Podcasts about digital sustainability

Host Chris Adams speaks with James Martin about how to communicate the environmental impact of software to a general audience. Drawing on his background in journalism and sustainability communications, James shares strategies for translating complex digital sustainability issues into accessible narratives, explains why AI's growing resource demands require scrutiny, and highlights France's leadership in frugal AI policy and standards. From impact calculators to debunking greenwashing, this episode unpacks how informed storytelling can drive responsible tech choices.

In 2010, the Association for Information Systems formed a special interest group () to nurture an international community of academics that study the role of digital technologies in fostering environmentally, economically and socially sustainable development. Fifteen years later, we sit down with , the current SIGGreen president, to reflect on the progress we have made. What do we know about how digital technologies help greening our planet? What efforts in empirical, theoretical, and design work is still needed? Is our role to understand the role of digital technologies or do we need to push and enact change ourselves? We conclude that environmental questions and problems are now firmly on the radar screen of our discipline but more work needs to be done for information systems academics to transform the way we think about and use digital technologies.  Episode reading list Corbett, J., & Mellouli, S. (2017). Winning the SDG Battle in Cities: How an Integrated Information Ecosystem can Contribute to the Achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Information Systems Journal, 27(4), 427-461. Seidel, S., Recker, J., & vom Brocke, J. (2013). Sensemaking and Sustainable Practicing: Functional Affordances of Information Systems in Green Transformations. MIS Quarterly, 37(4), 1275-1299. Hasan, H., Ghose, A., & Spedding, T. (2009). Editorial for the Special Issue on IT and Climate Change. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 16(2), 19-21. Watson, R. T., Corbett, J., Boudreau, M.-C., & Webster, J. (2011). An Information Strategy for Environmental Sustainability. Communications of the ACM, 55(7), 28-30. Jenkin, T. A., Webster, J., & McShane, L. (2011). An Agenda for 'Green' Information Technology and Systems Research. Information and Organization, 21(1), 17-40. Watson, R. T., Boudreau, M.-C., & Chen, A. J. (2010). Information Systems and Environmentally Sustainable Development:  Energy Informatics and New Directions for the IS Community. MIS Quarterly, 34(1), 23-38. Elliot, S. (2011). Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Environmental Sustainability: A Resource Base and Framework for IT-Enabled Business Transformation. MIS Quarterly, 35(1), 197-236. Kahlen, M., Ketter, W., & van Dalen, J. (2018). Electric Vehicle Virtual Power Plant Dilemma: Grid Balancing Versus Customer Mobility. Production and Operations Management, 27(11), 2054-2070. Gholami, R., Watson, R. T., Hasan, H., Molla, A., & Bjørn-Andersen, N. (2016). Information Systems Solutions for Environmental Sustainability: How Can We Do More? Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 17(8), 521-536. Corbett, J., & El Idrissi, S. C. (2022). Persuasion, Information Technology, and the Environmental Citizen: An Empirical Study of the Persuasion Effectiveness of City Applications. Government Information Quarterly, 39(4), 101757. Degirmenci, K., & Recker, J. (2023). Breaking Bad Habits: A Field Experiment About How Routinized Work Practices Can Be Made More Eco-efficient Through IS for Sensemaking. Information & Management, 60(4), 103778. Zeiss, R., Ixmeier, A., Recker, J., & Kranz, J. (2021). Mobilising Information Systems Scholarship For a Circular Economy: Review, Synthesis, and Directions For Future Research. Information Systems Journal, 31(1), 148-183. Haudenosaunee Confederacy. (2025). Values. . The Stakeholder Alignment Collaborative. (2025). The Consortia Century: Aligning for Impact. Oxford University Press. Hovorka, D. and Corbett, J. (2012) IS Sustainability Research: A trans-disciplinary framework for a ‘grand challenge”. 33rd International Conference on Information Systems, Orlando, Florida. Hovorka, D. S., & Peter, S. (2021). Speculatively Engaging Future(s): Four Theses. MIS Quarterly, 45(1), 461-466. Gümüsay, A. A., & Reinecke, J. (2024). Imagining Desirable Futures: A Call for Prospective Theorizing with Speculative Rigour. Organization Theory, 5(1), . Kotlarsky, J., Oshri, I., & Sekulic, N. (2023). Digital Sustainability in Information Systems Research: Conceptual Foundations and Future Directions. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 24(4), 936-952. Gray, P., Lyytinen, K., Saunders, C., Willcocks, L. P., Watson, R. T., & Zwass, V. (2006). How Shall We Manage Our Journals in the Future?  A Discussion of Richard T. Watson's Proposals at ICIS 2004. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 18(14), 2-41. Saldanha, T. J. V., Mithas, S., Khuntia, J., Whitaker, J., & Melville, N. P. (2022). How Green Information Technology Standards and Strategies Influence Performance: Role of Environment, Cost, and Dual Focus. MIS Quarterly, 46(4), 2367-2386. Leidner, D. E., Sutanto, J., & Goutas, L. (2022). Multifarious Roles and Conflicts on an Inter-Organizational Green IS. MIS Quarterly, 46(1), 591-608. Wunderlich, P., Veit, D. J., & Sarker, S. (2019). Adoption of Sustainable Technologies: A Mixed-Methods Study of German Households. MIS Quarterly, 43(2), 673-691. Melville, N. P. (2010). Information Systems Innovation for Environmental Sustainability. MIS Quarterly, 34(1), 1-21. Edwards, P. N. (2013). A Vast Machine. MIT Press. Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W. (1972). The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Universe Books. Over the Hedge. (2006). . McPhearson, T., Raymond, C. M., Gulsrud, N., Albert, C., Coles, N., Fagerholm, N., Nagatsu, M., Olafsson, A. S., Niko, S., & Vierikko, K. (2021). Radical Changes are Needed for Transformations to a Good Anthropocene. npj Urban Sustainability, 1(5), .   

The digital infrastructure we're all so dependent on has a negative - and growing - impact on the environment. In this episode, Michael Oghia talks about strategies for breaking down the big problem of digital sustainability, strategies for building a more efficient Internet, and challenges that come with the adoption of more sustainable practices. Show notes01:40 - Michael on RIPE Labs08:20 - Our World in Data gives similar numbers for the % of global carbon emissions from the aviation industry, as does this broader report from the European parliament.11:00 - E-waste dumps in Ghana11:10 - Map of conflict mineral mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo11:27 - Article from the Guardian on projected energy demands from AI data centres12:50 - Article on using 'waste heat' as a source of power13:20 - Michael RIPE Labs article on refurbishment as a strategy for digital sustainability15:30 - Michael's RIPE Labs article on Why Small and Medium-Size Operators Should Care About Sustainability17:15 - Read more about the origins of the term 'carbon footprint' in this nice piece by Tom Greenwood37:05 - The resources Michael is pointing us to here are available via the same article: Why Small and Medium-Size Operators Should Care About Sustainability Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Adams sits down in-person with Max Schulze, founder of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA), to explore the economics of AI, digital infrastructure, and green software. They unpack the EU's Energy Efficiency Directive and its implications for data centers, the importance of measuring and reporting digital resource use, and why current conversations around AI and cloud infrastructure often miss the mark without reliable data. Max also introduces the concept of "digital resources" as a clearer way to understand and allocate environmental impact in cloud computing. The conversation highlights the need for public, transparent reporting to drive better policy and purchasing decisions in digital sustainability.

Did containerization ship away our environmental responsibility? Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability and reliability. The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, Gaël Duez welcomes Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki, 2 experts in Kubernetes who are also pillars of the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability workgroup. This episode might beat the record of acronyms: KEIT, CNCF, TAG … And yet Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki provided crystal clear explanations when they covered:

Zrównoważone projektowanie cyfrowe to tworzenie technologii, stron internetowych i aplikacji w sposób minimalizujący ślad węglowy. Chodzi m.in. o optymalizację kodu, ograniczenie zużycia energii przez serwery, ekologiczne UX/UI i promowanie świadomego korzystania ze zdobyczy cyfrowych. Niestety zdarza się i tak, że firmy pozorują proekologiczne działania i deklarują „zielony design”, podczas gdy w rzeczywistości korzystają z nieefektywnych technologii, a ich serwery absorbują ogromne ilości energii zasilanej paliwami kopalnymi. Czym naprawdę jest „cyfrowa zieleń”? Jak unikać greenwashingu w projektach cyfrowych? W jaki sposób sprawdzić autentyczność działań na rzecz ekologii? Jak powinien wyglądać proces projektowy w duchu zrównoważonego rozwoju? Jak zwiększać świadomość projektantów w tym obszarze? Dlaczego warto angażować specjalistów od ekologii cyfrowej w proces projektowy? Temat „zielonego projektowania” omówiły – UX Researcherka Anna Sieroń (prowadząca) oraz Senior UX Researcherka Agnieszka Wilke-Trochymiak. W ramach cyklu „Prawdy i mity o ekologii. Jak być eko, kiedy jest się zielonym?” przyglądamy się najczęściej powtarzanym mitom na temat ekologii. W świecie pełnym sprzecznych informacji i uproszczonych odpowiedzi pomagamy oddzielić fakty od mitów, dostarczając wiedzy popartej nauką i doświadczeniem ekspertów. Naszym celem jest wspieranie świadomych wyborów oraz pokazanie, jak być naprawdę eko, nawet gdy dopiero zaczynamy swoją przygodę ze zrównoważonym stylem życia. Strefa Designu Uniwersytetu SWPS to projekt popularyzujący wiedzę z zakresu projektowania: produktów, architektury, wnętrz, mody i komunikacji. Pokazuje, czym jest dobre projektowanie i w jaki sposób realizuje ono konkretne potrzeby użytkowników. Więcej informacji o projekcie: https://web.swps.pl/strefa-designu

Explore the synergy between sustainability and accessibility in digital design with our insightful guest, Alexis, Senior Product UX Designer at IKEA. We promise a rich discussion on the shared goals of enhancing life and the planet, while tackling the challenge of fragmented reporting under the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Alexis shares groundbreaking strategies on integrating sustainable practices into digital technology, stressing the need for collaboration between professionals to ensure accessibility's material impact is both recognized and effectively communicated.Shifting focus to the power of optimism, we discuss redefining societal value beyond monetary terms. Drawing inspiration from compelling books like "What If We Get It Right," we advocate for moving away from pessimism to embrace hopeful innovation. Discover how sustainable and accessible practices can not only improve efficiency and creativity but also lead to better, more affordable products. We wrap up by emphasizing the importance of sustaining conversations on accessibility across multiple platforms, aiming for a long-term impact that transcends today's discussion. Join us for an inspiring narrative that challenges you to rethink value in design and business practices.Support the showFollow axschat on social mediaTwitter:https://twitter.com/axschathttps://twitter.com/AkwyZhttps://twitter.com/neilmillikenhttps://twitter.com/debraruhLinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/antoniovieirasantos/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/axschat/Vimeohttps://vimeo.com/akwyz

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast. Special Clips from our previous guests:Understanding Sustainability Reporting https://skipthequeue.fm/episodes/polly-bucklandPolly Buckland sat on the client side in a marketing manager role at BMW (UK) Ltd before co-founding The Typeface Group in 2010. She's an ideas person, blending creativity and commercial awareness to get the best outcomes for our clients.The Typeface Group is a B Corp Communications Agency + Design Studio based in North Hampshire. Their mission is to counteract digital chatter by championing authentic and strategic communication. Team TFG work with brilliant minds in business to extract, optimise and amplify their expertise, cutting through content clutter and stimulating saleswhile reducing digital waste at all costs.  The Typeface Group have been B Corp certified since October 2021 and is currently going through recertification. Digital Sustainability and the Elephant in the Room https://skipthequeue.fm/episodes/james-hobbsJames Hobbs is a people-focused technologist with over 15 years experience working in a range of senior software engineering roles with a particular focus on digital sustainability.He is Head of Technology at creative technology studio, aer studios, leading the technology team delivering outstanding work for clients including Dogs Trust, BBC, Historic Royal Palaces, and many others. Prior to joining aer studios, James was Head of Engineering at digital agency Great State, where he led a multi-award-winning software engineering team working with clients including the Royal Navy, Ministry of Defence, Honda Europe, the Scouts, and others.He also has many years experience building and running high-traffic, global e-commerce systems while working at Dyson, where he headed up the global digital technical team. Making Holkham the UK's most pioneering and sustainable rural estatehttps://skipthequeue.fm/episodes/lucy-downing-and-sue-penlingtonLucy Downing - Head of Marketing and Sue Penlington - Sustainability Manager at Holkham Estates.  Transcription:  Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with visitor attractions. Paul Marden: When consumers are asked if they care about buying environmentally and ethically sustainable products, they overwhelmingly answer yes. A recent study by Nielsen IQ found that 78% of us consumers say that a sustainable lifestyle is important to them. And while attractions have been great at a wide range of initiatives to improve their sustainability, this year's Visitor Attraction Website Survey will show that as a sector, we're lagging behind on digital sustainability. Paul Marden: So in today's episode, I'm going to talk about the learning journey I've been on personally, along with my colleagues at Rubber Cheese, to understand digital sustainability and how to affect real change. Paul Marden: I'll talk about what I've learned from hosting this podcast and how we've started to make real changes to our processes and our client sites to make them more sustainable. Welcome to Skip the queue. I'm your host, Paul Marden. Paul Marden: Back in April, I spoke to Polly Buckland from The Typeface Group about the importance of sustainability reporting. Polly Buckland: There's buckets of research out there as to the relationship between consumer behaviour and sustainability. So McKinsey did a study. “60% of customers actively prioritise purchasing from sustainable businesses.” Capgemini, “77% of customers buy from and remain loyal to brands that show their social responsibility.” I could literally keep quoting stats as to why businesses should take their sustainability goals very seriously and the communication of their sustainability initiatives very seriously, because it's becoming clearer. There was another stat about primarily women making the decisions based on sustainability of a business, and Millennials and Gen Z being sort of high up the list of people that are taking sustainability creds into consideration when they're making a purchase. So, I mean, it's a barrel load of stats that suggest if you don't have your eye on sustainability reporting and communicating your sustainability goals, you perhaps should have. Paul Marden: Of course, many attractions have been blazing a trail on the subject of sustainability for years. Going back in the archives of Skip the Queue to 2021, Kelly spoke to Lucy Downing, the Head of Marketing, and Sue Penlington, the Sustainability Manager for the Holkham Estate. First, let's hear from Kelly and Lucy. Kelly Molson: Lucy, I wondered if you could just give us an overview of Holkham Estates for our listeners that might not be aware of you or visited there themselves. Lucy Downing: So if you sort of picture it, most of the time when you think about stately homes, you picture a stately home with a garden. At Holkham, we are very much a landscape with a stately home. So 25,000 acres. We have a national nature reserve. A beach, b eautiful beach. It's been in Shakespeare in love. If you know the final scenes of Gwyneth Paltrow walking across the sands, that's Holkham, a bsolutely stunning. We're a farm, but at the centre of that, we've also got our 18th century palladian style mansion and that's home to Lord Lady Leicester and their family. They live in the halls. It's a lived in family home. But then we also have all of our visitor facing businesses. Lucy Downing: So we've got the hall, our Holkham stories experience, which is an attraction museum telling us all history and the now and the future of Holkham. Lucy Downing: We've got a high ropes course, cycle hire, boat hire, normally a really buzzing events calendar. We have accommodations. We've got Victoria Inn, which is near the beach. We've also got Pine Woods, which is a holiday park with caravans and lodgers. We have our self catering lodges, which within the park. And then we've got farming, conservation, gamekeeping, land and properties. We've got nearly 300 properties on the estate that are tenanted. A lot of those people work for Holkham, or if not, they work in the local community. We've got forestry and then we've also officiated and it's won lovely awards for the best place to work in the UK. It's a stunning landscape that surrounds it and we've got. I don't know if you've heard of her, but Monica Binnedo, which is global jewellery brand, she's based at Longlands at the offices. Lucy Downing: She decided a few years back to base her whole business there. She got all of her shops around the world, but that's where her business is. And I think she's ahead of the times, ahead of this year. She sort of knew how wonderful it would be to be working, I suppose, and not in a city centre, so I hope that gives you a flavour. But, yeah, I think it's 25,000 acres of beauty, landscapes with a house in the middle and lots of wildlife. Kelly Molson: I mean, it really is one of the most beautiful places and that stretch of the world holds a really special place in our hearts. It's somewhere that we visit very frequently and it's stunningly beautiful. Paul Marden: Later in that episode, Sue shared her insights on their sustainability strategies. Sue Penlington: So we've got three main themes. One is pioneering environmental gain I, which is all about connecting ecosystems and biodiversity and habitats. One is champion low carbon living, which is all about carbon emissions, our impact on construction and housing, our leisure operations. That sort of thing, and farming. And then the last one is the one that we always talk about. Tread lightly, stamp out waste. So that's all about recycling, reducing single use plastics and that sort of thing. So those three themes are what we're running with for 2021. We've got three goals, which are quite ambitious as well. And for me, I just see 2021 as that year of change where we'll make an impact. So we've done quite a lot of talking, and rightly so, and we want to take our visitors on that journey and really start to chip away at those goals. Paul Marden:  Now, let's talk a little bit about the fears around talking about sustainability. I think one of the things that is getting in the way of an open discourse around digital sustainability is fear. We're afraid of being judged by our actions and our intentions. In a recent survey by Unilever of social media influencers, 38% were afraid to openly discuss sustainability for fear of being accused of greenwashing. Again, let's hear from Polly, which is. Polly Buckland: Why, again, that storytelling part of the impact reporting is really important for me, because I will say we are not perfect. These are the things that we know we need to work on, but these are the things we've done better. And that's what I really like. The BCorp BIA assessment and their framework is because it takes you across five categories of measurement, and no one's perfect in any of them, but what it does do is it provides a framework for you to better. Paul Marden: Yes, absolutely. Polly Buckland: And measure yourself against. Yeah, I think if. I think the messaging behind your sustainability is really important. If you're professing to be perfect and you're not, you will get stung, because I think people can see through that. But if you are showing that you're trying to better, I don't think many people could argue with that. Paul Marden: Now, let's rewind a little and talk about my interest in digital sustainability. When I spoke to James Hobbs of the aer studios about digital sustainability back in July, we talked about my ignorance. So my background was at British Airways and I was there for ten years. It really wasn't that hard to spot the fact that environmentally, that we have a challenging problem, because when you stood on the end of Heathrow Runway, you can see what's coming out the back end of a 747 as it takes off. But I don't think I ever quite understood the impact of what I do now and how that's contributing more to CO2 emissions than what I was doing previously, which, yeah, I just don't think there's an awareness of that more broadly. James Hobbs: No, yeah, I'd agree. And it's complicated. Paul Marden: In what way? James Hobbs: I guess it's complicated to quantify the carbon impact of the type of work that we do in the digital industry because I guess there's what we're shipping to end users, which is one thing, but most modern websites and applications and stuff are built on a big tower of cloud services providers and all of their equipment has to be manufactured which has a carbon impact and rare earth metals need to be mined out of the grid. All of that stuff. Theres a big supply chain backing all this stuff and we can influence some of that directly, but a large chunk of it, we cant. So it makes choosing your suppliers quite important. Paul Marden: But in a presentation by my friend Andy Eva-Dale, now CTO of the agency Tangent, he opened my eyes to the impact that the digital sector has on the environment. The Internet consumes 1021 terawatt hours of electricity per year. That's more than the entire United Kingdom. Globally, the average webpage consumes approximately 0.8 grammes of CO2 per page view. For a website with 10,000 monthly page views, that's 102 kilos of CO2 per year. And as we'll see in a bit, the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey shows this year that the websites in our sector are anything but average. But let's talk about my learning journey. I've used this podcast as a way to learn about the sector and to drill down into sustainability itself. My interviews with Polly and James taught me a lot. It's one of the real benefits of running a podcast. Paul Marden: I can sit and ask people questions that in real life they may not want to talk about. Beginning from absolute first principles. Following the advice from James in the podcast, I've gone and studied the online materials published by the Green Software foundation, including their green software practitioners certificate. Some of that is quite technical, but a lot of what's in there is a real interest to a lot of people. Now let's talk a little bit about what I've learned along that journey. In an interesting conversation with Andy Povey the other day, he talked about people's innate reaction to digital sustainability and that for many people, the move to digital feels sustainable. I'm not printing things out anymore, so it must be sustainable. Of course, all that computation and networking has a massive global impact on greenhouse gas emissions, so not every website is sustainable. Paul Marden: In another conversation I had recently, someone said to me, why does all of this digital sustainability stuff matter? If I host my site on a green hosting server, there's no harmful emissions from the server. But that's only one part of a complex web. The power needed to connect up all the servers in the world and to all of the endpoint devices is immense. Of course, the carbon emitted to generate power varies country by country as well as by time. And that's not really in our control. But we can definitely control the impact our website has on all of that infrastructure. As the web page is in flight over the Internet to somebody's mobile device, the power it uses and consequently the carbon emitted along the way is therefore something that's definitely in our control. Paul Marden: The other source of learning for us this year has been the sustainability elements of the rubber cheese survey of visitor attraction websites. We made sustainability a core theme of this year's survey and we found some really interesting things. 80% of attractions in our survey have got some sort of sustainability policy, which is an amazing achievement and sets a benchmark for the sector. Also, a number of attractions are taking active steps to improve the sustainability of their website. But we found that this isn't necessarily being done in a framework of measuring and monitoring the sustainability of their website. So the changes that people are making could be making improvements to the sustainability of their site, but at worst, some of the techniques being used could actually harm the performance and sustainability of the website. Paul Marden: The thing is, if you're not testing and measuring, you can't ever know whether the changes that you're making are effective. The Green Business Bureau talk about how benchmarks provide a reference point to assess trends and measure progress and baseline global data. They say, "Companies have begun measuring sustainability performance, which allows them to make continuous assessments, evaluate where they lie on the sustainability agenda and make data driven decisions and policies. Measuring sustainability requires proper selection of key sustainability metrics and a means of making effective process improvements. These measures provide real time data and much needed quantitative basis for organisations to strategise and mitigate environmental and social and economic risks." I'll come back to making process improvements later, but for now let's just stick with measures. Back to James Hobbs, who talked about the ways in which you can measure the CO2 emissions on our website. James Hobbs: There are some tools out there that you can use to help you quantify the carbon impact of what you've got out there in the wild now. So the big one that most people talk about is websitecarbon.com, which is the website carbon calculator that was built by, I think a combination of an agency and some other organisations come up with an algorithm, it's obviously not going to be 100% accurate because every single website app is slightly different and so on, and as a consistent benchmark for where you are and a starting point for improvement. Tools like that are really good. Ecograder is another one. Those offer non technical routes to using them. Paul Marden: Now, both of these websites use similar technologies and methodologies to understand the CO2 emissions of a website. But the survey shows more than half of attractions have never tested the CO2 emissions of their site. This got me thinking. If it's that easy to test the sustainability of a single webpage and you can run them on any website, but most attractions aren't doing it, then what can we as Rubber Cheese do to help? So in this year's survey, we've run the largest audit of visitor attraction sustainability scores that we're aware of. So working with our lovely podcast producer Wenalyn, who also supports me with the survey, firstly, I run a proof of concept gathering and comparing data for a small number of attractions in our database this year. Paul Marden: Once we began to better understand the data, Wenalyn went and ran this against all of the sites that were in our database. With this, we hope to support the sector with a benchmark of webpage sustainability that can be used by anyone in the sector. And what this has shown us is that 58% of attraction websites are rated f by Website Carbon. That's 8% worse than the general population of all websites. But the sobering thing for me as an agency owner is that the sites that we build were in that 58%. The work that we've been doing recently isn't good enough from a sustainability perspective. So this triggered a number of projects internally for us to improve the sustainability posture of the sites that we design and build. Paul Marden: So I'm going to dig into one of those sites and the journey we've been on to remediate the sustainability of their site, because I think it can give a really nice understanding of the journey that you have to go on, the changes that you can make, and what the impact of those changes could be. Now, we started by benchmarking the scores for the site in question from Website Carbon and Ecograder. And this site was a grade F and marked 51 out of 100 by Ecograder. From there, we drove our improvements off of the feedback that Ecograder gave us. We worked as a team to estimate the work involved in the feedback from Ecograder to identify the tasks with the lowest estimated effort and the highest potential impact. Paul Marden: Essentially going for the quick wins, we implemented a number of really simple measures, we implemented lazy loading of images. This is making the browser only download images when they're just about to show on screen. If you don't lazy load an image on a page, then when the webpage opens, the browser will go and grab the image, calculate the size, and redraw the webpage with that image in it, even though the image is off screen. If the user then clicks something in the top part of the screen, maybe in the top navigation, and they never scroll down, they will never see that image. So all that network traffic that was used, all the computation in the browser to be able to figure out the size and paint the screen, was completely wasted because the user never got to see the image. Paul Marden: So by lazy loading, it means that if a person doesn't scroll all the way down the page, then an image near the bottom of the page will never get loaded. And it's an incredibly simple code change that you can write in now. This used to be something that you had to write custom code to implement, but most browsers now support lazy loading, so it should be really easy for people to implement that. Paul Marden: Another thing that we did was to correctly size images. We found that, but with best rule in the world, our editors were uploading images that were very high resolution, very big images, even though on screen we might only show a thumbnail. By resizing the images inside WordPress, we've made it easy for our editors to upload whatever size image that they like. But we only share the smaller image when somebody views the webpage, again, cutting down network traffic as a result of that. One other thing that we made a change on was to make the website serve more modern image formats. Paul Marden: Again, we used a WordPress package to do this, called imagify, and it means that our editors can upload images using the file formats that they're familiar with, like JPEG, GIF and PNG, but that we convert them to more modern formats like WebP inside WordPress. And that has better compression, making the images smaller without any discernible loss of quality, and making the whole webpage smaller, lighter, faster as a result of it, which has the impact of reducing the CO2 emissions that are needed to be able to use that webpage just as a guide. We measure everything that we do in the business in terms of the time it takes us to do things. So we're real sticklers for time tracking, but it was really important in this project for sustainability to work out what the differences were that were making. Paul Marden: So these changes, those three that I just outlined there cost us about a day and a half of development effort and much of that was done by one of our junior developers. So it wasn't hugely complex work that was done by an expensive, experienced developer. But in return for those changes, that one and a half days of effort, we've seen an improvement in rating by website carbon from F  to B and on eco grader from 54 out of 100 to 83 out of 100. This puts the site well into the realm of better than most websites on the Internet and better than 84% of attractions in this year's survey. Is it enough? No, of course not. We can do more and in fact, there are still technical improvements that we can make that don't impinge at all on the user's experience. Paul Marden: We can and we will make more changes to move the site from B to A or even to A+. But there's no doubt that following the old 80-20 rule, these marginal gains will be progressively harder and more costly to achieve. And there may be changes that are needed that will impinge on the user experience. Some things you cannot improve from a sustainability perspective without changing what the user is going to experience. If you've got an auto playing video on your website that consumes bandwidth, it generates network traffic. You cannot remove that video without removing the video entirely and changing it to be something that isn't autoplay but plays w hen a button presses that will have an impact on the user experience. Not everyone will click that button. Paul Marden: Not everyone will watch that video and say not everyone will necessarily have the same feeling about the attraction that they got when there was an autoplay video in place. But there are undoubtedly lots of things that can be done that don't impact the user experience of the site. One of the changes that we still haven't made, which is a little bit more effort, it's a little bit more complexity, and adds a little bit of costs to the hosting of the website is the introduction of a Content Delivery Network or CDN. Here's James Hobbs again from aer. James Hobbs: From a technical angle, I think one of the most impactful things you can do, beyond making sure that your code is optimised and is running at the right times, at the right place, is simply to consider using a content delivery network. And for your listeners who aren't familiar with a content delivery network, a CDN is something that all of us have interacted with at one point or another, probably without realising. In the traditional way of serving or having a website, you've got some service somewhere in a data centre somewhere. When someone types your website address in, it goes and fetches that information from the web server and back comes a web page in the simplest sense. James Hobbs: Now, if your website servers live in Amsterdam and your users on the west coast of America, that's a big old trip for that information to come back and forth, and it's got to go through lots of different hops, uses up lots of energy. A Content Delivery Network is basically lots and lots of servers dotted all over the planet in all of the major cities and things like that can keep a copy of your website. So that if someone from the West Coast of America says, "Oh, I'm really interested in looking at this w ebsite.", types the address in, they get the copy from a server that might be 10,20, 50 miles away from them, instead of several thousand across an ocean. James Hobbs: So it loads quicker for the user, which is great from a user experience, SEO, but it's also great from an energy point of view, because it's coming from somewhere nearby and it's not having to bounce around the planet. That's one thing that you could do that will make a massive and immediate impact commercially and from a sustainability point of view. Paul Marden: So there's another example of something that you can do that has very little impact on the experience of the website. In fact, it massively improves the user experience of the website, takes relatively little effort, but offers a huge improvement. Those are all things that we've done to one individual website. Let's talk a little bit about how we bake that into our process. In a 2022 article in the Harvard Business Review about how sustainability efforts fall apart, they recommend embedding sustainability by design into every process and trade off decision making. I found that language really interesting. It's similar to the language used widely in technology and security that was popularised during the launch of the EU General Data Protection Legislation, which talks a lot about having a security by design approach. Paul Marden: So taking this idea of designing sustainability into every process and trading off the decision making, we've incorporated it into our sales proposal, writing, designing and testing processes. Our people responsible for selling need to bake sustainability into the contract. We want to hold ourselves and our clients accountable for the sometimes difficult decisions around meeting a sustainability target. So we'll discuss that target at the beginning of the project and then hold ourselves to that throughout the design and build process, thereby not needing to do all the remediations that we've just done on the other website, because it's typically much easier, quicker, cheaper for us to implement a lot of those things. The first time through the project, as opposed to as a remediation at the end. We've also baked sustainability testing into our process. Paul Marden: No site goes live without having been tested by both website carbon and eco grader to make sure that the site meets the criteria that we set out at the beginning of the work. So we've thought a lot about how we can improve what we do and we've started to go back and remediate over some of the work that we've done more recently to make improvements. But my learning journey hasn't been entirely smooth. There are challenges that I've hit along the way. I think there's a few interesting challenges that are to be expected as you're going about learning things that I wanted to share. For example, we've done work to remediate the scores of one of our sites and been super excited with the impact score. Paul Marden: I mean, went from bottom of the Fs to A+, only to deploy those changes into production and it didn't move the dial at all on the production website. And that was heartbreaking. Once we looked into that in more detail, thinking that we've done loads of changes, move the dial such a dramatic amount, only to launch it into the wild and it barely touched things. What we realised that in the test environment that we used, we had password protection in place and the website carbon and Ecograder were testing the password screen, not the actual homepage underneath it. So there was a lesson learned for us. The other area where we've made lots of learnings is during the survey when we created our sustainability benchmark. We've seen test results so good that they can't be explained. We've seen somebody hitting 100 on Ecograder. Paul Marden: We've also seen scores that were contradictory on Ecograder and Website Carbon, and also scores that have dropped dramatically. When we first tested in August and did a validation test checked last week, we're still working our way through these wrinkles and I think some of it is because we're looking at many hundreds of websites rather than trying to learn by testing and improving just one site. But beyond the kind of technical challenges, there remain some things that I simply don't understand. And my mission going forward is to fill those gaps. Firstly, while both Ecograder and Website Carbon use the same underlying principles and tools to calculate CO2 emissions, they often can and do give different results. Paul Marden: Not just in the fact that one is A+, a F score and the other is out of 100, but that the basic page sizing in kilobytes and consequently the CO2 can and often is different depending on which tool you look at. And I don't understand why that is, and I need to look into that. And I'm sure we'll come back to the podcast and talk more about that once I do understand it better. But the other problem is that I'm struggling with the size of the problem and the size of the prize. There's no doubt in my mind that making these improvements is the morally right thing to do, and commercially it's right as well, because it improves your outcomes on the website as well as the sustainability. Paul Marden: I'm just struggling with the business case, because if I had an unlimited budget, I do make every change in business that improves the sustainability posture of the business. But most marketers, most people that listen to this podcast don't have an infinite budget. They have a very finite budget, and so they have to put their budget to work where it's going to have the most impact. And what's the return on investment of spending 5k on improving the website versus changing light bulbs to leds, or moving away from gas powered water heaters in the outside toilets by the penguins? It's really difficult at the moment for me to be able to understand where this is the right and sensible investment of sustainability funding within an organisation. So I've shared my learning journey over the year. What about you? What can you do next? Paul Marden: For one last thought, let's head back to the conversation between Kelly and Lucy and Sue from Holkham. Kelly Molson: Are there any advice that you could share with our listeners in terms of how they start or begin to look at sustainability? Lucy Downing: Interesting. I was chatting with Lord Leicester yesterday about the subject and were sort of agreeing that I think you definitely need to know where you are, particularly as a business. You know where you are, because then you can set your goals in a realistic fashion. And I think the one thing to remember is that it has to be realistic, because you need to set goals that you can financially deliver, because if they're not financially viable, then you're not going to be here as a business to deliver them. And what we're also finding and talking to other businesses that actually quite a lot of the sustainability gains that you can make are actually in financial ones too, because you probably cut down on some of your resources that you're using, you'll think better, you'll work smarter. Lucy Downing: So it's just, I think that's something to definitely remember, that it has to be sustainable in all ways, socially, financially and environmentally. That's definitely some key advice. And I think be authentic. There's a lot of talk around greenwashing. Don't be guilty of thinking, wow, this is something we really should do and we're going to do it and just talk about it. It has to be authentic. So really think about where you can make the biggest changes environmentally for sustainability and focus on those and just make sure. Yeah, it's like us really. We're saying we're launching our sustainability strategy, but actually for the past ten years, we've now we've got 100 acre solar farm, we've got anaerobic digester, we heat the hall and all of our businesses with woodchip, so we've got our biomass boilers. Lucy Downing: So we've been doing it for quite a long time without telling anyone. But what we're now doing is saying, actually, that's not even enough, we need to up it further. So, yeah, that's the thing. I think it just has to be authentic and realistic. Sue Penlington: Yeah. And from my point of view, I'm a bit of a doer do and not a talker, so don't get bogged down. It could be absolutely overwhelming. And I think when I was first approached by my boss here, I was just like, wow. Because it isn't just rubbish, it's every single business. Sue Penlington: It's huge. But from my point of view, small differences can make a really big impact and keep chipping away at it because solutions are out there. There's loads of people doing really cool things. And, you know, every night I'm on Google looking up something else or going down another rabbit hole because I've seen something on Twitter. So for me, every day is a school day. But, yeah, get stuck in and collaborate with other like minded people. You know, nowadays you're not considered swampy because you're talking about sustainability. Sue Penlington: Well, you know, it's totally on brand, isn't it? And let's not reinvent the wheel. If we can learn from other people, then let's do that. I mean, go for it. Literally, every single individual can make a difference. Kelly Molson: Oh, Sue, that's. Yeah, you've just got me right there, sue. And I think what you said about collaborating and learning from people, that has been something that's so key this year. People are so willing to share their plans, they're so willing to share what they're doing and how they're doing things. Especially within this sector, there's always somebody that's doing or, you know, a couple of steps ahead of you that you can learn from. And people are so willing to kind of give up that advice and their time at the moment as well. So definitely that's a key one for me. Ask people. Ask people for help. Ask people how to do things. Paul Marden: I'd like to thank everyone that contributed to this episode, including Kelly, Lucy and Sue at Holkham, Polly at TFG and James at aer. Thanks to everyone that's helped me with this journey in the last year, the lovely clients we've talked to, the survey respondents, and my team at Rubber Cheese, Steve, Ben, Tom, Sinead, Wenalyn, and Oz, who've all worked really hard to benchmark the sector and to make continuous improvements to our client's sustainability. As you know, we're really experimenting with the podcast format at the moment, and if you like this or any of the other changes, I'd love to hear. And if you don't, then tough, go make your own podcast. Only joking. I'd love to hear. If you think we can make improvements, you can find me on X, @paulmarden and also on LinkedIn. Paul Marden: If you're at VAC this week, the Visitor Attraction Conference, then I'll be there with Oz and Andy. So come and say hi to us and I'll see you again in a couple of weeks time. Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm. The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Help the entire sector:Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsFill in your data now (opens in new tab)

Host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain to dive into The Week in Green Software, exploring the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence and how the growing adoption of AI technology affects carbon emissions, as well as the growing complexities in the measurement and reduction of these. They discuss a primer on AI's direct environmental footprint, regulatory trends in Europe and the US, and the complexities surrounding the renewable energy credits tech companies use to offset emissions. The conversation touches on real-time cloud data initiatives, carbon accounting in AI, and the future challenges of balancing sustainability with technological innovation.

In the early 2020s, companies started facing a big question: how could they be more responsible in the digital world? Could something similar to CSR exist for this virtual and yet highly materialized world? Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) was coined to offer some much-needed guidance.

Join us in this engaging episode as we sit down with Claire, the Director of Sustainable Business Consulting at Transform. Claire shares her inspiring journey from her early passion for sustainability, her roles in digital product spaces, to her current position at Transform. She delves into the concept of digital sustainability, the environmental impact of digital products, and practical steps product managers can take to make more sustainable choices. Through insightful discussions and real-world examples, Claire provides a roadmap for integrating sustainability into product design and business practices, emphasizing the interconnected benefits for the environment, society, and business prosperity. Tune in to discover how small changes can lead to significant positive impacts and how you can be a part of the solution. 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome 00:06 Claire's Journey into Digital Sustainability 02:38 Understanding Digital Sustainability 06:19 The Role of Product Managers in Sustainability 12:23 Practical Steps for Implementing Sustainability 16:05 Balancing Sustainability with Consumer Behavior 19:47 Overcoming Overwhelm in Sustainability Efforts 23:41 Positive News and Upcoming Events 24:51 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Links to events and thoughts from Claire https://www.linkedin.com/posts/transformuk_sustainability-netzero-sustainabledesign-activity-7227324081518366724-YA5e https://www.transformuk.com/pages/towards-a-sustainable-business-blueprint Find Claire on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbolina/

This episode of EnvironMental is about the digital carbon footprint!

In this episode, Mischa interviews John Rarrick, Head of Marketing at Movius, about the company's innovative solutions in the telecom industry. Movius is redefining communication by offering a SIM-free, carrier-grade call and text experience. John discusses the impact of Movius's technology across various industries, from financial services to healthcare, and how it helps businesses achieve compliance and cost savings. Learn how Movius is paving the way for digital sustainability and revolutionizing global communication strategies.Show NotesIntroduction to John Rarrick, Head of Marketing at Movius.Overview of Movius's innovative telecom solutions, including the elimination of SIM cards for carrier-grade communication.Discussion on Mobius's product, MultiLine, which provides a second dedicated business number on any device.Insights into the impact of Mobius's technology on industries like finance, healthcare, and logistics.Exploration of the benefits of Mobius's solutions, such as cost savings, compliance with regulations, and enhanced communication capabilities.How Mobius collaborates with wireless carriers to offer seamless services.The future of telecom and digital sustainability with Mobius's cutting-edge strategies.Links and ContactsLearn more about Movius at: https://www.movius.ai/Connect with John Rarrick on LinkedIn: John Rarrick https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnrarrick/ Mischa's Stuff!Join my Podcast guest speaking Masterclass: Register Now This Masterclass will teach you:How to speak with confidence and authenticity.How to find podcasts that attract your ideal audience.How to get booked without the hassle.Ideal for coaches, course creators, and heart-centered entrepreneurs who want to generate leads, customers, and sales in a genuine way.Join us and start your journey to becoming a podcast guest-speaking pro!Register Now For social Media: FaceBook - https://www.facebook.com/MrMischaLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mischaz/Subscribe and share with your business associates who could use a listen!

Host Chris Adams and guest Romain Jacob delve into the often-overlooked energy demands of networking infrastructure to discover A Greener Internet that Sleeps More. While AI and data centers usually dominate the conversation, networking still consumes significant power, comparable to the energy usage of entire countries. They discuss innovative practices to make the internet greener, such as putting networks to sleep during low usage periods and extending the life of hardware. Romain talks about his recent Hypnos paper, which won Best Paper at HotCarbon 2024. He shares his team's award-winning research on how energy demand for networking kit powering the internet can be reduced by simply by powering down links when not in use.

Producer Chris Skipper is joined by guests Marjolein Pordon of ladylowcode.com fame and Andri Johnston from Cambridge University Press & Assessment to discuss the sustainability challenges associated with AI's increasing energy demands and the role of data centers in addressing these challenges. Marjolein emphasizes the need for sustainable infrastructure and the potential synergy between low-code platforms and AI. Andri shares insights from CUP&A's efforts to understand and mitigate digital carbon emissions, highlighting the importance of transparency and accurate reporting from cloud service providers like AWS.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your hosts are Paul Marden and Oz Austwick.Fill in the Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.Competition ends on 31st July 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://rubbercheese.com/survey/https://carbonsix.digital/https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmarden/Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital and the CEO of Rubber Cheese. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn't know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He's worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile. https://rubbercheese.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/thatmarketingbloke/ Oz Austwick is the Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese, he has a somewhat varied job history having worked as a Blacksmith, a Nurse, a Videographer, and Henry VIII's personal man at arms. Outside of work he's a YouTuber, a martial artist, and a musician, and is usually found wandering round a ruined castle with his kids. Transcription:  Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. In today's episode, Oz Austwick and I talk about the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey. After six weeks of data collection, we've seen some really interesting insights that we'll share and we'll also announce a new digital sustainability initiative that we're really excited about. Paul Marden: Hello, Oz. How you doing, mate? Oz Austwick: Hi, I'm good, mate, I'm good. How are you? Paul Marden: I am very good. On a slightly gray summer's day, hopefully, you know, all the private schools have broken up, so it should start to get busy in the attractions over the next couple of weeks and then we've got all the state schools breaking up in the next few weeks as well. So exciting times, hopefully. Hopefully busy times as well. Oz Austwick: Yes. So what are we going to talk about today? Paul Marden: Well, we are going to talk a little bit about the survey, but I thought it might be quite nice as well to talk a little bit about what's happening in the news because there's quite a lot at the moment. Oz Austwick: There is been a bit of a change of boss, haven't there has been. Paul Marden: A change of boss recently. But before we do that, shall we talk about where have we been recently? Tell me, tell me, which attraction have you been to recently? Oz Austwick: So this is why you're here, to keep me on track. The most recent attraction I've been to is Hazelmere Museum in Surrey. It's a bit of an eye opener, to be honest. I've always had a bit of a love for these tiny little provincial, formerly council run museums that you find in little towns around the country because you come across some amazing gems hidden in them. But Hazelmere Museum is a little bit different. I mean, it's astonishing. It's got a vast catalogue of natural history stuff. I mean, hundreds of thousands of pieces in the catalogue there. They've got an Egyptian section as well, with a sarcophagus and a mummy. Yeah, it's a great place. It's hidden away in this tiny little market town and if you get the opportunity, go, because it's great. Oz Austwick: But there is no parking, so you have to park in the town centre and walk along, which is the only downside I can come up with. How about you? Where have you been? Paul Marden: Sounds awesome. I have been to a few tiny little museums, actually. Recently I went to Winchester with my daughter and we did some of the military museums in Winchester because there's quite a few regimental museums in Winchester. They are all of them, you know, hyper focused on a particular regiment doing very specific things. So, you know, there's a cavalry museum and infantry museums. And it's just really interesting. My brother was in the army. It's quite nice to be able to take Millie and walk her around some of these military museums and for her to connect with what he did when he was in the army. So we're able to see, there's a little piece in one of the museums showing the war in Kosovo and how peacekeepers went over. And my brother had a medal from going to Bosnia. Paul Marden: He went to in peacekeeping back in the '90s. That was very interesting for her to be in a museum and connect with something that's of relevance to the family. He was slightly offended when I told him. Also, we saw model of Pegasus Bridge. And she was like, “Was he at Pegasus Bridge?” And I was like, “No, no. Uncle Barry's not quite that old. No, that's about 40 years too old for Uncle Barry.”Oz Austwick: Yeah. Do you know, I remember I went to Pegasus Bridge completely by accident once. Literally. We were just driving back and went, “Hang on a minute. This looks familiar. “Yeah. We stopped off at the cafe and had a wander around the bridge. And you can still see the bullet holes in the walls of the cafe building. And there are still tanks. Amazing place. Anyway, sorry, I digress. Paul Marden: No, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about what's happening in the news at the moment. Anything that springs to mind for you? Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, obviously, the change of government, I don't think it came as a big surprise to anyone. Maybe the actual numbers were a little surprising, but the fact that we've now got a Labour Prime Minister with a fairly clear majority I don't think was a massive surprise. How that's going to play out in terms of the sector, I don't know. Paul Marden: Yeah, we've got a different culture sector in place, haven't we, than were perhaps anticipating. So there's few changes of personnel than we perhaps anticipated. Oz Austwick: Yeah, I mean, I guess we'll wait and see. It's probably just a result of the change, but I guess I'm feeling fairly optimistic that things might improve. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. I feel an air of optimism that we haven't had for quite some time. Oz Austwick: Yeah. Paul Marden: Interesting times, other things in the sector. Interesting, exciting news. The Young V and a were awarded the Art Fund Museum of the Year. That's a, you know, a new museum that's doing lots of amazing work. We're real focused on kids and families. Lots of. Lots of co creation with young people involved in it. So that's quite exciting stuff. And it comes with a really hefty prize fund as well. So. So they got quite a nice pat on the back, a gong and some money as well to be able to fund their good work. So that's exciting. Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Good for them. Anything else? Yeah, Bloomberg. I think we should probably talk a little bit about Bloomberg earlier in the year. We talked a lot about to a lot of people about the fact that Bloomberg philanthropies were awarding grants as part of their accelerator program for attractions, culturally significant attractions, to improve their digital presence. And that's kind of happened. A lot of awards have been made, attractions have got money to spend, and that's beginning to work its way out into the community now. So I'm really looking forward to seeing if that actually makes a significant difference to the overall level of websites. And I guess we'll probably have to wait until next year with the survey to find out if there's been a change in the sector. Oz Austwick: But I think for those attractions that have received the money, it can't be anything but a positive thing. Paul Marden: I was quite impressed because it's not just money that they're getting. They're getting help and support from Bloomberg as well to guide them in the use of that money. Because I think sometimes you see charities getting awarded large chunks of money and sometimes it can be a challenge for them to spend that money effectively, whereas by being provided guidance from Bloomberg, you know, you can see that money is going to be well spent and well used. So that's. I'm pleased about that. It'll be really exciting to see some of those projects come to fruition. I was pretty excited about a couple of science centre related news items. So we the curious in Bristol has reopened after two years of being closed in fire. So that was, I think that was monumental for them to be able to turn that around. It was really. Paul Marden: I was really pleased to see them reopen. That's definitely on my list of things I need to do this summer, is go and visit them and see what amazing things they've done. Absolutely. And then we've also got Cambridge Science Centre as well, will be due to open in a couple of weeks time. So they've opened their ticketing up. So people can now buy tickets to go to Cambridge Science Centre who have been a little bit like we the curious. They've been without a physical home for a period of time and are reopening a physical offering again. So that's exciting to be able to go and buy your tickets and head on over to Cambridge Science Centre.Oz Austwick: And Kids in Museums as well. I'm not going to talk about it because I know you know a lot more about it than me. But they're looking for volunteers, right? Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So I think we talked in a number of episodes about the Family Friendly Museum Awards and short lists of those have been announced. That includes young v and a again. And we're looking for volunteer families to go undercover and do the judging. And I love it. The idea that families will get. They will have a contribution to the cost of money, pay expenses for them to go undercover and do this judging. And the feedback we get from those families is amazing. At the awards last year, each time an award was announced, we get a little snippet of what the undercover judges actually said and it's surprising what kids find important to them. The benches were comfy or the cafe was nice, you know, little things that perhaps adults might notice, you know, comes out in that undercover judging. Paul Marden: So, yeah, Kids in Museums need volunteers. Head on over to the website to go and find out a little bit more about that undercover judging. If you'd like to get involved in it. That's the news. But what do we really want to talk about? Oz Austwick: We really want to talk about our survey. Paul Marden: We really do. It's exciting. Oz Austwick: In fairness, we're kind of always talking about the survey at the moment. So now we're just going to talk to you about the survey rather than each other and anyone that will listen. Paul Marden: Yes, absolutely. Oz Austwick: We've been open for submissions for, what, six weeks now? Paul Marden: About that, I think. Yeah.Oz Austwick: A few weeks to go. It's proving really interesting. Paul Marden: Yes. Oz Austwick: Is that enough of the hook? Have we got you now? One of the things that I think is probably worth saying is that somehow, and whilst we wanted this to happen, I don't think we specifically planned for it, we've kind of lost a lot of the kind of fake submissions that we've had in previous years where people were clearly just having a look at the survey or not bothering to fill it in, or maybe it was bots doing it and we don't seem to have those. So the overall quality of the responses is just fantastic. And some of the venues that have submitted their data to the survey, I mean, they're astonishing. I'm not going to name any names because I don't know if I'm allowed to. Paul Marden: No, you're definitely not allowed to. Oz Austwick: Some of the biggest and most famous attractions in the country. Or even the world because we are worldwide this year. Paul Marden: But more importantly, also the smallest museums you could possibly imagine are in that data set as well. So what have we seen? We got all of these amazing responses. We've still got a couple of weeks left to go. We don't want anyone to feel left out. We definitely want more people to respond over the next couple of weeks. But let's give some teasers. What have we seen that we thought was interesting? Oz Austwick: Before we do, can I just make a couple of points that I think everybody needs to be aware of? The first is that any data you put in is absolutely confidential in every way. We're never going to release your data to the wider world. All the data that gets released is aggregated together and is done in a way that is completely anonymous. But what that does is it allows us to give sector wide data and we can give your data in comparison to that, so you can and see where you are. So there's no risk of anything getting out in the wide world that you don't want out there. It's completely non commercial. You know, we're not making money from this, we're not doing this, we're not asking for your data in order that we can make money. Oz Austwick: This is to give back to the community. We want people to have the information so that they can make the right decisions. And also, you don't have to fill in everything. If you look at it and think, you know, I ought to fill this in, I want to fill it in, but I haven't got time to do the whole thing, do half of it, that's okay. Even if you only fill in one question, that will improve the value of that answer to the entire sector. I'll shush now. Sorry. Let's look at some action figures. Paul Marden: Let's talk about some of the interesting findings. We've definitely found some things where we've gone. “Oh, really? Oh, how interesting.” So for me, one of them, I'm a tech geek. Everybody knows I'm a tech geek. Okay. Ticketing systems, content management systems, that's my bag. I was quite interested this year that we're seeing much more parity in terms of the ticketing system data that we're getting. So there is a number of ticketing systems where in previous years there's been a substantial number of people selecting Digitickets. In previous years we're seeing more. We're seeing more responses from other respondents this year with different ticketing systems. And I think we've said this before, it's nothing. These aren't necessarily indicating changes in the behaviour of the sector. Paul Marden: It more speaks to the different people that are responding in different years and we're seeing more responses from different people this year. And so we are seeing different ticketing systems appearing alongside Digitickets as key. You spotted something that surprised you, didn't you, in that respect? Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. When we designed the survey went through all of the ticketing systems that were familiar with and all of the names that we knew but hadn't had specific experience of working with. And we created what we thought was a really comprehensive listing of ticketing systems. But we allowed people to tick other and then write in what they were using and we clearly missed one big player from that list and they're probably the highest ranked so far. I haven't actually looked for the last week or so. They're certainly up there. They may not be the most popular but they're one of the most popular and it came as a complete surprise to us. So, you know, do make sure that you get your report because there is stuff in it that surprises even if it's just me, I mean. Oz Austwick: But you may well be surprised by some of the results of that. Paul Marden: Yeah, we saw interesting shifts. So we've done a little bit of year on year analysis as well. Already we've seen that there are more people selecting WordPress as their CMS. So that's now around half of all respondents have selected WordPress as their content management system. Oz Austwick: I'm going to take issue with your phrasing there because I'm not sure that's an accurate description. Paul Marden: Why? Oz Austwick: Because I don't necessarily think we've seen more people selecting WordPress, but we've certainly had more people stating they use WordPress. They may have been using WordPress years, much like the ticketing system. What we've got is a snapshot of the people who have submitted. Paul Marden: Yeah, so I meant selected the tick box as opposed to selected the technology platform. But you're absolutely right. It is indicative of the responses that we're getting this year. And it's not. They're not eating away market share from the other CMS's. I think we're seeing more people being able to tell us what the CMS that they're using is. So fewer people are saying I don't know or I can't track this, and actually giving us answer. Oz Austwick: Yeah, we made a real conscious effort to try and reduce the number of people just saying other. And I think that's probably made a big difference to these. Paul Marden: Yeah, up around is around 11% now, up from 4% in 2023. So that's quite interesting. We're definitely going to do some analysis this year to try and see. Can we slice and dice some of the other data by technology platforms to see if any of these platforms give those people that select them an edge in terms of their performance or their sustainability scores or things like that? Oz Austwick: I know one of the things that we noticed last year was that the bigger, more successful venues were more likely to use Umbraco or perhaps the other way around. The venues that used Umbraco were more likely to be the bigger, more successful venues, but there was no way of telling which was cause and which was effect or whether they were just completely disconnected at all. And hopefully now, because we've got a slightly bigger sample size, we might be able to be a bit more accurate with that. Rather than stating this is a correlation, maybe there's something we can actually action from this. Paul Marden: Yeah. You had some interesting stuff that you saw around how easy people find it to find stuff, didn't you? Oz Austwick: Yes. There's been a long debate that's been going on for longer than I've been with Rubber Cheese about the value of self reporting. And I know that there were some conversations with the Advisory Board that we put together to help design the survey this year about whether that was a valuable thing to do. And I think that, because that's how we've done it for the last few years, we've stuck with it. But also, I think as long as you're open about the fact that this is self reporting, the figure is still accurate. So when we ask people how easy it is for visitors to their website to find what they're looking for, over half of them ranked 8, 9 or 10 out of 10, so that it was very easy. Oz Austwick: And nobody ranked zero, one or two, so nobody thought that it was really difficult to find stuff on their website. But 50% of sites have never actually tested the site or collected feedback from users. So how valuable that figure is a different question. Yeah, we'll come to that later, because there's an important point that I think we're going to make later on about how we can make that figure more valuable. Paul Marden: You also saw some stuff around personalisation, didn't you? Oz Austwick: Yeah. The personalisation things are really important because as a marketer, you go along to agency groups and conferences and workshops and webinars, and for years, if not decades, people have been talking about how important personalisation is. If you've got anybody in your organisation that works with email newsletters, personalisation is absolutely key. And it's really clear that the more you personalise, the better you do. And 90% of the people who filled in the survey agree that personalisation is more important than not. However, only 9% of websites are offering personalised content. Paul Marden: It's a bit heartbreaking, isn't it? Oz Austwick: Yeah. Obviously we don't know why and we can say that even at this point, without the survey having finished, that's already up from last year. It was 6% last year and now it's at 9%, which doesn't feel like a big improvement, but it's a 50% increase. Paul Marden: It'd be interesting to slice that again and see is that the 9% that have personalisation, are they the attractions with larger footfall and larger budgets and that's why they can afford to do this and that's the big barrier to entry? Or is there a something else that actually know that smaller sites with less traffic and less footfall at the attraction can still offer personalisation? It's not just about budgets and some people can use this stuff and get really good outcomes from it, or spending all that time and effort mean that you get no real outcome of it anyway, and that all of those people that think it's really important are kidding themselves. And that's the great thing about the survey, isn't it, that we've got all of this data and we can start to draw those conclusions from it? Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is going to be a really interesting one to follow over the next year or two to see if. Is this year's number an actual increase or is it just a more accurate number? Yes, and I guess we can only see that as a trend over time. Paul Marden: Yeah. Oz Austwick: Now, you were very keen that we included some questions about AI and the use of AI. Paul Marden: Yeah. Oz Austwick: Have there been any interesting findings there? Paul Marden: Yes. So the majority of people have used some sort of AI content generation tool, so they've used ChatGPT or the like to be able to do generative AI, writing, copy and that kind of thing. We've not gone into depth about how much they've used it. Do they use it extensively? Is it part of their day to day work? It was simply a question of have you used any of these tools? So, you know, over half have used a tool like that. There is also hidden in that data set there's a few attractions that are doing some pretty innovative things with AI as well. So there's a couple that are using things like AI powered CRM or AI powered scheduling or workforce management. So earlier on you said everybody's submissions is completely anonymous. That is completely true. Paul Marden: But I am definitely going to be tapping up those people that gave us the interesting answers to say, “Would you like to come and tell the story in more detail?” So, yes, you're right, we're never going to share anybody's data, and we're never going to share anybody's stories without their permission. We will definitely, over the next few weeks and months, as we're planning the report, we're definitely going to go to the people that have given us interesting data that has made us go, that's very interesting, and talking to them. So we'll find out a little bit more about what those people are doing. But you had an interesting observation, didn't you? If half of the people have used something like ChatGPT, that leaves about half the people that haven't used it. Oz Austwick: Yeah, it's really difficult to know from where we sit as a digital agency that is constantly trying to stay ahead of the curve and understand new technologies and how they might be relevant and how we can use them to help our clients. You know, we may be, are we more familiar with this than most people, or is the way we see it representative? It's really hard to know. And I find it really hard to believe that the approaching half of visitor attractions simply haven't even looked at it. They've not even gone to ChatGPT and said, you know, find me a title for this blog post or something like that. It just seems that maybe they're missing a trick. Oz Austwick: And I'm not suggesting that you should go out and get vast amounts of content written by AI and plaster it all over your site. We know that Google is specifically and deliberately penalising sites it knows are doing that, but you can certainly use it to maybe improve your language. Or if you can't come up with a catchy title, you can ask for twelve different suggestions for titles and pick and choose. I find it really hard to believe that half the people haven't even done that, but that could just be my context. Paul Marden: I think you might be sat in a little bubble of your own making. I sat with people recently and walked them through. How do you prompt ChatGPT? What does prompting even mean? And talking about how is it doing it? And talking about the idea that it's all just probabilities. It's not intelligent, it's just using probabilities to figure out what the next word is. Yeah. And what does that actually mean to people? I definitely think that we sit in a bubble where we are. We are not experts. Neither of us, I think, would consider ourselves experts at best, gentlemen amateurs. But I think we sit in a bubble of people that are using this a lot and are experimenting with it. I don't know. Paul Marden: I think there's a place for Skip the Queue to look at this next year, to look at what are the innovative things that people are doing. But also starting at the 101 class, what does it all mean? What are these things? How could they be useful to you? How could you make use of ChatGPT to accelerate your content creation, to come up with new ideas that you haven't potentially thought of? So definitely, I think there's space in Season 6 for us to delve into this in more detail. There's one more area that I think we added this year that we're really excited about, isn't there, around sustainability. Paul Marden: Not because we think we are thought leaders on this, not because we think we're on the cutting edge, but because we're learning so much around this at the moment and really changing the way that we work, aren't we? Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a really important point. It's something that. Oh, which conference was it? I think were both there. One of the agencynomics conferences, Joss from Enviral, made the point that this is actually our problem. If websites are out there and they aren't sustainable and they are causing damage, it's the fault of the companies that have built them. And really, that's us. So we kind of feel that we have to be at least trying to take the lead in helping fix that. And you can't do anything to fix the issue unless you've got the knowledge and the understanding of where you are. And I guess that's where we are at the moment. We've asked a few really basic questions, but they've given some quite interesting statistics. Paul Marden: Yeah. So most attractions have got good intentions, so most have got a sustainability plan in place. We've not asked what that plan looks like or how comprehensive it is. It was simply, does your attraction have a sustainability plan? And most people have said yes to that. Oz Austwick: When you say it's a majority, I think it's quite important to note that this isn't like 56%, this is a huge majority. The vast majority of sites have sustainability plan to the point where you could say almost everybody does. Not quite everybody, but almost everybody. But that does make the fact that very few have actually specifically measured the carbon footprint of their website a little bit more shocking. Paul Marden: So that's the big, “Oh, really moment” for us was the idea that most people have got a sustainability plan. Some have even actually taken action to improve the sustainability posture of their website, but very few have actually ever measured the CO2 emissions of their website. So they don't, they're not benchmarking. This is not a coherent plan where you measure, take action, measure again and then replan. Very few of the attractions have actually done that measurement process. We know, we know from recent episodes where we talked about sustainability, the importance of measuring in terms of helping you construct a plan and working in a methodical way to improve the CO2 emissions and improve that sustainability posture. And I think we've recognised as a result of doing the survey that there is some impediment that is stopping people from measuring. Paul Marden: We're not entirely sure we understand what the impediment is, but there is definitely something getting in the way of people being able to measure. And I think that's our. There's the big thing that I wanted to be able to share today that we have decided as a result of doing the survey and then started to run through, we could see that most people haven't tested the CO2 emissions. So what we have done is we've enriched the database of all of the respondents that we've had this year and gone and done the CO2 emissions tests of their websites for them. Now, obviously, we're going to keep that private to us. We're not singling anybody out, but we are going to be able to aggregate together what the whole industry looks like as a result of the testing that we have done. Paul Marden: The testing, to be fair, is not just restricted to the people that have responded to the survey. We are also going and testing more widely across the entire sector to be able to get an understanding of what the CO2 emissions of the websites of the wider sector look like. So that's been, that's something that we've been really pleased that we've been able to do and it's something that we want to be able to offer out to everybody that has taken part in the survey. So one of the things that I guess we're announcing today that is a key thing that we've not talked about throughout the whole survey process, is we're going to give everybody that has taken part in the survey the opportunity to download the CO2 emissions report that we have gathered for them on their website. Paul Marden: So they will be able to see a grading of A to F as to what their CO2 emissions look like. They'll also see that broken down in a little bit more granular detail around the page size, the amount of CO2 that is emitted by the page, one page of their site, and a rough estimate of what that turns into in terms of CO2 emissions for their entire site. And that's something that we will share with everybody at the end of the survey. So this year, it's not just going to be one large survey that aggregates everybody's data together. We will also give individualised reports to everybody for them to be able to see where their CO2 emissions are in terms of their website.Paul Marden: With ideas we're hopefully going to work with friends of Skip the Queue and supporters of the survey to be able to come up with ideas around how you can actually improve that CO2 posture, which could, that could be an amazing thing for us to run the survey again next year, gather that data again and see today, as we're recording, BBC is running the Michael Mosely just one thing in memory of Michael Moseley. I think we can take inspiration from that. What if every attraction that got access to their report did just one thing to improve the CO2 posture of their website? What difference is that going to make to us as a sector as a whole in that one year process? Paul Marden: Because there will bound to be a few little things that you can do, knobs to twiddle and features to add on your website that will just improve that CO2 emissions posture just a little bit and make everybody better as a result of it. Oz Austwick: Yeah. And I think it's really interesting that even though we haven't got the full data yet, and we've not put it together in any meaningful way, it's already changed the way we work as an agency. But not only that, there are other changes going on in the wider community as well, because the website briefs we're getting through from attractions are talking about this more. So I guess from a personal perspective, if you're putting together a brief for a new website or an app or some kind of new digital service, put this in there, ask that somebody pays some attention to the footprint and the impact of your new site and make it part of the decision making process. Paul Marden: Procurement managers have the control. I absolutely believe that the person that holds the purse strings gets to set the direction of the project. And just like accessibility is always on, every tender, sustainability should be there. This is a easily, trivially measurable thing. And when procurement managers hold us to account, the industry will improve as a result of being held to account like that. Oz Austwick: Yes. Now, the sustainability reporting isn't the only new thing that we're going to do. There's one more big thing that we're going to do as part of the survey to try and make. Make the data far more valid and applicable. Do you want to say what it is? Paul Marden: Yeah, I'll take this one. Because this was an idea I had. It was an idea I had a few months ago. I would love to get real end consumer input into the survey. We asked attractions, how important is personalisation? Have you done user testing? How easy was it for people to traverse your website? We're actually going to go out and survey people who have visited a large attraction in the last year and ask them, how easy was it to buy your tickets? We could be asking them about personalisation. We could be asking them about, is sustainability a key deciding buying factor for you? There's lots of things that we could ask people as part of this consumer research piece that we're about to embark on. Paul Marden: I think it's really exciting to be able to join up the voice of the consumer with the voice of the attractions in the Rubber Cheese Survey as a whole. Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. Not only will it give us that knowledge from the other side of the transaction, but it'll let us know really very quickly whether the self reporting that people are doing as part of the survey is actually accurate. Is your view of how easy your website is to use, is that accurate? Is that the same view that people coming to your website for the first time have? Because we're all familiar with our own website and if you've designed the user experience, you probably think it's great and it may well be, but unless you actually test it and ask people, you can't know either way. So I think this is a really exciting thing to do and it allows us to kind of draw in more important information that can help us all as a sector improve.Paul Marden: Completely. And we've got a little ask in terms of that, haven't we? We would love to hear from you if you have got input into that consumer research, if you've got ideas of things, we could be asking real people that go to real attractions about how they use the website. You know, let us know. We'd love to hear feedback either. You know, send us a message on Twitter, reach out by email. There's links all in the show notes that will help you to make contact with us. But please just make contact and let us know. We've got amazing feedback from the advisory board and we will be talking about this piece of research with the advisory board before the survey goes out to the real people. But you've got a chance at the moment to be able to input to that. Paul Marden: So please do let us know what you think would be interesting. Oz Austwick: And whilst we're asking things of you, I've got a few more things that we want to ask. Paul Marden: Go on then. What do you want? What do you want? Oz Austwick: Well, all sorts of things. But for today, if you haven't filled in the survey, please do go along to rubbercheese.com. There's a link on the homepage through to the survey. There are different surveys for different parts of the world. Just click on the link, fill it in. You don't have to do the whole thing. Even if it's a partial response, it's still helpful. So please go along, give it a try. I'm led to believe, and I haven't tested this so I'm not going to state for effect, but if you half fill in the survey and then go away and come back on the same computer using the same browser, you'll go back in at the point that you'd got to so you can finish it. It depends on your cookie settings, but that's what is claimed. Oz Austwick: But even if it doesn't happen, you know, a half survey response is better than none. Paul Marden: We'd also like you to nag your mates as well. You know, I've been messaging people that have been responding and so many of the marketers that are filling in the survey are part of communities of other marketers. They're parts of communities, regional communities, Wales communities, or they're parts of sector specific. There's so many different groups and organisations that are working together. If you can, please raise the profile of the survey, stick a link in your WhatsApp group with all the people that you work with around you. We would really appreciate that. Obviously, the more people that submit, the better the data set. The more money we'll donate to Kids in Museums as a result of what we do. Paul Marden: And of course now everybody that submits will get their personalised sustainability report at the end as well, which is another great incentive to get involved. Oz Austwick: I guess the other thing is that if you filled in the survey before and you don't think you've got time to do the whole thing again from scratch, do let us know because we can quite happily provide you with all of the previous answers that you've given that are relevant to this year's survey and then you can just update or fill in the gaps. We're very happy to do that if it would be helpful. And still for those multi site organisations, if that's an easier way for you, for us to provide you with a spreadsheet that you can just put data into, we're very happy to do that too. Paul Marden: Absolutely. And the spreadsheet approach again lends itself very well. You don't have to answer everything. If you don't want to share information about the technology platforms you're using, that's fine. If you don't want to share information about your Google Analytics, that's fine. The more data that we get, even if it is partial data, it enriches what we've got and we get a better picture of the entire sector as a result of that. So, yeah, really keen to get input from more people. So that's our call to action. You've got one more thing you want touch on, don't you? You've got your book recommendation that you want to share with us. So tell us what your book is. Oz Austwick: Well, before I do, there are a couple of things I have to say. The first is that I realise that this is tangentially connected to the visitor attraction sector. That'll become clear, I'm sure, as soon as I reveal the book. The other is that I am an absolute massive history geek. So the book I would like to recommend that if you haven't read this is The Mary Rose by Margaret Rule, which is the story of the excavation and recovery of the Mary Rose itself. I don't know how old you are, dear listener, but I remember sitting in the hall of my school, my primary school up in Yorkshire, with a big TV in a box on a stand with this on the BBC Live and watching it be raised from the depths. And that's kind of stuck with me. Oz Austwick: So it's lovely to read the story of it from the person who kind of made it happen. And then when you've read the book, go down to Portsmouth and have a look because it is a visitor attraction. Paul Marden: Now, I guess it helps you with diving the 4D because you get the fuller picture of the whole story and then you go and do dive the 4D experience and you get to experience a little bit of what that excavation was actually like. And I bet you like any good book to a movie. The book tells the story in much more detail than the movie ever can. Oz Austwick: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Without a doubt. In fairness, it's going to be tricky to get a copy of this book to somebody because I don't think it's in print anymore. So it will be a secondhand copy. I've checked. You can get them. Abe books has a few. Paul Marden: Are you going to bankrupt me? Oz Austwick: No, no. It's not one of those secondhand books. Don't worry, it's probably cheaper than a new one. Now all the booksellers that are listening are going to put their prices up. But, yeah, comment on Twitter. Sorry, Twitter x. If you want the book and the first person will send it out to. Paul Marden: Yeah, so go find the show announcement, retweet it and say, I want Oz's book. And yep, we will find that and we will send a copy of the book. That will be a challenge for the team behind us that do all of the behind the scenes production to actually try and figure out how you order a secondhand book and get it delivered to somebody different. It's easy on Amazon. Not so easy on a secondhand book site, so that'll be interesting. Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, eBay Books is owned by Amazon, so, you know, there'll be a way. Paul Marden: I'm sure that's a wonderful book, is a wonderful location. If you haven't been before. It's an amazing attraction to go and visit. They've got a pretty good website as well. I think we've said it before. Oz Austwick: It's true. I've heard good things about their website. Paul Marden: Yeah, they seem happy. Great to talk to you again. As always, our little fireside chats are very enjoyable. We do tend to ramble on. We've got one more episode left of Season 5, but planning is underway for season six in the autumn, so nearly we're in the home straight now. Oz Austwick: Definitely do make sure you follow and you won't miss season six. Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm.  The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Help the entire sector:Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsFill in your data now (opens in new tab)

In this episode we preview the first episode of CXO Bytes. Join host Sanjay Podder as he talks to leaders in technology, sustainability, and AI in their pursuit of a sustainable future through green software. Joined by Dr. Ong Chen Hui, Assistant CEO of Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), the discussion focuses on Singapore's comprehensive approach to digital sustainability. Dr. Ong highlights IMDA's efforts to drive green software adoption across various sectors, emphasizing the importance of efficiency in data centers and the broader ICT ecosystem. Listen to the full episode via the links below.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden, CEO of Rubber Cheese.Fill in the Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.Competition ends on 17th July 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://aerstudios.co.uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesliweb/ Tools for Sustainability:https://ecograder.com/https://www.websitecarbon.com/ James Hobss is a people-focused technologist with over 15 years experience working in a range of senior software engineering roles with a particular focus on digital sustainability.He is Head of Technology at creative technology studio, aer studios, leading the technology team delivering outstanding work for clients including Dogs Trust, BBC, Historic Royal Palaces, and many others. Prior to joining aer studios, James was Head of Engineering at digital agency Great State, where he led a multi-award-winning software engineering team working with clients including the Royal Navy, Ministry of Defence, Honda Europe, the Scouts, and others.He also has many years experience building and running high-traffic, global e-commerce systems while working at Dyson, where he headed up the global digital technical team. Transcription:  Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. The last twelve months have been the warmest of any twelve month period since records began. And while over 70% of attractions have a sustainability policy, only 12% have actually tested the CO2 emissions of their website. In today's episode, we're joined by James Hobbs, Head of Technology at Air Studios and a member of the Umbraco Community Sustainability Team. James shares some easily actionable tips to reduce the emissions of your website. Paul Marden: James, welcome to skip the queue. Lovely to have you. James Hobbs: Thanks for having me. Paul Marden: So we always start with some icebreaker questions. So it would be unfair if I didn't inflict the same pain on you. James Hobbs: Go for it. Paul Marden: Let's start with a nice one, I think. What actor would you want to play you in a film about your life? James Hobbs: I mean, instinctively, I'd say someone like Jack Black. Just think he's really funny. A lot more funny than me. I'm not sure how much of a resemblance there is. He's got a much better beard than I do someone. Yeah. If there's gonna be an adaptation, I'd like it to be funny. Paul Marden: I like the idea of that one. I think I'd struggle with that one. I'd struggle to pick. Yeah, you know, it's gotta be an archetypal geek that would play me in the story of my life. I'm not sure who that would be. James Hobbs: Not John Cena or something like that. Paul Marden: So the next one, I'd say this one I found really hard, actually. What was your dream job when you were growing up? James Hobbs: Oh, okay. So I can answer that one easily because my parents still take the Mickey out of me for it. So when I was quite young, I told them very kind of certified. When I grow up, I want to be part time mechanic, part time librarian. Paul Marden: Well, that's an interesting job, shed. James Hobbs: Yeah, it's really random, I think, because I like, I love books. I love reading. Did back then, still do now. I also like dismantling things. I was never very good at putting them back together and then continuing to work. But, yeah, that was my aspiration when I was a kid. Paul Marden: I remember going to careers advisors and just some of the tosh, they would tell you. So everybody was told they could be an undertaker and you got your typical finance jobs. But I really. I desperately wanted to be a pilot. And I was told by the optician I couldn't because of eyesight, which was nonsense. But actually, I couldn't have done the job because I have a zero sense of direction. So later in life, when I trained for my private pilot's license, I got hopelessly lost a couple of times. The RAF are very helpful, though, when that happens. James Hobbs: They come up, fly alongside you and tell you to get out of their airspace. Paul Marden: They don't like people invading the Heathrow airspace. And I was dangerously close to it at the time. James Hobbs: Nice. Paul Marden: That's another story, though. But no, they sent me from my work experience to work in the local council finance department. Department, which I don't think could be more different than being a pilot if you actually tried. James Hobbs: I mean, it's not the most glamorous, I mean, it's important, but, you know, it's not quite Top Gun, is it? Paul Marden: No, no. Exactly. There you go. Tom Cruise. That can. He can play me in the film of my life. James. So we want to talk a little bit about digital sustainability. So I thought it'd be quite nice for you to tell the listeners a little bit about your background in digital and more specifically the stuff that you've been doing more recently in digital sustainability. James Hobbs: Okay, I'll give you the most succinct property history I can. So I guess my background 15, 16 years ago started off as a developer, not a very good one. And since then I've worked for a range of different sorts of organisations. So everything from a local council, national charity, global manufacturing company, and then two digital agencies. For the last ten years or so, I've been more in leadership positions, obviously have to stay close to the technology. And in more recent years, one of the big passions of mine, I suppose, or something I'm really interested is the sustainability side of digital, because I think it's interesting and that we can make a massive impact, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point. James Hobbs: But my current role is I'm Head of Technology at a creative technology studio called Air Studios, who also share my enthusiasm for sustainability. So I'm excited to do some work there. Paul Marden: Yeah. And my background stalking of you told me that air does some work in the attraction sector as well, doesn't it? So you work with a few attractions? James Hobbs: Yes, that's right. Yeah, we've got a few. Paul Marden: So there's some form here. James Hobbs: Yeah, I would say so. Paul Marden: Cool. One of the things that I know that you've been working with is so we're both. We've spent a lot of time in the Umbraco community, and Embraco is a content management system that a few attractions use not many, but some tend to be larger organisations that use Umbraco typically. But we've both spent time in the Umbraco community going to lots of events and talking to a lot of people. But one of the contributions you've made over the recent period is joining the Umbraco Sustainability Team. What is it, what does it do and who's involved in it? James Hobbs: Okay, so the Umbraco has this concept of community teams, which I think is a, Umbraco is a very unique organisation. Anyway, you know this because you're part of community as well, but they have a very strong connection and link with the community of developers. And not just developers, anyone who has anything to do with Umbraco and works with it. And the sustainability team is one of the several community teams that exist. The idea is that it brings together people from Umbraco's and people from the community who have a shared passion in something relevant to Umbraco to help steer it, share knowledge, and ultimately achieve a goal. And for the sustainability community team, the goal is to, I guess it's multifaceted. Firstly to make Umbraco as a product more sustainable, which is brilliant. James Hobbs: Secondly, to raise awareness of what organisations or individuals need to do to be able to improve the sustainability posture of whatever they're up to, which is brilliant as well. So there's a very umbraco focused side to it, but there's also a wider kind of awareness raising, educational side of it too, because this is a very, its a quite a new, say, it's a relatively new thing. I think digital sustainability as a concept completely hasn't really existed for that long, unfortunately. But now it does. Paul Marden: Yeah, exactly. And theres been some impact as well that the team has had on the product and the direction of the product isn't there. James Hobbs: Yeah. So and again, this is, there's several of us in this community team and I want to make it really clear that like a lot of work's gone on. It's not just me doing it. So we've managed to achieved a few things. So first of all, the Umbraco website, they launched a new website a little while ago. Its sustainability posture wasn't great. So we've worked with them, people that internally built that to improve it, and that's made a massive difference. Paul Marden: Excellent. James Hobbs: It's gone from being dirtier than a large majority of websites to being cleaner than most, which is great. We've pulled together some documentation for covering all sorts of areas from front end, back end development, content editing and so on, to educate people on how to build more sustainable websites. And some of the team members as well have built an Umbraco package, an open source package that you can install into Umbraco, and it will advise you in terms of the pages that you're making, whether they are good from a carbon footprint point of view or not. And we'll give you a rating, which is superb because it brings that whole thing in much closer to the end users who'll be making the pages. So that was a really nice piece of work. And on top of that, we do appear on things like this. Do webinars and talk at conferences and stuff. Paul Marden: Yeah, and I think Andy Evadale from Tangent is one of the members of the team. And honestly it was Andy who totally opened my eyes to this whole subject when I first started seeing him talk about it and giving some stats, and we'll talk a little more about those later on. There's definitely an impact that the team is having and it's really weird, isn't it? I mean, I don't want to geek out too much about Umbraco and the community, but there is something quite special about this commercial organisation that has open source software that gets given away for free, that collaborates with the community to build a product which is easy to use, pretty cool, really effective, but also sustainable as well. There's not many organisations that work in that way. James Hobbs: Yeah, it's unique and I love it. I think it's great. It just shows you it's possible to run a business and make money, but also have a really engaged community of passionate people and work together. I think it's brilliant. Paul Marden: Look, let's just take a step back from geeking out about Umbraco. Then I want to set the scene. Longtime listeners will know that Rubber Cheese run a visitor attraction website survey. We've done it for two years in a row. This year we simplified the survey down to make space for some more questions. And one of the key questions we've talked about is Sustainability. We are still just over the halfway point of the survey period, so there are still lots of responses coming in. But based on the data that we've got so far, we know that 72% of attractions in the current survey have got a sustainability policy, but only 12% of attractions have ever tested the CO2 emissions of their website. And we'll come to in a minute why we think the measurement and focusing on CO2 emissions in digital is important. Paul Marden: But whilst very few are actually testing their site, nearly half of all of the respondents so far have attempted something to reduce the CO2 emissions of their website. So there's clearly action going on, but it's not necessarily driving in a coherent direction because there's no clear benchmarking and target setting and retesting. So I think what I'd like to cover today is for us to understand that a little bit more, get under the skin of it a little bit, and then talk a little bit about how we can actually reduce the CO2 emissions, how can we actually make things different and why we might want to do it. Because it's more than just kind of the ethical, we all should be doing something. There were some real business benefits to it as well. My next question, without stating the bleeding obvious. Paul Marden: Okay, why do you think digital sustainability matters? I mean, the obvious answer is just because it does. But it's important, isn't it, as a contributor to global warming? James Hobbs: Yeah. So, I mean, there's lots of statistics knocking around, one of which I think it shows you the scale of the impact of the digital industry is. I think the total carbon footprint emissions of the digital industry is greater than global air traffic. And if you go and look on something like Flightradar or Skyscanner or whatever, and look at how many planes are in the air at any given moment in time, that's a pretty sobering statistic. There's lots of other ones as well, in terms of the amount of electricity that's being used, and water compared to even small countries like New Zealand. So we are generating a hell of a lot of carbon directly and indirectly, by doing all the things that we do. James Hobbs: And every time you hold up your phone and you load up Instagram or TikTok or download something, there's a massive disconnect cognitively, because it's just there and it just works and it doesn't feel like it's using up electricity and so on, but it is. There's a whole massive supply chain behind all of the lovely things we like to do on our devices that is hungry for electricity and generates pollution and that kind of thing. Paul Marden: Yeah. So my background was at British Airways and I was there for ten years. It really wasn't that hard to spot the fact that environmentally, that we have a challenging problem. Because when you stood on the end of Heathrow Runway, you can see what's coming out the back end of a 747 as it takes off. But I don't think I ever quite understood the impact of what I do now and how that's contributing more to CO2 emissions than what I was doing previously, which. Yeah, I just don't think there's an awareness of that more broadly. James Hobbs: No, yeah, I'd agree. And it's complicated. Paul Marden: In what way? James Hobbs: I guess it's complicated to quantify the carbon impact of the type of work that we do in the digital industry, because I guess there's what we're shipping to end users, which is one thing. But most modern websites and applications and stuff are built on a big tower of cloud services providers, and all of their equipment has to be manufactured which has a carbon impact. And rare earth metals need to be mined out of the grid. All of that stuff. There's a big supply chain backing all this stuff and we can influence some of that directly, but a large chunk of it we can't. So it makes choosing your suppliers quite important. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So if you're going down the road, if you accept the premise that this is a big contributor and making small gains on any of the stuff that is of interest to us and marketers who are owning websites attractions, I think for me, probably the first step is testing and trying to figure out where you are. Do you think that's a useful first step? Is that important as far as you're concerned, James? James Hobbs: I think it's important because with any sort of improvement, whether it's related to sustainability or not, I think quantifying where you are at the start and having a benchmark allows you to see whether you're going in the right direction or not. And improvement doesn't always go in one direction the whole time. There might be a two steps forward, one step back, depending on what you're doing. But I think without measuring where you are, and ideally regularly measuring your progress, it's hard to say what impact you've had and you might be going in the wrong direction and bumping up the wrong tree or whatever. So I think it's important. Paul Marden: Yeah, it's super important. And is it something that marketers themselves can do, or is this something that only a sustainability consultant can do, or is there somewhere in between? Is it the techy geeks that run the website that do this? Or is it a little bit of all of those things? James Hobbs: Well, that's a really good question. So I think this is still quite a new kind of industry. There are some tools out there that you can use to help you quantify the carbon impact of what you've got out there in the wild now. So the big one that most people talk about is websitecarbon.com, which is the website carbon calculator that was built by, I think a combination of an agency and some other organisations come up with an algorithm. It's obviously not going to be 100% accurate because every single website app, it's slightly different and so on. But as a consistent benchmark for where you are and a starting point for improvement, tools like that are really good. Ecograder is another one. Those offer non technical routes to using them. James Hobbs: So for the website carbon calculator, you just plunk a website address in hit go and it'll run off and tell you that's not very scalable. If you've got a 10,000 page website, or if you've got a large digital estate, there are also API level services that are provided that might make that easier to automate. But again, you then need someone who knows how to do that sort of thing, which raises the barrier to entry. I think what I would like to see is more and more vendors building carbon dashboards into their products and services so that the rest of us don't have to run around and build this stuff from scratch. Azure, for example, Microsoft's cloud platform, has a carbon dashboard that is scoped to your resources. That's really interesting and useful to see. James Hobbs: The stuff I mentioned about what we're doing with Umbraco and building a sustainability package, we're hoping to get that built into the core product. And again, the idea being that if you're a content editor or a marketer, you shouldn't have to know how to wire up APIs and do all this stuff, you should be able to see at a glance. Okay, well, that page I've just built actually is a little bit on the heavy side. Maybe I need to look at that. So I think the way to democratize it is to make it easier to do the right thing. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So these tools are giving you, they're giving you a grading? Yeah. So some of them are like a to f. I think it is for Website Carbon, Ecograder gives you a score out of 100. I think it is. Are there any advantages to one or the other? Or is it a good idea for people to use both of them and see the differences that the two different tools can give you? James Hobbs: I think it will come down to, well, for me anyway, I think using a tool in the first place is a step forward from what the vast majority of people are doing currently, which are not even thinking about it. So in many ways it doesnt really matter. I think it will depend on what people find easier to use. I think when people start to integrate this sort of sustainability measurements into their build pipelines, for example, release pipelines. That's where you will need to maybe think more carefully about the kind of data that you're interested in and what criteria you want to look at. Because, for example, at the moment, a lot of organisations who write software, hopefully their developers, will be writing some unit tests. And if the tests fail, then you don't deploy the website that should fail the build. James Hobbs: I think it would be good to move to a world where if your sustainability posture regresses and gets worse than similar things. There are other tools outside of those websites that we've been talking about, though. So there's an organisation called the Green Web Foundation, a nonprofit who do a lot of work in this space. And they've created a couple of tools. One's called CO2.js, which you can integrate directly into your website that can actually be a bit more accurate than the carbon stuff. And they've also built a tool called the Grid Intensity CLI. And without going into loads of horrible detail, what that is, essentially it knows when the electricity grid is at its most, what's the right word? At its most pollutant. When it's generating the most carbon. James Hobbs: So you can use that to figure out when to run background jobs or do lots of processing. You can do it when the grid is at its most renewable. So there's things like that as well. There's lots of options out there. You can go deep as you want. Paul Marden: Amazing. One thing that you just mentioned that I thought, oh, that's really interesting. I've never thought of that before, is the idea that you can drop a URL into Website Carbon or Ecograder and it will give you the score of that page. But actually, if you've got lots of pages on your website, you need to be testing across multiple pages. That should never occur to me before. James Hobbs: Yeah, because I think a lot of people plunk the homepage in and go, cool. It's a. I guess it's effort versus reward thing. No one's going, well, hopefully no one's going to spend time manually entering 10,000 website URL's into a tool like that. Not least because it would probably take the tool down. There are probably better ways of doing it than that. And also, homepages are typically quite different to the rest of a website. It serves a different purpose. So I think testing a representative portion of your digital services is probably the way to go. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. I've been wondering recently whether buyers should be thinking about this as something that's part of the requirements of a new website. So if you're going out to tender and buying a new website, oftentimes you and I will both see requests for proposal that have accessibility requirements in them. But I genuinely don't remember a time that I've ever seen an RFP say, “You must achieve grade c or above on website carbon across the majority of the pages on the site.” And I think when buyers start to do that you'll begin to see agencies doing more of this sort of stuff. I think baking it into contracts will make a big difference. James Hobbs: Yeah, yeah and it's that kind of selective pressure isn't it? Clients start requiring this stuff, then agencies will have to step up. And it's unfortunate that might well be the catalyst but actually I don't care what the catalyst is as long as we're going in the right direction. Its the main thing really, which is lessening our impact. Yeah absolutely. But yeah that whole supply chain thing is huge. That's one way we can make a big impact is by mandating certain things. And there's actually a certification, a green software engineering certification. It's offered for free that developers or technical architects can go through to educate them a bit on green software engineering techniques and things like that. James Hobbs: And that's the kind of thing that hopefully in the future companies who are putting RFPs out might say, “We want your engineering team to be aware of green computing techniques” and so on and be able to prove it. Paul Marden: Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised as well that it gets legislated for as well. So in the same way as you know, public sector bodies have got to meet certain accessibility requirements. I would not be surprised if we enter a world soon where there's a statutory obligation for these things to be done in a sustainable way as well. James Hobbs: Yeah. Paul Marden: So getting your act together now is a really good thing to do because there's going to be less work later on when you've got no choice but to do it. James Hobbs: Exactly. Get ahead of the game now. Paul Marden: So we've made the case, people have bought into it, they're going to go and do some testing and they realise that they've got a smelly, polluting, rich website. What can they do next? How can your average head of marketing, head of digital influence their website to get better? James Hobbs: Yeah. Okay, so this is where I think there's a really nice angle here. We did talk about this earlier on, but there is a fairly close link between the things that will make doing the things that will make your website, your digital services more sustainable and kind of KPI's and metrics that will probably make it more commercially successful as well, depending on what you're doing, with a bunch of caveats that I won't go into. So, for example, sustainable websites are typically lightweight, they're fast, they're optimised for getting the right things in front of the user as quickly as possible, which can include everything from content delivery networks to optimising images to a whole host of stuff. Doing all of those things will also typically positively impact your search engine optimisation, positively impact your conversion. James Hobbs: Because if you look at Google's guidance, Lighthouse guidance, the different things it looks at and so on, it's very clear that fast, relevant websites are what get prioritised and what Google's looking for. Fast, relevant websites that are served from locations close to the user are also likely to be sustainable. So there is a link there. And what that means is there's a built in business case for doing the sustainability stuff. James Hobbs: So if you've got a hard nosed suite of executives who couldn't care less about the planet, not that I'm saying that's what everyone's like, but, you know, the commercial world that we live in, it's a hell of a lot easier to sell this stuff in by saying, “You know what as well, like we can do an MVP or a pilot and we're confident that we might be able to improve conversion by 0.1%, 0.5%”, whatever it might be. It's also typically a good way to save money by being smarter about what you're computing and where and when and using some of those tools that I've talked about, you can save yourself potentially a bunch of money as a business, which again, is a commercial win. James Hobbs: So I think whilst the ethical side of it is really important, and, you know, none of us want to be boiling to death in 50 years time because we've ruined the planet. Making small changes in digital can have a massive impact because the amount of people that are using them. And I think it's easier to sell in because of the commercial. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm guessing there's stuff that you can do at key stages in the design and development of a site. So what are the things that people should be thinking about during the design of the site that could make it more sustainable? James Hobbs: So, okay, so that's a really good question. So this is a huge topic. So I can give you some examples of the kind of things you should be thinking about. So. And I guess we could divide them up into two sections. So when we're designing a website. There's how it looks and how the user experience work. There's also the technical design. As with anything, the further, the earlier you start thinking about this kind of stuff, the easier it is. Crowbarring in. It's a bit like accessibility, you know this, try and crowbar it in the last week of the project, it's not going to work. So from a design point of view, and some of this stuff is difficult to quantify its impact in detail, but things like not having massive 4k full bleed videos at the top of your webpage. James Hobbs: So being very careful and intelligent use of things like that, because they are large, they have to be transferred from wherever you're serving them from to the user. There's a big energy cost associated with that, not using loads and loads of external dependencies on your web pages. And that could be anything from fonts to JavaScript libraries to the vast myriad of tools that are being used. The more things you're throwing down the pipe to your end user, especially if your hosting infrastructure is not set up in a distributed way, the more energy intensive that thing is. You can even go as far as looking at the color choices that you're using. So certain darker themes are typically less energy intensive. Yeah, because of how OLED screens and modern screens work. Again, very hard to quantify. James Hobbs: And then we go down the rabbit hole of yeah, but where does the electricity that charges my phone come from? And you try and quantify all that stuff, it gets very head explodey. But there are things you can do in that sense. Some of them are easier to quantify than others. The weight of the page is a very easy thing to measure. If you keep that low, it will be easier to cache, it will load quicker for users, it will better for SEO, and faster pages tend to have better conversion. James Hobbs: And that works whether you're selling things from an e commerce point of view or you're trying to register interest, whatever it might be, from a technical angle, I think one of the most impactful things you can do, beyond making sure that your code is optimised and is running at the right times, at the right place, is simply to consider using a Content Delivery Network. And for your listeners who aren't familiar with a content delivery network, a CDN is something that all of us have interacted with at one point or another, probably without realising in the traditional way of serving or having a website, you've got some service somewhere, in a data centre somewhere. When someone types your website address in, it goes and fetches that information from the web server and back comes a web page in the simplest sense. James Hobbs: Now, if your website servers live in Amsterdam and your users on the west coast of America, that's a big old trip for that information to come back and forth. And it's got to go through lots of different hops, uses up lots of energy. A content delivery network is basically lots and lots of servers dotted all over the planet, in all of the major cities and things like that can keep a copy of your website. So that if someone from the west coast of America says, “Oh, I'm really interested in looking at this website,” types the address in, they get the copy from a server that might be 1020, 50 miles away from them, instead of several thousand across an ocean. James Hobbs: So it loads quicker for the user, which is great from a user experience, SEO, all that stuff I talked about, but it's also great from an energy point of view, because it's coming from somewhere nearby and it's not having to bounce around the planet. That's one thing that you could do that will make a massive and immediate impact commercially and from a sustainability point of view. Paul Marden: So you get those kind of performance improvement for the people all the way around the world accessing the site, but it's going to take load off of the server itself, so you might need less powerful servers running. One of the big issues that attraction websites have got is that it's such a cyclical market. The people that, you know,James Hobbs: Spiky.Paul Marden: Exactly when the Christmas meet Santa train is released at an attraction, or the traffic to the website is going to peak. If you can keep some of that traffic off of the web server by using that Content Delivery Network instead, you're going to be able to withstand those really peak times on the website without having to spend lots and lots of money on improving the resilience of the service. So it really is a win win win, isn't it? James Hobbs: I think so. And also it can help potentially avoid things like the dreaded queue where you log on to a website that's busy and it sticks you in a queue and you're 41,317th queue or whatever. Exactly like you say. If you can leverage this tech to take the load off your back end systems and I, you'll be delivering a better user experience. Paul Marden: One of the measures that I know a lot of the algorithms that are assessing CO2 emissions look at is the type of hosting that you use. So they talk about green hosting. What is green hosting? And is all green hosting the same? James Hobbs: No. So yeah, again, this is a big topic. So I guess hosting generally runs the spectrum all the way from kind of one boutique sort of providers who can set up VMS or private servers or whatever all the way through to the big goliaths of the Internet, the AWS and Azure and so on and everything in between. So green hosting is broadly hosting that is carbon neutral, powered by renewables, that sort of thing. So in theory shouldn't be pumping more pollutants into our atmosphere than it's saving. So if we look at the big cloud providers initially, so they've all made some commitments in terms of improving their sustainability posture. And this is really good because when one does it, the other one has to do it too. And obviously there's Google Cloud platform as well and they're doing similar sorts of things. James Hobbs: But it's almost this, I like the competitive angle of this because all it means is the sustainability posture of all of them will get better quicker. So it's good. So for example, I'll try and do this off the top of my head, you should check yourselves. But Azure and AWS and Google all have some pages that talk about their commitments and primarily they're focused on carbon neutrality and using renewable electricity. Aws have done a good job of that. So in certain AWS regions the year before last, they were completely 100% renewable powered, which is brilliant. Paul Marden: Really. James Hobbs: Yes. Not everywhere. Azure are going down a similar path and they've made the same commitment in terms of the year when they're going to hit renewable powered everything. They've also made commitments to water positivity. Enormous amounts of water are used during the operation of data centers and there are a lot of these data centres. So they've made commitments I think by 2035 or 2040 please double check to be net water positive, which is great. And the other thing that people don't think about, and this is I guess the supply chain thing I was talking about earlier, all those servers got rare metals in them. They've got all kinds of stuff in them thats been dug out of the ground, often in areas where there's a lot going on from a human point of view. James Hobbs: So Amazon, AWS, Google, et cetera, they're looking at that angle too. How can they keep servers in commission for longer so they don't need to be replaced as often? Where are they getting their materials from, et cetera, all that kind of stuff, because they're not just a computing company know they're invested in the hardware and getting this stuff out of the ground and manufacturing it and all the rest of it's a very big operation. So that's something we can't influence beyond pressuring them as consumers, but it is something that they're doing something about, which is great. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. And if we go back to that point I made earlier on, buyers are in control of this. If they are choosing to include that in their contracts to buy new web services, that it needs to be green by offsetting or green by using 100% renewable power, then that drives change, doesn't it? Procurement managers drive change through that kind of thing. James Hobbs: Yeah, absolutely. And just one final point on the greenhosting the Green Web foundation, who I mentioned earlier, the nonprofit who work in this space, they maintain a list of green web hosts. So hosts that are known to be green that you can use without having to worry too much. So it's worth looking at that as well. And it's a kind of impartial list. Paul Marden: Excellent. Do you think this is a story that attraction should be telling? So they're going to be, we're hoping that people are going to become energised by this and they're going to want to go on a digital sustainability journey. Do you think that is that something that they could be shouting about? James Hobbs: I think so, if done in the right way. Obviously, you've got to be careful of the sort of, we planted some trees and now everything's fine, because I don't think that's necessarily the case. But I think talking about it in the right way, which is we know we're not perfect, but we're doing something about it, and this is our plan, and being transparent about it, I think, is a good thing. I think it will also foster competition between different attractions, and everyone's a winner, really, because it will make everyone more sustainable. Paul Marden:  Yeah. James Hobbs: And yeah, I don't see why you shouldn't talk about it. I think its something thats important. And to your point earlier about consumers being able to influence some of this stuff, I really, truly hope that the generation of youngsters that are coming up now are going to be more hyper aware of this sort of thing, and they're going to care a lot more because it's likely to affect them more than it will us. So I would like to think that they will be selecting products, services, attractions, whatever it might be that can demonstrate that they're actually doing something to lessen the impact of their operations. James Hobbs: I've got two relatively young children, and I can already see them asking questions and being interested in this kind of stuff in a way that wouldn't have occurred to me when I was a kid, just didn't think about it. I cant change that. But what we can do is try and improve the world that were going to be leaving to the the youngs.Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So, one last question for you. Is there anything. Is there anything happening in this space that you think is really cool and interesting to think about? James Hobbs: That's a good question. I mean, like, I hope this isn't a non answer. I think the thing. The thing that is exciting me most is that more and more people are talking about this stuff. More and more people are asking questions about this stuff and I've done a lot of talks and webinars and things on this topic and the thing that really makes me feel positive and excited about it is that nearly all of them afterwards, people come up to you, they message you and say, “I just didn't realise.” The fact that we're able to raise awareness is brilliant because we can start to build up a bit of momentum. I think the thing that. I think I mentioned it earlier, products and services, building this sort of stuff into their platforms in terms of helping users use their services more efficiently, I think that's the area that I'm most excited about, because otherwise it's people kind of hacking stuff together. I think it should be a first class part of any solution, really is like, carbon impact of what I'm doing. That's what I'm probably most keen to see more of. Paul Marden: James, thank you. One last thing. We always ask our guests for a book recommendation and you've already said you're an avid reader, so no pressure, but I'm quite excited to hear about this one. James Hobbs: Well, there's two and I thought I'd just make the decision when you asked me the question about which one to recommend. So I'm going to go with my legitimately favourite book, which is the Player of Games by Iain M Banks. It's part of the culture series of novels and I'm a bit upset because Elon Musk has been talking about it. I feel like he's tarnished it slightly. A magnificent series of novels. I remember finishing the 10th one and sadly, the author died a while ago and I genuinely felt slightly bereft that there weren't going to be any more of them. It's a brilliant book. It's exciting. Yeah, it's exciting. It's so creative and inventive. It makes you think differently about things. It's definitely not one for children. James Hobbs: You know, there's a lot of violence and all kinds of other things in there. But it's a fascinating book. All of his books are fascinating. My favourite author. So if you're going to, if you think about getting into his books and specifically the culture novels, that's a great point to jump in at. It's accessible and it's absolutely brilliant. I love it. Paul Marden: That's quite the recommendation. So, listeners, if you want to get into this culture series of books, then when we post the show notice on X, get over there and retweet the message and say, “I want James's book.” And the first person to do that will get that sent to them. James, this has been brilliant. There's a couple of takeaways I want people to go and think about, one from me, which is go and test your site and then jump into the Rubber Cheese website survey. Paul Marden: Go to rubbercheese.com/survey, tell us all about your attractions website and one of those questions will be about have you tested the CO2 emissions of your site and have you done anything about it? The more we understand what the sector is doing, then the more we can understand how we can all help and improve things. Paul Marden: James, you had one idea of a place where people could go and find out more about this sort of stuff. James Hobbs: Yeah, I mean, there's some organisations that I mentioned. So the Green Web Foundation is one that's got lots of interesting material on there, both tools that they've made, but also they fund research in this space, which is really important. It should be treated like a specific discipline. I suppose they're doing some great stuff there. There's the Green Software foundation, which confusingly similar name, doing some good work in this space. There's also lots of interesting groups on discord forums that are out there. I guess my main message would be we're all learning more about this field. No one has all the answers, but there are organisations out there that you can come and speak to that can help you understand where you are currently. James Hobbs: And I definitely encourage you guys to fill in the surveys, Paul said, because the more information that we've got, you know, the better we can understand where things are. Paul Marden: James, this has been a lot of fun and really interesting. Thank you ever so much. Thank you for joining the podcast. James Hobbs: Thanks for having me on. Thanks a lot. Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm. The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Help the entire sector:Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsFill in your data now (opens in new tab)

Joining Chris Adams today is Mike Gifford, an accessibility and open web veteran, to look at the drivers adopting digital sustainability in the industry, learn from the field of accessibility and inclusive design how we can further sustainable software development. Mike tells us about the wins from the accessibility movement that we can learn from in this engaging episode.

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams explores the theme of Community Publishing and Greening Software, by talking to Branch Magazine's Hannah Smith and Marketa Benisek. They discuss community publishing and the lessons learned from producing Branch Magazine, which supports sustainable digital practices and includes diverse voices from the Green Software Foundation. The discussion covers the complexities of adopting digital sustainability and how Branch Magazine, through its innovative, carbon-aware design, has been a platform for expressing these nuanced themes in sustainability and how finding beauty in the imperfect might just be the answer to all your problems!

On the podcast today we have Nahuai Badiola. Nahuai is a freelance WordPress developer, theme, and plugin creator. He also writes WordPress code tutorials and enjoys sharing everything he learns about web sustainability in his blog, podcast, and at WordPress events. Nahuai's life took an unexpected turn one day when he attended a 10-minute lightning talk at a WordCamp. The content of that talk was web sustainability and it profoundly changed his perspective on how we should view our use of the internet. Nahuai has since been a vocal advocate for sustainability within the WordPress community. Today, Nahuai and I discuss the nuances of the environmental impact of web development with a particular focus on WordPress. We discuss ideas like reducing code in plugins, and highlight the Performance Team's efforts to make WordPress more green. If you're curious about sustainability within WordPress web development, and the community more broadly, this episode is for you.

On the podcast today we have Nahuai Badiola. Nahuai is a freelance WordPress developer, theme, and plugin creator. He also writes WordPress code tutorials and enjoys sharing everything he learns about web sustainability in his blog, podcast, and at WordPress events. Nahuai's life took an unexpected turn one day when he attended a 10-minute lightning talk at a WordCamp. The content of that talk was web sustainability and it profoundly changed his perspective on how we should view our use of the internet. Nahuai has since been a vocal advocate for sustainability within the WordPress community. Today, Nahuai and I discuss the nuances of the environmental impact of web development with a particular focus on WordPress. We discuss ideas like reducing code in plugins, and highlight the Performance Team's efforts to make WordPress more green. If you're curious about sustainability within WordPress web development, and the community more broadly, this episode is for you.

This time we were joined by one of the long-time trailblazers of digital Sustainability - Tom Greenwood, Founder of Wholegrain Digital and Author of “Sustainable Webdesign”. We spoke about digital Sustainability, and how Tom's Journey into it already began 2004. And we discussed the challenges of advocating for digital sustainability and where we are at the moment and what we actually can do as designers on various levels.  In the second half of the conversation we were diving deep into AI, its impacts and if AI can help us saving the world or helps destroying it. We were discussing if AI is creative and what the use of AI does to us as humans.  It was a very deep and inspirational conversation and if you want to learn more what you should ask yourself when using AI, tune in to this episode of the SUX Podcast.   Connect with our guest or us: Tom's Channels: Tom's agency Wholegrain Digital: https://www.wholegraindigital.com/  Tom's Newsletter “Oximoron”: https://tomgreenwood.substack.com/  Toms' “Humanitas et Machina”: https://hopefulepoch.substack.com/  Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomgreenwood/  Toms' Book “Sustainable Web Design”: https://abookapart.com/products/sustainable-web-design/  Sources from the episode: Book “Approaching the Natural” by Sid Garza-Hillman: https://abookapart.com/products/sustainable-web-design/  Blog-Article: “Will AI be good for the environment?”: https://www.wholegraindigital.com/blog/will-ai-be-good-for-the-environment/ Website Carbon Calculator: https://websitecarbon.com   Our Channels: Bavo's Linkedin  Thorsten's LinkedIn  Isabel's LinkedIn  SUX Slack Community  SUX LinkedIn  SUX Website Email us at podcast@sustainableuxnetwork.com to share your feedback or suggest future guests.

This week, Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain and Anne Currie for an engaging chat on the present and future of legislation around AI and Green Software. Our guests share their hot takes on various topics such as the usefulness of proxies in measurement. With backgrounds in climate and tech, and a future full of green energy, they share their insights into what we might expect, and hope for, from the future.

Asim Hussain is joined by guests Srini Rakhunathan and Navveen Balani, the technical leads on the Impact Framework. They delve into how this innovative tool effectively models, measures, simulates, and monitors the environmental impacts of software across various platforms. The conversation explores the framework's unique ability to handle diverse environments, from cloud systems to mobile devices, with an emphasis on the practicality and necessity of measuring software emissions accurately. Highlights include intriguing insights into integrating the Impact Framework with SCI Open Data and the future of green software development. This episode is packed with valuable information and thought-provoking discussions that offer a glimpse into the future of sustainable software.

In this episode, host Gene Tunny sits down with Simon Schillebeeckx, co-founder of Handprint, a nature tech startup. Handprint aims to help companies profitably and seamlessly integrate planet-positive actions into business activities. Simon shares examples of companies that have gone above and beyond regulatory requirements to contribute to the environment positively. Among other questions, Gene asks Simon about the scalability of Handprint's approach and the role of consumers in driving profit-maximizing businesses to make positive contributions. Please get in touch with us with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored. About this episode's guest, Dr Simon SchillebeeckxSimon is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Handprint Tech. Published author, former sustainability consultant, TEDx speaker. Strategic Management Professor at Singapore Management University (SMU), specialising in Digital Sustainability. He holds a PhD in Innovation Management from Imperial College London.What's covered in EP223[00:01:18] Regenerative economy and business activities.[00:04:33] The concept of Handprint.[00:11:28] Capturing value through sustainability.[00:16:02] A-B testing to determine how consumers respond to sustainability measure.[00:18:30] Linking ads to social impact.[00:23:06] Gamifying sustainability initiatives.[00:26:31] The potential for Handprint.[00:32:45] Plastic pollution and its impact.[00:36:03] Regenerative practices in agriculture.[00:41:28] Trust in carbon crediting.[00:48:49] Large-scale mangrove conservation and afforestation.TakeawaysAccording to Simon, companies are increasingly looking to go beyond just reducing their negative environmental impacts and instead create positive impacts through initiatives like planting trees or restoring coral reefs.Done right, these types of regenerative initiatives have the potential to improve business metrics like sales, click-through rates, and employee engagement.Handprint is working to make it easier for companies of all sizes to integrate positive impact actions into their business activities in a profitable wayHandprint offers a marketplace for companies to invest in credible positive impact projects, such as mangrove restoration and carbon sequestration, and provides tools for companies to visualize and capture value from their positive impact initiatives.Links relevant to the conversationHandprint Tech website:https://handprint.tech/Companies/organisations mentioned by Simon:https://www.sevencleanseas.com/https://plasticbank.com/https://oxcarbon.org/https://globalmangrove.org/Lumo Coffee (NB promo code for 20% discount on first order: EXPLORED20)https://lumocoffee.com/ Thanks to Obsidian Productions for mixing the episode and to the show's sponsor, Gene's consultancy business www.adepteconomics.com.au. Full transcripts are available a few days after the episode is first published at www.economicsexplored.com.

Most growers have reached the point in their year when it's time to look back on what they've accomplished, review the records, and start looking for ways to improve their operations in the new year ahead. Nutrien Ag Solutions can help connect growers to programs that pay farmers for their sustainable agriculture practices. But it's going to take carefully collected and curated data to back up your sustainability story. So Agrible is available to make data collection, management and insights easy to accomplish and understand. And in this episode, we're talking to Ryan Adams, Nutrien Ag Solutions Director of Digital Sustainability, to learn about the new features that are making this sustainability tool even more useful. Learn more or sign up at agrible.com.

In episode 127, Chris Butterworth stops by to shed light on the critical yet often overlooked topic of digital sustainability.Chris discusses the importance of education around digital sustainability and strategies to impact change and the carbon footprint of your company.He also addresses how to engage people in caring about their digital footprint and the environmental impact of LLMs and Generative AI. He shared his thoughts on the responsibility of large companies in reducing their digital footprint.(0:00) Intro(1:53) Defining Digital Sustainability(3:43) Education in Digital Sustainability(5:15) Regulations Around Digital Carbon Footprint(6:50) How to Fight for Change in the Digital Landscape(10:46) What Responsibility Do Large Companies Have in Improving Our Digital Footprint?(13:35) Who are the People at Organizations Launching Reduction Initiatives?(15:30) How to Implement Sustainability Changes at an Organization(17:47) How to Get People to Care About Their Digital Footprint(20:25) The Environmental Impact of LLMs and Generative AI(23:30) Don't Feel Guilty(25:54) Reducing Your Digital Footprint(27:11) Rapid Fire RankingsTop 3 of anything:MusicFamilyThe PlanetRank your best SEO marketing win:Redesigned a website to make it incredibly lightweight which while migrating domain and URLs boosted rankings.Rank your top 3 SEO tools:Screaming FrogWebmaster ToolsHemingwayRank your best SEO or trick or tactic:Focus on conversion over winning traffic.Rank what you love most about the SEO industry:It can be used to shorten user journeys.Rank your top 1-3 marketers:Tim FrickMark ButcherTom GreenwoodRank your best SEO learning resource:Your own experience.Rank your top cause or charity:Big Orange Heart

Hier könnt ihr die Studie direkt herunterladen: https://pathfinder-study.com/Eine Vorstellung der Pathfinder Studie. Vorgestellt von: Aurel Stenzel, Sine FoundationBenedikt Feja, TLGGNiklas Peulen, ExxetaPeter Borchers, pbo.vc & ESCPDas Thema „Nachhaltigkeit“ ist für deutsche Unternehmen schon längst kein Schlagwort mehr, sondern entwickelt sich schrittweise zu einem Leitprinzip: Nachhaltigkeitsmanagement beeinflusst ihre strategische Ausrichtung und ihren Marktwert maßgeblich. Jedes einzelne Unternehmen steht vor der Herausforderung, seine Rolle in diesem Kontext zu definieren und zu leben. Vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen und kommenden regulatorischen Anforderungen, insbesondere in Bezug auf die Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), haben wir uns mit diesem komplexen Thema intensiv auseinandergesetzt. Während Regulierungen im ESG-Bereich (Environmental, Social & Governance) rasant an Bedeutung gewinnen, kommen neue Fragen auf: Wie stehen deutsche Unternehmen in puncto Nachhaltigkeit wirklich da? Wie bereiten sie sich auf die CSRD vor – und was denken Führungskräfte darüber? Verstehen Unternehmen dieses Thema als Innovationsmotor?In unserer aktuellen ESG-Studie haben wir – TLGG, Exxeta, die Non-Profit-Organisation SINE Foudation sowie Peter Borchers von pbo.vc und der ESCP Business School – gemeinsam spannende Antworten darauf gefunden. Mehr als 150 Personen haben an einer quantitativen Befragung, durchgeführt vom Marktforschungsunternehmen Statista, teilgenommen. Die Befragten haben mehrheitlich C-Level-Positionen oder Führungspositionen mit Personalverantwortung inne. Dazu kommen ESG-Verantwortliche aus KMUs und Konzernen.Der Link zum wöchentlichen Newsletter rund um den Podcast:  https://bit.ly/newslettersustaindDiese Folge wird präsentiert von sustaind. Mehr Infos unter www.sustaind.de Imprint: www.sustaind.de

This Week in Green Software has Dr. Daniel Schien from the University of Bristol, UK, joining host Chris Adams to talk about old research, recent news, and future prospects all revolving around digital sustainability. This conversation touches on some of the work Daniel has done in the past (and plans to do in the future) as well as their thoughts and reckons on this and how it can be used to steer our efforts towards a sustainable future. Together, they cover topics such as streaming being the new flying, and some ways in which new research has changed their perspectives on some problems in green tech.

This episode is not in Spanish or Portuguese but it might have been

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Why this podcast? What to expect in Season 2? Take a 5 minutes walk-through with our Host Gaël Duez

Bæredygtig Business' vært Steffen Max Høgh har længe talt om, at bæredygtighed bliver det nye ”licence to operate” for verdens virksomheder, og noget tyder på, at den snebold allerede er begyndt at rulle blandt nogle af de danske produktionsvirksomheder. Det bekræfter dagens gæst Trine Plambech, Director of Digital Sustainability på Alexandra Instituttet. Alexandra Instituttet har udarbejdet rapporten ”Omstillingsanfører”, som har 10 danske produktionsvirksomheder som cases. De har alle kombineret de fordele, der ligger i digitalisering med at løse problemerne på bæredygtighedsagendaen. Med rapporten vil de sætte fokus på, at omstilling er lig med øget konkurrenceevne, og det fortæller Trine Plambech om i dagens episode. Udpluk fra rapporten: • At virksomhederne får stor fordel ved at bruge det digitale som løftestang til bæredygtighed • At det kræver dygtig ledelse, der involverer medarbejderne • At kravene til at være mere bæredygtige har spredt sig fra de store til de små virksomheder og at det har spredt sig som ringe i vandet og meget hurtigere end forventet • Og at det får virksomhederne til at rette fokus ud i værdikæden (samarbejdspartnere og deres ressourceforbrug – Scope 3) • At transformation er et lang, sejt træk i starten, men at man skal blive ved, fordi det bliver nemmere og snart også ”det nye normale” Nævnt i episoden: • Trine Plambech: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trineplambech/ • Alexandra Instituttet: https://alexandra.dk/ • GTS-institutter https://gts-net.dk/institutter/de-syv-gts-institutter/ • Omstillingsanfører: https://alexandra.dk/omstilling/ • Odico https://odico.dk/ • Wehlers: https://www.wehlers.com/ • Letbek: https://letbek.com/ • QueenFlowers: https://queenflowers.dk/da/ • Greentech: https://greentec.eu/da/ • Carmo: https://www.carmo.dk/ Tips, idéer eller ønsker? Skriv til mig på LinkedIn Du er velkommen til at skrive til mig på LinkedIn, hvis du har idéer til emner, jeg skal tage op i podcasten Bæredygtig Business. Find mig her: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steffenmax/ Ros og konstruktive forslag modtages også gerne. Og hvis du vil give Bæredygtig Business en god anmeldelse i din podcastapp, vil det være fantastisk.

In this episode of EnvironMental, we chat with Michelle Miller, the owner and creative director of Minty Made and founder of the Green Marketing Academy, about sustainability in marketing! In this episode we talk about fighting digital waste and the best ways to lower a business' digital carbon footprint! Here are the various places you can connect with Michelle: The Minty Made site: mintymade.com The Green Marketing Academy: greenmarketingacademy.com Michelle's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/greenmarketingmovement And here is where you can find our article: https://dandelionbranding.com/ep-minty-made-digital-carbon-footprint

In this episode of Environment Variables, we cover the State of Green Software Report with the Green Software Foundation's very own lead researcher Tamara Kneese. She and host Chris Adams delve into the insights from the report including key topics such as the carbon footprint of crypto mining, regulations for generative AI, and the role of consulting firms in shaping emerging technologies. They also discuss how the results highlighted the impact of the tech industry, AI sustainability, and the need for responsible innovation. To find out just how interesting the results of the survey have been and everything in between tune in now!

Au programme Alors que le monde continue de numériser et de réduire les fractures numériques, il y a une expansion massive de l'adoption des technologies numériques et des infrastructures associées. Comment veiller à ce que cela n'entraîne pas une augmentation exponentielle de la consommation d'énergie et des déchets électroniques, ni aucun impact environnemental négatif dans les chaînes d'approvisionnement des technologies numériques ? Aujourd'hui, la durabilité est source de tous les enjeux. Comment répondre à nos besoins actuels sans compromettre les générations futures ? Partout dans le monde, nous sommes confrontés à des défis environnementaux, économiques et sociétaux qui nous poussent à repenser nos modèles de développement. Souvent, les entreprises font passer la croissance avant la durabilité. Comment allier les deux ? Lors de cette conférence, suivie de questions/réponses, nous allons explorer les enjeux, défis et solutions pour les entreprises. Intervenants ► Lara-May Drole - Sustainability Manager - Mobilize Financial Service  Lara a passé plus de 10 ans dans le secteur des services financiers. Elle s'est orientée vers le secteur du capital-risque en aidant à lever des fonds et en soutenant des start-ups en Asie. De retour en Europe, cette expérience lui a permis de comprendre l'importance des pratiques durables dans les entreprises. Actuellement, Lara est chargée de diriger le déploiement et la mise en œuvre de la stratégie de durabilité de Moblize Financial Services, la financière de Renault-Nissan-Mitshubishi pour construire une mobilité durable". ► Alexander Lohnherr - Président MEIKO France  Alexander Lohnherr est le Président de Meiko France. Il est également Président de la Commission RSE & Environnement du Syneg et au Comex du GECO Foodservice.  Son choix de s'engager avec Meiko France résulte d'un alignement de ses valeurs avec l'impératif de durabilité des produits, de consommation moindre des ressources et de la nécessité d'accélérer le changement - notamment autour des nouveaux usages, portés entre autres par les lois AGEC et Egalim.

Embedding ESG considerations by design is an imperative - and this must be from the network up! In this special we explore the vectors of ESG change, especially around Sustainability, from opportunities to challenges, notably the intention-action gap regards awareness and actualisation, alongside complexity, and lack of consistency and comparability in measurement. To explore exactly this, I am delighted to be joined by Sarwar Khan, Global Head of Digital Sustainability at BT Group who was recently placed 25th in the Corporate Knights Global 100 list of the world's most sustainable companies 2023. In particular, we focus on the launch of the Carbon Network Dashboard and the Digital Carbon Calculator to help organizations accelerate their net zero goals by measuring and reducing their Scope3 ICT emissions. Milestone moments indeed! Alongside this we explore the power of the ecosystem in affecting change, integrative business and sustainability strategy development, inclusive leadership and skills implications especially for CIO's, plus skills advice too! And beyond this, as always :) we talk action on all things Data and Tech For Good including the Digital Boost Mentorship program for UK SMEs.And we would love your thoughts on the show too - thanks for listening! Sally, Sarwar and the #TTT Team And please join us on Twitter to continue the conversation! @techradiotttToday's guest Sarwar on LinkedIn:http://www.linkedin.com/in/khansarwarAnd our host Prof. Sally Eaves on Twitter @sallyeavesAnd LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-eaves

In this episode, we went across the world for Digital Cleanup Day. Our first guest, Ingrid Nielsen is based in Tallinn, Estonia and she has been working with Let's Do It World NGO for the last years in different capacities, as the head of Global marketing and communication, running initiatives regarding digital waste and other projects. “Let's do it world” is the mother NGO of both World Cleanup Day - 50 millions participants worldwide and counting- and its digital offspring which is the Digital Cleanup day. Our second guest, Oliver Vergeynst is based in Brussels, Belgium and he is the Director of the Belgian Institute for Sustainable IT since 2020. Together with the French and the Swiss institutes, they spearhead a lot of the research on Digital Sustainability while grouping both academics and professionals. We dive deep into the thought process behind digital cleanup day, how to get buy-in for digital cleanup, how best to do digital cleanup, and who are the targets of this ambitious project. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

In this episode, Gaël Duez stayed home in France to discuss gender equity in IT and building sustainability teams in large companies. His guests Lucille Vannier is one of the strongest voices in the French IT sector for gender equality. She is also the Strategy Deputy Director of the Sustainable IT Institute, which is the academic body spearheading most of the research in France on Digital Sustainability. She provides serious advice for anybody who wants to follow her lead in advocating for a sustainable and equitable future in the IT space, with lots of resources to check out too!

In this episode, Gaël Duez went to Argentina (or did he?) to discuss digital agencies. Guests Vineeta Greenwood and Gavin Shinfield share a passion for communicating sustainability in ways that their clients can connect to. Veterans of the B-Corp movement, they also prize collaboration and honesty, two keys to their success, and indeed our collective success in reaching our sustainability goals. Gaël invites them to play a short game that leads to long and meaningful answers … stay tuned

Podcastarama : Avis des auditeurs :⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Avis de la presse :⭐⭐⭐⭐     Il est allé au bout de ses convictions et de ses envies profondes et a fait sa transition au prix de quelques sacrifices totalement assumés !I    Il était CTO du groupe SeLoger, une expérience qui l'a marqué pour plusieurs raisons : déjà parce que c'était sa première expérience dans le monde du Web GP/start up/scale up et parce qu'il s'agissait d'une mission de CTO par intérim dans laquelle il a, malgré tout, pu avoir les coudées franches sur le lancement de plusieurs projets à impact ; amélioration du monitoring et gestion des procédures d'incidents, le projet move to cloud.    Alors qu'il est sur le point de quitter SeLoger, on lui propose un poste qu'il ne peut pas refuser. Il devient alors CTO du groupe Aviv, maison mère du groupe de SeLoger et d'autres marques européennes (Meilleurs Agents, CarBoat Media…). Son rôle est complètement différent : il doit analyser, donner son avis sur des dossiers d'acquisition et de fusion puis construire la stratégie d'intégration de ces marques pour identifier les projets qui peuvent être mutualisés. Il doit homogénéiser à l'échelle du groupe certains choix techniques et stratégiques.    Durant l'épisode, Gaël dresse le post mortem de cette dernière expérience. Aussi riche et intéressante qu'elle ait pu être. A postériori, il se dit qu'avec son pouvoir de décision de l'époque, il aurait pu avoir un impact nettement plus fort sur la stratégie numérique / impacts numériques sur l'environnement. Il aurait pu “conscientiser plus”, former via des ateliers à la fresque du numérique et identifier des relais en interne pour pousser les bonnes décisions.    Aujourd'hui Gaël accompagne les CTO et DSI qui souhaitent avoir de vraies actions à impact. De nos jours, le réflexe premier est de vouloir optimiser les infrastructures et la consommation électrique des serveurs. Mais ce n'est que la partie émergée de l'iceberg et Gaël nous donne quelques pistes pour mieux accompagner cette transition

In this episode, we went to Stockhölm to meet Sören Enholm, TCO Certified CEO

In this episode, we went to Chicago to meet a legend: Tim Frick

In this episode, we took a virtual Eurostar between Paris and London and met Anne Faubry, a Board Member of Ethical Designers ⚖️, and Tom Jarrett, a seasoned designer involved in the ClimateActionTech community where he designed its Branch online magazine

In our April's episode, we went to Berlin and meet Chris Adams, an "environmentally focussed tech generalist" as he likes to describe himself. From the early days of Rail Europe to the Green Web Foundation of which he is the executive director, Chris has always been passionate about environmental topics. In the Digital Sustainability field, Chris is such an old-timer that we decided to split our interview in two parts! In this second part, we discussed Digital Sustainability in general, past trends as well as expected developments. Chris also shared with us a mountain of references and people to follow in order to learn more about how to green the Web and beyond.

In our May's episode, we went to Berlin and meet Chris Adams, an "environmentally focussed tech generalist" as he likes to describe himself. From the early days of Rail Europe to the Green Web Foundation of which he is the executive director, Chris has always been passionate about environmental topics. In the Digital Sustainability field, Chris is such an old-timer that we decided to split our interview in two parts! In this first part, after taking the time to know Chris a bit better and how he burnt 20M$ in VC, we discussed at length about Green Hosting and Cloud Sustainability. And we deep dived in a step by step approach to green ops greatly helped by the questions coming from the Tech community following Green I/O. A warm thank you to them.

Podcast Episode Stop sending thank you emails they are adding to climate change by 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year. Part of our Digital Sustainability series

In this episode, we went to Paris and met Elisabeth Mouchy. In 2013, Elisabeth co-founded Delighted, the Spotify for art in San Francisco. Now, she is now Product Director at Meetic, the multi-awarded dating service. She is super open to provide feedback and insights on Digital Sustainability, a topic she has helped ramp-up at Meetic. We will see how to make sustainable the move toward greener product management. And the way Meetic has tackled painpoints ranging from "Where do I start" to "How to avoid the end-of-the-world versus end-of-the-month dilemna?". This episode has benefited from the support of a dozen of digital product experts across Europe. A warm thank you to them.

For the second episode of Green I/O, I met Sandra Sydow. She is a natural-born European: borned French, having studied in Sweden, worked in Germany where she married and now living in the UK for almost 10 years. Sandra has an impeccable track record at PHD as a Managing Partner where she thrived making complicated things easy to understand in digital marketing and working for global brands like Airbus, HP or Expedia. 2 years ago, she decided to dedicate her communication and pedagogical skills to fight climate change. She co-founded the climate pitch and became a Board member at the Digital Collage. In this  episode, we did not deep dive into a specific area like Green Hosting or Green AI but we focused on the most important asset in any Digital Tech company: humans! And the challenges we face when it comes to raising awareness about the increasing ecological footprint of our digital world. And transform it into concrete actions.

Tom Fox is joined by Jed Yueh, founder and CEO of Delphix. They discuss his newest passion project with SustainableIT.org and their mission to advance global sustainability through technology and leadership.  The Work of SustainableIT.org  Many people believe that sustainability is somebody else's problem to solve, but Jed makes it clear that we cannot keep thinking that way if we want to make a difference. At SustainableIT.org, they collaborate with esteemed technology leaders to drive sustainability forward across the world's largest organizations.  The Link Between Technology and ESG  Jed tells Tom that companies must “take a hard look at how you govern technology programs so that they don't have adverse impacts on society and the environment.” Most companies view ESG as something in-demand, and so they independently chart the course they will take on ESG initiatives. At SustainableIT.org, they create and identify the best programs that can actually digitize the way a business functions while decreasing its carbon footprint.  Making an Impact Facilitating change is not about one technology company being pro-environment. Jed names a number of SustainableIT.org's board members, explaining how many of these great technologists work for some of the world's biggest companies. “That's how we can have the biggest impact,” he says.  RESOURCES  Tom Fox's email Jedidiah Yueh | LinkedIn | Twitter | SustainableIT.org

Every company in the world will face pressures to understand their carbon footprint and decarbonize what they do. Adrian Cockroft, VP of Sustainability Architecture at Amazon Web Services, joins us to discuss more on their sustainability journey to the 2040 Climate Pledge. Listen to this podcast to hear the challenges, the benefits and the opportunities for companies that embrace the commitment to sustainability.

In this episode, we invite Tom Greenwood to talk about sustainable web design and his company Wholegrain Digital. Tom tells us about: - His background and how he became aware of the environmental footprint of technologies. - What is Wholegrain Digital about - The Website Carbon tool and the Sustainable Web Design website - The update with new data from Andrae and how they use it - Differences of approach between countries for impact calculation, and the topic of the Life Cycle Assessment - What it involved in being a Bcorp - How to convince customers to embrace sustainability - The trend in digital sustainability - His book Sustainable Web Design Ressources from Tom's work and involvement: * The WholeGrain Digital company website: https://www.wholegraindigital.com/ * The Sustainable Web Design website created with Tim Frick and MightyBytes: https://sustainablewebdesign.org/ * The Website Carbon Calculator: https://www.websitecarbon.com/ * The Sustainable Web Design book: https://abookapart.com/products/sustainable-web-design/ Other references mentioned in the podcast: * Victor Papanek, The green imperative : natural design for the real world: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/3125924 * Andrae and Edler report - On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology (2015): https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/6/1/117#abstract * Hypotheses for Primary Energy Use, Electricity Use and CΟ2 Emissions of Global Computing and Its Shares of the Total Between 2020 and 2030 : https://sciprofiles.com/publication/view/cec6690a8c69e66b2d1798af65611f08

In this episode, Danny talks to UX Designer Sam Selbie about finding simple ways to make your business website more sustainable. We look at ways of reducing your website's carbon footprint through some small changes, such as image sizes and hosting, as well as exploring how a sustainable website can also benefit your customers and their experience of your brand online! Find out how you can start being more sustainable today.

In this episode, we discuss the connection between sustainability, digitalisation, and the maritime industry. What unique challenges is the industry facing when it comes to sustainability and digitalisation? How does the industry implement changes necessary for long term sustainability, profitability, and highly functional digital solutions? How does maritime safety fit into this equation? What are some of the new solutions and tools within the industry? Erle Kristin Wagle has gathered insights of the responsibilities related to performance monitoring and sustainability from a front row seat. She recently joined one of the leading global digital solution providers to further develop the digital oceans business. Stay tuned for some truly insightful discussions! 

Natalie has been working in Digital Sustainability for a few years at ThoughtWorks, and recently joined Microsoft to work on Sustainability Product Innovation. In this podcast we learn about her career path in Product Development and Sustainability, and she talks about different strategies for Digital Sustainability. Natalie has worked with teams moving to the Cloud. She talks about how the Cloud can help reduce the environmental impact of IT but customers need to be able to measure and track their digital footprint too. As a Product Manager, she shares examples for how to design and measure products for Sustainability, and not only rely on offsetting emissions. She talks about how IT solutions can help companies become greener across many industries, but we also need to balance the growing environmental footprint of IT particularly with AI/ML and blockchain. Finally, she talks about her new role at Microsoft. You can follow her at https://twitter.com/nataliehollier or https://www.nataliehollier.com/ She follows the community Climate Action Tech: https://climateaction.tech/ Her talk in May : https://www.womenincleantechsustainability.org/wcs-talks/part-3/ Her book list: - Designing for Sustainability - Tim Frick -https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-for-sustainability/9781491935767/ - Cradle to Cradle - William McDonough & Michael Braungart - http://www.cradletocradle.com/ - Green Giants - E. Freya Williams - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23875817-green-giants - Drawdown - https://www.drawdown.org/the-book - Tools and Weapons - Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne - https://news.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/tools-and-weapons/ - How to avoid a climate disaster - Bill Gates -https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-new-climate-book-is-finally-here - World Wild Waste - Gerry McGovern - https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/

Technology is a double-edged sword- capable both of doing and undoing damage to environmental quality. In this episode, I speak to Michael J. Oghia (External Relations Coordinator, SDIA - Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance ) on Digital Sustainability and the emerging relationship between the Internet and the environment. Listen, subscribe and help share the word by leaving a 5-star review: https://anchor.fm/pointers-in-10 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pointers-in-10/message