek> deliverables

<tantek> +1

addison: for us, primary thing is to review requests… there is a breakout later today where the horizontals are… throwing rocks at each other

addison: I wish chairs knew better what to expect and so on

addison: still chasing people to get stuff done

addison: early review and early engagement is still a challenge

addison: WHATWG and CSS are kind of the big ones, I have hundreds of issues open with them

addison: I don't know if sustainability has that level

addison: we're not here to make you eat your vegetables, we're here to help you improve your specs

<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to add to addison

<jenstrickland> Sustainable Web has done a wonderful job of creating that helpful culture.

tzviya8: horizontal review is one of the greatest things at W3C… and there's also many problems with it, we rely on a small number of people to review everything

tzviya8: if I need to review 100s of specs per year it is probably not going to happen, so we have to help people do it themselves too

addison: education is probably more important than checking it later

tantek: what tzviya8 brings up re scale and bottlenecks is really important

tantek: getting through a massive queue is where things get stuck and/or burn people out, and that's not sustainable

tantek: I don't want to let perfect be the enemy of good enough

tantek: want to call for ideas re parallelising

tantek: if we develop a self review checklist, would help to have example technologies so that we can try to do some assessments

<Rachael> +1 to iterative approach that rotates between checklist development and experiiments in assessing

<tantek> +1 jgraham: systematic harms vs individual harms

<Zakim> tantek, you wanted to ask about parallelizing - in particular is there interest in doing some "practice" sustainability review at the TAG? (tnitot)

<kirkwood> W3C Environmental Impact Statement.

jgraham: it's not clear to me how this actually works in practice, without having done the exercise it is hard to tell, maybe different from a11y, because often with sustainability, the harms are non-local, imagine a user who has this set of circumstances, and if they use this technology it causes harm to them, with sustainability it's more global. So looking at it in practice will help

Rachael: I agree there are some differences between accessidbility and sustainability, but both have things that need to be addressed… the more you rotate between different data areas, the better it wroks

kirkwood: for a little background, I'm an environmental engineer who went into web

kirkwood: re environmental impact assessment… I have some past experience with this… I am very interested in the ability to create some impact here… looking at power consumption could work, but tradeoff of information exchange around environmental issues could offset that

tantek: not sure how much you looked at Web Sustainability Guidelines?

kirkwood: yeah people can have a half empty / half full kind of perspective

tantek: James noted the difference between individual harms and systemic harms as an interesting contrast

tantek: there are these kinds of contrasts in a11y and i18n, most of the harms there are noticeable by the individual

tantek: some of them may also be eventual impacts too, if enough websites used a bad technoloy could cause pain over time too

tantek: but with sustainability that indirect impact is much bigger… probably same for security and privacy

<Zakim> tantek, you wanted to explicitly note contrast between horizontal review harms individual vs systemic or immediate vs only at scale

tantek: things that use a lot of power, eg used to be bitcoin, now training LLMs

<Zakim> rigo, you wanted to ask about data collection

rigo: open question… I worked on the digital product passport, the goal there, within the Green Deal, was to create databases to allow people to make decisions based on being informed

rigo: to be able to make those assesments, the checklist as such is nice but how do you gather data. If the group is starting horizontal reviews, question is how do we gather and organise data, so that it corresponds to our checklist

tantek: this has been a really rich discussion so far, it feels like there is momentum for this issue

tantek: are there other project areas, from the sustainability cg efforts that people would like to explore or talk about? can name a few of them if that helps

<tantek> https://www.w3.org/wiki/Sustainability#Work_Areas

<jenstrickland> I'm interested in Principles.

tantek: if we take the TAG's ethical web principle re sustainability, how can we expand on that, should we expend on that?

jenstrickland: we use something from a policy template where we incorporated a statement of principles, would love to be part of documenting principles

tzviya8: I am concerned we have two community groups, there is overlapping interests

tzviya8: not sure what happens since last TPAC in this group, would like to see this to have more activity

tzviya8: maybe merging the groups could help

tzviya8: as there is real interest in getting this off the ground

tantek: my quick assessment of that… it's the cooks in the kitchen problem, with so much work to do, eg horizonal review, web sustainability guidelines, there is some amount of division of labour that this could benefit from

tantek: and now we have the IG that is being launched, then we have two CGs and an IGs, could then look at divison of labour better, things scale better if we allow smaller groups of people to work on things, as long as there is very good cross communication

tantek: one of the chairs of the sustainability cg had to step down, that just left me… I've had a bunch of other project, could benefit from a co-chair if there's someone here who has the ability to drive things, would be happy to share that responsibility

tantek: if you're interested in co-chairing the CG let us know, CGs work well when there's multiple cochairs

jenstrickland: wanted to offer a suggestion… the sustainable web group… they're one of the most finely machines I've ever seen at the W3C… those folks deserve not just blue 3D-printed trophies

jenstrickland: they are getting a lot done

jenstrickland: if we collaborate and then sub groups can take on specific projects

tantek: appreciate the suggestion

tantek: agreed that group is very productive, but came to different conclusion… I don't want to upset their focus and productivity

tantek: this work requires a very active editor

tantek: if we can find someone who has the time that is the key next step

tantek: you can join this channel or the Slack channel for sustainability

tantek: thanks everyone! And once again if someone wants to cochair sustainability cg and/or edit the self questionnaire, that'd be great!

<taylore> what is the slack channel link?

<tantek> taylore see https://www.w3.org/wiki/Slack to start