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In this personal post written by our Director of Operations, Hannah reflects on this week’s recent events surrounding the sudden disbanding of the WordPress Sustainability team. She highlights three arguments why WordPress should be involved in climate conversations, and considers the art and risks of leadership.
This week sadly saw another episode of “how to badly handle your leadership privileges” brought to you by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. This time the drama revolved around the fledgling WordPress Sustainability team, and resulted in Matt making a snap decision to disband the team.
This snapshot of the Team’s Slack channel captures the events as they unfolded:
It starts with team rep Thijs Buijs explaining his decision to step down from the team due to his concerns about the leadership of Matt and his seeming desire to create drama in the community. Matt then joins the channels shortly after and posts this:
“Today I learned that we have a sustainability team. 🙂 Thank you @Thijs Buijs for your effort in this area, looking at results of the team so far, and the ROI of time invested, it’s probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely.
It doesn’t seem like creating a team around this was able to further any of its goals, so we should probably try a different approach, or consider whether it’s salient for us to be involved at all.
(For example, is it worth talking about the climate impact of WordPress, or instead should we just have really great performance metrics and try to optimize our code as much as possible, and focus on that efficiency.)”
Matt then archives the team and channel. And poof, two years of community contributed work lands like a big squishy mess on the floor.
In this post, I set out some personal thoughts on two areas of this:
- Matt poses a pertinent question about why should WordPress talk about its climate impact. It’s a good question and one we should be able to answer in a compelling way. Because people caring about sustainability and climate isn’t going anywhere.
- The way in which this question was posed and resulting actions is not ok. It matters that people stand-up and call for accountability when bad calls are made. Good leadership is a fascinating art, very difficult to do well but extremely relevant to making the kinds of changes that the climate crisis is forcing us to confront.
A bit of background if we haven’t met before
I currently work at an organisation called Green Web Foundation (GWF) as Director of Operations. We’re an independent non-profit dedicated to a sustainable and just internet for all, and are working towards a fossil-free internet by 2030. Both the internet and the climate crisis are global in nature yet impact people in specific localized ways. A lot of our work is about enabling conversations about the negative impacts and creating tools to help people take action.
I have a proud and very beautiful history with the WordPress community. I was a freelance WordPress developer for seven years. For five of those years I co-lead the Bristol WordPress meetup group and also co-organised Bristol WordCamp in 2019. I taught WordPress at a local developer bootcamp for three years and contributed back to the project by volunteering at various other WordPress events and contributor days around Europe.
On a personal level I feel I owe WordPress a great deal. It was the first tech community where I felt people took me seriously as a woman who liked coding and wanted to get good at it. The software was good, there was a lot of demand for my work and I built a good business. It gave me confidence, skills and a network of fabulous people to collaborate and hang out with. It was WordPress people (Tom Greenwood and Jack Lenox) that introduced me to the concept of digital sustainability which resulted in my career switch to GWF.
I am a WordPress fan. I am a sustainability advocate. I care so much about both things, and I especially care about that overlap – WordPress taking whatever steps it can to become more sustainable.
I supported making the case for getting the WordPress Sustainability team off the ground in 2022 along with the wonderful Nora Ferreirós (UX/UI designer), Nahuai Badiola (co-founder of OsomPress), Csaba Varszegi (Sustainable Web Designer at LittleBigThings) and Thijs Buijs (owner of Yellowlime).
Nora, Csaba, Nahuai and Thijs should take ALL the credit for moving this work forward. My role has been very small. They navigated a very tricky process to make the case for first getting a channel made and then establishing a formal team within the Make WordPress community. Between them they handled the day to day running of the group. I must stress as volunteers.
Even though I stepped away from formal involvement in the group due to capacity constraints on my time, I continued to use my role at GWF to support the group members and their efforts wherever I could.
So you can see why I might have some thoughts to share…
Why should WordPress talk about climate impacts?
Matt’s comments in the sustainability channel suggest there is an opportunity to communicate the reasons why it really matters that WordPress talks about climate. I’ve also seen a lot of comments in this reddit thread asking genuine questions about sustainability in a software/WordPress context.
If you can put to one side the drama (I’ll get to my thoughts on that in the second part) this question is really important:
“… is it worth talking about the climate impact of WordPress, or instead should we just have really great performance metrics and try to optimize our code as much as possible, and focus on that efficiency… ”
Yes, it is important to talk about the climate impact of WordPress. It’s not the same as performance and efficiency.
Here’s three solid reasons why WordPress leadership should care about doing work in this space:
1. Laws.
The best example is CSRD in Europe that states:
If it is material for the undertaking’s Scope 3 emissions, it shall disclose the GHG emissions from purchased cloud computing and data centre services as a subset of the overarching Scope 3 category “upstream purchased goods and services”.
This law affects organisations that make up around 80% of Europe’s GDP. Many of them will use WordPress and are mandated to report on the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) associated with running web servers. WordPress is the CMS market leader and customers are going to expect to be able to get help with this.
Ignoring it effectively passes this down the chain to individual companies and proudly proclaims WordPress doesn’t care about laws. The alternative is to bake reporting into the product and make it easy for users to comply.
2. Competition.
Even if companies aren’t mandated by laws in their territories to report, many are choosing to understand their climate impacts anyway and bake it into their procurement processes. Many of WordPress’s competitors are way ahead on this game providing guidance through their Sustainability teams. Umbraco CMS does this. Wagtail CMS does this.
Ask some people familiar with the matter inside Automattic, or rather, who have since left. As an example, they will tell you that a condition to winning VIP work within regulated industries (financial services, governments etc) is being able to provide a satisfactory response about sustainability reporting to close the deal.
3. Being socially responsible.
It is a fact that the world is warming and the climate is changing. If you want to be a future-forward project, you’re going to have to account for the variability of resources and ultimately work with your supply-chain to operate within planetary boundaries.
Performance and optimization is important. But Jevons paradox explains this next bit well – overall resource use from efficiency won’t fall because it’ll be easier to use, meaning more people do and resources continue to be consumed at the same rate, or even greater rate.
The route to actual impact is through an aggregated view of the industry. The bigger picture is not just how much energy is used to operate software on an individual level. It’s also about how dirty or clean it is, and how much went in to manufacturing the infrastructure used. Also what other resources are consumed such as water and rare raw minerals and what the technology enables through its use.
These go beyond performance. They are a new way of thinking. That’s why a community driven sustainability team is needed – to hold and advance that conversation.
The importance of accountability in leadership
In the second part of this post, I want to move on to the way in which all this unfolded and talk about how we as a community respond.
I know the former sustainability team reps – Nora, Nahuai, Csaba and Thijs well. They would have absolutely jumped at the chance to put these points across to Matt or anyone else in WordPress leadership roles if given the chance. As I’ve said the questions were excellent ones, and the debate is welcome. I can say on their behalf, we’re glad they were raised. Thank you.
But with the channel now gone, where is this debate supposed to happen? Is it actually going to happen? What can we do to positively encourage this exploration of the issues? Was it even asked in good faith?
I get that leadership is hard and empathise with Matt. I’ve been in different types of leadership roles most of my career. Nothing as high-flying or pressured as co-founding the world’s most successful CMS. But I’ve had numerous roles that seek to change the way people do things, and it’s exhausting work and you’ve got to be quite hard-headed to some degree. I can’t imagine the pressure of holding the roles Matt has for so long.
One of Matt’s big themes of drama is around freeloading and not contributing enough to the WordPress project in return. We’re told this is what’s at the heart of the Matt vs WPEngine drama. At GWF we also operate open-source tools. We’ve got a popular one called CO2.js. We know of a number of profit-making organisations who have made money off it and never credit our work, and certainly don’t contribute back financially or any other way. We’re a non-profit! It sucks.
But not everyone. And it’s certainly not a prudent action to burn everything down to make that point.
Let’s talk about the members of this former sustainability team again for a moment. Every single one of them gave up countless hours of free time to contribute to the WordPress project, with a view to making not just the project better, but society around it. Isn’t that what we want? Shouldn’t they be applauded? At the very least given an opportunity to defend the things they so passionately care about.
Instead the opposite happened and they were shoved outside without a moment’s notice. What the hell is going on here? Talk about not being able to tell friend from foe.
Good people got caught in the cross-fire and it’s not ok.
I believe the sustainability community, and the WordPress community at large, would extend sympathy and kindness in return when someone under pressure takes accountability for their mistakes. Because we all make mistakes.
But at what point are there too many mistakes to peddle back from? They are coming thick and fast from Matt’s camp these days. What needs to happen here to break this cycle of attacks? That’s a question about both sides, because a lot of the comments in this reddit thread are ugly af.
Being in a leadership position with influence and powers is a privilege. But we also know there are downsides for having too much power for too long. Even if you absolutely earned every single scrap of it, you’re not immune from losing the skills that made you get to where you are.
The kindest way I can describe this act from Matt is cruel. It’s a perfect example of an empathy deficit, and it’s getting in the way of meaningful progress for WordPress core and the other connected things a large community like the WordPress one cares about.
Wrapping up
Where do we go from here? Well one thing is for sure, nobody is going to stop talking about or working on sustainability. WordPress leadership have an opportunity to get on the right side of this and start building bridges to the people with the knowledge and passion to help.
Also without some humility and accountability from Matt, no-one is going to stop talking about how WordPress leadership needs to change.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
British politician Lord Acton.
(If you’d like to comment on this post, it’s also been published on LinkedIn. If you’re keen to discuss how we can collaborate on moving WordPress’s sustainability efforts forward we’d love that – get in touch).
Acknowledgements
I had a lot of help in framing the three reasons why WordPress leadership should care about climate. A lot of good points were contributed to others. Many thanks to Chris Adams, Michelle Thorne and Fershad Irani (my colleagues at Green Web Foundation), as well as Thibaud Colas and Alexander Dawson (collaborators who I chat with inside ClimateAction.tech).
Let’s also acknowledge again the literal blood, sweat and tears of the WordPress Sustainability Team reps, who for two years worked as volunteers to progress the issues as best they could. Nora Ferreirós (UX/UI designer), Nahuai Badiola (co-founder of OsomPress), Csaba Varszegi (Sustainable Web Designer at LittleBigThings) and Thijs Buijs (owner of Yellowlime). Thanks you four for everything you’ve made possible for the community 💚