What is the goal of the Web Sustainability Guidelines?

Łukasz raised this question in the Web Sustainability Guidelines GitHub repository a couple of months ago as part of understanding and setting a goal for the measurability taskforce with the Sustainable Web Interest Group:

There's a number of different paths to progress the work in the task force and in order to decide which of them to take we'd like to define ultimate goal of the Sustainable Web Design guidelines (followed by a definition of measurability task force goal).

It's come up again, and has been flagged for discussion in the group call this week. I'm capturing this note with my reply which I've also shared on GitHub.

This issue was flagged by @TzviyaSiegman as a conversation topic for the next group call on August 14. I'll leave my thoughts here as I'm unable to attend that call.

I advocate for adopting a narrow scope when goal setting for the WSG. Throughout W3C writing and documents there are constant references back to "the web", and I believe that we that we should keep that central to how we frame the mission of the WSG as well.

Centering a framing around "the web" allows for two things:

1. It allows for a narrower target audience to be defined.
2. It reduces the complexity of the guidelines.

Both of these go hand in hand. Having a defined target audience will greatly help with how guidelines and supplemental material are thought about, selected, and written. It's also an important part in being able to clearly communicate the guidelines.

For reference, here's the target audience for the WSG from the current introduction:

Web Sustainability Guidelines promote planetary, people, and prosperity best practices based on measurable, evidence-based research; aimed at end-users, stakeholders, website or application creators, tool authors, tool authors, educators, students, policymakers, purchasing agents, product owners, managers, and decision-makers

That's a broad audience, and you'd speak to different groups from that list in different ways.

Other frameworks and certifications (e.g. B Corp, RE100) already exist that address sustainability at the organisational level. It just feels beyond the scope of W3C guidelines to be getting involved at that level. Rather these other initiatives can be signposted to like "hey if you're looking to adopt these web sustainability guidelines, then your organisation would also benefit from these other initiatives". Individual guidelines could even link out to these where appropriate.

When thinking about "the web" in the context of writing guidelines, another question emerges - who are we writing for? Those who are building on the web (designers, developers etc), or those who are building the web platform (browser engineers)? For mine, I think the WSG are designed the former group (building on the web) at this stage and should be compiled with them as the primary audience.

So with all that said, here's a (long) one liner from me defining the goal of the WSG:

The goal of the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) is to define strategies and practices for those building on the web to make web content, online products, and digital services more sustainable through the lens of planet (environment), people (individuals, community, society), and prosperity (shared equity).

Got thoughts? Let me know, or contribute over on GitHub.