Open Source Carbon Footprints

Chris Adams is joined by Thibaud Colas; product lead at Torchbox, president of the Django Software Foundation, and lead on Wagtail CMS. They explore the role of open source projects in tackling digital carbon emissions and discuss Wagtail's pioneering carbon footprint reporting, sustainable default settings, and grid-aware website features, all enabled through initiatives like Google Summer of Code. Thibaud shares how transparency, contributor motivation, and clear governance can drive impactful sustainability efforts in web development, and why measuring and reducing emissions in the Python ecosystem matters now more than ever. Learn more about our people: Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website Thibaud Colas: LinkedIn | Website

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Resources: Wagtail CMS [01:46] Web Almanac | HTTP Archive [08:03] Google Summer of Code [11:07] Wagtail RFCs [19:51] A Gift from Hugging Face on Earth Day: ChatUI-Energy [27:55] PyCon US [36:07] Grid-aware websites - Green Web Foundation [39:22] Climate Action Tech [41:07] Agent Bedlam: A Future of Endless AI Energy Consumption? - My Framer Site Here's how re/insurers can curb GenAI emissions | Reinsurance Business

If you enjoyed this episode then please either: Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts Follow and rate on Spotify Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel! Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! TRANSCRIPT BELOW: Thibaud Colas: If you get your contributors to work on high value and high impact things, that's the best way to motivate them. So that's kind of the idea here is, formalize that we have a goal to reduce our footprint. And by virtue of this, we, you know, make it a more impactful thing for people to work on by having those numbers, by communicating this specific change to images, here is the potential for it to reduce emissions. Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. If you want the way we build software to be more sustainable and more inclusive, one way to improve the chances of this happening is to make it easier to build it that way, so building greener software goes with the grain of the software framework you're using. And one way to do that is update the defaults that prioritize accessibility and sustainability in the framework itself. One of the people I've seen who really exemplifies this idea and this approach is my guest today, Thibaud Colas, a lead developer at the software agency, Torchbox, the current president of the Django Software Foundation and the product lead at the popular Wagtail Content Management System, which is also built on top of Django. The Wagtail CMS powers sites like the NASA Jet Propulsion Labs website, the University of Pennsylvania's website, the Tate Gallery, and even the main NHS website in the UK. So while it might not have the same coverage as WordPress, which covers more than a third of the internet, still powers a large number of, a number of large sites, and changes made in this framework can have a decent reach. So changes made here are worth discussing because the Wagtail CMS docs, in my view, are probably the most advanced talking about sustainability for any open source CMS right now. And there's a clear link between sustainability and embodied admissions of the hardware that you actually, that people need to use to access your websites too. And with that in mind, you c