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Matt Mullenweg is at it again:

Members of the fledgling WordPress Sustainability Team have been left reeling after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg abruptly dissolved the team this week—an action prominent tech journalist Kara Swisher has described as “bizarrely heinous behavior.”

(From: Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash - The Repository)

Dude shows once again he has too much power over too large of a project. Fershad Irani wrote that he likely never cared about sustainability anyway.

In Why should there be a WordPress Sustainability Group? Chris Adams explains open source CMSes should have a sustainability group for many reasons, including reducing risk:

If you expect people to use your product or service, you might be expected to help people responsible for compliance when using it now.

Through our carbon.txt project we propose a standardised, yet distributed place on website domains, to efficiently surface the structured data that companies now have to publish anyway.

Carbon.txt would become a single place to look on any domain for public sustainability data relating to that company, that would allow anyone to build a database.

(From: Introducing carbon.txt - Applying lessons from crowdsourcing net zero data - Green Web Foundation)

In Branch, Michelle Barker suggests a new mindset for the web:

If “move fast and break things” is Silicon Valley’s rallying cry, then the flip-side is “move slow and mend things”.

(From: The perfect site doesn’t exist - Branch)

She says we should center sustainability in our work on the web, be intentional in content and code, and prioritise being human to being perfectionist. I could not agree more.

In Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data, Michelle talks about the environmental cost of creating and storing so much of our data in the ‘cloud’:

the need for limitless digital storage bumps up against the very real physical limits of our planet.

(From: CSS { In Real Life } | Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data)

She explains it's not only a huge amount of data, a lot of it is probably unnecessary:

It’s estimated that up to 88% of the data stored in the cloud is ROT (Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial) data, or “dark data”: data collected by companies in the course of their regular business activities, but which is not used for any other purpose. It all amounts to a lot of junk data that has no purpose, that will never be needed or looked at again.

Yup, I definitely store a lot of photos and emails that I will never need to look at again. I should set aside some time for cleanup.

I agree with Michelle. Design could help consumers decrease their storage. I want my software to encourage deletion, not (or not just) addition, bring it on!