Guidance for Grid-aware websites

[thibaudcolas]

Thank you to everyone who has submitted proposals for our Grid-aware websites project idea so far!

Here is some additional guidance on how to improve your proposals, based on questions we received, and what we saw in the proposals.

Structure

Proposals are free-form, any structure is allowed. If you’re not sure where to start, we would recommend a structure that helps address all components of the project:

• A grid-aware version of the wagtail.org website.
• A blog post explaining the process and outcomes.
• A report on energy use of different website front-end and back-end components.
• A set of recommendations for other Wagtail websites to become grid-aware.

This can be in the form of four sections, or one project timeline with tasks that cover all relevant sections, or a mixture of both.

Length

The shorter the better. We recommend a maximum of 5 pages.

• One to introduce yourself, broadly showcase your experience (linking to external resources is recommended), explain your motivation.
• 2-3 to explain your take on your project

Writing longer proposals is allowed but generally won’t help. Our reviewers have limited time and brevity is encouraged.

AI writing for proposals

Writing with an AI is completely fine. Be mindful not to abuse it, as we care much more about your understanding of the project than the correctness of your english writing. Use of AI helps a lot with english writing but can result in project plans that don’t match reality and give reviewers the wrong impression on your degree of understanding of the work needed.

How to make your proposal stand out

From what we have reviewed so far, proposals are most low on details on this point of the project:

report on energy use of different website front-end and back-end components.

Measuring energy use of websites is hard, and it’s an active area of research. Proposals will stand out if they showcase a well-researched plan on how we would do this. Mentioning relevant tools. Possibly combining multiple approaches to present a fuller assessment.

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If you have further questions that aren’t covered above feel free to ask them here – you can update any submitted proposals right up until the deadline for GSoC. And we will review proposals and questions here as they come until that deadline. Only submitted proposals will be considered for our final selection – make sure to re-submit within the GSoC platform.

[thibaudcolas]

We’ve received 15 proposals for this project! Thank you all for giving it a go ☺️ The results will be announced on the 8th of May per the GSoC timeline.

In the meantime I wrote a post showcasing some of the grid awareness concepts we’re considering that might interest you all: OLED and dark websites = lower footprint.