What is responsible digital?
Digital responsibility is a field that has been booming in recent years, with growing awareness of the negative impact of human activities on our environment.
It is mainly focused on the environmental impact of digital technology, as detailed by the Ministry Territoires Écologie Logement website (in French).
Against a backdrop of digital transformation of businesses and growth in usage, the environmental impact of digital technology is becoming a matter of great social awareness, which calls for political responses.
However, the definition of responsible digital can be broadened to include the implementation of measures that minimise the impact of a digital service on the environment, but also takes into account issues such as accessibility and the protection of user data.
This is the approach we have chosen to adopt with Ikacode. On this page you’ll find our position, our digital ethics and the things we’ve set in place to work towards this ideal in our work designing and developing websites.
Web eco-design
The digital sector is one of the few where the carbon footprint is still following an exponential growth curve.
Even if visiting a website has a much smaller impact than watching a movie online, it’s important to reduce it as much as possible.
A website will be eco-designed when, throughout the creation process, thought has been given to ways of limiting this impact without affecting its effectiveness.
This is something that needs to be done from the outset, and not just during the performance optimisation phase when the site is finalised.
Choosing an ecological web host for our customers
- 100% renewable energy supply (wind and hydro mix).
- Long life cycle of materials.
- Optimised server cooling circuit.
- Outside air cooling for 98% of the year. No use of fresh water for cooling.
- Heat generated by the servers is reused to heat the offices.
- PUE between 1.10 and 1.16 (the aim being to be as close as possible to 1).
More details and certifications available on this page.
Reducing the impact of web design
A number of tools, such as EcoIndex, exist to audit a website’s level of eco-design. These tools are not 100% reliable, but they are good indicators for identifying areas for optimisation.
We try to strike a balance between the level of complexity of a site (and therefore its environmental impact in terms of the resources it takes up), and the fulfilment of its function.
In other words, you can always lighten and optimise a site to the point where all that’s left is a simple, uncluttered html document, with no stylisation or anything other than simple text.
We don’t think it’s necessary to go that far, and that you can combine eco-design and aesthetics.
Other measures
We use reconditioned equipment, starting with the computer.
Our communications and invoicing are paperless.
We also use green energy from Enercoop, a French ecologicial electricity provider.
Extra ressources
- The RGESN (Référential Général d’Écoconception de Services Numériques)
- The A+ Website Carbon score of Ikacode
- The Green IT association
Accessibility
Making a website accessible means reducing the barriers to its use for as many people as possible.
Web accessibility is generally associated with visual impairment. But an accessible website enhances the experience of many other people, whether or not they have a disability, for example when you are in a sunny place, your device has a small screen or a slow Internet connection, etc.
There are 4 fundamental principles defined by the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) for accessible web content:
- Perceptible: users⋅trices must be able to perceive it in one way or another, via their senses.
- Operable: users⋅trices must be able to control elements using their mouse, a keyboard, a voice command, etc (example: buttons).
- Understandable: this goes without saying.
- Robust: content must remain accessible on different browsers, now and in the future.
We undertake to take web accessibility into account in our web design and development work.
To find out more :
Data sovereignty
Protecting and respecting your users’ data should not be limited to making your site compliant with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
Today, the majority of websites use tools that collect data on their visitors, which will then be used for advertising purposes, for example.
Those famous cookie acceptance banners we are now used to are just the tip of the iceberg.
A website should only collect the minimum amount of information about its visitors.
We use open-source software solutions (i.e. where the code is open and auditable), and data hosting in Europe.
All our customers can take advantage of a statistics tool validated by the CNIL on our Matomo instance, and access to open-source CRM tool to manage their web project. Our billing is also self-hosted, to preserve our data and those of our clients.
WordPress also allows you to retain ownership of your data, which other popular proprietary CMS such as Webflow or Wix don’t allow.
AI Use
Artificial intelligence generation models have been everywhere since 2022.
We have chosen not to use such tools, or to use them only very sporadically, for several reasons:
- the environmental impact of artificial intelligence generation tools is disproportionate.
- these generation tools have equally alarming social consequences.
- they also pose problems of copyright and leakage of the data you entrust to them.
- to use AI tools on a daily basis is to soften your brain and your creative spirit, and to make yourself dependent on them.
- large-scale content generation (text, images, video, music, etc) is flooding the web, which in turn will feed the same models. Instead of enriching it, we’re impoverishing the web.
- Realizing that an article we’re reading has been simply generated and not well thought by someone is not a pleasant experience. We don’t want to inflict that to you, so our articles are 100% human generated.
Despite these criticisms, we’re not fundamentally opposed to artificial intelligence. We even occasionally use certain tools to check code or brainstorm. That’s about it.