About this Wiki
Welcome! This wiki serves as knowledge hub for anyone seeking to create sustainable digital products.
Table of contents
Getting started
The easiest way to get started is to attend one of our local events. If reading is more your thing, we’d recommend to start with the Principles and Definitions – both of those pages provide a great foundation to understanding what makes a sustainable digital product.
Purpose
Finding information which aligns with our values and goals is becoming increasingly difficult. New content emerges daily, especially on the topic of sustainability. We created this Wiki as a curated, opinionated place to collect information on the research, concepts and knowledge around sustainable digital products
What it’s not
This wiki is not a complete database of all information on sustainable software and related fields like Green IT, Sustainable IT, and others (read our definitions page for more information on why). It’s not a neutral catalogue of information with no filtering or judgement.
We believe the most value lies in the curation of knowledge, tools, methods and concepts by an independent organization with a clear set of principles and values.
One of our core values is transparency, therefore it’s important to communicate this openly and clearly with readers. We apply the same to our publications, events, policy positions and advocacy. You can subscribe to them here (link needed).
Guiding Questions
The information in this wiki is curated & collected around a certain set of guiding questions:
- How can the principle of sustainable development be applied to the production & operation of digital products?
- What does software look like which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs?
- Which indirect environmental & social impacts, through its supply chain of hardware, infrastructure and energy-use, are digital products responsible for? How do we reduce them?
- What are the responsibilities of the actors in the process of producing digital products and the supply chain of infrastructure providers and hardware manufacturers?
Governance
Everyone is welcome to contribute this wiki. In fact, we encourage you to make edits, comments and add information via pull requests on our repository (link needed).
Our aim is to be inclusive: If you are not familiar with Git version control, you can email your edits to: [email protected], with a link to the page and edits in a format that allows us to see your changes.
The Wiki itself is governed by Leitmotiv, a not-for-profit, independent think-tank. It’s part of our vision for a sustainable digital future. The content is governed by a board of editors which review and edit all submissions & changes to the wiki to ensure they are not in conflict with our values & principles. However, we are not perfect, so if you feel there is content that is not in line with those values, do let us know.
The Name
The name S12Y is inspired by A11y (accessibility) and means ’s’, 12 characters (ustainabilit) and ‘y’. The credit for the idea goes to Mims Wright.
License
All the work of this Wiki (unless when referring or including the work of others, such as visuals, academic papers, data or tools) is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0.
This work is licensed under
CC BY-SA 4.0
Financing
The initial launch of this Wiki was financially supported by German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action in a project managed by the German Environmental Protection Agency.
The ongoing maintenance is financed by Leitmotiv.
Financial contributions & donations to support the Wiki are very welcome on Open Collective.
Hosting is provided as a donation by a regional IT company, HKN located in Krefeld, Germany. The underlying infrastructure is operated by a regional IT infrastructure company from Hamburg, Germany - ScaleUp Technologies.