(exciting music)
-: So, what do we do at the Green Software Foundation?
So, a lot of what we do is, is standards,
and I think we've heard about the SCI today
is one of the standards that we work on.
This is it.
Everybody thinks of the SCI,
and, I remember I had a friend who said
she freed up a whole evening
to sit down and read the SCI specification,
and was finished in about 10 minutes,
because it's actually not very long.
It's about four pages long.
But what the, the magic of the SCI is we managed
to get 68 organizations together to agree
on a kind of basic concepts,
and that's kind of why it's important to have standards,
just so we can agree on these basic things. So that's the
SCI, there's an, an entire specification, which goes into
a bit more detail to how to compute different parts
of this equation, but it doesn't really stop there.
Kind of what's next?
How do we, oh, and what we did was we developed the SCI
in collaboration with all those organizations,
then we moved it into ISO,
then we became an ISO standard.
That's really where the power of a lot of the work
that we do is through that collaborative effort.
You don't get something into ISO after the fact.
You have to start from day one, saying,
"We want to do this thing collaboratively.
We need to demonstrate that BCG,
that all these other organizations got involved together
to create this standard."
That's how it gets adopted.
And once it gets into ISO,
that's when policy makers pay a lot more attention.
So a lot more attention being given to SCI
since its ISO submission from policymakers. A lot more
interest from that perspective. What's next?
I'm literally just on the train over,
was communicating with people
from the Standards Working Group on SCI for AI.
How do we explore and expand this space even further?
There's also a lot of interest.
Blockchain has not disappeared, remember blockchain?
Do you remember it? (audience chuckling)
It was a hot topic before AI.
It hasn't gone away.
In fact, I think, looking even at today's emissions,
blockchain is still higher than AI.
And even when we go forward a couple of years,
AI will surpass, but blockchain is still there.
It's still out there,
it's still a significant cause of emissions,
but that there's a lot more interest,
as interest in SCI for finance.
What does that look like?
So, this is kind of what's being explored next.
A lot of the focus for next year is going to be giving
lots more concrete advice, concrete specifications,
pushing them into ISO, getting more policy makers,
giving more advice for policymakers,
so, when they do develop policies,
it will be aligned and a lot of us will have our input
into that process.
So yeah, I just have this join us for a few seconds.
If there's anybody who's interested
in joining the foundation, you can reach out.
I'm happy to have a conversation with anybody.
So this talk originally was,
I think I had the title, "Doing for Sustainability
What Open Source Did for Software."
That's a 45-minute talk, that's not a 20-minute talk.
A 20-minute talk is "Impact Framework:
The Solution to Opaque Carbon Reporting,"
so there's, like, a subset of that talk,
unfortunately without all the jokes.
(audience chuckling) So this is gonna be
a very serious talk.
I couldn't get most of my jokes in.
So, Impact Framework is something
that we've been developing inside the foundation.
It's actually started to develop when, like,
the SCI came out,
and we developed, delivered it, everybody got together.
It was like years of discussions on calls,
so many conversations, and we delivered it.
Then I was like, "Right, everybody, go calculate it"
... and it was very hard to actually compute the SCI score.
It still is quite hard.
Like, even though we've actually all agreed
on the equation,
actually computing that value is still quite significant.
So there's a bunch of projects that started
inside the foundation,
and they all evolved eventually into what we now call
the Impact Framework.
So what is it?
It's a couple of different things.
It started off as what we call a custom calculator.
How you actually calculate an impact an SCI score,
or other scores, as GHG.
How do you actually calculate that?
But where it has evolved into,
and where I think it's even more interesting,
is it's turning into a file format
for communicating environmental impacts.
This is why I get very excited,
but the audience is like,
"I don't really know what you're talking about."
I'm very, very excited about this.
Like, we need a future where, when somebody...
I get sent constantly PDFs, blog articles,
this, that, the other, like, "This is our computation,"
and it's very hard for me to make that judgment,
make that criteria.
We need a common way of communicating.
I'm a standards body, so that's obviously what I believe in,
but remember the world where we didn't
just use USB-C for everything?
That's the world we're creating,
is we all can all communicate climate impacts
exactly the same way.
Trust me, that will grow this ecosystem
incredibly fast.
So I just need once to explain a couple of concepts
for Impact Framework so we can understand how it works.
So one of the things we noticed a lot of organizations doing
is this is carbon, this is water, this is electricity.
Like, we don't actually get these numbers directly
from a lot of organizations.
We need to compute them ourselves.
And what we noticed the community starting to do
a couple of years ago was, like,
well, we don't have carbon figures,
but I know much, how many CPUs are being used,
and I know what the utilization is,
we know how many downloads they have,
we know all this other information.
Is there a way of turning this into carbon?
And so, this is what we call an observation,
and that's what we call an impact,
and that's what Impact Framework does.
It helps take observations and turn them into impacts.
This is a beautiful animation, oh my word.
So what this did, we do it with a bunch of models,
and one of the things we realized,
everybody historically was trying to create, like,
this one model that worked for every single use case,
whether you're... whatever cloud provider,
whatever you are doing, this one model would work.
And what the community realized,
actually, that doesn't work for us.
We need to break this out into smaller models.
If you're used to the Linux environment,
kind of like breaking things up
into a lot of smaller chunks,
and then you can cherry-pick the models that you want to do,
what you need to do to compute your environmental impact.
And that's really the feedback we were getting
was from a lot of organizations, a lot of people,
"We can't use this generic method.
My company uses a very unique stack of software
that it doesn't work for me."
It needs every single computation for every single company,
for every single software product.
It's gonna be a bespoke computation.
This is going to be a hard problem to solve.
This is not an easy problem to solve.
This is the hard...
sustainability, climate change is the hardest problem
humanity's ever faced.
We are not gonna have any easy solutions here.
So that's what they were really working towards.
We want bespoke solutions.
This is where I go into a demo,
and this is where I lose most of you,
because I'm about to show you,
although I did give this talk in Brighton,
and there is a little bit more,
little bit more to it than there was at that point.
So, how it works,
so this is where I...
Trust me, it's okay.
(audience laughing) It's okay, okay?
I've given this talk before,
so I won't show you much of this,
but this is what we call an Impact Framework manifest file.
We actually call an IMP file, a .IMP file.
You will be sharing .IMP files.
You won't be sharing to me your carbon emissions number,
you'll be sharing a .IMP file,
and this file contains within it
not only the carbon emissions calculation of our website,
but everything, all the data that was used
in that calculation,
all the methodologies, all the coefficients
all baked into this one file,
and it's actually reexecutable,
so you can then take this file and go,
"Oh, I don't agree with how the GSF has computed this.
We actually have a different methodology,
and we're gonna recompute and give our
methodology." We don't take sides in the GSF.
Use whatever methodology you use.
We just want to standardize ways for you
to compute that and communicate that.
So this is, I won't go into too much detail.
There's quite a lot of data inside here.
We know, I gave this talk in Brighton last year,
where all I had was this YAML file
and it was very hard to give the talk,
but so one of the things that we've been building recently
is we know this is very hard for people to understand.
I can read this, a lot of other people can't read this,
so we built a visualizer.
So this is the visualizer, and again,
this is not a dashboard per se,
this is just a visual representation of that .IMP file,
this file that we will be computing
and sending to everybody else in the future.
So this is the total carbon emissions of the GSF website.
The data is from August 1st to August 31st.
That's the dataset.
Our total emissions was 2.4 kilos for our website,
and our SCI score is 0.13 grams per visit.
That's how an SCI score works, it's carbon per something.
But we also know that these headline numbers, they're not...
If you want to get to action,
if you wanna get to advice to take,
you need to get granular.
That's one of the things we really advocate for,
is to get as granular data as possible.
Temporily granular,
and what days was the carbon emissions that high?
How does that...
What information can you decide from that?
But also, where?
A website is a complicated process.
The processes that we build in,
our website is quite simple in comparison.
A lot of our organizations have tens of thousands
of servers running very, very complex,
but you need to know where those emissions are coming from
to find the actions that you need to take.
So that manifest file that you saw
actually has a tree inside it with all the emissions numbers
for everything inside it.
So this is all of it, and it was broken down.
I know, on this day, the carbon emissions were 81 grams,
and I can see what drove it.
Most of it was the users, on the website.
Makes sense, right?
The browsers.
Even when the browser, you can dive into kind of how
did we compute and calculate that?
You can dive even deeper.
We believe it's all here,
all the data that was used in that calculation is there.
All the methodology that was used in that calculation,
it's all here, it's all transparent.
You can take this file,
you can take this file,
I'll send this,
I can send this to people,
and, you can say, "Hey, I don't agree with you.
That's interesting, how did you make that?
How did you calculate that?"
I can download it.
I can then open it up myself in my own editor,
or however I want to look at it.
I can see all of the information I've had.
I can go, "Do you know what?
I don't agree with this."
This is... you won't, you won't know what this is.
This is what we call a power curve.
You can go, "I don't agree with your estimate there.
I think it should be 100.2."
You can save that.
You can then go into a terminal.
There's lots of tooling here that you can build,
and you can recompute
"My Website's Emissions."
You have the power to recompute
our emissions with your coefficients,
your models, your methodologies,
and republish it back to us.
We don't know if this is right.
Joseph, head of R&D, he's been a climate scientist
for 12 years.
He's been in the Arctic and Antarctic,
measurin, ice sheets,
which I thought was cooler than what it was.
It turns out you don't get, you don't actually get a, ah... a, uh...
I always imagine the Antarctic,
all these scientists are in these kind of buildings.
It's a bit cold, but you know, they have...
It's a tent, it's a tent.
You sit in a tent for a month.
So he computed all of this,
but we don't know whether we're right or wrong.
This is our best guess.
We think we're right.
You can challenge us.
That's really the future that we want.
We want a future of transparency,
where we are being fully transparent
with all of our data, all of our emissions.
We want everybody to be this way
so that then you can be challenged.
That's the future I want, is you can be challenged.
You can be,
because we're only gonna learn
through people challenging each other,
questioning each other's solutions,
and proposing a better solution.
So if you think it's wrong, do you know what you can do?
You can download this, you can change it,
you can check it back into our repository.
You can then create a pull request,
and, "I think you're wrong,
this is why I think you're wrong."
This is the future that we want.
Let me make sure I covered everything...
Yeah, we also have, we ran a hackathon last year
for the Impact Framework,
and we had quite a few plugins.
These are methodologies.
These are plugins for the Impact Framework
that can be built.
We had over 50 submissions,
and they're all now available on this website.
One of my favorite...
one of my favorite is...
... is Death.
Yeah, one of my favorite is Death.
This is a plugin that you can add
that will then take from your numbers,
and you add it to your pipeline of plugins,
and as well as carbon,
it will compute the number of premature deaths
that are gonna be caused by your product.
It also will compute how many people will be displaced
by your software products.
I know it's a challenging conversation,
but this is why we're here.
Let's not forget this, this is why we're here.
So, um... yeah...
let's get back to the talk.
There are a lot more jokes
in the 45-minute one, (audience laughing)
seriously.
It was hilarious, I had the whole room crying,
but, um, ah... so yeah.
So what's the plans for this?
So we had that file that you saw, that .IMP file.
Like, it's very early,
we haven't really started this process yet fully,
but the discussions now are to then publish this,
get it as a proper standard.
We should get consensus on and publish it to ISO.
My dream, every product in this world
that is computing an environmental impact,
you can right-click, download an .IMP file,
and then you can then compare that impact to something else.
You can then start really communicating.
I want the USB-C for sustainability
so we can all connect together and all start communicating.
That's what we need.
This is me, this is not the foundation, this is my dream,
and there are things in the foundation
which are forming into this dream.
This is my personal dream.
You will not be able to sell a software product
in this world in the future unless it has a SCI score
with evidence backed by a IMP file.
That is the future that I want.
If this future existed,
everything else would snap into place.
If you have to sell a product,
you have to publish a SCI score,
that's the future that we want,
and that's the future I'm dreaming of,
and that's the future I want to help build,
and I'm gonna build it through standards.
I know we're gonna be...
This is a saying that I have.
"If you're fully transparent,
you can't be accused of greenwashing.
You can only even be accused of being wrong."
In my fuller talk about open source
and how we kinda wrap it all together,
this was the punchline,
'cause open source is about transparency.
It's abou, bringing it all together.
So I think if you're fully transparent,
you can't be accused of greenwashing.
You can only be accused of being wrong,
and that's the future that I want.
I want the future where, when somebody publishes
a sustainability report,
there are no claims of greenwashing,
there's just, "Oh, interesting approach.
I would do it this way.
Here's my computation."
That's the world that I want.
That's it.
Thank you very much for your time.
(audience applauding)