Developing out in the open (original) (raw)

From the word go, users and readers were directly involved in the testing and development of the new version of theguardian.com that kicked off in 2014. The digital development team received thousands of comments and suggestions while work on the ‘beta’ version of the site was in progress, via our own blogs and sites as well the Nieman Labs site.

The roll out started in the US and Australia and was eventually launched in the UK early in 2015. The team collected more than 130,000 pieces of feedback in the first few days after it went live, via a blog and social media channels. The website is a work in progress and it continues to be developed ‘in the open’, with part of the site publicly available on the GitHub site.

This thirst for feedback and collaboration with users applies equally to other digital products such as apps and iPad editions. But it’s not all take – the digital teams share their knowledge and source coding with industry peers and the global tech community, via the likes of the Guardian’s Next Gen Blog and GitHub and as well as the developer site, which contains information on the department, projects and information about advertised job opportunities in GNM.

Diversity

A lack of diversity in the media and technology companies is acknowledged as being a major barrier to growth and innovation. In 2014, members of Guardian News & Media’s (GNM) digital team took part in a survey on diversity. The findings showed that 18% of the digital team are women, which is higher than many respondents estimated. Just 12% of technical roles are filled by women but 37% of senior management are female. Overall, when compared to other media and technology companies, we are near the bottom of the list when it comes to have a diverse workforce in our digital teams.

In November 2014, the Guardian hosted a panel discussion on the topic of diversity. The aim was to build understanding and generate debate about the value of diversity in the media sector. The agenda included recruitment, editorial content, commercial viability, and digital development. The idea was to encourage the audience (Guardian staff) to think about why diversity matters and how it relates to their work. The digital team supported and promoted the event and were instrumental in securing one of the panel members, Erika Owens, who is program manager at Knight-Mozilla OpenNews. Her organization runs fellowships that bring digital experts together with journalists in their newsrooms for periods of up to 10 months, to tackle the challenges facing news organisations with creative problem-solving using code.

Digital team members are also involved in voluntary work that helps to promote coding and digital skills. They’ve hosted an event for Girls in Tech at which chief digital officer Tanya Cordrey spoke. And they regularly volunteer to teach coding and other digital skills, particularly to encourage and increase the number of people from diverse backgrounds who get involved. This volunteering includes organising sessions for The Hour of Code, a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries, and Code Club, a nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9 to 11 living in the UK.

Climate responsibility

In recent years we have been assessing how the digital consumption of our content affects the environment as a result of the energy consumed while people read articles and watch our videos on our site. In the year 2014/15, the overall carbon footprint of the digital operations was 5,986 tCO2e, 9% higher than last year.

Carbon emissions have been increasing as demand for our online services grows (page views were up by almost a billion on 2013/14). The big increase in the amount of time spent watching videos has quadrupled the carbon footprint of the mobile network over the year. But our new-look site has supported the ongoing shift from desktop and laptops to smartphones and tablets, which have a significantly lower carbon footprint. So, overall, our digital carbon efficiency has increased by 2% and you now only consume 0.076gCO2e reading a single article on the Guardian.

We are continuing to analyse energy consumption in our data centres to improve efficiently and we are also using cloud service providers to improve efficiency and scalability to serve the content. We are working on getting better carbon data from these providers.