Earlier this year, some of our more technical staff were accepted into the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Sustainable Web Interest Group. This was a quite a big deal for us, so it seemed worth writing a post to mark the occasion. Read on for a little more about the W3C Sustainable Web IG, and who’s in, and what it means.
First of all, what is the W3C Sustainable Web IG?
The World Wide Web Consortium, or the W3C to it’s friends, has for decades been pretty much where poeple define how the web works, and recently it created a new formal group, with W3C staff dedicated to running it, called the Sustainable Web Interest Group.
If you’d like to know more about the group, shortly after it was set up Green Web Foundation staff member Chris Adams interviewed Tzviya Siegman, the new sustainability lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Alexander Dawson, one of the key authors of the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines (the WSGs), in the Environment Variables podcast episode, Shaping Web Sustainability with the W3C.
Who’s now in the Sustainable Web IG?
Hannah Smith, Fershad Irani, and Chris Adams have all been accepted as Invited Experts to the Sustainable Web Interest Group. Roughly every two weeks, the group meets to work on the activities outlined in the Sustianable Web Interest Group’s charter.
What does this mean?
This is pretty huge for us – just like how the W3C helps people define how the web works in the wider sense, being part of the W3C Sustainable Web Interest Group helps define how a more sustainable web can work. Documents published by the W3C are frequently what governments look to when they write laws that affect the web, and are referred to when large companies define the standards they require in commercial agreements. If we can set new more sustainable defaults for the web, then it helps us get closer to a fossil-free internet.
We’re very grateful to the support from existing members in the Interest Group, and in particular the leadership, Ines Akrap, Mike Gifford, Tim Frick, and Tzviya Siegman, for encouraging our staff to apply in the first place.
Onwards!
