The digital industry uses huge amounts of power & water to keep our infrastructure up and running. In real terms, the impact of digital is equivalent to the entire airline industry, or the same amount of carbon as Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangladesh, The Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia combined.
In an evolving digital world, where it is expected that our emissions will increase, we need to take a stand collectively to make a difference in the digital products and services that we are creating.
So here lies the opportunity to be creative, and we’re encouraging you, your clients, and your Umbraco websites to sign up for the Umbraco Sustainability Challenge; Shaping Sustainable Umbraco Websites Together!
As an industry, we’re still working on what are the best approaches to make our websites more sustainable. We want to see creativity, collaboration, and thinking outside the box.
What are your great ideas to make your websites more sustainable?
How you do that is up to you! You could:
The winners will show new and unbound ways of thinking and demonstrate measurable impact. Don’t limit yourself!
Don't be afraid to communicate, work within the community and ask questions. Share your progress and results and inspire each other to make a bigger impact.
We’ll start the first phase of our challenge together! Today, we kick off and share some first best practices and some hints and tips. In the first 20 days, we’ll help you to inspire your organization, teams, and clients to participate. By raising awareness you’re already on to a winner! Then, at the end of this first phase, you can let us know which website(s) you’d like to use for your part in the challenge.
Once you’re ready, submit for the challenge by October 24 Update 25/10/2024: based on feedback, we have decided to prolong the deadline until 1/11: https://feedback.umbraco.com/sustainability-challenge-sign-up
With all participants signed up, we’ll enter the next phase where we’ll get our hands dirty and our websites more green!
We ask you to start with some research on your participating sites. Gather some benchmarks, screenshots, and statistics to show the current state. This is a really important step so you can make an accurate comparison and show what has improved and the impact you’ve had.
Now is the time to get going! What you do, what tools you use, and where you’re focusing is up to you. This challenge is all about your own ideas so be creative.
There’s no rush, but to make a meaningful impact you’ll have 3 months for this phase. This will give you enough time to invest, adjust, measure, and improve.
Tip: for inspiration, please check out our brand-new Sustainability Best Practices. Here you can find hands-on tips and inspiration to get you going.
The final phase of the challenge consists of sharing your results with the world! Optimizing your website is nice, but sharing what you did is even more important! By sharing your insights, your successes, and your failures, we will grow as a community!
As a participant, you need to share the results with us. We’d like you to share this in a green format, so think carefully about how you could do that (more info on this will come).
The Sustainability Community Team will review and announce the winners of the challenge. By signing up for the challenge you already won, because you made a bit of impact, H5YR!
But in this phase, we want to give the ones making the biggest impact more attention and award them with some amazing prices!
We can’t wait to see what you end up doing to improve your projects.
Remember that you can find best practice tips right here and remember to submit your project by the 24th of October
Join the Sustainability Challenge
Good luck, go make a difference!
It’s almost October! And that means that we’re celebrating Hacktoberfest for the 7th year in a row! You can have an impact on Umbraco in many different ways - both by contributing by code and also through no-code contributions such as blog posts, copy editing, podcasts etc, This year we’ve even added an extra no-code contribution option 👀 See how you can take part in Umbraco’s Hacktoberfest activities below - happy hacking!