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PROPOSED Sustainable Web Interest Group Charter
The mission of the Sustainable Web Interest Group is to improve digital sustainability so that 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 (2 years) |
| Chairs | Ines Akrap (Storyblok) Tim Frick (Mightybytes) Mike Gifford (CivicActions) |
| Team Contacts | Tzviya Siegman (0.25 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
Web sustainability examines how digital technology impacts the physical world using an approach that puts people and the planet first (of critical value in the Ethical Web Principles). Upcoming or existing laws and policies in this sector also set mandatory digital sustainability-related targets. Web sustainability offers many benefits, including accurate measurement and reduction of planetary impact (such as emissions, resource usage, and waste). Web sustainability also includes intersectional issues relating to people (accessibility, privacy, etc.) and shared prosperity (good governance), which can lead to healthier ecosystems overall. PPP (Planet, People, and Prosperity) principles drive these efforts while accounting for a multitude of variables across different disciplines.
This guidance is intended for end-users, stakeholders, website or application creators, tool authors, educators, students, policymakers, purchasing agents, product owners, managers, and decision-makers who will either request or actively implement sustainable change within their organization.
The Sustainable Web Interest Group will 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 implementable holistic practices. This not only includes digital emissions but also interconnecting variables that 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
The Sustainable Web Interest Group develops and documents guidelines, patterns, processes, and best practices (along with supporting materials) for addressing sustainability issues within digital technology affecting both people and the planet.
The group provides coverage for websites & web applications, authoring tools & user agents, user experience design, web development (and tooling), hosting & infrastructure, business & product strategy, and metrics data (concerning research, statistics for measurability, and related weighting of the guidelines).
The Interest Group will focus on the following activities:
- Publishing a set of guidelines (based upon the CG Draft Report).
- Working with regulatory and standards groups to improve compliance targets within our work.
- Improving measurability (how guidelines are endorsed and weighted through quantitative data) to provide more accurate advice within published deliverables.
- Creating educational materials to foster wider adoption of the guidelines.
The Interest Group may recommend mitigations for sustainability issues in existing features of the Web platform, up to and including their deprecation.
The Interest Group may recommend methods to reduce emissions that reinforce (but don't replace) existing beneficial practices (Accessibility, Performance, Privacy, Security, etc).
Out of Scope
- Non-web aspects of native applications in both mobile & desktop environments: However, Web applications remain in scope.
- Hardware: Unless related to hosting & infrastructure, we will not provide coverage of the manufacturing or usage of products beyond the remit of Internet usage.
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 Group Note, or otherwise reach a stable state.
Guidelines
The Interest Group will deliver the following guidelines:
- Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG)
-
These guidelines explain 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 designers, web developers, stakeholders, tool authors, educators, and policymakers.
Draft state: Adopted from Draft CG Report
Expected completion: [Q1-4 YYYY]
Other Deliverables
The Group expects to create these deliverables:
- At-A-Glance & Introductory documents offering signposting to the group's work.
- Quick Reference & Checklist which provide a compact list of the WSG's.
- Laws & Policies document overviews related regulatory and best practice policies.
- STAR evaluation methodologies, techniques (case studies), and test suite (metrics).
- JSON API to facilitate third-party implementation of the guidelines.
In addition, the group may work on:
- 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 Interest Group.
Success Criteria
- Request the publication of the WSGs as a W3C Statement.
- Provide guidance based upon evidence (where possible), and if evidence is lacking; use industry best practices, develop measurability data, or conduct research to validate claims.
- Where machine testing of sustainability features is possible, seek interoperable implementations. Where machine-testability is not possible (due to the nature of their function), indicate this in the deliverables.
- Offer guidance across multiple disciplines of existing web technologies and expertise, and provide well-defined goals that benefit the wide spectrum of sustainability.
- Align published guidance with existing regulatory requirements to increase compliance levels.
This Interest Group expects to follow the TAG Web Platform Design Principles.
Coordination
For all guidelines, this Interest Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG. The Interest Group is encouraged to engage collaboratively with the horizontal review groups throughout development of the guidelines. The Interest Group is advised to seek a review at least 3 months before any request to advance a Note to W3C Statement.
Additional technical coordination with the following Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document:
W3C Groups
- Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
- For guideline modeling and WSG interoperability.
- Web Performance Working Group
- For guideline interoperability with reducing resource waste.
- Sustainable Web Design Community Group
- The Sustainable Web Interest 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 participants 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 Interest Group recognizes that numerous organizations around the world focus on similar or adjacent topics. We have identified the below as early partners whose expertise and willingness to collaborate will support our success.
- Green Software Foundation
- Help align with sustainability targets.
- Green Web Foundation
- Help align with sustainability targets.
- UNEP CODES
- Help align with sustainability targets.
We will also monitor the work of and where appropriate collaborate with standards bodies (external to the W3C) such as those listed below as their work relates to the compliance adherence work we are including within the deliverables.
- Global Reporting Initiative
- Help align with sustainability targets.
- IETF Environmental Impacts of Internet Technology
- Co-ordination and collaboration on documents.
- International Standards Organization
- Help align with sustainability targets.
Participation
To be successful, this Interest Group is expected to have 6 or more active participants for its duration, including representatives from the key users of the guidelines, and active Editors and Test Leads. The Chairs, Editors, and Test Leads are expected to contribute half of a working day per week towards the Interest 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, although active contributors are expected to join the group.
Participants in the group are required (by the W3C Process) to follow the W3C Code of Conduct.
Communication
Technical discussions for this Interest 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 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 Interest Group home page.
Most Sustainable Web Interest Group teleconferences 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 participants of the group, for Member-confidential 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 participants 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 Interest 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 Disclosures
The Interest Group provides an opportunity to share perspectives on the topic addressed by this charter. W3C reminds Interest Group participants of their obligation to comply with patent disclosure obligations as set out in Section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Interest Group does not produce Recommendation-track documents, when Interest Group participants review Recommendation-track specifications from Working Groups, the patent disclosure obligations do apply. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the licensing information.
Licensing
This Interest 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 Month YYYY | DD Month YYYY | None |
Change log
Changes to this document are documented in this section.