When we started millipedia in the last century our strapline was "millipedia - ethical multimedia". We soon realised that no one we were talking to really knew what multimedia was, so that soon became "ethical media" and more recently, given that even print involves mostly digital work now, "ethical digital".
Even though we moved from multi-media to digital the ethical part of our identity has stood firm. But what does it mean to be an "ethical digital" company?
Who we work with
The most obvious manifestation is in who we work with. Nearly all of our work is for charity, educational or arts organisations.
This isn't to say we don't ever work with commercial organisations but we don't ever pitch to work with them. We're lucky enough that we've never had to try and drum up custom so are able to chose which organisations we partner with.
We have a more formal list of the types of organisations we'll work with over on our ethical policy statement.
The tools we use
We try to avoid companies whose ethics don't tally with ours wherever we can.
For example, we will absolutely try and persuade you not to use Google Analytics on your site and offer you alternatives that provide much better privacy for your users.
If we need cloud computing resources then Amazon Web Services is right at the bottom of our list (Especially now Amazon are top of this year's Evil List).
In fact we've decided as company policy not to use Amazon again.
Of course we're aware that sometimes an organisation just has to use organisations it would rather avoid and we won't force you to use something that doesn't provide an equally good or better service.
We are big fans of open source software. Both in the sense of the freedom we have to change things and also the community aspect of developing open source projects. Whatever it is we're developing for you then you can be sure there'll be a good chunk of open source software being used along the way.
Our Intended Audience is Everyone
The web is a brilliant way of distributing information, and that info should be accessible to as many people as possible whatever method they use to access it. We put a lot of effort into making sites accessible as well as usable.
Image from the accessible icon project.