Umbraco Community visit

Our Head of Technology, James, recently visited Denmark as part of his volunteering efforts with open-source CMS, Umbraco.

I’m very fortunate in that there are lots of rewarding things about my job, and one of them is getting to take part in initiatives like the Umbraco Community Teams Visit.

It’s not all just fun, though - there’s a serious purpose behind my involvement, and that’s what I’m going to be talking about today.

What are Umbraco Community Teams?

Umbraco is an open-source content management system used by hundreds of thousands of organisations around the world, ranging from Government to non-profits to commercial companies.

While the CMS is open-source, it’s backed by a commercial organisation - ‘Umbraco HQ’ - who provide paid services wrapped around the core product.

One of the initiatives HQ have launched is the concept of Community Teams - bringing together people from HQ and experts from the digital industry to collaborate on improving Umbraco in several key areas.

I’m part of the Community Sustainability Team - and our focus is to reduce the carbon emissions of Umbraco and raise awareness of sustainability generally!

What is the visit?

Umbraco HQ is based in the lovely city of Odense, Denmark, and once a year HQ brings all the Community Team volunteers together for 2 days of planning, collaboration and team building.

Normally we get together once a month online, so being able to work together in person is really valuable. I’m fortunate to be in the Sustainability Team with some really interesting, knowledgeable people, and I’ve learnt a lot about digital sustainability by being able to work with my colleagues - and it’s even better in person!

What did we get up to this year?

We had a pretty packed agenda this year - and it was my first time having missed the year prior. The theme this year was ‘back to basics’ - considering people new to Umbraco and the community and making sure that their experience with the platform is as smooth and friendly as possible.

For us, that meant adjusting our work to ensure we are focused on making it as easy as possible for Umbraco users to be able to do the right thing by the planet, and lower carbon emissions.

We recapped on activities from the previous year, including building and launching an open-source sustainability package (plugin) for Umbraco that has had thousands of downloads, and discussed how we could continue to enhance it alongside our other work.

We’ve done all sorts of things from writing documentation, advising HQ on how they can improve the carbon footprint of their new umbraco.com site, and talking at a range of conference and on podcasts to spread the word about the important role the digital industry can play in lowering carbon emissions - and how Umbraco is leading the charge. It’s nice to look back on all these things - it’s a long list!

We spent some time visiting Energinet, Denmark’s national energy regulator, and learning about Denmark’s goal to become completely renewable powered in relatively few short years. They’re doing some fascinating work, and there are definitely parallels between what they’re up to - particularly the complexity of knitting different systems together - and what we in the digital industry do too. It’s always great to have an opportunity to learn from other industries and bring back some of the good stuff.

Alongside all the discussion and work, we also made time to bond not only as a team but also the wider group of community team members and the lovely folks from HQ.

Having worked in the digital industry for a while, I can honestly say that there isn’t a community quite like Umbraco. They’re a great bunch of welcoming, friendly people, including the HQ folks. It was a pleasure to spend some time with them - especially working towards such an important goal.

What’s next?

We’ll continue having our monthly get togethers, and we now have a long list of things we want to achieve as a team over the next 12 months - ultimately working towards our goal of lowering carbon emissions.

I’ll be sure to report back regularly on progress!

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about digital sustainability and why it’s so important, please get in touch with us at aer studios