Add Website Carbon badge to footer

[willguv]

Shall we include this in core, switched off by default?

https://www.websitecarbon.com/badge/

[davidupjohn]

Add this sort of thing

[willguv]

Would you add this to your pages @davidupjohn ?

[davidupjohn]

at bottom of this https://www.tverc.org/cms/ I'm not 100% how useful it is unless there's an overall strategy in the council to reduce all co2 that our websites produce.

[markconroy]

I've a fear that this Carbon Badge is more an advertisement for the creators hosting company than anything else. It's not an official carbon badge from a state organisation or a university, for example.

[willguv]

Good insight, cheers @markconroy. Is there an official badge or standard that you know of?

[finnlewis]

@markconroy I think it is more of an advertisement for the reality that all our web activities have a carbon impact. I don't see any hosting advertised.

Calculating carbon emissions is not a precise science, but they are quite transparent about how they do it: https://www.websitecarbon.com/how-does-it-work/

It looks to me like the https://www.websitecarbon.com/ calculator is created by https://www.wholegraindigital.com/ who don't appear to do hosting: https://www.wholegraindigital.com/#services

I think anything that encourages efficient web pages and people to use hosting powered by 100% renewable electricity is potentially a good thing.

[davidupjohn]

I had a long chat with Tom and some other bloke that run https://wholegraindigital.com/ (they are behind the widget) they were really nice and not interested in trying to sell me anything and thought the council weren't really their main target. But as a council, we need to be aware we aren't seen endorsing one company over another so Mark I appreciate the caution.

[andybroomfield]

Maybe something as a generic Drupal module hosted on drupal.org than a Localgov one?

[markconroy]

I'm certainly not proposing a veto on using this widget, but I do want us to be clear that it is a marketing tool for another organisation (and if we're fine with that, I'm fine with that).

@finnlewis in terms of them advertising themselves:

1. The 'Consultancy' link in the main header brings you directly to the Wholegrain Digital website consultancy landing page
2. There's ads for the book by Tom Greenwood who is the co-founder of Wholegrain Digital
3. Wholegrain Digital are mentioned in the footer of every page on the site
4. If you test a site, there is a "Take action" section presented, each "action" is a link to the Wholegrain Digital blog

So, like I said, I don't mind if we do use this, and I'm sure the people behind it are the very nice and have created this website for the most altruistic of reasons, etc, but I do want us to be aware that we are implicitly endorsing websitecarbon.com as a product.

[justinepocock]

I don't think having the badge is the best of ideas but I run sites through that generator all the time.

There's a lot of good information about measuring sustainability from a CMS point of view here https://wagtail.org/sustainability/

I was speaking to Mike Gifford about doing this for Drupal but it's been blown up to a larger sustainability question and not just focussing on carbon.

I'd love to figure out how we can get metrics like Wagtail have so we can work as a team to improve all the sites. Thibaud Colas the developer at Torchbox who is leading on this is in a lot of climate tech groups (with Tom Greenwood) and is keen to offer support too.