Project logs are monthly updates about the The Good Manager project. We want to keep track of the design process and update our roadmap along the way. These project logs will also be useful in order to document the project and produce a documented guide that will be available publicly.
For the first project log, we want to talk about the choices made for the development of the beta version of the platform.
Iterative platform design process
We want our platform to be accessible and sober at its core. This is a great challenge, and we strive to evaluate our progress. Our idea is to start small and improve ourselves along the project. This way, we can learn by doing and pass on our tools and findings. Therefore, a beta version of the platform is the perfect exercise to raise issues about web design, web development, inclusiveness and low-tech.
Hosting
We will need to host a mix of static pages (guides, e-learning modules) and dynamic content (news, documentation). Interactivity and updates can be kept low but are required: for example, we want to accept contributions for a wiki section. Therefore, when it comes to hosting a website like ours, many choices are available.
Hosting solutions have different impacts of the platform's ecological footprint. But how to evaluate it ? We can look at hardware and energy usages.
Some websites conscious of the ecological impact of the web tend to host themselves their online resources. This is the case of Low-Tech Magazine, a solar-powered website hosted on a micro-computer (source). With this kind of self-hosting, hardware and energy sources are under control, and can even recycle old hardware parts. It requires access to a renewable energy and some technical knowledge to maintain the system.
A single website that requires such an infrastructure raises questions about its effectiveness and its actual footprint. Does running a micro-computer and using solar-panel for a website is energy-effective? What level of technical knowledge and maintenance frequency is required? Beyond the empowering of running its own web, we can wonder if mutualization of resources and hardware is not a better solution to reduce the ecological? This is exactly what data centers do.
Datacenters are places that concentrate many servers and share the resources necessary for their operation. As a result, they consume huge amounts of energy, but pooling consumption helps to reduce the individual footprint of each site.
In addition, the optimization and management of hardware and power consumption are managed by professionals. It is not a question of relying totally on experts, but the economies of scale of such structures are an interesting solution when infrastructure management is not our core expertise.
Our current preference: for now, our choice regarding hosting is to be hosted at infomaniak. This hosting provider have numerous engagements in reducing its ecological footprint by recycling policies, energy management, hardware pooling... Other solutions are available, and we may describe them in the commented guide of the platform.
Design and Development
Reducing the energy consumption of a website on the client-side requires to understand the cost in computing power of, for example, CSS animations and scripts. Server requests for images and other medias also have an impact on the energy consumption (client-side, server-side, and for the network).
The chosen layout of a website and its elements will impact accessibility as well. Many rules regarding the layout should be considered for inclusiveness. Many tools are available for developers and designers to produce accessible and low-consumption websites, but they must be aware of these matters. For example, making an accessible website requires for developers a good knowledge of semantic HTML, and may required advanced CSS and Javascript.
Beyond the availability of appropriate tools for building accessible and lightweight websites, team members should make this tools their own. Some habits of development relying on specific tools block the adoption of more efficient technology or good practices. Training of teams to new tools and workflow is therefore part of the change.
Our current preference: for now, our choice regarding design and development is to work on static website generator (Gatsby) in keep the number of server requests as low as possible (compared to a Wordpress or Drupal website) while keeping a great freedom in the implementation of the design.
Content publishing
Content creation is the real value added of the platform. We aim at delivering useful content and we need to manage this content accordingly.
We conducted a survey to evaluate the editorial habits of our team and pick the tools with the less friction possible. For now, the content produced in the project lives in a shared dropbox, and we can add content through a headless Wordpress. A site generator can gather different sources of data (dropbox, Wordpress API) and build a static website with the data at a given time. This way, we could keep using tools we are used to and convenient for an international partnership, while offering content on a lightweight platform.
The writing of the contents has not really started for many outputs, and one of the elements that will have to be foreseen will be a good hierarchization and formatting in order to automate the uploading from documents such as word or excel, and have natively accessible documents.
Tools we use on a daily basis in this partnership, like Dropbox, Slack, or Google Suite, have an ecological impact. We strive to evaluate it, or at least to evaluate our usage of them. We need to keep monitoring our practices of this project management tools to see how it evolves with futures features implemented on the platform that will require a lot of interaction between stakeholders (wiki, e-learning modules, guides...).
Future steps
During the next month we aim at delivering a functional beta version of the website, at least in English and French, and start translations for the others languages of the partnership. This beta version is an opportunity to explore the web development part with Gatsby (a static site generator) and its integration with wordpress and other data sources. It will also be an opportunity to combine accessibility and low-tech approach in the design process.