The theme for this year's community days was Back to Basics. As a fairly ‘young’ team, with lots of passion and hunger to deliver impact, we just hit the ground running.
We thought it would be good to look back over our mission, vision and values statement so that we can be more vocal about what we’re doing and be clear about the future priorities and what is guiding the roadmap for the team.
Our team was formed to drive conscious, sustainable use and development of Umbraco - for developers, editors and users alike. Our team is dedicated to collaborating with the community to learn from one another, and understand diverse perspectives and experiences to progressively and proactively deliver low-carbon digital solutions to contribute to a greener world.
The question we will always ask ourselves is ‘How can we reduce emissions’. However, understanding that sustainability is broader than environmental topics, we hope to collaborate with DEI and the Accessibility guild to drive a wider impact.
We boiled this down to:
Mission
Our mission is to reduce carbon emissions related to Umbraco, taking brave action to create awareness and drive conscious, sustainable use and development.
Vision
To lead the way to more sustainable CMS Platforms
Values
By nature, we’re guided by Umbraco’s values of Open, Friendly, Hungry, Trust and Respect, but we wanted to define some additional values that we as a team will abide by.
- Transparent
- Collaborative
- Progressive
- Responsible
So what’s next?
We started developing a roadmap, to help us plan the year ahead and build off of some of the success we’ve had so far.
- The Umbraco package – this has been really successful with over 1000 downloads in 6 months. But we want to do more, we’re looking at:
- Providing more content direction to editors for things like their media uploads, and scheduled tasks architected to the Green Web Foundation Carbon Aware Software Development Kit which can help make decisions for websites based on data from the grid.
- Additionally we’re looking to provide more holistic carbon ratings within the package for whole sites, including trends based on historical data as we’ve spotted a gap in the market here.
- Enhanced configuration options, so you can adjust the way in which the calculations work for the estimated carbon emissions.
- Introducing health checks, which will provide warnings and recommendations from the developer section.
- Adding in more meaning and data visualisation so people can see the equivalents at a glance.
- Umbraco version comparisons, from version 7 – 14, what is the difference between the versions? Creating some more visualisations that we can include in pitch decks, release notes between the versions, reports etc.
Working with HQ
We sat down with Martin Wulser, to discuss ongoing Umbraco HQ emissions, and to understand how we as a team can help HQ. Working with Umbraco on the Sustainability section of the website, not only looking at what Umbraco is doing (to lead by example) both as a company but also working with the community to build sustainable products and services. In addition to this, there is a real desire to help agencies how they can implement sustainability best proactive in their own companies. We spoke about the Umbraco Cloud offering, and looking at making live data more transparent to users, to be open about Umbraco’s efforts.
Summary
We’ve had a productive couple of days. We’ve collaborated (and positively challenged) on plans and initiatives, as well as having more dialogue with HQ (special thanks to Mats, Bjarke, Martin, Kec) and other community teams (the back-end team, the DEI team). It was so rewarding to look back at everything we’ve achieved this year, from our sustainability package, our events and documentation, running the most well attended Umbraco webinar in history and of course, running our sustainability competition and creating an Umbraco bike which now has a new home in Edinburgh (shout out to Liam for the win again and of course the picture!).
Written by: Amy Czuba and the Sustainability team
Published: September 12, 2024