Digital Impacts Schema and Taxonomy
Share and understand the environmental impacts of digital technologies.
Digital Impacts Schema and Taxonomy (DIST) provides a suite of open-source tools enabling any organisation to report on their digital technology estate's environmental impacts in a consistent way that others can understand.
Taxonomy
Standardised categorisation system across multiple impact dimensions for structuring impacts and ensuring nothing important is missed.
Methodologies
Curated list of measurement methodologies to support data production for all categories of the taxonomy.
Coming soon
Schema
Designed to become the definitive data format for sharing quantified tech impacts.
Get started
Most organisations start by mapping out their technology estate using the taxonomy categories. The approach is flexible meaning you can map your estate in full or in part - for example just at an application, product or service level.
Our methodologies map (coming soon) is a curated list of approaches you can use to help you estimate figures for your technology estate. The schema is there to help you with the final step of making your estimated figures standardised and transparent for others to see.
You can follow this process on your own using the materials provided by this website and our open-source community. To request help in finding a partner to support you on this journey contact Green Web Foundation who can put you in touch with a suitable person from the DIST community.
Contribute back
You can get involved in this project in a variety of ways, large or small, and we welcome all contributors, novice or otherwise.
Flag gaps, inaccuracies, or improvements by raising an issue via our GitHub repo, or contribute to on-going discussions on existing issues.
Why DIST?
Right now, lots of responsible organisations understand that the production and use of digital technologies has a significant and expanding environmental impact.
These organisations are stepping up and working hard to estimate, report on and ultimately tackle these impacts.
But because there is no consistent, open, structured way for organisations to report on or share the data they are producing, we're hamstrung by our inability to use this data for comparing different organisations or aggregating it.
DIST sets out to work collaboratively with others across the field to address this.
DIST's vision
Our vision is to see a shared language for digital impacts that support consistent, machine-readable, and comparable reporting formats, in a way that is:
- Practical enough for any organisation to start using tomorrow with whatever data they have.
- Rigorous enough to satisfy auditors, regulators and standards bodies.
- Broad enough to cover planetary, societal and individual impacts.
- Flexible enough to accommodate evolving measurement methodologies without breaking backwards compatibility.
- Open enough to be adopted, extended and improved by anyone.