The Climate Reality Project
“World’s Easiest Decision”
My Contribution
Engagement Type
Case Study
Climate Action, Simplified
World’s Easiest Decision was an interactive global campaign for The Climate Reality Project, founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, created around the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris. The goal was to take an enormous and often complicated subject and turn it into a simple proposition: saving the planet should be an easy decision.
Rather than approach climate advocacy through a conventional petition page, the experience used humor, simple questions, playful characters, animation, sound, and interactive storytelling to move visitors toward action. Tool of North America developed the digital experience, working with The Climate Reality Project, Mustache Agency, Moth Collective, and other production partners to bring the campaign to life.
From Proposal to Delivery
My involvement began before development. I helped write the proposal and plan how the concept could be delivered from a development and technology perspective. As the project moved forward, I remained directly involved with stakeholders from concept through delivery, helping translate the campaign idea into an executable digital product.
I planned the development effort and managed the development team through production, coordinating priorities, implementation, technical requirements, and delivery. My responsibilities also crossed the boundary between creative and engineering. I worked to ensure that graphics and other creative assets were completed, prepared, and delivered to the development team when they were needed so production could continue moving forward.
This put me at the intersection of stakeholders, creative production, development, and infrastructure. My responsibility was not simply to operate the finished application. I helped determine how we were going to build it, organize the development effort, move assets through production, and ultimately get the experience into the world.
Building an Interactive Global Campaign
The experience paired intentionally simple questions with animated characters and environments. Questions such as whether visitors lived on Earth or valued economic growth made the campaign’s argument through humor rather than presenting climate policy as an intimidating wall of information.
The resulting long-scrolling experience used responsive HTML5, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS3, animation, audio, video, and parallax techniques to create depth while maintaining the flat illustrative visual language developed for the campaign. The experience was designed to work across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices and was localized into eight languages for an international audience.
I also helped develop the interactive Green Seal displayed in the upper-right corner of the experience. The seal was a distinct interface element within the site, separate from The Climate Reality Project’s logo, and extended my development work beyond the primary scrolling experience.
Architecture & Launch
The campaign was tied to a major international event, which made production architecture and launch readiness important parts of the delivery strategy. I owned the technical architecture and worked directly with Rackspace’s launch team to develop the approach for how the experience would be served in production.
Together, we worked through the infrastructure concepts needed to support the public launch. The production stack incorporated Varnish for server-side HTTP caching with Apache behind the cache layer. I also established deployment through our continuous integration environment so application code could be deployed through a controlled, encrypted workflow.
Owning the architecture meant connecting application decisions with the realities of production delivery. The site had to support a media-rich, animated, multilingual experience while being prepared for the attention surrounding a global climate campaign and COP21. That required development planning, infrastructure strategy, deployment planning, testing, and close coordination with our hosting partner before launch.
Campaign Impact
World’s Easiest Decision launched in the lead-up to COP21 in Paris as part of The Climate Reality Project’s effort to mobilize people around meaningful action on climate change. The digital experience directed visitors toward signing the campaign petition and helped turn a complex global policy issue into an accessible, shareable call to action.
The original project record reported more than 3.2 million actions associated with the petition presented around COP21. More broadly, the experience became part of an international campaign designed to put public pressure on world leaders gathering in Paris and demonstrate support for meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Recognition
The experience was also recognized by the digital design community for its combination of interaction, animation, responsive design, and cause-driven storytelling.
World’s Easiest Decision is an important example of how my responsibilities had expanded beyond a traditional technical or DevOps role. I was involved before the project was awarded, helped shape the development proposal, worked directly with stakeholders throughout the engagement, planned and managed development production, coordinated creative assets into implementation, helped develop the site’s interactive Green Seal, owned the architecture, and worked directly with Rackspace on the strategy for taking the experience live. The project brought together the technical, delivery, stakeholder, and cross-functional responsibilities that increasingly defined my work on large digital experiences.