Offri un caffè a ElectronicsReference

Thank you for supporting Electronics Reference!

Electronics Reference is dedicated to producing free, high quality educational resources to facilitate learning and skills development for all people.

Our primary goal is to 'Be a Force for Good'. This means that we carefully evaluate our impact on the world. This includes the positive resources that we provide as well as the negative impact that we have to the environment.

We also have strong, achievable goals that are based on promoting STEM education while minimizing our negative impact.

In the long term, we would like to contribute not only by providing free high quality resources, but by sponsoring other educational organizations as we grow.

We also want to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2025 and 20% net negative carbon emissions by 2027.

This means that visitors to our site will actually be helping to reduce net carbon emissions just by browsing.

However, we have a long way to go! Electronics Reference operates on a shoestring budget. Costs are high and we have no paid staff.

Our determination to maintain high standards for publication and accessibility means that we don't make as much as we could.

Maximizing Our Positive Contributions

Maximizing our positive contributions is a relatively easy task because the heart of what we do is provide free educational resources.

However even running a small website like this does come with some considerations regarding how we can maximize our positive contributions.

We decided on the following guidelines:

- Actively promote and provide free education regardless of geographical location, gender, race, or age
- Never throttle or block users from economically disadvantaged areas.
- Minimize product promotions and sales-dependent resources (i.e. paid courses or content)
- No content whose educational value is secondary to monetary value
- Stay away from publishing on sensitive topics; focus only on educational resources

Minimizing Our Negative Impact

In order to minimize our negative impact, we have to identify its sources first.

The first potential source of negative impact is by publishing incorrect information and therefore contributing to misinformation or worse. We try to reduce this by fact-checking every bit of information on the site. We don't publish haphazardly, we don't allow external contributors, and every word is carefully deliberated over before publication.

The other potential source of negative impact is that of carbon emissions. It takes electricity to host a site and to visit it. We follow the best practices guidelines set out by Yoast in their article "The carbon footprint of your website and how to reduce it", including:

- Using a host registered with The Green Web Foundation
- Using a CDN so that data only has to travel a short distance
- Reducing the size of page content
- Eliminating redundant content

These efforts help to reduce our negative impact, but they can't eliminate it. That's why we are setting goals to help our net positive impact scale with our growth.

Our Future Goals

Electronics Reference is still a new site but has lofty goals that depend on how the website grows:

- Net Zero Carbon emissions by 2025
- Sponsor a STEM related organization by 2026
- Net 20% Negative Carbon emissions by 2027

Learn more about our values and goals.