Open-source content management system (CMS) provider, Umbraco, has announced the formation of a community-led task force to discover ways to reduce the carbon footprint of websites and digital experiences that are developed on the Umbraco platform. The Sustainability Team members will work together with Umbraco HQ to devise and share the latest carbon-conscious practices with Umbraco developers, digital experience designers, business decision makers, and clients.

Since 2005, more than a million websites and digital experiences have been built on the Umbraco platform. It is among the top three CMS platforms used by UK public sector organisations, and the primary CMS used by small to medium membership organisations, such as the British Medical Association and the American College of Surgeons.

Umbraco Product Owner, Lasse Fredslund, who is heading up the Sustainability Team explained, “Umbraco has a highly engaged open-source community, with more than a quarter of a million developers contributing software updates and extensions, while we maintain the core CMS. As the largest open-source .Net CMS in the world, Umbraco has both a responsibility to seek ways to reduce our impact on the environment, and an opportunity to work with our digital agency partners and developer community to make a much bigger difference collectively.”

Umbraco recently published its inaugural Impact Report, which details the measures it is taking to conserve resources, including migrating to Microsoft .Net Core to make the CMS more efficient and reduce energy consumption.

The Sustainability Team contains a blend of people with development and business management skills, to drive technical and operational changes within organisations that help reduce the environmental impact of their digital services. “Every member of the team has solid technical experience in developing professional websites using Umbraco, or has the management expertise to guide clients’ sustainable business choices,” says Lasse Fredslund.

The Umbraco Sustainability Team members include:

• James Hobbs, Head of Engineering, at Umbraco Platinum Partner, Great State.
• Rick Butterfield, Development Team Lead, and Amy Czuba, Account Director, at Umbraco Platinum Partner, Nexer Digital.
• Jeffrey Schoemaker, CEO and co-founder, of Perplex Digital
• Andy Eva-Dale, Technical Director at Umbraco Platinum Partner, Tangent,
• Thomas Morris, Tech Lead, and Neil Clark, Service Design Lead, at TPX Impact. Neil is also a member of the BIMA Sustainability Council.
• Kirstie Buchanan, Growth and Partnerships Director at Umbraco Platinum Partner and Cloud Powerhouse, CTI Digital, which also has Green Foundation accreditation.
• Umbraco UK and Ireland, Partner Manager, Frederik Klerens, has taken on the role of Sustainability Board Steward and will liaise with members and relevant experts at Umbraco HQ.

“We want to foster a culture of digital sustainability with our partners,” says Lasse Fredslund. “We know that even small improvements in our CMS, which conserve energy and reduce emissions, contribute to much larger benefits when amplified across hundreds of thousands of digital projects worldwide.”