By Janus Boye
“Making sustainable digital services is not a tool or code problem - it requires us to human better”
With this thought-provoking quote, Hannah Smith set the stage in her highly rated talk at the HE Connect 22 conference in Manchester.
Hannah is the Operations and Training Manager for the Green Web Foundation, a non-profit with a clear mission: to make the internet fossil free by 2030. Her role is to ensure operations within the organisation are running smoothly, especially as they grow beyond start-up phase. Previously she was a freelance WordPress developer and speaker.
She’s based in Porlock, a coastal village in Somerset, England and also our expert of the month.
Getting into sustainable web
When Hannah was studying computer science at the University of Bristol, she was involved in a local people & planet student group, but as she said in our conversation, she didn’t connect technology & environmentalism in her student years.
After learning procedural programming in C, object oriented programming in Java and much more, she graduated in 2004 and did some various digital media work for a small local company.
In 2007, she then started at the Environment Agency, which is also based in Bristol. As project support officer, later project manager, IT portfolio manager and finally improvement and assurance manager, she both learned quite a bit, but also started connecting IT and the environment. She shaped the requirements for IT investment work and changed the way they and their departments handled project/change spend.
Following 6 years at the Environment Agency, she took the leap and became a freelance WordPress developer in late 2014.
A few years into this she wanted to bring sustainability into her day job and as a WordPress developer she was putting on a 2019 WordCamp Bristol and really wanted the conference to be sustainable. She still hadn’t fully connected WordPress and sustainability, but rather thought about it as a conference that was conscious about the environmental impact. At the conference, there was a session titled a A study in Green, held by Wholegrain Digital, a London-based agency with a mission to help accelerating the shift to an Internet that’s good for people and planet. This really made the connection clear to Hannah. As she said in our conversation:
“It was like a light bulb flicked on in my head. I suddenly realised that digital has physical, real world impacts but I just hadn’t been acknowledging them until that point”.
Shortly later, she went to WordCamp Berlin and they had a similar talk on how websites can be polluting the planet. Since then it has snowballed and Hannah has been keen to do more in the tech sector with environmentally friendly web.
Becoming a Sustainable Digital Tech Trainer
In 2020, she then founded Green Tech South West to bring together an emerging community of green-minded people to showcase and discuss diverse approaches to using tech to tackle climate change.
One year later, in 2021, Hannah became a fellow on the new Green Web Foundation fellowship program exploring how to advance climate justice among internet practitioners. Her research and outputs was all open sourced and targeted to support those who wish to use WordPress to create sustainable digital services. Hannah explored whether Doughnut Economics be used as a holistic way of exploring the digital tech sector’s impact on global sustainability.
Hannah on stage at the HE Connect 22 conference in Manchester
Earlier this year, in March, she then moved to join the Green Web Foundation as a Training and Operations manager. Her role is now to improve their tools, including the Green Web Check, their hosting directory and also to develop a training offering.
To quote Hannah:
“The best about working for the Green Web Foundation is that we’re a non-profit. Our drive is to work with a diverse group of organisations to create a positive transition to a more sustainable digital tech sector."
When she joined our higher education in Manchester in September, she gave a highly rated presentation with the below eye-opening slide on building a sustainable internet.
Taking action towards environmentally sustainable digital leadership
Since our member call with James Cannings on building websites for environmental sustainability in August 2021, we’ve been focused more on sustainability and according to Hannah, customers also increasingly care. It’s not just a novelty to think about the green web, but in the UK, Hannah is seeing large and complex organisations integrating sustainability into their procurement for digital services. She specifically pointed to these two examples:
Defra, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has written a guide on the topic: Sustainability in information and communication technology (ICT): a Defra guide
NHS, the UK national health service has it as a part of their digital architecture: Deliver sustainable services
As she said:
My view is that if government is on to this, it must be hitting mainstream. These organisations tend to be very slow to adapt
Hannah is also seeing an upcoming change in browsers, so that similar to expired certificates, they will tell you about carbon emissions of the websites you are visiting.
This could be similar to Google Lighthouse, which has raised both awareness and the importance of accessibility and performance, and this will give visibility to really bad websites.
In addition, Hannah predicts a decline in the real-time web. Do we really need immediate and constantly updated real-time figures? Carbon-aware software is coming out that will delay processing, e.g. of analytics data, until there’s more renewable energy on the grid, and also do it less often than today.
Learn more about Hannah Smith
Hannah was a speaker at our inaugural HE Connect 22 conference in Manchester, where she gave a highly rated talk on Sustainable digital services - how can you respond? (PDF download).
Interested in meeting Hannah? Join our upcoming member call on 6 December or make it to Aarhus in June for the UX Connect 23 conference.
Finally, you can naturally also connect with Hannah on LinkedIn.