Green IO

“Climate activist in a suit”. This is how Rainer Karcher describes himself. It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. In this episode Gaël Duez welcomes a strong advocate of moving the corporate world into the right direction from within? Having spent 2 decades in companies such as Siemens or Allianz, Rainer Karsher knows the corporate world well, which he now advises on sustainability. In this Green IO episode, they analyse the current backlash against ESG in our corporate world and what can be done to keep big companies aligned with the Paris agreement, but also caring about biodiversity or human rights across their supply chain. Many topics were covered such as: Why ESG has nothing to with “saving the planet”3 tips to tackle the end of the month vs end-of-the world dilemmaEmbracing a global perspective on ESG and why the current backlash is a western world only issue Knowing the price we pay for AI and how to avoid rebound effectThe challenge with shadow AI and why training is pivotalAnd yes they talked about whales also and many more things!BTW, Rainer will also be one of our 2 keynote speakers at Green IO Munich next week where he will wrap-up the day after having represented SustainableIT.org on the NGO panel as their CSO. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Rainer’s LinkedInGreen IO website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Rainer’s sources and other references mentioned in this episodeGreen investment needs in the EU and their fundingEU Omnibus package EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)China’s new CSDS standards: Far-reaching requirements in sustainability reportingChina introduces basic standards for corporate sustainability disclosuresSustainableIT.org Green IO episode with Laetitia Bornes part 1 and part 2heartprint.euheartandzukunft.eusustainableit.orgTranscript (auto-generated)Gaël Duez (00:00)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.Gaël Duez (00:27)Climate Activist in a Suit When I first read this statement from Rainer Karcher, it immediately resonated with me. How can we move our corporate world into the right direction from within? It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. And today I'm welcoming a strong advocate of the second option. Rainer knows this world well, having spent two decades in companies such as Siemens or Allianz. He founded Heartprint a year ago to keep on advising them on sustainability. Today, we will try to analyse the current backlash against ESG in our corporate world and what can be done to keep big companies aligned with the Paris Agreement but also caring about the biodiversity crisis or the human rights across the supply chain. By the way, Rainer will also be one of our two keynote speakers at Green IO Munich on July 2nd and 3rd, where he will wrap up the day after having represented SustainableIT.org on the NGO panel as their chief sustainability officer.Gael Duez (01:40)Welcome, Rainer. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (01:44)Thank you very much for having me and thank you very much for the very good introduction. I'm really looking forward, first of all, to meeting all of you, hopefully, who are listening now, and to meet you, Gail, in Munich on July 3rd, which is Munich, which is my hometown. So I'm really happy to be part of that and just looking forward to seeing you all.Gael Duez (02:01)Yeah, thanks a lot for this and you have a lot of pressure on your shoulders. I know that because you're playing home. So we expect a lot from you.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (02:08)And you can, you can. I'm not sure whether I'm able to fulfill, but I'm very much looking forward to at least giving a bit of thoughts and sharing my mind.Gael Duez (02:13)I'm sure you will. Thanks a lot for this. And you know, when we were discussing how ESG is delayed from most agendas due to according business priorities in the current times, you were actually very vocal about the lack of business acumen of decision makers doing so. Because according to you in particular in such times, ESG remain a major business goal and executive committees or board should not, and I'm quoting you here, deprioritize future readiness. So there's so much to unpack with this stance of yours, but maybe you could start with explaining what you meant by… and deprioritizing future readiness.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (02:58)Absolutely with pleasure and thanks for that question. Well, let me just maybe circle back a little bit. And as I've started my combination of IT where my foundation lies, so I'm an informatic person since 1997. So my career started in IT and kept it that way for quite a long time, exactly as I said, more than two decades. And about five years ago, I've started to get into sustainability from a business perspective and combine my private passion for environmental protection and for certain other things with job and with IT. But at that time, there was a very strong focus mostly brought up from Fridays for Future and all the for future type of combinations. And the society, I think, got very much more interested in talking about the topic, which was a good one. And then from my perspective, things happened. It just turned into something which nowadays is called the green left wing woke type of a thing. And once you start using ESG or sustainability as a term, people are, or least the majority of people are like, ⁓ gosh, come on, again that thing and again that talk. In particular, if you go to businesses and if you go to the C suites of companies. And the thing is, ESG was never meant to be a left green, woke type of a thing. It is just something for ensuring the foundation of our future. And if we're talking about future readiness, from a personal perspective, from a company's perspective, from business and from survival, than it is about just being aware of what's going to happen, create transparency of what to expect and have a bit of an ability to predict what you can do and how you can influence things. What I mean on that, bringing that down to ground level is if you own a company, if I just got handed over a company maybe from the fifth or sixth generation back something which was founded 100 years ago. The only thing I'm very much interested in is keeping my business going. And whatever it takes, I need to be ensured that the future and whatever is happening there is something I'm able to either influence or to predict to be able to adopt it. And that means that if, for example, there is someone crazy coming up in the US and raising taxes to 50%, I should be aware of how much influence this will have to my income. If I do have a lot of business which has been made with the US, I should be aware. And I should have a plan B, some kind of a backup plan if things are going to happen, what they're happening. And the same is relevant for anything which could come up from the environment. If there is a hailstorm showing up in three days, if I am a car dealer and I do have 1,000 of cars parked outside, I should be aware of that. And I should have an ability to maybe bring them to a parking garage or elsewhere. If I do have maybe agricultural business ⁓ I'm going to take, I should be aware. If there is a very dry summer to be expected and maybe set up something which is helping to water my plants. Otherwise, I most likely have an issue from a business perspective. So nothing of that has to do with saving the planet or just doing some kind of good stuff and saving animals or insects or anything. No, it has not. It's a very purely business perspective in ensuring that my business is able to keep going.Gael Duez (06:10)And how do you differentiate in that case ESG from, I would say, risk management that every good company should have put in place?Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (06:22)That's the fun thing. There is not that much of a differentiation and there doesn't have to be. So resilience and risk management is something which, at least in exactly the way like you said it, I did work for Allianz, which is an insurance company. So they are very much interested in all that aspect. So resilience plays a crucial role for them. So take their business perspectives, which is indeed just in trying to regulate as little as possible as damages and just selling policies and polices or insurances as much as possible as well. So the business model is at risk if things turn around the other way. So if they have to regulate a lot of damages caused by strong weather results, for example, take the latest example of Switzerland where there was hundreds of households just pushed away from a glacier which just broke. If you are the insurance company and you have to regulate that. This makes you multi-million or even billion worth. Take the example of wildfires which took place in the US, in Los Angeles, same thing there. So if you're an insurer, you have to be aware of the risks which could occur and just then make your business based on that. And that awareness, that risk awareness is exactly what we're talking here as well. So future readiness comes very much with exactly this. But that was the example of an insurance company. If I'm a local small medium-sized company, producing anything for maybe the big enterprises. Those companies normally do not have a view into this. There might be some little, yeah, different sessions depending on what kind of business you do, but most of the small medium-sized companies don't even have a division looking into risks or analyzing them. And that's exactly where Future Readiness comes in from my perspective with very small, very concrete examples, not with 120 PowerPoint slide type of strategy paper, which you need to read through and then still nothing changes. No, tangible results, tangible and grabbable examples of how to make yourself aware of what to expect. And maybe another example, even if I'm a small company and I am the ones maybe producing some electronic components for big suppliers, I do have maybe dependencies from Asia, from electronic goods which are being produced there. So supply chain risks a core. And that is something which to me is a perfect example of the classical ESG. So I have environmental risks, have social aspects like human rights, I'm doing the production cycle, modern slavery and all that things. And I have governance structured things which are, for example, regulations like carbon board adjustment mechanisms. So the term ESG itself, sustainability as a term, might be in a wrong angle in the meantime and being wiped off the agendas. But you change the narrative and if you just change the perspective towards something which is be aware of what to expect and try to find a backdoor plan, try to find something which can help you with diversifying maybe your supply chains. Then we are talking about future readiness from a pure business perspective, nothing to do with saving the planet or doing something for anyone from the green party.Gael Duez (09:19)I fully got it and it brings a question in my head because quite often it seems to be for medium sized business, even for big corporation, very strong tension between what should be done to be future ready, but in a matter of years and what must be done to be financial ready for the next quarter report for instance or even just to meet the end of the year from a financial perspective. And this tension I've met it quite a lot with people saying yeah I know that at some point my factory might get into trouble because we might not access water in such a cheap and easy way that it used to be the case before. Yet we know about this supply chain issue and like 90 % of our suppliers are based in Asia. But under the current economical circumstances, we cannot do anything else. How do you answer this sort of not necessarily even a pushback, but just question arising from your clients?Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (10:23)Yeah, yeah. Well, there is two angles which I always try to come up with. So the first one is depending on the size of your company, you depend on loans from banking and financial industries. So if you invest into new machines, if you have a big project coming up, you need to have a cheap and a very good and affordable loan from banking industries. And I just yesterday read an article that the biggest investment bank from the Nordics plus the European Central Bank already reacted to omnibus. So the current deregulation ideas from the European Commission, so to say, and just simply decline. And they just simply said, well, you can either go ahead with CSRD and with the reporting like it was supposed to be and like it was originally, or you can just count on it that depending on your interest as a company, loans are getting more and more expensive, or you won't even get one. So this is the first reaction I would have. Just simply think about that. If you have even a short-term type of a planning, if you only have a six-month or a one-year perspective ⁓ to look into the future, you still are in trouble if you completely ignore that topic, if you try to avoid thinking of it just based on, well, the European Commission decided to just push it up for another two years. Well, the banking industry does not. They are very much interested in already understanding how future-ready your company is of today.Gael Duez (11:41)But it's funny that you're mentioning the banking industry because you know there is a famous hearsay that there is no climate deniers among insurers because the insurance world is perfectly aware of the devastating effects of climate change. But the financial sector and especially the banking sectors comes under much more pressure usually because they still finance fossil fuel expansion plan and the like, and they're not really super clear on how to finance the ecological transition. So it's kind of a surprising example that you provide. And if you could elaborate a bit on it, like, do you really believe that the banking sector is actually now pushing more and more for sustainable practices? I'm really curious about it.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (12:31)So I'm mixing emotions to be honest. I do know a lot of people out of that bubble and in particular within due to my time in Allianz in the financial sector. So I do know a couple of people even in the largest banks of the world. And yes, for sure, there is a lot of praying water and drinking wine. There is a lot of, yeah, let's just do this and that. And you need to invest into sustainable futures and still. those banks are the ones which are investing the most still in oil and gas, which is our enemy. So therefore, let's be clear on that. But on the other side, from a pure business perspective to those banks, I know from those people that the risk analyzes ⁓ for all of them. And independently, whether they invest a lot or just very little or nothing into oil and gas, all of their risk assessments came up quite clearly. If they put millions into any kind of companies and invest into any kind of companies without a clear strategy, the risk is way too high that they never see that money again. And from that perspective, they will have to change and they will change. Is that something which can happen like a finger flip? It can't. So this is something which takes time. And that's another thing which I've very much learned during the last six, seven years now in the big corporates. If you believe that a 300,000, 500,000 people company is able to be changed within half a year or a year, it can't be. Even if it has to. And even if, yes, for sure, the pressure is incredibly high. This is where, and probably already can now listen to the climate activist and the suit. So this is that mixed and emotion type of a thing, which I'm struggling with each day and trying to find that balance and transport that into a narrative, which has been understood then from the C-level back to your first question, because yes, I know, and I'm the activist here, the windows and the opportunities are closing rapidly fast. And I just listened to Johann Rockström last week in Berlin, who just showed up the graphs of what to expect and that the two degrees won't be something we can expect in 2040 or 2050, no, already by 2030. So it's incredibly increasing at the moment and the rise of the temperature and the loss of species in biodiversity aspects, all of that is dramatically increasing and we should and we have to act the fastest as we can. But on the other side, we lost that opportunity already 15 or 20 years ago. So this is something I could get depressive now and looking back in anger and say, well, we should have, but no, this is not me. So the optimistic person in me as well. Let's do whatever we are able to and let's push it as hard as we can, but still keeping it realistic. circling back to your original question, the second point on that is, well, if I do have a company which completely ignored the aspect of sustainability so far, I always come up with the argumentation, well, then let's start with things where you're even able to save money. So the return on invest is immediately there if you, for example, look into energy efficiency. 90 % of small medium-sized companies never ever looked into an energy efficiency aspect with automation. This is where then the digital comes up and my twin transformation heart beats a bit louder. There is so much opportunities today where you are not even able react manually anymore and you don't have to, but just implement very easy, easy to consume, very affordable solutions to increase energy efficiency. Save energy and so therefore save money as well and get the return on investment quite rapidly. So and this is where you can have a starting point with and based on that define a strategy and a vision for your company and what most people in particular the C level is underestimating is of how many people within the company are already interested in supporting that ideas. So majority of small medium-sized companies I've spoken to in the last 12 months was at the beginning like yeah well you know. This is not a topic for us and nobody speaks about sustainability as a whole. And there is no clear vision and strategy. And I doubt that we just get the approvals from the employees and from operational roles. And they have been all wrong. 80 % of human beings, and that's the average value, are quite well aware of what's going to happen. And 80 % would like to change and take some kind of an influence, but they don't because they don't have the ability to in their day-to-day jobs. If you just grant them a vision and an idea and a strategy and some kind of support, you would wonder as a small medium-sized company of how much is possible to be changed in a very short period of time with all the knowledge, the experience of your employees, of the people surrounding you.Gael Duez (16:55)So actually, it's not two points, it's three aspects. The first one being get good financing conditions by being sustainability compliant. The second one is go for savings and cost savings equals energy savings and actually reducing waste most of the time comes with some sort of a cost savings. And the third one is actually please your employees and your stakeholders and your shareholders, maybe, but at least your stakeholders because most of them are more climate aware than you might think so. So that will be your answer to this usual pushback end of the world, end of the months. And Rainer, you mentioned the omnibus law, so maybe for the listeners, and there are many of them not based in Europe, if you could just clarify what it is. But also it helped me ask actually you another question, which is actually a double question. So it's three questions in one, I think I think you're having a hard time with me. I'm sorry with this.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (17:46)I'm enjoying it lot. I hope that keeps it interesting for the listeners. That's the only thing we would like to get.Gael Duez (17:56)Excellent. If you can just briefly explain what is the omnibus situation and how you connect it with the current backlash against sustainability that we see in Europe and in the US, and maybe also because you're a very global person, well connected around the world, how much of the current narrative that we have in the ESG circles or sustainability circles at large is actually a western bias because as far as I'm checking on the news around the world there are a lot of other countries still implementing ESG regulations. seems it's always a bit difficult to assess what is going on in China especially when like me you don't speak Chinese and you don't know the culture that well but it seems that for instance China is pushing a very ambitious agenda on ESG regulation. They're actually quite aware of the biodiversity crisis. It doesn't mean that they're doing everything to solve it, yeah, how much we are just convincing ourselves that the world is now facing a backlash where it's actually Trump and its European followers that are actually doing this backlash. So it's a lot of questions and you can feel free to unpack them the way you wantRainer (Heartprint GmbH) (19:08)I like the global perspective. And exactly as I said, I'm working globally since a long, long, long time. So that I did spend most of my career in global faced companies. mostly had colleagues from all over the world and influenced them from different cultures and from different type of thought and mindset, which I always reallyGael Duez (19:13)Yeah, yeah.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (19:26)let's just maybe start unrolling the questions and getting a bit of explanation. So the omnibus is something which came up now, in particular due to the economical crisis which we are facing all over Europe based on the new US administration and all the tariffs and taxes and all the things which he came up with. ⁓ And I'm not further commenting on because otherwise I could get immediately very angry. But let's just stick it with that. Since he's in place, the European Union tried to find ways to support European economies and lower bureaucracy and lower the effort which has to be taken, for example, for non-financial reporting. So it is a quite already established type of a thing to… put yourself into non-financial reporting. It's nothing of just now a year or two. This has been in place since quite a long time for big corporates. So a lot of companies with more than 1,000 employees and 50 million on the revenue do have to report that since already 15 years or even longer. So it just got replaced then by the so-called CSRD, which is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Within that, was, or there are, ESRS, so that's the reporting standards for environmental, social and governmental structures. And that exactly was meant for the next three years to bring it further down to reporting even to companies above 250 employees. So not the smallest ones, not the hidden champions, but companies with 250 employees and more would have been required to report. Omnibus now with the idea to reduce bureaucracy, to make it a bit easier for the small companies was brought in place to just limit to 250 employees company, but to raise that to a 1000 people company. So there was a couple of millions which would not or which are not affected due to that any longer. And it was then pushed by another two years. So not with implementing it by 2025, but 2027, 2028. And this is exactly where the criticism comes from, from my point of view, that with omnibus, things are being delayed at a time where they should not be delayed. Future readiness, as we spoke about already, is being even de-prioritizing companies are not looking into it. Because this is a bit of the typical carrot and stick situation. If you're not enforced in doing, you don't. At least that's the majority of companies who are looking into that. If there is no law in place, which pushes me to do something, then I just simply don't do it. And that's exactly where I think we need to change the perspective and need to come into another angle. And that is which most likely didn't even make it into the news. There is, with coming with Omnibus, so that was a bit of the good part of it, a voluntary type of a reporting. So that's the voluntary standards, which is then meant to support the small companies with creating a very simple and very much slower and smaller type of a reporting to standardize that. So if you're working with a big enterprise, if you are a supplier for a big enterprise, you mostly get sustainability questions anyhow day by day on your table. If you're in tenders, if you try to work together with others, you need to report on sustainability. And the voluntary standards was meant or is meant standardize that, that you don't have to reply to each of your customers in a different way would like to have it in an Excel sheet. The other one as a PDF, the third one as an email. The fourth one would like to have maybe access to your database with an API. So to standardize that, ⁓ Omnibus came up with the voluntary standards. And this is something which I think makes total sense. And in exactly that way, I think if you look at it and keep the standards, keep the reporting for the big corporates where there is a lot of things already in place and a lot of reporting already has been happening for the last two years or at least one year and keep that and bring it more to a standardized way for the small companies. So this would be a bit of the explanation what the omnibus is all about. To your second question, I 100 % agree. We are looking very much on the depriorization and on everything is getting worse and worse over time now from the industrialized Western world. If you go to other parts of the world, if you go to developing countries, if you go to sub-Saharan Africa, they have a complete different view and a complete different perspective on sustainability as a whole. And why? Because they're under pressure much more than whatever we are already. If you go to India, for example, in my former surrounding in Allianz, I had a huge amount of colleagues working in India. So 6,500 of Allianz technology employees are working in Trivandrum in the most south of India and in Pune, which is more in the north. What I found and still find is a lot of passion, a lot of engagement of the people there to really make things happening because they were affected much more than whatever we are. ⁓ And not only from a climate perspective, not only from rising temperatures and the loss of water and strong weather results, but plastic pollution, as an example, if you take plastic pollution, well, we do have a very good recycling system. So what you couldn't see now is that I just ⁓ questioned whether it is a good recycling system.I'm I just did see a reporting which was science based just two days ago, which was just showing up the recycling quotes in Europe, which are less than 12%. So we are reducing the recycling to a very little minimum and only PET has been recycled. All the rest as it's mostly combinations is not. So if you think we're good in that, we are not. It's just been mostly sold or burned or just dumped somewhere, we just don't see it. And that's a bit of the difference of what it is in India. But back to the question, you said it as well. China, for example, took over a third of the European CSRD. Well, a bit of an adopted wording and somehow a little bit of a different angle. But a third of the regulatories which we came up with for the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is now being pushed away through omnibus, has been taken over from the Chinese government and brought into local laws. And well, I'm not putting, and don't get me wrong now, I'm not putting an autocraty and a society which is ⁓ putting pressure on human rights from every angle and ignoring human rights from a democratic perspective like what we are looking into. I'm not putting that into a positive view, but exactly as you said it. So the depriorization of sustainability and ESG is not at all happening all across the world, It might come up from a different interest. And if you take China, for example, which is the country with the biggest increase of solar and PVs over the last two years, that comes for sure not from a ecological reason, but a pure economical one, because solar is in the meantime, the cheapest way of producing power to the grid as you can get it. And this is exactly the reason why they do it. So there is definitely different type of interests. But on the other side, Like you said, those who are affected, those who are feeling pressure, either on waste or on temperature or a lack of water or lack of biodiversity, if you have to start pollinating plants manually by hand, if you have to have people climbing up trees, pollinating apples and oranges to get the fruit at the end, because there is literally no bees left, no insects left to pollinate in other ways. Then you start thinking and this is exactly what we are still missing and already not given an answer why I think it is what it is. I think we are still way too protected in the Western industrialized world. Still everything is in supermarkets, still everything is somehow affordable, still everything is existing. If I open the tap, there is still fresh and clear water I'm able to drink right out of tap, at least in the majority of Europe. And that is something which I think is a bit of just pushing away the realities of what the world as a whole looks like and the global issues are.Gael Duez (27:28)That's funny, it is exactly the word that popped in my head when you were discussing and explaining the global situation that we are still so protected. protected or putting very nicely things under the carpet, as you mentioned for the plastic recycling or downcycling. By downcycling, mean that you use the product to build something with a less quality, so for instance, plastic bottles, they will never be used to make other plastic bottles as the little recycling sign could wrongly advertise us, but more to create carpet or garments or whatever. And I think this would be much more understandable for the the general public, if we were talking about downcycling rather than recycling. But this is a green IT or digital sustainability podcast. And I'd like maybe to zoom in a bit and ask you, how shall tech companies navigate these troubled times and embrace the paradigm that you've just described, starting with future proof. No Sorry. Starting with future readiness.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (28:36)And future proof is a good one as well, so we can talk about it in both ways. So that's totally fine. So try to visualize a butterfly. A butterfly is only able to fly if both wings are moving. And if there is only one wing, it will immediately drop off. And that's exactly what I try to explain what twin transformation stands for. It's the transformation of, and that's the one wing digital, and make digital sustainable. So looking into your own footprint into the things which are just coming up due to technology. So that's a major energy consumption. Take AI, which just now skyrocketed the energy consumption of data centers all across the world and still keeps going. So I think we are already at 3 % of the world's energy, which is consumed by data centers purely, just data centers. So not everything else for infrastructure, networks, Wi-Fi, whatever type of things, no purely data centers. And this is going to be predicted to go up to maybe even 22 to 30 percent in the next years due to AI because of a massive energy hunger which comes up on that. Same is relevant for water consumption. So all those data centers need to have cooling independent whether they use direct cooling, which is mostly a closed circle or and this is the majority of data centers use cooling on the roofs with chillers, whether it's just water chilled and used for such kind of cooling just have a massive consumption of fresh water. And this is something which we still don't have an answer for. And well, this is the own footprint. If you take materials, if you take the amount of equipment which is being dumped each day instead of circular usage and instead of refurbing the company devices and just handing it to a second life or just ensuring that materials like raw materials ⁓ is being just reused again. of that is the outcome and the own footprint of digital. And that needs to be turned into a sustainable aspect. So you need to be transparent. You need to know how to treat things and sustainability needs to take an influence into that one wing. The other wing is the sustainability transformation or the future readiness transformation. And all of that to get support from digital. What I've experienced in most of the corporates in the past and still, if I look into companies nowadays, there is a lot of manual effort if it comes, for example, to the reporting aspect. what we've spoken about a bit earlier, CSRD and all the non-financial reporting, most of the companies, and I hope that you agree in listening now, still have Excel and SharePoint and PowerPoint and emails and PDFs and whatever type of things as a source and data tool to work with for such kind of reporting. Does it have to be that way? No. There is definitely digital answers. Is AI supported answers, there's a lot of things in automation you can just achieve in supporting your surrounding and your work. And thing is, those people who I met who are in sustainability manager roles, in sustainability head roles, chief sustainability officers, majority of them is non-IT people. So they do not have even an idea how to make things different than with Excel or with PowerPoint or anything else. So what it needs is digital and IT people need to support those people because none of them is in such kind of a sustainability position to just do non-financial reporting. None of them is interested in day by day shuffling Excel sheets and counting numbers. All of them would like to take influence and make things happen within the company surrounding and I am able to support them with digital. We are able, for example, in product cycles. So taking another example, Green Digital Twins, this is a very perfect version. If you create a digital copy, a twin, of your product, of whatever type of material type of thing you're working with in a company and just color it a bit green in remark of looking ⁓ into maybe the weight. If you reduce weight, do a digital twin without even producing something, you can maybe lower weight for a transport of a good. If you repairability already upfront, you can support the longevity of a product. If you just have an awareness, of which components are being used in a final product, you're even able to already predict the recyclability of that product. All of that are definitely a lot of things where digital can support sustainability and the other way around, where sustainability needs to have a closer look into the digital world and ensuring that digital is not increasing the issues and the problems, but helping them and supporting.Gael Duez (33:09)You know, a few weeks ago, had a Letitia Bornes, a researcher on digital sustainability and one of the good experts of rebound effect. And when I was listening to you after having listened to her, I'm sort of having mixed feelings about it because, I mean, on paper, what you describe is flawless. I mean, and I love the butterfly example, by the way. But what has been happening over time is that every time digital enhance or improved processes, reduced waste, reduced energy consumption and so on, some sort of rebound effects happen, which most of the time cancel out the gains. And this is always where I'm a bit cautious. Like I would love to deploy what you're describing, like a word where IT and AI and so on would purely focus on reducing creating a more livable planet But this is not what has happened most of the time. It's a nuanced world and I don't want to be oversimplifying here. How do you deal with it? How do you create the conditions where what you describe will actually happen rather than having this crazy rebound effect like, it's more efficient by 50%. So let's spend 70 % more on it to gain new customers markets. Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (34:34)And that's a very concrete danger I do see as well. That's without any doubt. And the more efficient we will get, let's now follow maybe the predictions of the big corporates, the tech giants from the US who are currently now predicting that AI will solve most of the issues. AI will increase the technology which is being required for carbon capture and storage. AI will help us for fusion reactor development and all that things. So they make us feel thatGael Duez (34:44)Thank you.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (35:00)AI and digital will solve all the world's issues and we can just lean back and keep going than what we've done already the last 100 years. And this is the complete opposite of what it should be. And I agree with you. So there is definitely a huge risk that there is rebound effects in certain other areas. And that's even more showing the importance of people like us who are aware. And it's all with awareness. It all comes with transparency and with understanding what the outcome is and that we always pay a price.Gael Duez (35:05)Yeah.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (35:29)I think, and now let's just maybe circle into a bit of another angle. So far, we've kept it mostly in the environmental and technological aspects. maybe a bit increase the focus on the social component and meaning on us, human beings. If you take the amount of people with mental health issues and depression at the moment, which is massively increasing, mostly due to the pressure which we face, mostly due to all that always on things with social media. And if you just take all of that, think people are getting more and more aware, well, there might be an outcome with what I do each day and there might be a price I have to pay for. And that's exactly what we need to be aware of. If we use digital, if we use AI, if we use technology, it is not what the ones producing it and making the most money and billions out of that is trying to sell us. It comes with a price. That price is something which we have to bring up even more on the agendas and why it needs to have collaboration, why it needs to have NGOs. Even if in the US, for example, NGOs are not that famous anymore and Trump is wiping off kind of financial support for them, we need them. We need to have people who are independent, who are not money driven, but who are driven from values, from common good, which are interested in changing the world. Are they the ones to answer all of the world's questions? No, they are not. It's a balance between. And that brings me back to my own personal brand, to that climate activist in a suit idea. It needs to have a balance between both worlds. And that comes again, repeating that with the awareness of what is the price and what is the outcome we can get and finding a right balance in reducing the risk of any kind of bouncing back into then doing even more and even doubling than maybe the outcome.Gael Duez (37:12)And that's absolutely right. And you mentioned two things that actually would like to get a bit of a highlight from you, which is the price we pay for AI. And I think the example you took was excellent. And you mentioned the NGO and I briefly mentioned in the introduction that you're the chief sustainability officer of sustainableit.org. So for those who are not familiar with sustainableit.org, I would say that this is an NGO who focuses mostly on IT executives such as CIO and CTO How do you help them with your CSO hat future readiness and also to push back this AI frenzy with this sort of fear of missing out the syndrome that we are facing to take a balanced decision.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (38:01)Yeah, thank you very much for that question. So maybe for those not knowing me, I'm working full time in my own company for Heartprint which is my paid job, my day to day job, which is paying the soup on the table for my three kids and for my wife and the family at home here. And then they do have ⁓ a side job, is pro bono for sustainableit.org. Sustainableit.org, exactly as I explained it, was found about three years ago in the US. It's a classical NGO, no commercial interest, no financial interest. The only thing we get financially is the fees from the members, which are in the meantime 135, mostly exactly as I said, big stock listed companies from all across the world. And what the initial idea in nutshell was all about is in defining standards and in just joining a group of people who are interested in doing the same and speaking up with one voice towards those who are trying to fool us. So that was a bit of the initial idea, because if you started ⁓ five years ago, in requesting maybe carbon footprint from hyperscalers, you got either no answer or completely hidden type of an answer without any value. And that was something which started the idea in defining sustainable standards in IT and by IT increasing the pressure with speaking out of one voice. And in the meantime, it just got developed. We've got changed a bit of the focus to AI and now we are defining currently together with roughly 50 people from such kind of companies and member companies, but as well supported by science, by the UN Global Digital Compact, by World Bank and certain others, what is responsibility in AI and what does it mean as a standard. And this creates currently guidelines and this creates white papers and a bit of a framework which is being released in roughly three weeks, so end of June. And the idea here is to… Again, define a standard which currently only has certain angles and certain local aspects. So there is, for example, the European AI Act, which got defined about two years ago. But this is, first of all, not comprehensive. There's very little in it, which is on environmental aspects, for example, water consumption and stuff. On the other side, it's European and it doesn't have a global reach. And so therefore, what we try to do here is in defining that things. And my job there is in supporting the board as a member of the board in adjusting then maybe strategic angles to take as an NGO as a whole. as you can clearly guess already, so the US headquartered NGOs are quite heavy under pressure at the moment. So if you're talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, which plays a major role, if you go in ethics, for example, for AI, as well in standards for sustainability, this is quite difficult at the moment for all the US people. In the board and even for us being an US headquartered NGO. So what we're trying at the moment is to change a bit of the pressure more to European sides. We are creating a newly adjusted European advisory board and we are then trying to push things more from that angle because we can. We are still in the democratic freedom to talk openly about things and we are still able to just push things further in… regard of diversity aspects.Gael Duez (41:14)And in Europe, science is not a gross word. So we can keep on talking about it on fact-based rather than belief-based. now circling back, so thanks a lot for all these explanations about the symbol.it.org and how also it helps us understand better what is at stake at the moment with the US. With your members, and maybe it's too early for you to answer, but how do you advise them to embrace AI wisely. Mean, do you have some concrete example or is it too early to say?Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (41:48)No, I can at least give some maybe one, two ideas into that aspect here as well. So what it all comes up with, and by the way, this will be promoted then as well and will be opened up to public as well with very concrete guidelines and practical how to start things and very practical examples from the big companies which are members of Sustainable IT. But one of the things is, again, transparency. So if I, and this is an example. Where German Railway, Deutsche Bahn, example, started already about a year ago or something. The usage of mostly then the on-prem AI solutions, so none of the big corporates is using public ChatGPT or Mistral or anything else. They do have their own on-prem solutions for data privacy reasons, which do have then with an API for sure the large language models of big solutions on the market or copilot and everything else but they still have their own on-prem solutions. That means they do have an opportunity to influence how it's been displayed. And one of the things Deutsche Bahn did was displaying after a prompt what was the energy consumption caused by that prompt. if anyone from Deutsche Bahn is using in their internal AI system ⁓ their large language model to create maybe the next PowerPoint slides or just an email to the next manager maybe asking for a celery raise, then there is an immediate response which just shows the prompt you just used did cause 25 kilowatt hours of energy use. So that is one of the very concrete examples which I would propose if you're in a big corporate surrounding to just come up with a bit more of understanding and awareness. And what it requires then, and this is maybe a next example, if you're working in a smaller surrounding just using AI from public offerings ⁓ in maybe paid options like OpenAI, Mistral, with Luchette or anything else, then it is again on training. So don't hand it to your colleagues. Don't hand it to your employees just completely without guidance, without awareness, without a training. They need to understand what the outcome is all about. they need to understand sometimes a small language model would do and sometimes even a Google search would do. Well, maybe a bad example because Google just wiped off the standard Google search and replaced it with AI.Gael Duez (44:04)Yeah.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (44:07)What I was going to say is you need to be, again, aware. And that awareness could either come with transparently showing it. If you do have the ability, if you don't, start things with a training. now maybe to those who are just listening, say, well, we still don't use AI within the company. I bet you do. You just don't know about it. And you just don't maybe want to know about it. Because if you, as a company leader, are not providing solutions for your employees, they'll find their own ones. And I mean, it's very easy to register for the full free versions or just pay, I don't know, $10 or $15 per month for Le Chet or anything else just on your private account and still use it in the company surrounding. And I am sure in most of the companies, a lot of people are using already AI, even if there is no official answer, no official provided service form from the company perspective. So training, training, training.Gael Duez (45:00)I've never thought about shadow AI the same way as shadow IT, but actually it makes total sense. But thanks a lot for this. And thanks a lot for providing this concrete examples and the feedback from your position at sustainableit.org. I think we are out a bit of time now.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (45:05)Yeah. So do we.Gael Duez (45:21)Let's finish with a positive piece of news. What is according to you? ⁓ The news that you got recently that uplifted you the most. can be in sustainability in general, or it can be in IT sustainability more specifically. Feel free to pick the one youRainer (Heartprint GmbH) (45:40)Very good question. So I would like to maybe turn the angle again a bit into something probably unexpected, and this is whales. ⁓ So a very good friend of mine, is Frauke Fischer. She is a biodiversity expert from the university in Germany. And she wrote a book which is in German, Walmacht Wetter, or translated version, ⁓ whale is causing weather. And if you're interested in reading that book, I can highly recommend. It's something which explains how whales are influencing weather during their lifetimes and once they die. one of the positive news I recently read is due to whale protection, which is in most of the countries in the meantime a common thing, there is only very little exceptions, but due to whale protection, the number of big whales and blue whales and the whale population in general just got… way, way, way better than what it used to be and what it looked like and way better than what got expected. And this is, to me, just an example if we really want to make things happen, if we are really willing in changing something and the transformation is then understood from the majority of people. If there even is a couple of people declining or still not believing in things, if the majority is following that path, we are able to make things happen and influencing in a positive way. And this is exactly what I would like to maybe use as a closing remark for myself.Gael Duez (47:04)I love it, especially because I go whale watching every year. That's the sort of ritual before going back to school because in Réunion Island, that's the perfect timing. But, I love it.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (47:17)I didn't even know about that. You're well watching. at that. So without speaking about it upfront, I touched something which is close to you as well. I love that.Gael Duez (47:24)Excellent. Well, Thanks a lot, Rainer, for joining the show today. And I'm really looking forward to hearing you on stage at Green IO Munich. And thanks a lot for joining there as very happy.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (47:36)Thank you very much, for having me. It was a great pleasure talking to you and looking forward seeing you soon.Gaël Duez (47:41)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on our website, greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with other responsible technologists is also a good idea to provide them with inspiration. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more listeners. In our next episode, we will welcome Anita Schuttler, a well-known IT sustainability expert involved in many NGOs to talk about the latest developments in green software engineering. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Munich was a huge success last week and the next one is in London on September 23rd and 24th. As a Green IO listener, can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.Green IO New York, ICT4S, GreenForum Berlin, Green IO Munich, … Eventually responsible technologists have more an more places to meet, learn, share, and grow our community. A world of opportunities and … frustrations because many of us cannot attend all these great conferences. 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How is sustainability covered in main tech conferences? Sure cybersecurity, DevOps, or anything related to SRE, is covered at length. Not to mention AI… But what room is left for the environmental impact of our job ? And what are the main trends which are filtered out from specialized conferences in Green IT such as Green IO, GreenTech Forum or eco-compute to generic Tech conferences? To talk about it Gaël Duez sat down in this latest Green IO episode with Erica Pisani who was the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. Together they discussed: The inspiring speakers in the trackWhy Qcon didn’t become AIconHow to get C-level buy-in by highlighting the new environmental rikThe limit to efficiency: fine balancing between hardware stress and usage optimizationWhy performance and sustainability are tight in technology  Why assessing Edge computing’s positive and negative impact is trickyAnd much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Erica's LinkedIn Erica’s WebsiteGreen IO website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Erica’s sources and other references mentioned in this episodeQCon London's "Performance and Sustainability" track with a list of all the talks/speakersBuilding Green Software by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu and Sara BergmanPrevious Green IO episode with Ludi AkuePrevious Green IO episode with Sara HsuGreen Software FoundationWilco Burggraaf's page on GSF which has links to his writingTranscript (auto-generated)Erica Pisani (00:01)Think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other.Gaël Duez (00:12)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.How is sustainably covered in main tech conferences? Sure, cybersecurity, DevOps and its DORA metrics or anything related to SRE is covered at length. Did I forget to mention AI? Not anymore. But what room is left for the environmental impact of our what are the main trends, which are filtered out from specialized conferences like Green IO or Ecocompute to non-specialized conferences, the big tech conferences. And to talk about it, I'm delighted today to have Erica Pisani with us. So Erica lives in Canada, Toronto, software engineer in a FinOps company. And when she doesn't work, she enjoys playing violin and working in the woods with her dog, which might give us hints on why she eventually managed to be the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. So I'm really glad to have you on the show Erica and that's going to be a great debrief that we're going to have.Erica Pisani (01:42)Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. I'm super excited to join Green IO.Gael Duez (01:47)You're more than welcome. So, Erica, how did you end up being the MC of the Performance and Sustainability Track at QCon London this year? And please share with us the long version where you explain how you started to get interested in IT sustainably in the first place and is there any, I don't know, maple syrup involved? Yeah, I know it's terrible cliche. Go for it.Erica Pisani (02:07)No, no, I do love maple syrup. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily part of the story. But I guess the longer story is I originally, so the punchline, guess here is I came to sustainability in software development through edge computing. And really I started looking at edge computing because I just didn't know what the heck it was. A couple of years ago, every like cloud provider from, and I was working at Netlify at the time, every cloud provider from Netlify to Versal and Cloudflare and like AWS that were going on and on about compute power being available at the edge, data being available at the edge. My coworkers were so excited about edge functions launching and I straight up had no idea what they were talking about. And for me, the best way for me to learn stuff is to try and learn it as if I was gonna teach it, which is that age old advice. So to motivate myself to learn about Edge, I ended up deciding on a whim to pitch a lightning talk of I'm gonna talk about the Edge and I'm gonna talk about why it's important and exciting for software developers. No sustainability component in it whatsoever. It was just I wanted to learn more about it. And fortunately it got picked up because it was this huge thing. And I got extremely lucky that through the great vine of conferences, my talk got the attention of a member of the programming committee at QCon in 2023. so I go to QCon London and I can't remember what the track was at the time, but there was a sustainability track there at the time and Sarah Bergman was speaking. And I remember going to see her talk and I'm sitting there and I can't remember the name of the talk exactly, but she's, talking about the different scopes and the stuff that you see in the building green software book. And as I'm sitting watching her talk about this, I realized that the edge that I'd been focusing on for so long could actually play a part in the sustainability, sustainable tech movement. And so I ended up completely overhauling my talk because I was just like, just want to focus on learning more about sustainability in tech and how this can tie in and we can leverage it in this really amazing way. And I got so excited that like for me, felt like one of those turning points in how I view my career where I wanted to start looking through how I build software through that lens a lot more seriously. And because I was so excited about this, another programming committee member maybe about a year later because she kept hearing me talk about, and we kept in touch just because we met at the conference, got along. and she's like, so we have another like sustainable track that's going to be a QCon. And at that time I had been doing a few different conferences and was kind of tapped out. I was, I needed a break. So she's like, you don't have to do it this year, but consider it maybe for next year. And so, you know, 2025 Qcon London is about to roll around and she asked again like would you be interested and I was like I'm recovered I am ready to go let's do this and so that's how I ended up hosting the track this year.Gael Duez (05:26)Excellent. That's really, really cool to kickstart with something you don't know and having this approach like I want to teach about it to make sure that I understand about it, which is I must admit a bit of my approach as well. Like I love ending up teaching pretty fast when I'm investigating a new field because that's the only way to actually put your brain is not always purely backed by science or research papers. So yeah, I got you on this one.Erica Pisani (06:00)Yeah, and I don't know about you, but for me, sometimes when I'm in a rush to solve a problem, I sometimes hand wave over things I don't understand and just keep going. And when you have when you force yourself to like, okay, someone's going to ask this question, you have to understand why it's behaving in this particular way. It's so much better in the long run, but it's definitely always tempting to skip when you're when you just want to get the shiny thing working.Gael Duez (06:14)Absolutely. Yeah. And it's especially true when you've got some momentum in the field, like in green IT or IT sustainability at the moment, where there are more and more. And that's the good news. There are more and more people getting involved, talking about it, posting about it. mean, my LinkedIn be read the entire, the eight hours nonstop with this sort of constant media production, we tend to forget about the longer form of thinking, which is reading a book or preparing a course. And that helps actually to structure much more the topics you're investigating rather than just, I've heard about him. I've heard about her. she read. She did something amazing. She said something amazing. But at the end, how do you connect all the dots is really missing. That's my feeling when I'm reading too much of my LinkedIn feed, which is, guess, the only social network that I'm still active in.Erica Pisani (07:12)Yeah, no, I understand. And even just like all the newsletters available out there too. It's very overwhelming.Gael Duez (07:16)Yeah, wow. Oops. And I play guilty for the green eye one, but it's a monthly only. It's a monthly only. I choose the rhythm for the reason.Erica Pisani (07:24)It's one of the few that's like gone through my, what's the word now, my frequent like just purges of my newsletter inbox. It's managed to stay the test of time.Gael Duez (07:32)Yeah. That's a good test. Erica, let's talk a bit about QCon this year in April it was. Were you also in charge of sourcing, finding the speakers?Erica Pisani (07:51)Yeah, I was asked to be a track host. So QCon London happened in end of March, beginning of April, and I had to start doing my like, my research and reaching out in September, October of 2024. so kind of had the themes, I could make of it what I would. And I was responsible for almost creating the story that I wanted to tell in the context of performance and sustainability through the speakers that I was selecting. There were some restrictions because budgetary reasons for conferences, like on geographies. And obviously, they're hosted in London. They want to see some folks that are based in that tech community. But otherwise, the conference was really great for track hosts like myself to find who we wanted and invite them in.Gael Duez (08:42)That's a pretty prestigious name. I guess when you reach out to someone, say, hey, would you consider talking to QCon and submitting a talk, usually the door doesn't slam on your face like, wow. Excellent. So that being said, what were the top trends you witnessed in green IT? within yourErica Pisani (08:53)I'm not gonna lie, it was very helpful to be able to say I was coming from CubeCon London.Gael Duez (09:11)Sustainability and performance track in QCon London, but also feel free to elaborate a bit on the bigger conference. It's just that I'm not 100 % sure that you had the time to actually enjoy the rest of the conference, so I don't want to push you out of your conference zone thinking, oh well, I read the program, but that's pretty much it.Erica Pisani (09:29)I know I honestly, I was very glad my track was the first day because after the first day I was zonked. I can't imagine doing two days of a conference and then having to host the track. I'll start with the general theme of, guess, the wider conference from what I was able to pick out. Obviously AI is the thing right now. A lot of people are talking about AI's impact on the tech world, on the wider world. There was...Gael Duez (09:34)Can you imagine? That's a different story.Erica Pisani (09:55)Someone who, if I remember correctly, was giving a keynote even just like on design and how design is kind of being impacted in positive and negative ways with AI. There was a significant number of talks that talked about AI and if it wasn't the main feature, it was at least touched on and referenced on how it was impacting the topic that was being discussed. But would say there was still a good variety of topics being spoken about at the conference. It wasn't so dominating that it was just like QCon have become an AI conference. was just it because it's playing such a large part in software right now and has been for a couple of years. is understandably taking a lot of space in people's minds and there's a lot of questions. And so there's a lot of speakers that are stepping to the plate to talk about how AI is affecting things in different ways.Gael Duez (10:28)Yeah, AI-con.Erica Pisani (10:47)In terms of the themes of the performance and sustainability track, one of the themes that I would say, so in terms of the talks that were selected, they covered different things in general. I want to kind of talk about how you advocate maybe for sustainability initiatives at a leadership level, because one of the common questions that would come up from audience members is how do you get buy-in from the wider organization? There's a lot of software developers who listen about, yes, this does matter. We know it's important, but we still have to tell business leaders something to be able to take the time to experiment with gathering metrics, understanding what metrics do we need to gather. ⁓ As Sarah has mentioned before, I think in one of your recent episodes for Green IO, sometimes it's not entirely precise and that can be difficult to get buy-in for if it's not like you have a hundred percent certainty that these metrics are going to give you a clear picture of, let's say the carbon emissions of your software stack. And so one theme was like, okay, how do you get, how at it as an organization leader or organizational leader, how do you get buy-in from the wider organization and start adopting more sustainability practices so that you can move in the direction that you want to move? Obviously I had an AI feature there, so had someone come and talk about how to develop AI in more resource constrained environments. AI most of the time is talking about developing big LLMs with massive amounts of data. And obviously it's well known about AI's energy consumption. So I wanted to have someone be able to speak to how do you make AI performant in a smaller scale, which means that it's more sustainable.Gael Duez (12:15)Yeah. Was the speaker, Okay?Erica Pisani (12:30)Jade Abbott. So she is the CTO of Lolata AI and she's based out of South Africa and as she talks, I know the talk isn't quite, it's not live to the public yet, but she talks a little bit about how South Africa has unique constraints environment-wise. Like you can't depend on constant running electricity to be running these big, or training these large language models ⁓ for let's say like, you know, two weeks straight. So it was a really interesting talk to hear how to build those things. And then local first software is not just within a sustainability perspective, but in general, it's becoming more interesting across the board because it's a very performant way to build software. ⁓ And so that was something that we were able to highlight in this track. And obviously Sarah was on the talk and talking about, or on the track and was talking about metrics and how to gather that information. That's also a question people often have is how do information to be able to take action on it because you can't act on something that you can't measure and move toward a better outcome.Gael Duez (13:37)Did she talk about the observability versus good old metrics debate?Erica Pisani (13:42)Yes, yes she did. Yes, a little bit. She got like a lot of great stuff in the 40 minutes that she had. ⁓ And I'm actually excited when the recordings come out to rewatch it again because obviously there's so much information you take in a conference.Gael Duez (14:00)So you mentioned the buy-in being one of the main topic. What would be the two, three, four main insights that you've got from these different talks? So Sarah's talk, ⁓ who else was actually talking about the buy-in, the C-level buy-in?Erica Pisani (14:16)Ludi. And I wanted Ludi's, yeah, because she had experienced decarbonizing tech stacks ⁓ at one of her companies whose name I forget at the moment.Gael Duez (14:20)Ludi, yeah, obviously Ludi, yeah. Loomi My daughter's got one so that's pretty easy. It's a story box.Erica Pisani (14:33)Okay. Thank you. Hahahaha! Okay. That's really cool. So yeah, that was like probably the largest theme. And from there, it's like how to have more sustainable AI, how to develop more sustainable software. those were, think that like the big themes that came out of that track and that there were often a lot of questions about.Gael Duez (14:57)Okay. So now I'm going back to my previous questions. How can we get some buy-in? What were the main insights shared by Ludy and Sarah and some other speakers? Do you recall some vivid examples of things to do or not to do, actually?Erica Pisani (15:17)Well in, in Sarah's talk, she, and I, I realize it's, ⁓ it can, it can sometimes be a bit of a challenge to do this, but be okay with accepting the use of proxy metrics that are perhaps not perfect. And I think even to ask business leaders to do this is obviously a bit of a, is a bit of a challenge or like organizational leaders is a bit of a challenge, but even as a, speaking as a software engineer to have to take metrics that I know are not completely accurate is a bit challenging even for me to sit with. I think she made a very good point that it's better to have at least something that's somewhat approximate and close to what we want, and at least be able to somewhat measure it and improve it over time than to be completely blind as to what the state of the software stack is in terms of our sustainability initiatives, if we have them, or if we have certain concrete ones in the organization. And for getting buy-in,Gael Duez (16:01)And measure the evolution.Erica Pisani (16:14)Ludie, think really accurately summed it up or one of her great points anyway, was that it is a business risk ⁓ to just gloss this over. The weather is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Data centers are not necessarily going to be safe from these massive, seemingly once in a generation storms that seem to be coming every year. And taking that seriously now, even starting to get in the mindset of we need to think about this. I think it's only a matter of time and I think there's some, can't necessarily quote the specific regulations and stuff like that, but governments are starting to make it a regulatory thing. so regulatory considerations are something every business pays attention to anyway. So if you're getting on the right foot now, it makes it far less painful in the future because this this is going to come.Gael Duez (17:06)Interesting this resiliency approach because it goes so much against our culture in the tech space at the moment which is like you know there is no limit sky is a limit which is actually true sky is limited it's called the greenhouse gas emissions in the sky is the the blood limit but that's a different yeah but that's a different that's a different issueErica Pisani (17:21)The literal limit,Gael Duez (17:31)I think it's good that we have these talks and people speaking up on these and maybe rebounding on what happens around us. Like what happened in Spain and Portugal should be a wake-up call to pretty much everyone running a 24-7 infrastructure because suddenly you can have no electricity. For the moment, backup generator are available for everyone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, But hey, for how long and what is the cost actually to running all of this?Erica Pisani (18:00)Yeah, and at least closer to home for me, we had some terrible wildfires over the past number of years. Wildfire season starts increasingly earlier and earlier every year. ⁓ And I think probably the most memorable thing that happened with that wildfire season was a few years ago when the smoke from the wildfires in Canada were blanketing New York, and it seemed like an eerie Mars-like situation. ⁓Gael Duez (18:00)It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was crazy. And not so fun fact, I use in quite a lot of my public talks now, the white fire in Canada to get some proportion from people and I'll ask them what is the size of the country that is equivalent to the burnt area from these white fires? And people that don't imagine, proper answer is Nepal. then when you put it like, you know, the Nepal map on the average European country or the average even US state, it's pretty big. Suddenly, you're like, oh my god, this is insane. But the problem is it's often pushed back as some ecological concern, And the connection with our tech world is not made that much. This is why all this water stress, for data centers, or energy stress becomes that much important. And you mentioned another trend that you nurtured in your track, was efficiency, software efficiency, running software with less energy. I guess Holly Commons talked about cloud zombies, were there other insights also? And what did she mention also?Erica Pisani (19:30)Yeah. So obviously the zombie server thing is a good one. ⁓ Another one being that if I think that I'm gonna be paraphrasing here, but like efficiency is there's a limit to efficiency. There is a limit to how, and I think this is even worth noting in the sustainability context because we may take the idea that we may need to run fewer servers at a much higher degree of like utilization to help ensure that we reduce the amount of carbon emissions that we have. And there's a fine balance there where if you were to run servers maybe at too high of an efficiency, and the example that Holly had given was that of like a combustion engine, a car. There's a theoretical maximum efficiency that it has, but it's designed to run at far lower than that threshold because you don't want to wear the engine out. And similarly, that's something that we have to consider when we're trying to like resource capacity plan where we want to make sure we have enough servers to handle the amount of traffic, not as low as like, what was the quote that maybe like 12 to 18 percent of the capacity of a server's use that's obviously way too low. But we can't necessarily be at 90 to 100 percent because now we might be running the risk that our carbon emissions are related to the embodied carbon cost of having to replace our hardware frequently. And she also tied it back really well to just even like humans working way too hard all the time and needing to still take time to rest. And I think that's something that is important in a world like ours where we are trying to build more sustainable software in a world that is increasingly getting hotter. And it can sometimes feel like we need to work.at 100 % all the time to get closer to that. But I Holly's talk in that it also reminds you to rest a little bit, take care of yourself because you can't be running at 100 % all the time.Gael Duez (21:20)Do we need all of this? And all of this that far and that fast. That's super interesting what you've mentioned because it connects with two dots. first of all, what Holy Mansion is really literally backed by science and researches such as I know that I'm quoting him a lot, butErica Pisani (21:35)Yes.Gael Duez (21:52)Professor PS Lee in Singapore was like this big expert on water cooling and really study the impact on hardware of how you manage a data center in tropical area. He has provided me tons of feedback and that was one of his feedback. The hardware, it has some sort of a sweet spot for running operations. And even if it's not like the max capacity, sold by the hardware providers, actually, above a certain threshold, you're really as you say, you're significantly decreasing its lifespan. So obviously, increasing the emission via the embodied carbon, because you will have to replace sooner the gear. And so that was really connecting in my mind when you mentioned it.Erica Pisani (22:39)Yeah.Gael Duez (22:41)And it also connected to something else that we should be cautious about all this talk about how much energy we waste or how much server capacity we waste. know, in Green IO Singapore this year, we had this talk from, this AWS software engineer. He was showing this graph of how unused capacities on average you could find on a standard AWS server, And I think we should be very cautious about this theoretical number and it might be proven way lower in true operational condition. And back to the track itself, about?Erica Pisani (23:27)One of the, I think, things that was really exciting about the, like, just hosting the track too, is seeing, there seemed to be like this effect where as more people came to the different talks and people started hearing about the different topics that were in the track, there was increasingly higher amounts of people coming to the track as the day went on. And it seemed like a lot of folks...Gael Duez (23:41)Okay.Erica Pisani (23:53)We're really excited and really engaged. And I think that that's really encouraging to see that when folks are aware of the sustainability stuff that we can work on in tech that we have available to us, it seems like it's more we know what we want, we need to do, and we have some ideas of what we can do, and it's just a matter of executing on it. People are really excited to take that back to their organizations and start adopting it themselves. I know sometimes you see some talks where folks just don't know what to ask, but that's not what I saw at QCon. Everyone was super keen, which I love to see, and that made me really excited for my speakers as well, because I'm glad that they got to see just how excited people were about sustainable tech.Gael Duez (24:44)and having a lot of questions is always a very good sign for a speaker, that's for sure. And actually, it connects with a question I wanted to ask you, all this momentum and people showing up more and more over the day, because I was wondering, why did you choose to name your track Sustainably and Performance? And was it the only angle performance to attract devs attention? Was it like if you had mentioned only sustainly or green IT, was it not enough? What is your explanations for this choice?Erica Pisani (25:21)well, I have to admit, I didn't get to necessarily call the track that like it came in as performance and sustainability. I can make some tweaks to it, but for the most part, it was like, we have this idea that we would like this track to be this. do you feel comfortable playing together a track for this? And I think though, that it was well named because I think.Gael Duez (25:25)Okay. Okay.Erica Pisani (25:43)Like performance is something that a lot of software developers usually, that's often the stuff that they're running into in their day-to-day works and something that's very front of mind. They're dealing with like too slow of an application in this respect or ⁓ this database isn't responding well in this capacity. And so they're looking for solutions and ideas on how they can tackle the performance challenges that they maybe have and their organization, or they're anticipating that there will be challenges and want to know ahead of time. That being said, think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other. And I thought I'd like, as I was building the track that angle I thought was very important to me because you the best of both worlds in this sense. You can look to build performance software and by looking to build performance software, you can work toward creating a more sustainable future with the tech that you're building. And I didn't want it to seem like you had to pick either or. There is a lot of opportunities for both. was also why I really doubled down on that title for the track.Gael Duez (26:56)Yeah, makes sense. Anyway, if this is a wording that would attract people, I think you made a really good choice to use it to make sure that your room is full and then they got exposed to great content. If the room is empty, mean, that's pointless to have like the most technical possible talk on sustainability in scope one and two and three and four and what not. I got your point.Erica Pisani (27:18)Yeah, but it is good even just to have a, almost like if you can envision the software that you ultimately have at the end of the day that happens to be sustainable and ultimately I want to see a sustainable future and so it's a little bit like I'm pulling that messaging in a bit. I think it makes it more real for people. It doesn't feel like an abstract theory.Gael Duez (27:26)I completely got it. I've got a question. I'm always curious about what is mentioned when people are talking about sustainability and planetary boundaries and the likes. Was it like mostly about carbon and energy or where other environmental impacts such as water, resource exhaustion, et cetera, et cetera, also mentioned?Erica Pisani (28:02)⁓ Water resources and stuff like that was mentioned in the talks themselves. Holly both called that out specifically in their talks. For the folks that were on the other side, the attendees, they tended to think more in terms of the energy.Gael Duez (28:09)Okay.Erica Pisani (28:18)Not to say that they weren't thinking also about the water usage and stuff like that, but I think usually when folks were asking questions, it was more like, want to reduce the energy consumption of my data center to reduce my emissions more than it's consuming X liters of water every day.Gael Duez (28:34)Which makes sense because this is their main proxy metrics to act like on day one. If you decide to migrate your cloud or even to do like carbon aware computing, it requires the DevOps and the Ops and sometimes the SysAdmin to be put in the loop and it's a longer game and QoCon being really focused on Dev and DevOps, starting with energy makes a lot of what you shared is very positive news because I remember that three years ago in main tech conference just talking about energy savings was really a Revolution and now if it goes beyond and some talks mention also water That's a very positive sign. OkayErica Pisani (29:16)Yeah, and even those metrics, like we're getting better at tracking them, but Ludie called out in her talk, like it can be difficult to get really concrete measurements sometimes on that alone. And so if we're looking to gather more information on, let's say, water usage, that's going to be something that we'll have to advocate for with our cloud providers to start giving us more information in that respect as well.Gael Duez (29:23)Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. makes lot of sense. Okay, so Erica, thanks a lot for the wrap-up of this five talks at QCon London. Can I ask you one last, maybe two last questions? What's next for you in the Sustainably Area, of course?Erica Pisani (29:48)Of course. There's a few different things I'd like to look at on the side for myself. I've had a few different ideas kicking in my head, partially inspired by some of the talks I'd seen at QCon and just from following other folks in the field. One of them being because I, in my role right now at the financial tech company, we use Django, which is like a framework that's been around for ages. And I can't remember who the person was on Blue Sky that kind of gave me this friendly nudge, but there was this whole discussion happening in a Django forum of people trying to figure out how to best measure like carbon emissions or energy usage of Django apps. And there wasn't necessarily some good consensus on it. And so that's something that I'm hoping to take a look at at some point with what free time I have. ⁓ And then otherwise I'm still just trying to learn from everyone else right now. And what I am learning and at least having some ideas about it and blogging about. So that's kind of what's next for me right now.Gael Duez (30:41)Okay, interesting sense. And you mentioned resources and stuff that you've learned. Would you like to share with the audience your main sources of information, except for QCon London, obviously, this year?Erica Pisani (31:11)Yeah, I really like following the folks at the Green Software Foundation. Sometimes I'll take a look at, they have working groups that are looking at like developing papers on let's say recently, I think they did a working group on AI and I'm just interested in seeing what they're thinking of in terms of developing more sustainable AI. I also like following, I don't know his last name, but his first name is Wilco and he's very active in. Yes. So he's someone that I follow and just like pay attention to as well as, yeah, and Sasha Luciani, even though I don't work in AI, I still love listening to, or not necessarily listening to, but what she writes, I tend to read as well. And then I listen to Green IO, which is also how I've been getting some of my information.Gael Duez (31:43)He's amazing. Yeah, thanks a lot. Okay, thanks a lot for this. And maybe to close the podcast on our usual positive piece of news, would you like to share something? I know that you're based in North America, so it's not that easy at the moment, but would you like to share a positive piece of news regarding sustainability or life in general? I don't know. ⁓Erica Pisani (32:12)Yeah, sure. Like I mentioned before, I got like really interested in edge computing. I like I've gone deep down that rival hole of understanding more about how people are investing it and how it's growing over the years. And I think something that's got me really excited, and that makes me like, I consider a wonderful piece of good news is that as more distributed computing, obviously distributed computing is a thing already, but as it gets more adopted in an edge computing sense, there's really cool opportunities for things like smaller edge data centers incorporated into maybe urban environments where the data centers can heat buildings. And by being able to be used in that way, we can actually significantly reduce carbon emissions of heating buildings, which is a major, major source of carbon emissions. And that, I don't know why I'm nerding out so much about that, but I think that's an amazing piece of news, especially being in a colder climate like Canada.Gael Duez (33:13)Yeah, I was about to say that in tropical area, that's kind of the opposite. what do you do with this extra heat? And, know, to bounce back on what you said, this edge computing and this CDN stuff and all of the likes is really something that I'm trying to investigate more and more because on one hand, yes, it can be the case at having, you know, less network to travel through, we can reduce somehow not the immediate environmental footprint of data because it has almost zero elasticity, but the would say midterm long term sizing of the overall network. it makes sense like to have computing capacity closer to the end user. But on the other end, if you look at how the world is decarbonizing, there are huge gaps. And I'm always wondering, if I'm going to try to take a North American example, but if I've got users based in Ohio, do I really want to do edge computing in Ohio far as I remember, the grid is pretty dirty there. Rather than hosting most of my server capacity in Quebec, where I think it's one of the lowest carbon electricity grid in North America. this trade-off, I think I've never seen any article, any research paper truly embracing it and trying to tackle it. So correct me if I'm wrong. And if any listener had some research paper, please send them my way. But yeah, that's a real challenge for me. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say because you're the edge expert. like, you know, talking about it, but I've got an expert. So I'm going to ask the question to the experts.Erica Pisani (35:09)No, don't worry. So the question is more like how to balance like having edge data centers, let's say in dirtier grids compared to just hosting in. Yeah, no, that's a very good question. And I think I would also be very interested in this research paper should it exist. I think that is one of those things that it's gonna be one of those.Gael Duez (35:22)HahahaErica Pisani (35:32)Design architectural decisions because to your point, if I'm in North America and I, you know, being based in Toronto, I have this wonderful data center that is one of the greenest in the grid, not that like a four hour drive away from me. I would rather use that data center and test whether hosting stuff at the edge in Toronto makes from the reduction in the distance traveled of the request, does that make a meaningful difference to host that stuff here where we may need to be burning in the middle of winter fossil fuels to be able to supply the electricity grid? Or is it better to just rely entirely on the data center? I don't have necessarily a good concrete answer for that, but I think that there would, I would love to see there be tests done on that because depending on, I guess, the fossil fuel that's being used in that particular grid, there can be a very meaningful difference to hosting everything on the data center, not leveraging the edge, versus leveraging the edge heavily and getting the reduction in emissions from not having the request travel as far.Gael Duez (36:41)Agree. If you ever want to resume your studies and do a PhD, you've got a research topic. But anyway, well, thanks a lot, Erica. That was cool to do this wrap up episode about QCon. I wonder if the listeners will enjoy it as well. So please feel free to comment.Erica Pisani (36:49)Yeah, I have lots of material now. Gael Duez (37:06)Because if so, we will do more. are other great tech conferences also that are focusing more and more on sustainability, but it was also great meeting you. I was not aware of how involved you were in the field, so I'm very glad that we connected now. So thanks a lot for joining the show.Erica Pisani (37:21)Thank you again so much for having me. This was a blast.Gael Duez (37:25)Low carbon blast. Talk to you soon, Erica.Erica Pisani (37:27)Low carbon blast, yes, always. You too, take care.Gaël Duez (37:39)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech. Now, if you enjoy this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with fellow software practitioners seems also a good idea, if they couldn't attend QCon this year. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board.In our next episode, we will welcome Rainer Karcher, a pillar of the SustainableIT.org association and a climate activist in a suit, as he likes to describe himself. We will talk about the importance of not deprioritizing future readiness, which is what is the current backlash against ESG doing, and what IT and digital has to do with it. Stay tuned.By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. New York was a blast last month and the next one is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. As a Green IO listener, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIPJust make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

Laetitia Bornes, a Doctor in Human-Computer Interaction and Systems Engineering, discusses the complexities of modeling in climate science, using Vinted's claims on avoided carbon emissions as a lens. She critiques oversimplified models and emphasizes the need for transparency and credibility in scientific research. The conversation also highlights the importance of systems thinking and the innovative concept of 'protopia,' advocating for realistic paths toward sustainability. Expect insights on how education and long-term thinking can reshape our approach to climate change.

In this insightful discussion, Laetitia Bornes, a researcher with a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction who specializes in sustainability, challenges the carbon-negative claims of platforms like Vinted. She dives into the complexities of rebound effects in tech, revealing how profitability often undermines sustainability goals. The talk exposes the methodological pitfalls in measuring avoided emissions and advocates for a systemic approach to designing environmentally-conscious tech that truly benefits society.

Description“It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering.”Some down-to-earth facts and analysis were coined by Pr PS Lee, one of the world's top experts in liquid cooling - and Pr. Heng Wang - a renowned expert in digital governance - while cross-analysing Singapore’s main challenges from an infrastructure and governance perspective of the ongoing AI Boom. Among the topics covered in this discussion with Gael Duez were: The lack of standards and the need for holistic approachesOur imperfect, incomplete and unpredictable knowledge on AIThe fit for purpose approach with the right mix of cooling solutionDealing with legacy datacenter infrastructureThe moratorium on new data center and the other tools used by the Singapore government to cap energy consumptionThe carrot and stick approach to manage the environmental impacts And much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in New York on May 14th and 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Pr. Poh Seng Lee's LinkedInPr. Heng Wang's LinkedInGreen IO website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Pr. Lee and Pr. Wang's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:𝘈𝘥𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘎𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning EngineersOpen Compute ProjectSingapore Green Data Center RoadmapTranscript (auto-generated)Prof PS Lee (00:01)It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering. I think for high-power AI workloads, then think going with liquid cooling, I think it's almost becoming the standard solution. But then not to forget, you also have storage, you have networking equipment. So these are actually typically the lower power,Gaël Duez (00:24)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech. One last thing. This episode is a bit special because it was recorded live from Green IO Singapore two weeks ago. The sound quality isn't as good as you have been used to, but the quality of the guests is as good as ever. Enjoy the episode.Gael Duez (01:33)We’re live and we're doing this fire chat session at Green IO Singapore, second edition, and we're trying something new, which is recording live with all the technical hiccups that happened for the last 20 minutes. So my dear listeners, you didn't experience them, but the participants, did. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor P.S. Lee and Professor Heng Wang to discuss the environmental footprint of AI, but from a very hands-on perspective based on the city-state of Singapore, because both of them are experts, Professor PS Lee from an infrastructure perspective, Professor Heng from a governance perspective. So how does this rise in energy consumption, resource consumption caused by the AI boom is concretely impacting the infrastructure of Singapore and the way Singapore governs its digitalization. Without further notice, I would love to leave the ground to Professor Heng Wang. Can you briefly introduce yourself?Pr PS Lee (02:34)First, thanks for having me. I'm Poh Seng or PS Lee from both Energy Studies Institute as well as Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Singapore. So my personal research centers around data center liquid cooling. So I've been working on this for past three to five years. Liquid cooling is not new but associated with the demand for AI now becomes almost as a part of requirement in order to sort of unleash the AI performance. But I more importantly is that the switch from conventional air cooling to liquid cooling, it can actually result in very significant energy savings as well as carbon footprint reduction. So think that to me is actually the more important question, how do we actually take advantage of various technologies to manage the carbon footprint of the industry so that we can allow the growth in the most sustainable fashion. Gael Duez (03:30)Okay, thanks a lot. Professor Wang. Prof Heng Wang (03:38)Thank you for having me here. Singapore Management University, Newport House School of Law. Before that I was a professor at the University of South Wales in Sydney. I work on the governance of digitalisation and sustainability. So the issue is about how do we align digitalisation with sustainability and one of the core issues about how do we navigate through the uncertainties because we are not necessarily have all the knowledge about that. How do we use the regulation governance, different tools to align the two together. And also I contribute to World Economic Forum, governance alliance from the perspective of responsible users. Gaël Duez (04:10)Quite a lot to deal with. So without further notice, let's jump right into the main question. What is according to both of you the main issues, the main pitfalls with this current AI boom in your fields of expertise?Prof PS Lee (04:34)I think for the infrastructure side, the industry has been operating air-based systems for the longest time, the past three, four decades. So while liquid cooling is not new, think in general the industry does not actually have a lot of practitioners that are familiar with the design as well as the operations of liquid cooling infrastructure.So I think there will be a period whereby there's quite a bit of learning as well as training that's actually necessary so that we actually equip the industry practitioner with the necessary know-how as well as tools to solve design and operate the liquid cooling infrastructure. Then obviously one of the natural questions is actually what about the CAPEX indication? We also gained the switching from liquid cooling to air cooling the demand while it's picking up is certainly not at the same volume as airbase is now. So that's why it's still the perceived delta in terms of the CAPEX Then I think even the more challenging is actually existing infrastructure. How do we actually allow wind retrofit of your existing data centers in a cost-effective fashion. So I think these are some of the issues.the other is actually standards. think currently there is a lack of standards while there have been various guidelines, for example from ASHRAE, from OCP. But think there isn't a very well established standard when it comes to the new AI infrastructure. So I think it really needs to be a power-tracking of both the technical, the technology development as well as the governance including the standards.Pr. Heng Wang (06:20)I think I agree what you have said, standard is one issue. From governance perspective, or from knowledge perspective, I think we have a number of major issue. First, about knowledge. So if you use AI, AI is fast developing. have an issue about we have imperfect knowledge about AI, it's kind of beta version. And secondly, we do not have complete knowledge.because you you mentioned about cooling, mentioned about energy transition, know, e-waste, and different context, finance and other sectors, so you have silos. You knowledge are not really distributed as much as we want. Certainly also, it's also been an issue about unpredictability, so the social response to AI is an issue. If you think about AI will compete with your drinking water, the feedback to that will be different. So that's the knowledge side.imperfect knowledge, incomplete knowledge and unpredictability. From governance perspective, we have mismatches. Mismatches about one is if you look at horizontally, your short-term and long-term consideration. Short-term you want to roll out fast. You also have a bottom-up decision. You have the use cases long-term, you have a susceptibility. And also you look at the governance levels. have domestic ones, sub-national ones, to regional ones, to international ones, which has been pretty tricky nowadays.And also if you look at the issue of the silo solution earlier, you also have to break that. So that's come back to the issue, how do we build the knowledge? And how do we engage with stakeholders at different levels and to forge the standards and also to evolve over time?Gael Duez (07:58)two questions to dive a bit on what you say. First of all, Professor Lee, it seems to me that you made the assumption that liquid cooling was the de facto solution to solve maybe partially the energy crisis caused by AI, but is it the only one? mean, if you take a step back and you position yourself as like an almighty father of Singapore, of Singapore's infrastructure, would you say, okay,We need to go all in into liquid cooling, retrofit everything like this or is there different ways, different approaches that we should follow?Pr PS Lee (08:38)It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering. I think for high-power AI workloads, then think going with liquid cooling, I think it's almost becoming the standard solution. But then not to forget, you also have storage, you have networking equipment. So these are actually typically the lower power, so you don't really mix to go to link cooling.But even in AI, if you look at for example training versus inferencing, especially the later, inferencing you probably don't really require super high power chips. So in that regard, you can probably go with some of the air-based solutions, but maybe going from the conventional what we call the perimeter cooling involving crack-claw to a roll-based solution like in-roll coolers or rear door exchanger, which allows you to cool higher airflow rate.such an AI influencing hardware. So I think it's always a case of fit for purpose.Gael Duez (09:41)And in the case of, just for the listeners who are not super familiar with the wording, AB is air based cooling So, for a city like Singapore, did you manage to estimate the share of the current infrastructure that should be sort of retrofit toward liquid cooling and the share that should go as it is today?Pr PS Lee (10:04)I think Singapore is actually quite unique because we have a moratorium about three years ago because back then, data center industry is consuming 7 % of electricity, obviously it's 7 % so it's actually huge. The government actually has its net zero commitment and obviously it's also concerned about the energy demand so that's why a moratorium was actually put in place which was actually finally lifted.Thereafter, actually have a data center called for applications. But if you look at the licenses that were actually awarded, they are just averaging about 20 million. So I think for a mature data center market like Singapore, the reality or the fact is you have a bigger stock of existing data centers. Or you can call it legacy or ground-fuel data center. So I think the solutions that we should be looking at, whether or not you do liquid cooling or more efficient air-based solutions.will be quite different compared to example Malaysia in particular, Johor Bahru because there's a lot of new data centers that are coming online. So for them, I suppose right from day one, they can actually start by designing or incorporating the coolant into the infrastructure. But for a merchant market like Singapore, I think likely we'll have to do it in phases.without undue interruptions to ongoing operations, as well as undue delta in terms of the CAPEX But I feel that for mature data center markets like Singapore, the green retrofit data center, in fact, will be a lot more needle moving in terms of bringing down the carbon footprint compared to emerging markets like Malaysia.Gael Duez (11:53)That's interesting the connection with the governance issue when you mentioned the moratorium that happened three years ago. mean, what is today in your view, Professor Wang, the balance you mentioned like short term, long term, how do you believe that Singapore would position itself in this fast rhythm regarding AI adoption and even like investment in new infrastructure, retrofitting infrastructure and likePr. Heng Wang (12:21)That is a great question. It involves the issue about understanding the costs and benefits. So you have to actually, it's a trade-off, which is a very difficult one. So I think it's very important to understand the risks, to build the knowledge It's only in this way you can make the informed decision. So that would be very important for the government's arrangements to understand what's happening, what's likely to happen. And you need foresight.AI now is a landscape, move much faster. Like if you think of a highway in the past, you have 100 kilometers or 200 kilometers. Now it's 1,000, 20,000 depends on the speed of the development. So I think the first important step is actually we have to build a network of the stakeholders to understand risks and also the short-term and long-term considerations of that.specifically you probably need to take more concrete measures like the Carrot and stick to launch towards that. So for example, for understanding risks, whether you want to encourage disclosure, disclosure of CO2 emissions, water consumption, so e-waste and other things, or you want to...efficient labeling as we have done before you you utilize the adaptive existing tool for that or index or verification there could be also be industry use case for verification it's not only about the cost of money you can make money in a sense of it you can be as an ethical leader in that regard and those kind of things or you want to think of a monitoring forecast and also the early warning for exampleI looking at thinking also being, it's also about the technology side, which I looked at earlier, is that whether it's also useful to train the AI models with those kind of training principles. So in this way, actually even if you use a prompt answer to the prompts, bearing in mind those kind of issues. And also you should like, whether you're thinking of what something you can do now, like the tendering offering requirements. So if have a project, and you'refor energy efficiency, so you have raised to top instead of raised to bottom. So there are other things you can do. You think about whether regulate AOMs and others. So I think a coherent approach and engage with different stakeholders and use different tools will be very important to make that happen.Gael Duez (14:50)And if I can wrap up what you said, it's all about gathering the different stakeholders and using a mix of carrot and sticks. Could you maybe provide one or two examples of each in Singapore? Did the Singapore authority, maybe government, maybe governmental bodies, started to use the stick? I mean, they used a pretty big stick when they forbidden any new data center facilities three years ago.but it has been lifted now. But what sort of sticks do you from the Singapore government, and what sort of carrots?Pr. Heng Wang (15:27)I think that's actually as mentioned, you mentioned example the government may take measures about the developments of new data center, that's one example as you mentioned. But also that Singapore has a green data center roadmap. That's also been a way where they're trying to promote water and energy efficiency because actually if you have energy consumption over a certain threshold, then you are expected to have those kind of monitoring or the water usage of that.think that's maybe probably more things to be done because this is a very new area. that's the reason why, mentioned earlier, that you can't think of adapting existing tools for that. Instead, everything starts from scratch. So that's the issue about when you talk about carrot and stick, energy and that going as mentioned earlier will be one way where you can give a reward because consumers will know what it means. Or for large energy models, you never requirement things, taming what are the energy consumption of that. So consumers may choose which energy actually more environmentally friendly. So what I try to make is that actually we have to think creatively and adapt to that. But not necessarily everything will be able to do that. One example is environment impact assessment. This is a tool which is difficult to apply because it's, you know...So I just want to say that you have to adapt and risk one, but also think about developing new ones.Gael Duez (16:51)I think the Singapore green data center roadmap was mentioned earlier today by the IMDA representative Dr. Lawrence Wee But it has been something that has been existing prior to the AI boom. Is it correct?Pr PS Lee (17:09)There was an earlier version, I think they called it the Green Data Center Research Roadmap. So I think even back then, I think they mentioned things like liquid cooling, but I think the latest version which was actually launched last year is really about pushing for accelerated adoption of various solutions. I think like what Prof. mentioned, it really has to be done holistically. It's not just...one singular solution like liquid cooling. You also need to look at the details right, are you still end up rejecting the heat, are you still end up consuming a lot of water operating the wet cooling towels. So I think the Green Data Center roadmap the latest edition I think it actually sort of put up a holistic kind of framework right, so that operators as well as their so-called partners, vendors, equipment vendors.consultant can really adopt a holistic mindset in terms of looking at different aspects all the way from the procurement of your energy sources to the adoption of some of the latest energy-efficient solutions including liquid cooling to possibly recovering waste and actually putting it to productive end-use. So I see that as a progression.But I think for me the next step in my view is really to come up with a holistic green or sustainable data center standard. I think we have different pieces, including I think one of the new standards that me together with my colleagues among the audience that's developing essentially on the liquid cooling standard. But I think it's more than just liquid cooling. So I think really I look forward to Singapore showing the leadership to establish a holistic standard for green or sustainable data.Gael Duez (19:05)And just from our understanding, the roadmap as it is today, it's a set of best practices and things like that, but there is nothing compulsory at the moment. There is nothing sort of related to what the European Union did with the energy efficiency directive. But now, if you're above a certain power capacity for your data center, you need to waste heat as you mentioned, share of energy renewable. This sort of reporting, is it already in place in Singapore or not yet?Pr PS Lee (19:38)what it would extend that the EU is doing but I think what we can see is actually IMDA and EDB is actually tying for example the PCCF8 to for example the green data center roadmap as well as the green mark for data center 3G green and 4 version so I think it still serves the purpose of actually really compelling the industry to sort of be very intentional as well as be very theholistic in terms of assessing the different aspects that would actually lead to the more sustainable operation of the data centers.Gael Duez (20:14)And maybe to close this fire chat, can we reverse the question? What do you see both of you as the greatest opportunity leveraging AI for sustained purpose in Singapore?Pr. Heng Wang (20:30)Yeah, I just been seeing a lot of new ways that AI provides the possible way to do with that. So something I'm thinking of, you know, can use AI to simulate. So if you different governance or regulator arrangements, you could have agents. And then you can think about using AI to simulate what an outcome of that would be. So that probably will inform your decisions, you know, and also bring the different positions of actors into that.And of course, AI will be used in the allocation of the energy resources and even allocation of the human resources for free energy generation, so on and so forth. So many ways that we need to explore.Gael Duez (21:10)And just a side question because I didn't mention it in the introduction but you're an expert in blockchain techniques, not necessarily cryptocurrency but blockchain use. Do you see any related use between the AI boom which is a machine learning boom, now let's be honest, it's just a marketing trick to name it AI, and blockchain today or for you are there still two separate topics?Pr. Heng Wang (21:36)Yeah, I'm not sure about blockchain technology expert, but I think that actually blockchain will be one way that nowadays we're thinking of synergize or work with the AI. So people even in the area like finance, example, or FinTech areas also looking to the AI's more important use of that, including how do you leverage technologies to do the compliance, regulatory compliance, for example, if you have an environmental.regular requirements, whether we can use blockchain and other tools to make that happen, and AI to assist that process. So that's also been a possible way that we try to explore. But we have to see what are the rules by that. So for example, people may say we want regulation by design. So we require you to have the designer to build into your green stability in your AI or similar arrangements to make sure you comply with the requirements.Pr PS Lee (22:27)Pr Wang already mentioned that can obviously leverage on AI for the simulating performance, can use it for optimizing the operations of the data centers. But I think the other aspect which I think really the AI can be sort of leveraged on is actually to orchestrate your computing, your power and cooling. Currently it's done in silosBut if you are able to time the workload to match with the availability of green electrons, then obviously you can actually better reduce the operational carbon. So see AI has a lot of potential in various aspects. In fact, can even leverage on AI for the entire life cycle of the data center, all the way from design, operation to end of life.Gael Duez (23:15)Thanks a lot, of you. That was the first time we record live a podcast. I hope that, I mean, the sound obviously would not be studio quality sound, but I hope it will be understandable. Thanks a lot to the audience for attending. It was a great exercise. And yes, let's meet next year.Pr PS Lee (23:32)Thank you.Gaël Duez (23:36)Thank you for listening to this live episode from Green IO Singapore. Don't forget to share it on social media or directly with other data center practitioners. Our next episode will not be about the AI energy score. We had to postpone its recording, but with Letitia Bornes to talk about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to digital technologies. It will be based on a study she co- authored about Vinted, the massive second-hand platform. Stay tuned.By the way, we decided to open our Slack workspace to our listeners willing to get involved in the making and the promotion of the GreenIo Podcast and its newsletter. The link in the show notes and you're more than welcome to join. One last thing, visit greenio.tech to check our next conferences. New York is in two weeks. The lineup is a blast. And as usual, you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 10 remainingtickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists build a greener digital world.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O’Reilly. Since Tim Frick’s book “Designing for sustainability” (8 years ago!), O’Reilly didn’t publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So, it’s a fair statement that this book was long awaited. But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why Sarah Hsu, one of its 3 co-authors as well as the chair of the Green Software Foundation’s Principles of Green Software committee, joined the show to talk about the trends she witnesses first hand in the green software engineering field and how she would envision a v2. More specifically she talked about:    🌟 GreenOps being the new kid in the block   👨‍🏫 What FinOps can teach to GreenOps   📈 How SRE can help treating environmental metrics like any other business metrics   🕵️‍♀️ The hard truth about the four nine    📏 Progress made in measurement   🔬 What the Rumsfeld’s Metrics can tell us about the difference between monitoring and observability   🚧 Why it should always be space and time for deviationAnd much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday! And now, you can join us on the Green IO Slack.📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO Singapore is next week on April 15th and 16th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Sarah's LinkedInGreen IO Website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.Sarah's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Building Green Software (O’Reilly)Green Software Foundation and the Green Software Foundation PatternsSarah's Qcon London talkSarah's talk at CamundaConCNCF Kepler projectSoftware Carbon Intensity standardGoogle SRE bookHoneycomb’s O’Reilly Book Observability EngineeringExtending the OpenTelemetry Java Auto-Instrumentation Agent to Publish Green Software MetricsClimate Product Management PlaybookTranscript (auto-generated)Sarah (00:01)I'm a strong believer that we, Software Practitioner, should follow suit with what SRE are already doing. We have to treat the environmental metric like any other monitoring metric and use it to drive critical business decisions.Gaël Duez (00:15)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month, on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favourite podcast platform and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O'Reilly. Since Tim Frick's book, Designing for Sustainability, eight years ago, O'Reilly didn't publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So it's a fair statement that this book was long awaited.And watching the line during the book signing at Green IO London last year, I guess its launch was a success. But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why I'm delighted to have the last of the Building Green Software's co-authores, who didn't join the show yet, to be with me today, Sarah Hsu, to talk about the trends she witnesses firsthand in the green software engineering field. Based in London, Sarah is a pillar of the Green Software Foundation where she chairs the Principles of Green Software Engineering institution as Site Reliability Engineer. And on top of being an author, she's also a regular speaker at Kubernetes Community Day, LeanAgile and GreenIO conferences. Welcome to GreenIO, Sarah. And first of all, congrats for your Tech Woman 100 Award last year. How does it feel?Sarah (02:21)Hi, Gaël I'm so excited to be here. I love, welcome to Green IO spill. You say that all the time. I feel like sometimes I can hear it in my sleep, you know.Gaël Duez (02:34)Excellent.Sarah (02:35)But anyway, yeah, thank you for asking about the award. Winning it, it did feel great. And while it's fantastic to have my own hard work recognized, and it really is a celebration for everyone who has been part of my journey. It honors the dedication of my incredible teams, my work team, my GSF team, and of course, my book team and it's celebration of the success of all our project. And I guess personally, I think the most important thing that came out of this is that it's a massive, massive kudos to every single person who has invested their time and effort to support me along the way. And that includes you, Gaël things like we met two three years ago at the very, very inception of like green software and green IO.Gaël Duez (03:30)I wasn't expecting to be included in this amazing crowd that you gathered around you I'm a bit surprised, but happily surprised. Thanks a lot. And I have to say that it's great because this recognition, it really highlights that sustainability is a teamwork, but it also shed a very positive light on sustainably being a hot topic in the IT industry and I think we need all these positive signs, especially at the moment. So, congratulations again.Sarah (04:06)Thank you.Gaël Duez (04:07)And without further notice, the I don't know how million dollar question, but actually it could be a Gartner title for one of their study. According to you, what are the main trends that you see in green software since a year ago, since the release of your book?Sarah (04:29)Well, how much time do we have? I'm joking.Gaël Duez (04:32)Between two to three hours. No joking.Sarah (04:35)Hopefully we're not here that long. Well, the space, the green software space has exploded in the past couple of years. Like look at Green IO and the popularity and the engagement has just been amazing. So I guess the first and foremost trend I think is the people, right? The incredible people that we have all met in the past couple of years have been absolutely wonderful.There really is a real sense of camaraderie. People are here all to learn from each other, to help each other. We are comparing nodes and most importantly, we're celebrating every single little wing within the space. And even though the space really, really has exploded in the past year, we're still in a critical stage of raising awareness among the wider software community. And personally for me, my keynote at Ling Agile, Eddinger Conference last year is one of those moments I probably would never forget. The energy of the crowd that day, it was just incredible. And how appreciative people were of my talk and my time. It really made all those late night and weekend sacrifice worthwhile. So yeah, I think that's the first trend. And it's not strictly technical, but still so important to highlight and hopefully serve as an encouragement to all our listeners out there. We should keep it going. We've got to continue this broken radio energy in every single direction we can to make green software. Not the afterthought, but the first thing everyone discuss in any technical meetings.Gaël Duez (06:20)And I do agree that I can feel this energy and growing concern and the growing commitment of many responsible technologists, would say, whether they work in design, ops, cloud, you know, obviously software development, et cetera, et cetera. Do you have any other trends on top of this people trend, I would say, then don't worry, I've got plenty of much more technical questions.Sarah (06:47)Okay. Yeah. So the second trend, I guess I want to mention is the realization that green software really is not an ivory tower. We're not asking the overstretched engineering team to work on something completely new. The way we see green software is that it integrates seamlessly with software engineering practices. And it really isn't here to disrupt your established workflows. And I guess that nicely leads me to my next trend, GreenOps. I know I feel like we need to make a catchy tune for GreenOps. So yeah, Gaël, maybe that's something you can help us out since green IO opening is so catchy. But GreenOps is getting very catchy and it is the most trendy kid on the block right now. And just so everyone is clear, when we talk about GreenOps, we mean green DevOps, not the fossils. But yeah, guess green DevOps is here to rule us all. So I would say that is the third trend that I've seen for the past year.Gaël Duez (07:58)So I would say to wrap it up, first trend, people, large awareness raising movement amongst people working in our Second trend will be, we're not in an ivory tower and we need to connect to every other specialties building amazing software to make it work. third is definitely green DevOps, be more precise. On this one, actually I have a question. Is it a leader or is it a follower of the FinOps movement? And by that I mean that we talked a lot about the mutual reinforcement of GreenOps and FinOps especially for all the tech stack based on cloud and especially public cloud services.Do you see this reinforcement happening and do you believe that the rise in GreenDevOps has been mostly fueled by the rise in FinOps or are they two separate movements enjoying mutual co-benefits?Sarah (08:56)Again, I'm saying in on behalf of myself, I personally think GreenOps extends really naturally from DevOps and FinOps. And I think GreenOps is, can stand on its own weight, but FinOps is just a lot more mature in the space and it's already had amazing framework and not a lot of thought process going out against it. So yeah, I personally think FinOps and GreenOps. They are basically just two sides of the same point and they have the same goal, right? Which is optimization. and I believe that we, we're soft engineers, right? We are inherently lazy people. So why would we want to reinvent the wheels? Why will we not incorporate try and tested practices that the FinOps people has already done for us to achieve this optimization utopia? If you know what I mean. So yeah, I know there are some really strong arguments against using cost as proxy for estimating software's carbon emission. And I tend to agree. However, we really should not overlook the important lessons that FinOps is trying to teach us. Firstly, it's all about accountability, Sustainability is no longer just an ethical headache.It's every single person's responsibility, from the finance people to legal to operations to HR and of course to us engineers. We all really need to play our part the second point in my opinion is all about transparency. We need that transparency to empower everyone. If the legal guy who sits two rows behind us can't feel that sense of accomplishment, why would there be an incentive to take part, right? And lastly, I think the most important point that FinOps already outlined for us is the knockoff benefits or as we would like to call it in the book, co-benefits.One of the messages we really, really want to get out there with the book is the core benefits of green software. So yeah, similar to FinOps, achieving cost optimization has loads and loads of knock-on benefits.Gaël Duez (11:10)That's very clear. mean, there are technical debates. You mentioned one that cost is not the best proxy for carbon emission, water consumption, etc. I would say that at the beginning of the journey, usually their best friends at some point, they might diverge a bit. That being said, You said you see a very strong trend in the GreenOps movements. Is it more on awareness or do you already see tools and patterns? You mentioned that FinOps is much more mature when it comes to framework and tooling, et cetera, et cetera. Do you see some no brainer techniques or patterns or frameworks being adopted in the GreenOps movement or are we still in a would say searching and exploration mode.Sarah (12:01)I think, yes, a lot of the things are already being adopted in the grown-up space, but people just don't realize they're already doing it, if that makes sense. I'll give you an example, right, like automation. Like automation has been everyone's best sidekick for people from SREs to devops to engineers to testers, automation is there to allow us to continue to the bandwidth to innovate, to work on exciting business problems, right? And automation is not just a way to achieve in DevOps. Automation also have loads of other co-benefits when you think about it through the GreenOps perspective.Gaël Duez (12:50)I would say that I see these adoptions and especially in automation, getting a lot of interest. I'm still concerned about the gap between willingness and action. Which leads me to this very related question. In the chapter on operational efficiency, was it monitoring? I don't remember, but that's okay. You mentioned that reliability engineer and sustainably advocate should be best friends. And Wilco, who's a regular listener of the show and I were discussing about it. And his question was a very pragmatic question that he wanted to ask you. Where are sustainable site reliability operational practices hitting a roadblock? And what should be the key focus to drive them forward in 2025?Sarah (13:40)Right, so I guess the biggest roadblock, not just for SRE or sustainable advocates or anyone really, is the measurement piece. We really can't improve what we can't measure. I guess speaking as an SRE, we really, really need that standardized real-time metric across the board. We SREs have like perfected production monitoring in the last 10 years. So if the sustainable people really have this metric ready for SREs, we can then just throw this metric over the fence and have them start treating it like one of the golden signals. the four golden signals of production and monitoring, or as I would like to call them similarly in the book. the fore horseman of matrix based monitoring, a latency traffic error and saturation. So, so yeah, what that means is that we SREs use them alone with the concepts of SLO and SLI, service level objectives and service level indicators to serve our clients. And I'm hoping, I'm really hoping that everyone who's in the software business can agree with me that everything we do, really everything we do comes down to our clients, right?It really is measuring, but we really shouldn't be inventing the world of how we should treat this real time metric. We really should be using the concepts of SLOs and SLIs and aeroboject to drive the actual needs of what our client wants. Right? For example, I can go on and on and on. Sorry.Gaël Duez (15:05)But I'd love to listen to your example.Sarah (15:25)Okay, so for example, if any of those fancy new feature we talked about is going to disrupt one of SLOs, then why are we really even pushing out the new features? We should be looking at how to stay true to our promises to our clients based on the service level agreements and service level objective that we have established already with them. And moreover, if for the past months we have had many late night incidents, should we really be pushing out new features? Shouldn't we be focusing on fixing the reliability and the resilience of our website? Again, using the concepts of SLO and our project to make business decisions. And sometimes I think engineers. Forget the enormous complexity that comes with supporting a four nine services. And if you really want to strive for a four nine services, and in this context of four nine of availability, I means a system being operationally available 99.99 of the time, which means that a maximum of 52.56 minutes of downtime per year. And what that means, per month is you only get to have 4.38 minutes of downtime per month. And downtime here, what we mean is we don't just mean the time we might have spent solving an incident, but also any time when the system is not working. For example, some people might have CI-CD set up to do automated upgrade security patches, or they are not allowed to do continuous rollout, so they need to have rollout schedules so yeah, I am really, really, I'm a strong believer that we, Software Practitioner, should follow suit with what SRE are already doing. We have to treat the environmental metric like any other monitoring metric and use it to drive critical business decisions. Why are we pushing our new feature? It's just going to massively drive up our product's rate of carbon emission, right? So yeah, I really should stop, otherwise I can go on and on and on. But really long story short, believe, site reliability engineering principles are pretty sustainable already as lay out a set of disciplines that keep us honest in delivering what our clients truly want.Gaël Duez (17:47)It's just that. Let me think a bit. I think it's really, really enlightening the parallel that you make. And that's for sure that with the SRE framework and all this tool, the SLI, the SLO, could even go to the SLA, et  et we could copy past sort of this methodology or incorporate within it the environmental impact metrics. What I see two pitfalls at the moment is the first one. There is no such direct business consequences of not respecting an SLO when it comes to environmental impacts, at least until now and until we have got some serious regulations regarding carbon emissions or other environmental impacts, which are unfortunately not happening that much at the moment. Now, it could still be the case if there are some very strong internal commitment or if some company had very committed stakeholders requiring to meet a certain carbon budget, a certain water budget, etc. But my point is for the general company, the feedback loop is not as strong when we discuss environmental impacts than when we discuss reliability, site reliability impacts. That will be my comment number one. And please feel free to comment. What I would just add also on top of it is that, and you're going to hate me for this, do we always need 99.99 % of reliability to sell vegetables? If a simple cohort analysis will show that 99.99 % of our customers are sleeping because we are very focused on a single area for eight hours a day and they never visit a website. And I'm a bit provocative here, but I see your point. also see that sustainable leach should also help challenging what should be our SLO. And the dogma that I've been following thoroughly when I was CTO, like 99.99%. And I remember these dashboards and I remember this hard discussion with product managers wanting to push new features, et cetera. So it's really ringing a bell, 100 % resonating with my past experiences, what you've described. However, if I were to be in the same reading room today, I think I will challenge much more the SLO and maybe make it a bit more subtile, sorry for this poor use of word, by agreeing that SLO should be adjusted for time for certain categories of customers, because that will also dramatically help to reduce the system footprint. So that will be my comment number one and my comment number two. And feel free to disagree entirely with these two comments.Sarah (20:41)Okay. So the, so the first comment is that, because there's no strong sense to come to, be compliant with the SLOs that people set out for the green software metric or something that people will not be as willing to like uphold what promises they've made. Is that, I getting that correctly?Gaël Duez (21:06)Absolutely, absolutely.Sarah (21:07)Yeah, you know what, like… I think sometimes SRE principles are more than just a technical set of problems that we're trying to solve. They are more of a cultural problem as well. And it really is trying to solve cultural problem between teams, how to get teams to work together, how to get everyone to understand that reliability of a system is our one true goal, right?That is not just so for self-ingenious who are just pushing our features, they need to understand how difficult is it to support their own features, right? So I think SRE is a great set of disciplines, but people sometimes forgot to look at the other side, which is a massive cultural problem, right? Like having people to buy in on this of principle is not that easy.Sarah (22:00)And I think that can be said about having people to buying on green software slightly as well. But I just think it's so important to put a message out there that we are ready to treat this important metric as one of the signals that SRC already tracking. And we already have this framework of SLO census lie and error budget to really consider how reliable and how reliable not even just in the sense of availability and resilience, but how reliable we are with the promise to our clients of how much carbon our thing should be emitting. So I think it's a lot easier to say than done. And when we talk about SRE, a lot of the time people forgot the culture side of the clash people have when they start bringing SRE principles. So yeah, I do agree with what you just said. It's really hard for people to stay compliant without the regulations. But the message we want to get out there from the book is that there is this framework. It's being tried and tested. It's working. And we should now reinvent. I think that's the message. And then I think for the second question, right, is about the wheel.Like you want a full night services, but just for the eight hours that your customers are maybe awake. But I think that's not how availability work because availability is soft, like average for months. So for example, like you, you are building an internal web app and, and then the, the, the user of those internal web app lives in, I don't know, in Singapore, right?Do you really need those web app running when those people has come home? And then you would take the average of all availability, not just the eight hours they're working, but then the time they're not working. So I think that just means you really are not aiming for four nine services. is, I really feel like people use four nine as a badge of honor to say, hey, my service for nine is so complex we really shouldn't be using four nights as a badge of honor. Like you really need to figure out exactly what's needed for your clients, not like what you want to do, right? Similar to like the whole embodied carbon argument, people...Gaël Duez (24:27)Absolutely.Sarah (24:32)Want to use the latest and greatest technology to build a mobile app. But do you really need that though? Like if you're just having, I don't know, like a news reading website, you don't need the latest chips or the latest technology to run that kind of app. So, so yeah, I think it's all about compromise and trade-offs and, and it is hard for engineers because it is a lot of fun to work on the latest stuff. Yeah.Gaël Duez (24:56)Absolutely. And it's part of the cultural game, I fully agree. Now, just going through all this very interesting straight of thoughts around SRE, implementing this SRE framework, tested and reliable, as you said, requires to be able to monitor and to monitor, there is also the question of to observe and observability. So my first question would be did you notice any significant improvements in monitoring the environmental impacts of the code in production? Because this monitoring is a prerequisite to implement all this SRE framework that you've mentioned before. And you touched upon this point earlier in the episode. So what are the trends regarding monitoring at the moment? And maybe you want to add observability. mean, answer it the way you want.Sarah (25:51)So yeah, I think we have made good progress, really, really good progress in this space. Even though, again, I already said, we still don't have that standardized real-time carbon metrics, right? Well, we are seeing more and more projects popping up around in the cloud-native space, in the Kubernetes space. Now we have Kepler, which use EBPF to work out the real-time power consumption for Kubernetes workload. You're probably thinking, yeah, but… Power consumption doesn't take into account the carbon intensity of the sources, right? So again, we are making progress, but not to where we want to be yet. But it's great to see those progress. And of course, I have to mention SCI right? We have now SCI being recognized as an ISO standard, not just universities are teaching about them, but a researcher team in Germany has now extended OpenTelemetry Java agent to generate SCI score automatically, which is really, really neat.And yeah, so I think we have seen significant improvements in the space and the second sort of like the second tale of the questions about observability. So yeah, I guess like, again, I should spend the better half of an hour to talk about how great monitoring is, but the world has now slowly moved on to observability. And so should we slightly? And right before we get too excited, let's take a step back and then let's discuss what is the difference between monitoring and observability. And to borrow the phrase, all you used earlier, this is a million dollar question that every SRE has been brewing over for the past couple of years. So yeah, it's very nerve wracking, but yeah.Gaël Duez (27:48)We're gonna get rich!Sarah (27:53)Anyway, hopefully I don't get it wrong trying to explain what the differences are. So as we all know, microservices architectures are our favorite frenemies. They have not just brought us incredible agility and speed to push out new features, new way for the team to work as a team to collaborate, but they've also made our system rather complicated. If anyone at home can look up something called the Romsfield Metrics, it's basically a framework not initially designed for software engineering or software operations, but a paradigm that has been broadly applied in different fields across various So the framework can help us get a better grip on our understanding of uncertainty and certainty when we are making decisions rise of four quadrants basically divided into like knowns, knowns, knowns, unknowns, unknowns, etc. So yeah, so traditional monitoring is really, really good at helping us figure out a set of problems, knowns and unknowns, which is quite mouthful, but I'll give you an example. If we have a monolithic application experiencing performance issue, we are probably know which hand of metrics that we need to instrument and monitor. And for example, it could be a CPU problem. And what that means is we then need to set up a plot of graph, maybe set up an alert, monitor the CPU usage of applications to make sure our system never become overwhelmed. And well, probably everyone can agree that the issue of an overwatt CPU is very well established problem that many people have already faced before. So generally speaking– It's a relatively painless bug to solve because CPU usage is a metric. We already know how to monitor and the problem itself is well-astooned. However, bugs can become very, very tricky really quickly as we move through the quadrants to problems that are known as unknowns and unknowns.Think of it this way, right? If you're a mobile developer, and what kind of metrics and dashboard do you need to set up to detect an issue that only affects the Pixel 7a in Taiwan, right? And you as a mobile developer, you probably don't just support one generation of the phone, but you support the past five generations and maybe different flavor of Android phones as well, right? And Taiwan, it's just one small country. There are so many other countries that you have to support. So again, traditional monitoring does need a bit of spruce up as it's really, really hard to predict what could have gone wrong and where things might have gone wrong. And you guys know how much I love making analogies. My favorite analogy for debugging an unknown problem is to think of it as a murder mystery without any clues So yeah, what is observability?Observability originated from something called the control theory. Specifically, we define it as a measure of how well the internal state of a software system can be understood from its external outputs. So the way we can think of it is that observability will not just help us identify that something has gone wrong, but where and why something has gone wrong. So in green software terms, we want all this. We want to be able to pinpoint exactly where in our system maybe is a process that has violated our green promises to our clients, right? And we don't also just want to know why, we want to know where and how so we can fix it.So this emerging topic is again another set of like thinking and principles that serve as a really good exercise for us to start thinking about how exactly will we fit into the space, if that makes sense. And again, why are we reinventing the wheels?Gaël Duez (31:55)In me, again, as you say, and it makes me think that this is a big, rabbit hole and I really want to dive into it, but I cannot because you're not supposed to do too long podcast episode and because otherwise my boss wouldn't be happy, my shareholders wouldn't be happy, my advertising companies wouldn't be happy. But the good news is I don't care. I've got an answer of these. So let's ask the question. connecting when you mentioned observability and sustainability, it was really, really connecting two dots in my mind regarding the unknown and the unknown unknown, which is exactly the issue we've got with the carbon intensity of most of the electricity grid. I the question is not we want to monitor most of the time. If you look at electricity maps, and sorry, you can have the same with what time. I'm not advocating for one solution or the other. What strikes me all the time is how much unknown we've got. And even when you zoom in most of the time, it's in many, many countries, it's still country level So when we are trying to take decisions, with an SRE framework, for instance, as you mentioned, we are facing a lot of unknown. And you can even go further with the unknown of the embedded carbon, because with the supply chains today, it's really wild guess to assess what is a true amount of carbon or water or rare resources that are embedded in any piece of equipment. And every time that someone actually does it chemically, to reverse engineering the composition of an IT equipment, they discover new things which add the impacts. And I had beautiful examples recently where people were like, product carbon footprint is so far away from what we are experiencing in our lab. But anyway, sorry, I'm rambling. My turn to be too talkative. My point is, it's very, very interesting to embrace all of this. Observability approach because in the sustainability world, we know that we don't know that much. Now, my question, because there is a question, is do you believe that we sort of embrace fully this observability approach and onboard it within this SRE framework that you mentioned before? Or do you believe that because this is a nascent area, and sustainability, carbon awareness, water awareness, resource awareness are also nascent areas or topics. Adding the two of them will create way too much complexity and people will sort of reject it like it's not mature enough, come back in 10 years when things will be clearer, more structured, easier to use. That's a one million dollar question. Another one. We're going to get very rich at the end of this episode.Sarah (34:59)Haha. Why not? Again, I, don't know, speaking, speaking as someone who does write code every day in enterprise setting. what's really important for me as an engineer is that there, there definitely should be space and time for deviation, right? That you can't always be following like I know other people hate the word best practices but you can't always be following what someone at a completely different organization say the best practices is right. We need to allow time and space for people what best practices mean for them in their context and I agree that while everything is very convoluted there's too many unknowns, unknowns not just in necessary world in the observability space, we figuring out what's going on with our systems. But like, again, you were saying like, the carbon awareness, water awareness and all that. But it's just so important that we just keep tap on each other. Right? Because I personally don't see observability take a backseat. Like it's going to be how production systems are being run in the future. And then sustainability, I mean, we're on a podcast called Green IO is going to stay, right? So how do we make sure two disciplines that maybe things very, Orthogonal, orthogonal but move up at the same time, right? Like we should still be orthogonal, but we should not be more than orthogonal, if that makes sense. Like we just have to keep tap because it is two separate issues, but there's a lot of overlap and then synergy to share. But it's just important to know why two fields of engineering, these two fields of engineering will have to coexist in the near future. And it's time to make sure we keep tap on each other. Right. And hopefully, observability can influence how green self-engineering field evolved and vice versa. I don't know whether that's the answer you look for.Gaël Duez (37:11)I was not looking for any specific answer. I'm really enjoying the conversation. It might be a bit conceptual, but for whoever has coded I think it will ring some bell. Now you mentioned, and I want to have just a bit of time to talk about the book, but I've got one last question related to exactly what you mentioned right now, which is the Green Software Engineering principle. We had a discussion on the trends and the future tools and framework that should be used. I mentioned in introduction that you are actually the chair of the principles of Green Software Engineering Committee. Can you tell us, because we do love insider information, that we can trade yet for another million? So could you tell us more about the new area where you focusing and maybe some changes that you foresee in this principles?Sarah (38:09)Okay, I'll try to be short, sorry. I do just want to say that it's principle green software engine, just principle green software. anyway, so some of the area we're focusing on. I'm pretty sure you probably have heard about green software patterns. So Leah Matthew, who I work very closely with is now one of the coaches for the patterns. A loan was Francisco. And they're both amazing. I love working with them. Really great to see them thriving in Green Software Foundation. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, principles and patterns have always been a very tightly working group and where we meet very regularly to talk about principles and patterns. And principles, after we published version one, sort of come to like a natural end. We still answer to loads of questions. We now have loads of different translations to different languages. We have French, we have Dutch, we have Italian. I think we also have Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. It's absolutely incredible to see the commitment from not just GSF, but then the wider community on translating the principles, principles of So we're sort of like at the tail end of like where the project is for the moment, but now all our energy is on patterns. And I don't want to spend too much time talking about patterns. I'm hoping maybe like, Gaël, you can invite Leah and Francisco to talk about patterns when they reach like a natural milestone. But right now the main focus is about patterns. And you're probably thinking, you keep saying the word patterns, what is green software patterns? So patterns are set up of like vendor and tool agnostic best practices that people can do when they are trying to achieve green software principles.So that's sort of how I see patterns. They are a set of best practices from a persona sort of view and how to achieve the three Holy Trinity's of Greens of Virginia, which is carbon efficiency, electricity efficiency and hardware efficiency and carbon aware. sort of was happening with principles and patterns.Gaël Duez (40:00)Hardware efficiency. A true focus on pattern. And fun fact, before you actually mentioned it, I was taking notes and the note was Leah plus second semester 2025. I guess. So you say. I guess that we are really aligned here that once the work is finalized enough, they will be more than welcome to be on the show. And that's crystal clear that you focus on pattern. Maybe it's time to leave or wrap it all. Honestly, I think I could spend another hour discussing with you, there are also… much smaller second part of this episode or at least a few questions I wanted to ask directly related to the book. So if you don't mind, we will move on and I'd like to ask you five questions, but I've got a very hard challenge for you. Are you ready to tackle it?Sarah (41:11)Yes, and I do think we shouldn't have the poor class too long. So I'll speak quicker and I'll shorten my answers. And if we think a question's not working out, let's just can it.Gaël Duez (41:15)Ha ha ha ha. So the challenge is one sentence answer. You can do it. So I don't have the options to put some music like, and I'm a terrible singer, so I won't do this. But a few questions I wanted to ask you about the book, because also brings valuable information aboutSarah (41:25)Okay, wow. I can do it, I can do it.Gaël Duez (41:49)its reception and what it says about the current trend in green software. But my first question is, well, you the first feedback is commercial success. So can I ask you how many copies were sold or distributed?Sarah (42:02)So unfortunately, I actually don't know. But what I can tell you is that the book has now been translated into Spanish and it's in process of being translated to both simplified and traditional Chinese. So, know, sorry, mom, you still need to read my book.Gaël Duez (42:20)Well, that's usually a positive sign because you don't start translations if it's a flop.Sarah (42:27)Yes, and there's also, why is it called? An audio book version as well. Forgot to mention that.Gaël Duez (42:34)Okay, so if someone from O'Reilly listens to this episode, we would love to get the figures, especially if they're really good, but I know that they're not bad because I've seen the, you know, as I say, the line and people queuing up to get a book signing and yeah, a lot of traction around, but that was okay. That was me being very curious. My second question, which chapters are most suited for a version two? According to you and maybe your co-author if you started to discuss it.Sarah (43:01)We haven't, so this is from me and I apologize to Anand and Zara. But probably I would say again, monitoring chapter, because a lot has happened. We now have like real time EVPF way of getting power metric for Kubernetes workload. So there's a lot of interesting space to explore out there. And measurement, because it can definitely do a bit of sprues up. It's already a great chapter, but a lot has happened in this phase. And I guess again, GreenOps right? I think we got to do what FinOps are doing. We need to have the formalized principles and framework written down in a way that's like bite-sized. People can just use it. So I think that's probably the three chapters I think could really do with some spruce up if we're going to do a V2.Gaël Duez (43:51)Thanks lot for you, very direct and honest answer. And my last question will be, what's next?Sarah (43:57)I am going to make the same joke again. sorry, everyone who's already heard this joke. But what I'm doing next is I'm continue my tour as a rock star talking, signing and hopefully singing about all the good work Anne Sarah and I did for the book.Gaël Duez (44:15)Ha ha haSarah (44:19)So yeah, personally, I will be at QCon London early April on the sustainability track. And then I'm heading off to Devol XX in London in May. And most excitingly, hopefully go to in October in Copenhagen with Zara. This will be third time meeting Zara in real life. So it's very, very exciting. So yeah, that's probably what's next for me.Gaël Duez (44:38)Woohoo!Sarah (44:47)And yeah, I spent a little bit more time in the how to get SCI into the outer space is probably something I would like to do as well.Gaël Duez (44:56)Hmm. Yeah, got it. Congratulations for joining QCon And I must admit that I'm pretty proud because in QCon this year, QCon London, I will have, as far as I know already, two of my former guests speaking because Ludy Akue is also deliver talk about sustainability in IT. So I take it as a very positive sign and I'm very happy with it.And among all this great news of you talking and being able to push the message and to raise it onto the asm among crazy crowds of fans yelling at you and sending flowers on stage.Is there any positive piece of news that you'd like to share to close this episode?Sarah (45:48)I guess, I actually, don't know. I feel very being put on the spot, but I guess the most positive thing is that, I guess like a quick thank you. I know it's so cheesy. We have enough cheesiness already, but it is a good, a great thank you to every single person I've met in the past year to talk about Green Software to talk about the book and the energy, the synergy and like, and I think you said,Gaël Duez (45:51)You don't have to you don't haveSarah (46:15)Something, I can't remember exactly the word you said earlier, but what's so great about like, we know climate problems are hitting us hard in the face and the world is on fire. We're getting flooding every other day. But then the positive energy that everyone has to say, if we just get our ducks in a row, we can solve this problem. And that is my feeling that I got from everyone. And it's amazing. It's just amazing. And that's something. I think is a great news that I'm hoping we're hoping to encourage anyone right to get into the green software space. And yeah, it's one of the most amazing space you will feel so welcome. So so yeah, it's that does that count as a good news?Gaël Duez (46:59)very good news to close the episode. And once again, thanks a lot for joining. Thanks a lot for joining this episode. Thanks a lot for joining several Green IO conference. all the great work that you're doing looking forward to seeing you again later this year.Sarah (47:14)Thank you, No worriesGaël Duez (47:16)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us 5 stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know, it's not easy to find a feature on these apps, but it's worth it. One single rating on a podcast platform equals 1000 likes on YouTube. Maybe this is why they made it a challenge to use, but I trust you to succeed. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with other software practitioners seems also good idea to provide them with inspiration on GreenOps, SRE, observability and the likes. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to spread the word to more responsible technologists. In our next episode, I will welcome Boris Kamazayoshikov to debrief all the announcements made about sustainability at the Paris AI Action Summit, starting with the release of the AI Energy Score. Stay tuned. By the way, we decided to open our Slack workspace to our listeners willing to get involved in the making and the promotion of the Green IO Podcast and its newsletter. The link is in the show notes and you're more than welcome to join. And one last thing. Visit greenio.tech to check the next conferences we organize. Singapore is in one week and its full agenda is now available. New York is in one week and many speakers have been disclosed. As usual, you can get a free ticket to any Greenio conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 100 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

Did containerisation ship away our environmental responsibility? Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability and reliability. The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, Gaël Duez welcomes Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki, 2 experts in Kubernetes who are also pillars of the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability workgroup. This episode might beat the record of acronyms: KEIT, CNCF, TAG … And yet Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki provided crystal clear explanations when they covered:    🍳 Why Kubernetes is a lot like a restaurant,    ⛈️ The challenges with sustainability in cloud computing,    🛠️ The CNCF KEIT project,    🌱 CNCF’s reorg and what might happen to the TAG Environmental Sustainability,    💪 The power of open source communities, And much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO Singapore is on April 6th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guests and connect Flavia’s LinkedInNiki’s LinkedInGreen IO website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Flavia and Niki's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:FOSDEM 2025 talk: Kubernetes Emissions Insights: Turning Cloud-Native Green (Without Recycling Pods)KubeCon 2024 talk: Debunking Myths About Environmental Sustainability in the Cloud, Building a Greener CNCF LandscapeCNCF TAG Environmental SustainabilityCNCF Kepler projectCNCF PrometheusCNCF FalcoSoftware Carbon Intensity standardBoavizta APIAknosticGrafanaLabsTranscript (auto-generated)Flavia (00:00)I got to meet Nikki and all the people at the CNCF and I had the opportunity to go to KubeCon in Paris last year, it was amazing because it's not just about the who and the what, but it's about the people. So the energy that came out of that group, I like, want to be part of this. I want to, you know, join forces to build something togetherGaël Duez (00:16)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode as well as the full transcript are in the show notes You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech.Cloud computing is nothing but material. It is just someone else's computer, as a popular quote says. Yet, using cloud services comes with its specific challenges for whoever is willing to seriously monitor its environmental footprint. And with the rapid adoption of cloud-based solutions, came extra layers of abstraction and remoteness with the bare-metal servers which ultimately compute and store the data.One of these extra layers is the use of containers in the orchestration system. And they have been massively adopted in software engineering and cloud operation, the so-called DevOps. The software containers market is now a multi-billion US dollar industry with a double digit gross rate. Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability, and reliability.Flavia (01:41)Thank you.Gaël Duez (02:08)The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, I'm glad to have two experts in Kubernetes, by far the most used container orchestration solution in the world.Gaël Duez (02:24)Flavia and Niki who will be at CubeCon 2025 in London next week.Gaël Duez (02:32)Flavia is CTO at Agnostic and a tech lead in the CNCF TAG Sustainability Screen Reviews Working Group. She has decades of experience in software engineering, and in her early days, she co-authored several O'Reilly books on AWS and also built an IoT platform She is originally from Argentina and now lives in Utrecht, Netherlands. Niki Manoledaki is a senior software engineer at Grafana Labs, where she's part of the platform engineering team but she is also an environmental sustainability advocate, keynote speaker and a community facilitator, starting with co-chairing the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Tags Green Reviews Working Group. She's based in Barcelona, Spain. And fun fact, reflecting the 2024 year for the Green IO Podcast, I was concerned by the lack of Spanish speaking guests in the lineup. And I've realized that in 2025, there are a majority so far. So I do hope that all this episode will help spark meaningful conversations, both in Spain and in Latin America. And at some point I will have to consider hosting a GreenOil conference in Barcelona, Or maybe in Amsterdam first.Niki (03:48)Barcelona is a great place to host conferences. We do have the Mobile World Congress already happening. Actually, it's happening soon.Gaël Duez (03:57)I also happens in...Flavia (03:57)It would be nice when there's a train that goes from here to Barcelona, but they're still in progress.Gaël Duez (04:05)I know. At least Paris is well connected by train, both from Barcelona, the Netherlands, UK, etc. So at least for Green IO Paris, it will be easy to join by train. That being said, hello, both of you.Niki (04:19)Hello.Flavia (04:19)Thank you for inviting us.Niki (04:21)Yes, it's great to be talking with you both today.Gaël Duez (04:23)Yeah, that's going to be a very interesting episode. And my first question might sound a bit dumb, but could you explain Kubernetes to our non-ops audience for a start?Flavia (04:37)There's maybe an analogy that I read once and I thought it's pretty clear. If you think about a very busy restaurant where you have a lot of guests and you need to make a lot of food and you need to organize this so everything comes out. So there's enough food for everyone at the right time. can think about Kubernetes in that way. Kubernetes is the chef organizing all the cooks. You have maybe the containers can be thought of as the individual chefs. And each individual chef has to be in charge of making one specific dish. And then you have the nods, which are the kitchen stations for different purposes, like a kitchen station for grilling, another for baking, another for chopping. And then the pods are like a team of cooks working on one single order. like in Kubernetes, you need to handle load or scaling properly, right? You need to make sure that the orders go to the right people so that they don't get overloaded. You need to put more cooks on a specific dish which is more popular, et cetera. If one group of cooks have a problem with something, then there's always. Yeah, the authority and the organization to fix that. So concepts like scalability, reliability, you want your meal to get to the table and on time. Those are maybe nicely included in this metaphor.Niki (06:34)And just remember for listeners who may be less familiar with the cloud, we're talking about hundreds of servers. So hundreds of computers and, how do you get the dish, which is the, application that a user is trying to, to access, available for hundreds if not thousands of users. So we need to make sure that this application is available on every server. And that's what Kubernetes does is it orchestrates that all of these dishes are available at all of the tables. So all of the applications are all of the servers for everyone to be able to enjoy them.Gaël Duez (07:16)Got it. And now that you've mentioned all these servers, let's go to our main topic, which is what are, according to you, the top sustainably challenged running containers and maybe more specifically Kubernetes.Niki (07:32)So monitoring and auto scaling is what I would say the two branches of sustainability in Kubernetes. So we need to make sure we run everything as efficiently as possible. So we need to make sure resources are allocated in the most efficient way. So to do that, we need to be able to observe these resources how much CPU, how much memory, energy, and various other things. And then on the auto scaling side, we need to ensure that we are not deploying more than what you need. So everything needs to be basically packed together as tightly as possible so that we don't have idle resources just laying around and not being used.Flavia (08:23)So that's a really good document. And I hope that these resources translate around what you are being used.Gaël Duez (08:30)And is it the case today? Because I've seen some numbers in non-scientific studies, so I won't quote them here, but saying that in general, we are facing a massive over-provisioning of resources due to auto-scaling and all of this, is it true or is it a urban legend according to your experiences?Flavia (08:51)Yeah, it is very true. Last time I was at FOSDEM giving this talk and I asked people, did it ever happen to you that you found servers that were running that were not they didn't let me finish my sentence. Everybody was like, yeah. So, I mean, yes, this is, this is a very common problem. And I think it roots from the fact that, ever since we started using cloud, we can spin anything, anytime very easily without realizing the consequences immediately in terms of, yeah, not only price, but impact the environmentGaël Duez (09:36)And this tendency to overuse them, how can we fight back, especially from a sustainability angle? I know that both of you, you've been working on a project named KEIT which, the goal to automate the monitoring of the energy consumption, but maybe it goes beyond and it goes all the way to carbon estimates. So you will correct me if I'm wrongFlavia (10:02)So with KEIT, we are basically showing in what way your software and infrastructure and hardware cause an impact and what is source of this impact. Basically we use the software carbon intensity formula which is an ISO standard it considers three aspects. It considers the energy consumed by the software. It considers the carbon intensity of the energy used and the emissions of the hardware. in a way, you can see with the software carbon intensity, you can see where you have the most potential to improve. Or at least you can, you can observe it. can make changes and then you can improve. You can see as well which part of your software is, is generating most emissions. For example, looking at different namespace, looking at how many nods you have, et cetera.Gaël Duez (11:06)OK, got it. And my question is, where does this number come from?Niki (11:11)From the past two, three years while I've been building the CNCF environment sustainability TAG I've worked on the open source technologies that underlie the KEIT project. So I haven't worked on the KEIT project directly large part of what it's based on is open source tools that I've been maintaining or helping to build. And that includes, for example, Kepler, is an energy monitoring tool within Kubernetes. that is a tool that we could get very technical. Like really, some of the measurements from the kernel of the server. We basically, through Kepler, we're able how much energy is being consumed on the server and what is it linked to? which application is emitting or consuming this energy, which is measured in millijoules. So that's one of the components of the software carbon intensity specification to the same of that we have.Gaël Duez (12:26)Niki, just to clarify, I've got a bunch of questions regarding KEIT. The first one being, when you extract the energy consumption from the kernel, is it a measurement or is it an assessment via some sort of a low-level model?Flavia (12:45)You have both options because either have the, I don't know what it stands for, but the RAPLNiki (12:53)Running average power limit.Flavia (12:54)Okay, yeah, so component in the chip which lets you measure the energy consumption of the hardware or if not the nice thing of Kepler is that there are models to estimate them if you don't have a chip with the RAPL. But yeah, in general, course, everything is an estimation. even this RAPLE measurement. It measures only, I believe, the CPU but not everything else around it. So we do have to accept as engineers, even if we don't like it, that everything is an estimation and just work from there. It's better to have estimations than to have nothing.Niki (13:41)Yeah, it's a model, right? So everything is a model. Some models are more useful than others. there are so many different ways to measure energy consumption. But then there's embodied carbon and the energy that went into building the physical components of the server, for example. But as Flavia mentioned also, we do have gaps there are gaps such as networking. like gateways and other networking components are notoriously hard to measure. I know there's different communities, like different open source communities, and there's conversations amongst us, but still networking is something a lot of people are working on and that is really difficult to measure.Gaël Duez (14:34)So, if I understood right how KEIT works, you've got this energy consumption, either via RAPL or via other estimated model, that you translate into carbon emissions. Maybe this is the missing point. I guess you're using solutions like Electricity Maps or WattTime. Am I correct to assume this?Flavia (14:56)Yes, exactly.Gaël Duez (14:58)Okay, and then you add on top of it the embedded carbon from the servers, but you could not really include all the networking part. Is it correct summarize what you've said before like this?Flavia (15:11)Yes, yes, I think so. So it's those three sides of it and their limitations, I would say, almost in all three parts of the formula, because for the embodied emissions, for example, it's very difficult to get information, already difficult to get embodied emissions, but they are usually incomplete because there's not information about the disposal or the recycling of it. It's not disclosed by data centers or by cloud providers, or they don't say how many years the hardware is being used because that also has an impact on the embodied emissions.Gaël Duez (15:54)And do you use the data from the manufacturers or do you have other sources of data?Flavia (15:59)We use Boavizta, which is from a French, non-profit. so they have a whole database of the different hardware. so they have an API. You can say, I have this. I don't know, instance type. Tell me what are the embodied emissions. in KEIT we do that dynamically because the instance types can change to include this in the formula and calculate the SCI score.Gaël Duez (16:33)Thanks for the clarification. And do you have any success stories to share yet about how KEIT has been used in some organization or within some teams?Flavia (16:44)Well, I do have to say it's at the very beginning, project, but We are the moment working with one client, which is the Consumers Association, a non-profit in the Netherlands. so we installed it because basically you have your cluster, can deploy pretty easily and then you have an overview of your score. But we also added this widget to show the number of nods that you're running. And then we immediately saw like, okay, we're running too many nods in an environment which is just for development. So we are now working on improving that on setting up carpenter consolidation to make sure that only the necessary nods are being used at a certain time that's a very, for me, very nice example where it's helping.Niki (17:43)And at Grafana Labs also we're deploying Kepler at scale. It's quite challenging because Kepler for example, we mentioned, which is one of the components in the SCI and it relies on certain information that it should be able to fetch from the kernel but in the public cloud such as AWS, example, or GDP or Azure, this information may not be accessible. So there's certain other estimate methods that it needs to use. So all this to say that running this energy and carbon estimation models at scale is very difficult. And from my side at Grafana Labs, We are trying to run this at scale and kind of find which issues we come across and how can we deploy it in a production environment with as little issues as possible. So all of this is still a work in progress, but it's really great that we can come together in the open source community and kind of exchange this knowledge.Gaël Duez (18:56)For the clarification that this project is still an early stage project. People interested in this specific project, they can join you at TAG sustainability group. And actually that leads me to a question I wanted to ask in the beginning of this interview could you help us maybe make some sense of the true alphabet soups around CNCF What is CNCF? What is TAG? What is the Green Reviews work group, for instance?Niki (19:26)So the CNCF stands for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. it's a project actually of the Linux Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization that hosts a lot of open source projects. And the CNCF was created, I think in 2015, to host Kubernetes when it wasFlavia (19:41)I think 2015 took host Cabrera's when the organization was initially created by the...Niki (19:49)Initially created by Google and then was donated to the Linux Foundation and the Linux Foundation created the CNCF to host it. And then other projects were hosted also by the CNCF such as Prometheus, which is a monitoring, well, a time series database for monitoring metrics. And then other projects joined and now there's, I don't know, like maybe dozens if not hundreds of sandbox projects. I'm not really sure on the number. But Kepler, which we talked about previously, is one of these sandbox projects that was donated by Red Hat and Intel the CNCF. So then with different subjects around this tool such as security, there was the creation of are technical advisory groups. And one of these tags that was created two years ago is the environmental sustainability TAG. And in this TAG, we promote and advocate for tools and use cases around cloud native sustainability, including Kepler, for example, and KEIT and other things like the SCI, the software carbon intensity specification. We talk about this at KubeCon, one of the biggest conferences that is related to the CNCF and FOSDEM as well. There have been talks about this cloud native sustainability tooling.And finally, we come to about a year and a half ago, we wanted to have a technical project where we can really get into the nitty gritty of how do you deploy Kepler? How do you link carbon emissions metrics such as WattTime and Electricity Maps, how do you get the embodied metrics from Boavizta and how do you calculate the rates of the software carbon intensity of tools and we created the green reviews working group. The idea for that is create reports or we report on the sustainability metrics such as energy use and carbon intensity and other more traditional metrics such as CPU usage and memory usage. we've been doing that with Falco, which is a tool. It's a security tool, a project hosted by the CNCF to work with the students and care for the students. And other things so we've been basically trying and innovating and just new ideas come, new people come to contribute their ideas, they want to try something, and we have this space to make it happen. And KEIT is kind of emerged from this work, I think. Flavia, maybe you can tell us more. yeah.Flavia (22:53)Well, we had this idea of making, we initially called it a sustainability plugin. So trying to reflect in a Kubernetes environment, the environmental impact of the infrastructure and software. And we a lot of ideas on things that we wanted to see there, only I thought it was pretty complicated. So I thought, how do we do this? And then I started looking around what's out there then I found the CNCF environmental sustainability TAG and I joined I saw this green reviews project and the software that was being worked on. I thought this is at least very good reflection of what we want to build. But for generic Kubernetes clusters. So I learned about the SCI and deploy actually maybe these things, because they are not so concrete, you don't see the power in it. But when I got to meet Nikki and all the people at the CNCF and I had the opportunity to go to KubeCon in Paris last year. It was amazing because it's not just about the who and the what, but it's about the people. So the energy that came out of that group, I like, want to be part of this. I want to, you know, join forces to build something together.Gaël Duez (24:15)Actually, it's an interesting mention that you've done because I wanted to ask both of you a bit more about how it is to run source projects and to have this open source community working together, especially for, I would say, greater good project. Just before we jump on this of questions, to understand clearly what the Green Reviews Working Group is. I understood well, it's a bit of a permanent brainstorming work group on everything related to sustainability within the CNCF space. Or does it also has, I don't know, sub-team fully dedicated to maintain or code or create new products. I'm having a hard time understanding the connection between this work group and the tools that you've mentioned before, such as Kepler or KEIT.Niki (25:20)So the environmental sustainability TAG is kind of the broader brainstorming group. In the Green Reviews working group, we are creating a benchmarking pipeline. So we are doing benchmarking tests for cloud native tools such as Falco.Niki (25:40)to measure the softer carbon intensity rates. it's very similar to KEIT essentially, and we run benchmarking tests measure the different factors of the software carbon intensity specification. So that's the runtime energy, the emissions impact, the embodied carbon, and all of this using a unit of work, so like a rate. So yeah, the idea was, to take the software carbon intensity ISO specification when it became public last year, and to create an example using cloud native tooling to show how it can be done in Kubernetes.Gaël Duez (26:20)Okay. And one last logistic question. If people want to join you, do their organization needs to join? Can it be done on a voluntary individual basis? Do they need to fill a form or how does it work concretely?Niki (26:38)It's fully open source, so everything is completely out in the open. a Slack organization for the CNCF. And if folks Google CNCF community invitation, they will get a portal to where they can put their email address and get an invitation to join the CNCF Slack. I know that a lot of organizations join the CNCF, but we don't require that in the TAG or in the working group. So anyone can join the meetings. The meetings are twice a month. And we do a lot of planning during those meetings. And we talk about the different pull requests that people are working on or that need to be reviewed. then we triage some of the issues And we do have like a agile workflow. So anyone is welcome to join. And then we have our GitHub repo where people can see issues that are open and that are beginner friendly. And we have the issues board where people can see which ones are next and ready to be picked up if they want to contribute. So people often will join for a bit, maybe pick up an issue, contribute a way, learn. And then maybe they'll stay for more long term or some people come for a bit just to like learn. So just like any other open source project, really we're looking for contributors and long-term maintainers and we're open to everybody.Gaël Duez (28:22)Talking about open source projects and Flavia mentioned it a bit earlier. FOSDEM celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. Shall we say that everything is doing well for the open source community and maybe more specifically for the projects related to sustainability? Or are there some challenges that we don't necessarily see beyond the success?Flavia (28:46)Yeah, there's always challenges. especially that people find time to work on it. Because is an area where people get attracted to it because they want to do something good. They want to have a purpose. So you do find a lot of people wanting to join the environmental sustainability TAG or help in the green reviews project. But it's hard to find people who have the time or who are ready to spend some time on it.Gaël Duez (29:23)Flavia, before discussing more specifically the time constraints, I had a specific question regarding the KEIT project when I see how imbricated it is with other open source projects. How do you manage to build something that is so heavily relying on other components which are also open source?Flavia (29:47)Well, first of all, it's great to have those tools because otherwise we couldn't have built what we built. We just put them together. what we needed to check is the licensing to make sure that we are not infringing any of the licenses of the software that we are using. so far we've had good experience. for example, one of the projects that we are using is so there's electricity maps and there's an exporter for Prometheus to get that data into Kubernetes. It's called the grid intensity, From the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's also open source and there was something that didn't work exactly like we expected or we needed to make an improvement and we just made the change. Applied our PR. It was approved and problem solved. So in that sense, it can be easy because given the need, you can just make the changes yourself.Niki (30:53)I think this is the issue of open source tooling and how well maintained it is, or if there is enough contribution to keep it running is kind of a bigger problem in the industry and for Kubernetes and the Kubernetes ecosystem as well. Like even though a lot of these projects are hosted by the CNCF. Oftentimes, there isn't everything that you might need your use case. And maybe someone needs to find time to contribute back to the open source project. For example, like if there's a feature missing or if there's a bug. Oftentimes there needs to be that kind of instinct of like, okay, this is missing. I'm going to take some time to contribute upstream. Upstream meaning to the open source project. And that's how the tools can continue to exist. But there also need to be long-term maintainers who are sponsored by their company, maybe, who are given the opportunity to take time to contribute to open source projects as part of their work. one of the main challenges in open source projects, I would say is, people finding time to contribute to this project.Gaël Duez (32:18)Niki, that's very interesting that you mentioned people being employees of corporations, large or not, and having some of their professional time allocated to open source. Because I've been recently recording in releasing actually an episode on the WordPress sustainability group that has been quite brutally dismantled. And that was part of a bigger drama of WordPress governance it made me realize how much the WordPress community is dependent on automatic. Is it something that you fear also for the CNCF? Is it something that is more the exception than the rules or what is your? Yeah. Point of view on this dependency that we might find from time to time.Niki (33:09)the CNCF has managed to build a huge community of people who are excited and able to contribute to their projects. And this is an extraordinary feat of like modern technology and like community building. So I would say I'm not. I'm not worried about Kubernetes itself or the really large projects hosted by the CNCF, there's always an underlying worry or an underlying realization that we need to contribute back to what we're using. And maybe that's kind of part of the success of all these open source projects. if a lot of companies are depending on it for their operations and then they have an incentive to contribute back to keep things running. a sociological aspect, I find it fascinatingGaël Duez (34:09)And maybe because you've sort of already explained it, but if both of you, had to, I don't know, bring three ingredients to create the perfect recipe for a thriving open source community, such as the that you belong to, what would it be?Niki (34:29)Great question.Flavia (34:30)I would say purpose is one all these people also that you see in the open source community, like in conferences, like FOSDEM, they really believe in something. They are not just techies, but they, I mean, they are techies, but they, believe in the power of the people building something and being free and open. So purpose is one. Now what I was going to say, so everybody who is there really wants to be there, contribute to something bigger than themselves. And I wanted to mention because the TAG ecosystem in the CNCF now is going through a restructuring because well, after many years of the development of the Kubernetes software ecosystem, things changed. And so we used to have the TAG environmental sustainability, TAG security, TAG application delivery, and a couple more. And now this is all going to be restructured. Does this have anything to do with the current situation? Because the NCF, even if it's a… and nonprofits, it is based in the United States. Does it have anything to do with the political situation in the US? I don't know, maybe. So the TAG environmental sustainability will be renamed, will be part of a different TAG. My point being that even through all of this, there's all this bunch of people that I'm part of, which is want to continue. We don't care the naming. We just want to continue with what we are doing. I don't know in the case maybe of WordPress I don't know because I couldn't finish the episode of last time I don't know if the people who were working on it will continue because in the end it's all open source. You can still do what you want.Niki (36:35)I mean, I think that the open source community enables us to work on things that otherwise would be difficult to do on the day to day. Because there will always be changes in the business direction, for example. Whereas open source work means you can always get back to it and continue some work and do it for as long as the community decides to work on that. So it does give a lot of freedom. another thing I would say is that new problems require new solutions. think innovating in the open is a great way to build new solutions. For me, innovating in the open is the best way to really bright and motivated people involved to come together and try to solve this together rather than behind closed doors, which is what business often is like. So it's really great to be able to maintain those spaces. And I'm glad that the Green Reviews Working Group will continue to exist as a project in the CNCF, despite of the reorganization that is happening. And we'll know more around KubeCon Europe, which is going to happen in AprilGaël Duez (38:01)Thanks a lot for sharing your opinions and your feedbacks on how to run successfully in open source community. I could not not hear some or expectations regarding this reorganization? Do you already have some information which has been shared or will it all come as a big surprise at KubeCon Europe as you say there, Niki?Flavia (38:22)It was already shared, the reorganization. So there's going to be like five TAGS and sustainability will be part of, operational resilience, I think. So it will be more up to us to make this visible and to keep it going. the community is there, people want to improve. So we'll keep going.Gaël Duez (38:57)Concretely speaking, it's a general reduction of the number of TAG groups within the NCF, am I right? Or is it just specifically targeting the environmental sustainability TAG?Flavia (39:11)It's a reorganization of all the tags. So some are merged, some are newGaël Duez (39:13)Okay. Okay, got it. And so now you've got bigger tags, five only, and I guess they will structure in subgroups, subworking group, like some of them working more on operation or resiliency, efficiency, sustainability, or how will all those different projects will be maintained with this single big TAG, for instance.Flavia (39:38)Yeah, there will be, I think, like sub-projects. in theory, working groups will continue running. They will just be part of a different TAG. So we will have to see if the chair of the talk where we are in, we hope that they all that is also someone who considers sustainability important. it's all volunteer work, but we get from the CNCF, we get resources for, for example, infrastructure and where to run our software, pipelines, our databases. So yeah, we'll see how this develops, but we all want to continue.Niki (40:25)I'm excited also to see how sustainability can fit in the operational resilience kind of story, includes, for example, it observability, more concretely, like traditional observability, as opposed to like carbon observability, right? I think it's interesting to see how it will become part of that operational resiliency story. think it might actually, in the best case scenario, might help folks to explain how sustainability fits in software.Flavia (41:09)It's software.Niki (41:10)I guessFlavia (41:10)I guess.Niki (41:11)If we're talking about resiliency, I don't think it's too far away. I'm hoping to learn from that. I think having closer proximity to other domains will mean there will be a lot of like cross pollination of ideas and lessons learned and more contributors maybe, maybe contributors who would not have approached sustainability, learn more about it by being in the same TAG. So I'm hoping to find like positives from this and I guess we'll talk about it more at KubeCon and we'll see how it will go.Gaël Duez (41:52)That's a good point and it's a very optimistic way to see things that I really enjoy. Maybe we will have to redo an episode in a few months or before the end of the year to see how, yeah, to be continued. Yes, absolutely. to understand a bit how things developed. The WordPress situation was a worrying signal, but it doesn't mean that all the open source community needs to be continued, shut down sustainability or reorganize it. So if you feel optimistic, that's great. And I think on these very positive notes we can close this podcast.Flavia (42:29)Yeah.Gaël Duez (42:32)I really want to thank both of you for joining and explaining both the projects you've been running, but also the way you've been dealing with these open source projects and how this open source community at CNTF works. that was really enlightening. So thanks a lot for joining the show today.Niki (42:53)Thank you so much for having us.Flavia (42:53)Thank you, it was fun.Niki (42:54)Thank you so much for having us.Flavia (42:54)Thank you, it was fun.Gaël Duez (42:56)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it on social media and TAG your connections working in cloud operations and DevOps. If you attend KubeCon next week, this would also be a useful tool to kickstart conversations. And of course, don't forget to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. It helps us reach out to more soon-to-be responsible technologists. In our next episode, we will celebrate a birthday with Sarah Hsu. A year ago, her book, Building Green Software, was released. And she will tell us everything about its impact, the feedback she received with her co-author Anne Curie and Sarah Bergman, and the trends she sees in green software, including AI training and inference. Stay tuned! One last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Green IO Singapore and Green IO New York are just around the corner, respectively in April and May. Early bird tickets are gone. But you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Lucky you. Just make sure to have one before the 50 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

"We are 100% convinced that IT sustainability matters but we can’t add more non business requirements, we have agile teams." This often heard sentence from product managers or CPOs, led to this dedicated episode on agility and sustainability where host Gaël Duez welcomes 2 seasoned agile coaches: Joanne Stone, the founder of Agilist 4 planet and the We Hope Magazine, and Joanna Masraff, co-organiser of the the Agilists4Sustainability meetup group, and the Agilists4Planet conference. In this interview, filled with positive energy, they covered:    🛠️ Sustainability twisted technics,   🏃 Urgency vs sustainable pace of transformation,    🎯 Objectives or Key Results when incorporating Sustainability into OKR framework,    🎬 How to kick start sustainability transformation,    🔥 The importance of passionate people and influencers,    🧙 Agile coaches as alchemists of change.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO Singapore is on April 16th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Joanna's LinkedInJoanne’s LinkedInGaël's website Green IO website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Joanna and Joanne’s sources and other references mentioned in this episodeAgilist4Planet Agile Alliance sustainability initiative and Agile Sustainability manifestoWe hope magazinegreen-po.org piratejo.co.uk Sustainability incubator project (SIPS) Green Software FoundationTranscript Joanna Masraff (00:01)I think this is where sustainable thinking actually comes in we're very used to thinking very specifically about the problem, about the solution that we're trying to do, but actually, we need to take that step backward and think wider, more holistically about both the problem and the solution space, maybe slower thinking is needed rather than all this now, now, now, right?Gaël Duez (00:24)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.We are 100% convinced that IT sustainability matters, but we can't add more non-business requirements, and have agile teams. How many times did I hear this from product managers, CPOs or tech leads, not really knowing how to move from awareness to action? So it has been a while since I wanted to have a dedicated episode on agility and sustainability. And when Marjolaine Pillon pointed me into the direction of Agilist for Planets, I gladly connected with Johan and then Johanna about their work which was perfectly aligned with those questions. Joanne Stone is the founder of Agilist for Planet and founder also of the We Hope magazine. She has more than 30 years of experience in IT and was an early adopter of agile practices. She lives in Brooklyn, Ontario, Canada. And Joanna Masraff is one of her very early adopters.Jo's journey in the agile world is marked by her role in co-organizing the Agilist for Sustainability meetup group and the Agilist for Planet conference. to be honest, sustainability has been part of a professional journey almost from the beginning with other topics such as inclusivity and equity. And she's also a co-founder of Green PO in the UK. I have also to tell you that I'm recovering from a pretty bad cold, so my voice is a disaster. But the great news about this episode is I'm not going to be the one talking as usual, so my guests will do. And anyway, I'm delighted to have them on the show. Welcome, Joanne. Welcome, Joanna.Joanne Stone (02:33)Thank you. Glad to be here.Joanna Masraff (02:34)Thank you very much for having us.Gaël Duez (02:37)Glad that we've eventually managed to have this recording.Joanne Stone (02:40)Yes.Gaël Duez (02:43)So maybe starting with the basics, you are both part of the Agilist for Sustainability group. is this group about and what is this NGO Agilist for Planet about?Joanne Stone (02:55)Go, go,Joanna Masraff (02:56)So Sustainability came about actually due to the XP 2023 conference because they had, was the first agile conference that we were aware of that had a sustainability track. So suddenly the group of us who were already working on agile sustainability got together and said, right, we're speaking at this conference. Let's gather ourselves together and let's actually create a group, a community because we have more, we know of a lot of people who are trying to do this work. So why not create a group to share the learnings that we're going through, the things that we're finding out, the things that we're trying, the experiments that are working, that aren't working. And so Agilent for Sustainability group was born. But before that, we actually had Agility Impact, which Joe Stone started. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that?Joanne Stone (03:52)I guess I'll start off with Lisa Atkins has been very much a big supporter in terms of sustainability and Agilist and sustainability. if you're not familiar with her, she's done a lot of really great work in Agile coaching teams. She knew that basically from an agility perspective that us, Agiles, could do more She felt that we can work in certain disaster areas All over the world and at that point time when I was talking to her about it. This is when the Australian fires were actually happening and I got really curious as to how Agilist can actually be part some of these climate-affected changes and like how can we actually be part of something like that? And so I started basically interviewing tons of people all over the world. And Lisa kept on kind of like carrying this torch about how could we, how can we actually bring Agility, Agile Coaches in Sustainability. What she did then is she had been, I think she'd been tapping into a lot of people, a lot of stories all over the world. And she started a keynote panel back in 2022 in Nashville. And that got a group of people together and Yuda Eckstein who's been doing this work for a lot longer than a bunch of us have. She was there and we just kind of like started to get introduced to others who were doing that. And then the, so basically what we wanted to do and Joe was actually starting to talk about as well is bring this awareness of the work that great people are doing all over the world. So we met at the XP conference, and we just kind of like kept collecting their incredible, incredible stories of what they've done by using agility and with sustainability. So whether that's economic or environmental, we would say. And it's incredible the amount of people that are actually doing some of this work right now.Gaël Duez (05:54)And that's an interesting question because you mentioned some examples coming from using agility with a Tech for a good angle. And we tend here to focus quite a lot on green IT, which means making sure that IT teams and product teams in do take into consideration in the way that produce the IT services, produce the digital products.some sustainability principles. how do you see the connection between agile and sustainability? And maybe it goes both ways. So could you elaborate a bit on it?Joanna Masraff (06:30)the way that I'm coining it now, which I think really works and everybody, as soon as I say it, they're like light bulb, right? Is that Agile has been bringing social sustainability to the workplace since it started. So if you think about Agile's true mindset underneath it all, which is what true Agilists talk about, if you know what mean, it's really about bringing collaboration, communication, and the people to allow divergent thoughts and divergence in people to be included within the solution, to allow everybody their own space to be who they are within the team that they work in. So really, this is the bottom line social sustainability within the workplace. So that link, that connection between Agile and sustainability, at least on the social side, has always been there. So it's really a case of expanding origin into the kind of economics and environmental spaces within sustainability.Gaël Duez (07:33)I love the idea that it's in the DNA of agility to embrace sustainably at least the social angle I've never considered it that way. But it makes perfect sense when you see how rooted in human focus values, I would say the agile principles and the mindset of agility is. So now how did you manage to onboard into it, also the environmental aspect of it?Joanna Masraff (08:00)So the way we see it and what we've had people try out, not many, let's be fair. This is very still kind of experimental stage, but we have had teams and people who inject sustainability into every technique that they use within the team. So I call it the sustainability twisted techniques. So for example, if we take Scrum, you can inject a sustainability goal into your product goal, into your sprint goal, into your definition of done, into your definition of ready. know, into every single user story that you have in your backlog, there can be an item that determines the metric that you're using to measure the sustainability of this piece of work, which you as a team have chosen beforehand. Or even taking it a step slightly higher, you can think about your team charter. What you as a team agree, matches to you when you start working as a team or at any point, working in a team, you can say, stop, really this it matters a lot to me. Let's inject this into into the DNA of what we do as a team. What we found though, which is quite interesting is that a lot of people are still in that awareness stage. They're not quite at that stage where they're ready to think about how they measure their carbon footprint off their software, which I'm sure, I mean, the people who are listening, you are the forerunners, right? So you're trying to help the rest of your teams get on board with what you're trying to do, I'm sure. So what we find is that a lot of teams start with something like accessibility in the sustainability arena, which is a bit sad for accessibility, because how long have they been knocking on the door saying, let's be more accessible? However, at least they're starting with something, right?So it's interesting when we start talking about sustainability, especially when we start talking to product people, they think about the social sustainability angle much more readily than they do think about how they can make their products more environmentally sustainable. So this is where actually GreenPO work is kind of based in that space of raising the awareness as to what environmental sustainability and digital product means. And also how they can inject it into all of their processes and techniques that they're already using.Gaël Duez (10:23)A lot to unpack here. And I would love to ask you two questions, and they may be bit interconnected. The first one is, can you share some concrete example regarding the carbon footprint, regarding all the environmental footprint, or how you can create this, quoting you, agility twisted techniques, just to illustrate and to make it concrete what you've suggested. I really love the term actually. And the other question is, as you rightfully said, most of the teams, most of the company, they're still in awareness phase, sometimes even early awareness phase. So how would they kickstart with this techniques?Joanna Masraff (11:07)Sure. So concrete examples with regards to carbon footprint. We had a team who are measuring the carbon of their product. And so what they did is they injected that into their OKRs basically. So their overall goals for their year was to reduce the carbon impact of their products, which they managed to do just by having OKRs. I don't have specific numbers I can give you, but I do know that they did manage to reduce the overall impact of their product by injecting it just into their OKRs. However, on the other side, have had members of our meetup group, and Joe can talk more about this, I'm sure, who they tried to start it. They brought up the question in a retrospective, for example, and everybody was like, is that a thing? I didn't know that was a thing. I don't know how to do that. But she kept bringing up the question. And eventually what happened is that in the company, she found the other passionate individuals and they grouped together and they had a hackathon on it. So they had a hackathon on digital sustainability and the carbon footprint of their products. And they were able to figure out how to start measuring the impact of their product from a hackathon. So it's not a quick win. It's not, let's talk about this and something immediately happens, of course. But we have had quite a lot of our members kind of tell us of their stories, their struggles actually, and how they overcame them. You know, the continuous resilience towards the lack of knowledge and lack of awareness and how they kept pushing towards it becoming a part of the team's work.Gaël Duez (13:02)And Joanne, this is also the approach that you see quite a lot or  got different storiesJoanne Stone (13:08)for me, it is about bringing the the planet into the conversations with the specific teams. So how can we bring that that conversation in so people can start figuring out how best to do some of this work. we trust the teams. Like we trust that there is a lot of intelligence within the teams that they can figure this out or figure out what is really super important for them. you know, those conversations can lead to towards concrete things that the team itself will actually do. And this could change from one team to another. think within some of the stories that we share, which is, which some of the agile coaches will do is we'll work with some of the leaders as well. So one of the big things is that we're in an entire system and that system is actually sometimes controlled by the shareholders or by the performance management, by the accounting and how they have to report on all the different stats, right? A lot of things are driven outside of the teams, is, can be really, you know, it's scary in a way, especially if you want to, you feel that you want to make a what we found is that some of the coaches that we're working with in the story with Carolyn's wife is probably one of them. Like she, she worked with some of the executives to start repositioning their purpose of the vision or their why.Joanne Stone (14:38)so that it's not profit over planet, but it's planet over profit. And so she got that as part of their strategy, So it started to become embedded within the actual culture of the organization. And those are really cool, because if you start embedding it within the culture of the organization, it then to come down to the team perspective. And we have something more than just a recycling program. I think what I find in what I get really frustrated about and I mean we have beautiful people on the ground We have developers we have coaches. We have so many people that are out there that really want to truly make a difference But yet they're stuck within this sort of like container and unable to control and do what they would like to be able to do Right, so it's really quite frustratingGaël Duez (15:27)That's a very interesting comment because I wanted to ask a question to Joanna about when she mentioned OKR, if it was the O or the KR. And actually what you described is really the O, the objective. The overall objective is putting planet over profit, which is a conversation that hopefully will happen in many, companies in the next years, but honestly, that doesn't necessarily happen a lot. And I was about to ask a question to Joanna about the KR, which is that even if the objectives are not, you know, focused a lot on the planet, is there some leeway to do things, playing a bit with the key results, whether it's, I don't know, incorporating in the design phase, for the definition of ready, a person, with other metrics? Because we know that we talk a lot about carbon footprint since the beginning of the episode, but it's not always easy to measure carbon footprint. You could try maybe to make sure that any devices older than six years would still work on it or whatever. You've got different approaches. So my question first to you, Joanne, is do you believe that it's necessary to tackle the O first and that there is not that much room for key results or even in a regular company, in a company really focusing on making money at almost any cost an agilist can find some way to incorporate a bit of sustainability in their practices?Joanne Stone (17:05)It's where I think this is why Agile is, we've got a lot of background in terms of doing transformations, right? So what typically happens is we have a lot of people on the bottom level that really want to adopt this thing, right? So I don't care. It's Agile, AI, whatever the flavor of the day is, right? Really passionate about wanting to do this. And right now the passion in my mind is all around climate sustainability, right? And people are frustrated and wanting to do it. So the way that we've seen this work is like a bottom-up and top-down approach, right? yes, it's great if you can get the whole organization, if you're Patagonia, right? And you're able to do this through in, throughout. Right? The cultures change. It's beautiful. But we know that there's two different ways. Agilent, we always wanted it to be done from the top down because we know that that's where the biggest impact will be. And it'll be a lot faster if it's adopted from there. Because then all the systems that are required to support, you know, the objectives and it be passed down straight to the team. reality is that doesn't happen. Right? So it really has to start from the two different spots.But I think from the bottom up, this is where your tech community is super smart. So they know that there is front end changes that they can make, the back end changes that they can make. They know that they can make changes at a lot of different levels. And so really it's back to them. I would be going at the team level having the first step as to what discussions do we want to have? Modify the product in whatever way that we feel that we can make it greener. If we don't know, can we research it? Can we come to podcasts like this, where I can figure out different ways? I was listening to one of your podcasts around how do you balance the energy, basically, and where can we host some of the servers so that it's more greener? And that was so brilliant. I think we have to go out and we have to figure out the different ways and different parts of our applications to make greener. But it could just start with a bunch of different ideas, a backlog, something that we can then incorporate every single sprint and then ask the question though, because from an agility perspective is how will we know it will work? So it is one of those things where we create experiments where we kind of look at and try and figure out what the results are that we want. So we run that experiment every single sprint to kind of see whether or not the results, we're gonna get the results and then we reflect on it and figure out where we need to go next after we've learned it. So that's the way that I would sit there and approach it. I don't think there's any concrete kind of way in terms of we start here in the front end or the back end or whatever the case may be from a tech perspective. I think you have to work with the team and the team's expertise and start getting them excited about doing this and start including it as part of the backlog so that they can start working on it. So that's the way I would kind of approach it.Gaël Duez (20:21)It's a great reminder that agility is about experimenting things and that we don't have necessarily to change the definition of ready or the definition of done, whatever, so my question might be to you, Joanna, is like, what kind of experiments did you experience in the different coaching situations that you've been doing?Joanne Stone (20:25)Yeah.Joanna Masraff (20:44)Yeah, absolutely. can I just jump and answer a little bit of the other question first, if that's okay. So just to bust a myth a little bit, because one of the things that you said, struck a chord was, you know, what key result can you use? Yeah. And actually cost generally you can use. So if you reduce your cost, you are making your digital product more sustainable.Gaël Duez (20:50)Be my guest.Joanna Masraff (21:12)So, and that is one of the ones which is a win-win-win, let's be fair. It's a win for the people who are interested, a win for the company, and it's a win for the planet. there's lots of studies out there that are ongoing and information you can get to show that being sustainable is profitable. So if you have some stakeholders who are, you're trying to talk about sustainability and they're coming back and saying, we don't want to do it or whatever, you can go to them and you can say, do you want to save money? Because this will save you money. Whether you care about the fact that we're destroying the world or not, that's up to you. But if you're only interested in money, then actually we can save you money by doing this. And I believe that that's actually one of the experiments that one of my coaches did was to actually look at their cloud costs as they reduced their energy use rather than trying to translate it directly to carbon. Because let's be fair, I'm sure most of your audience are aware that the figures that you get on our hyper scalers and our cloud providers are not correct when it comes to their emissions. So instead of looking at that, they actually chose energy. They reduce their energy usage a variety of different ways and managed to reduce their cloud costs as well.That's just kind of one of the experiments I can remember off the of my head. So it's thinking about who are your stakeholders? What might they be interested in seeing and therefore setting up your experiments so you're not just kind of satisfying your own curiosity, but also you can help push the agenda for the planet towards your stakeholders as well. and I think this is where… sustainable thinking actually comes in we're very used to thinking very specifically about the problem, about the solution that we're trying to do, but actually we need to take that step backwards and think wider, more holistically about both the problem and the solution space, maybe slower thinking is needed rather than all this now, now, now, right? And now I've forgotten the second question that you had.Gaël Duez (23:21)Let's put it another way. If I'm an agile coach, seriously convinced about the sustainability challenge and starting to work with an average team, not like climate denier, but not people waking up every morning thinking, how am I going to save the planet? Okay. Just average, nice folks. What kind of ideas should I put on the table for them to start thinking about it?Joanna Masraff (23:45)Yes, it's a great question. And I'm a little bit stumped by it, be fair. So in my mind, this brings us back to awareness, because it always starts with the awareness. one of the things that we've done at Anne Digital, so this is not a team level, this is more thinking about… and just to kind of go backwards a little as well is what you'll find, especially in Europe especially, is that a lot of companies do actually have something in their strategy now, which relates either to sustainability, net zero policies, or even responsible business, which is such a wonderful phrase, isn't it? Here's sarcasm. So maybe take that bit out because I might get fired.Joanne Stone (24:34)HAHAHAHAGaël Duez (24:35)Keep it, but I will use AI a to mask your voice. And nobody will ever know if this is you.Joanna Masraff (24:43)That's it.Gaël Duez (24:45)So you see I've got a use case for AI.Joanne Stone (24:47)Hahaha.Joanna Masraff (24:48)Nice. So yeah, we're finding a lot of companies, especially in Europe, because of the new regulations, you know, they have some form of sustainability within their strategy. But there was some quote, I think it might have been Reuters that came out with it, which said something like, I'm going to forget the numbers. So I'm going to have to check it for you. it's 65 % of those businesses that have it in their strategy have no idea how to action that strategy. So they have it up there, but they think, you know, your recycling policies or cycle to work policies or, you know, electric car policies and things like this are going to solve that problem for it where of course it's not going to. So this is where you start with the start of your company's sustainable transformation where we believe you need your agile coaches.What we did and digital is we started with an awareness week. So sustainability and inspiration week. We had various speakers from both inside the company and outside the company come and tell whoever wanted to attend to tell them about different aspects of digital sustainability. So it was one week this year and over 10 % of the company decided to come along off their own back, which was excellent. But we didn't stop with awareness. What we did then is we took that and we created an action week. So the action week was basically a discovery split over two days to allow people to come and take all this awareness that they had established and determine a very high level roadmap for the company as to how we can become more sustainable and create more sustainable products. So instead of it being, you know, completely a top down transformation, which we know, again, if you force change upon people, it doesn't work. What we did is we brought the strategy together with the passionate people at the bottom who were interested in what to change and how to make this change. So we created this high level roadmap. And one of the top items that everybody came out with was upskilling. So training for every different capability within the business.So we're currently creating that training material internally, again, because then you have internal experts on specific areas that the rest of your company can go to. However, of course, there are specific people who are doing digital sustainability training that you can reach out to. But we're in the middle of creating these training sets among the different capabilities so that each different capability, starting with those who are interested, and then of course it will become mandatory as the company take on new policies and regulations. But everybody's going to end up going through this, but we start with the passionate people, the people who want to, so we're not forcing change upon them. We use those people as the influencers, the proud shouters of, I did this. You know, it was cool. I learned some really new stuff that was wonderful. You you use the power of the people rather than the power of command.Gaël Duez (28:09)But then it takes quite a lot of time mean, let me play a bit the devil advocates here, but basically this company had an awareness week, which then lead to an action week, which then lead to, we need to train people. And sorry to be a bit provocative here, but there is not a single gram of CO2 or water or material or whatever that has been saved so far. Am I right? Or they also managed to get some quick actions.Joanna Masraff (28:37)Well, the quick action was the CTO realized that he needed to clean up the cloud space. So that was great. I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I know that that's what he, scooted off quickly to when he had that awareness as to how much money again, that he was losing because of the unsustainable practices with how we were using cloud. He was like, yes, we have to adopt this.Gaël Duez (28:42)Okay, that's good.Joanna Masraff (29:05)So we made a, not a denier, but maybe not a huge supporter, a bigger supporter, and we cleaned up our clouds. So not as much as I would like, and yes, it's a lot slower and I grind my teeth a lot, let's be fair. However, I believe it's the way to bring the people with us in the transformation.Joanne Stone (29:23)And I feel this urge of action, right? Like we gotta get in there and gotta do it, right? Because, know, the time is of the essence, right? And I think this is when we talk about agility, what I really like is the fact that we do these things at a sustainable pace so we don't burn ourselves out is one thing. the aspect of what Joe's,Joe's saying is how do we inspire people to get into action? How do we get more people on board? what's the minimal amount of energy that we need to expand on to kind of get that going, right? That is indeed an approach where you can, you know, get everybody, the people who really want to be able to do, bring them all together in a room, talk about it, figure out exactly what we need to do and then start creating the plan. You know, get the leaders on board, know, realize that they made this, you know, my gosh, this is, this is the, this is the mess that we've created. You know, that, that starts to inspire people to get into action as well. But I think when you're asking the question, like I have a team, I'm an Agile coach, I don't care, Agile coach, Agile leader, person X, right? I want to do more work in from a sustainability, right, or to makeJoanne Stone (30:37)like from a climate perspective or environment perspective, I want to improve what we're doing right now. And the thing that I've heard in and out of all the conversations that we've been interviewing people is the Green Software Foundation. So what Joe was saying, I think you were talking about this before too, but this is aspect of bringing in knowledge or awareness. You know as a team I might come in there and go, hey guys, let's just, why don't we go to the Green Software Foundation and learn exactly what's there. Take a course, one of us take it, let's do it on one of our learning days or whatever the case may be so that we can learn more as to how we can actually apply this. So that would be potentially a place where I would start, how we as coaches work, we're known to utilize and empower the team, right? So, the word, not the, it's been overused a huge amount of time. But within that is like, we know that we don't have all the knowledge, right? But we can point them into different directions. But starts within the team itself. So, either they have the knowledge or we have to there's a quest for knowledge, right? So it's like, we gotta learn more. Okay, where would you start? Software foundations. Okay, let's go there, right? But I would actually, for me, always starting with the team, having a conversation, putting it out there. What do you guys feel about this? Do you guys wanna do something about this? Can we try something about this, right? And then just start it, like those conversations, know, week over week when we're building the backlog or planning out what we need to do next. would do that. And if I was a leader, a manager or something like that, I would work with the team to go, okay, will be our objectives? How do we wanna measure this? How do we know we're successful at it? I would be, let's try and improve our product by, or improve our product, or basically let's ensure that 20 % of the stories that are coming in every week, it has to do with sustainability, right?So I would do something like that. So it would encourage the team to actually start taking on the work. We did this, by the way, with DevOps and tech debt before in the past. And it was one way to allow for space for the team to actually do that work, which is really important because it's hard to stop doing the product work that we need to do right now. So someone has to create the space for the team to actually do that work.So by giving it like 20 % or whatever the case may be is a great way of allowing for that space for that team to actually create some of that work. But I would definitely be starting off with that conversation.Gaël Duez (33:29)And if I try to wrap up what you've both said, it's old story again, because it's all about raising awareness, getting some training, empowering teams. as you say, Joanne, starting the conversation. Having at some point middle management some space, that's crucial here because otherwise… You know, the good intentions are squeezed between the bottom of the top down approach, but hey, it's middle manager most of the time who have the key to truly kickstart and even ramp up more than kickstart ramp up things. So is there anything specific about sustainability and more specifically environmental impacts in this discussion or is it? Quite similar to how we had to incorporate cyber security, inclusivity, or accessibility, as you mentioned. Is there anything specific to the environmental topics when it comes to onboarding them into agile practices?Joanna Masraff (34:31)The only thing I is back to the thing that with all of those other things you've mentioned, it hasn't been a cost saving. So that one thing generally makes it easier to bring your middle managers in because their bottom line usually is cost. Apart from that, the transformation itself, it's really not that different, which is why...Gaël Duez (34:42)Okay.Joanna Masraff (34:56)We brought Agile and sustainability and Agilist and sustainability together because we, you somebody called us, a friend of ours called Agile Coaches, the, the alchemists of change, which I really liked. So that's why I'm using it. So we really are change makers. We know how to come in and help make those changes. And I believe in JoJo's, the two Jo's minds, the next transformation is the sustainability transformation. And we can help with that. We want to help with that.Joanne Stone (35:35)And the reason why is because I look at all of these particular problems and challenges as wicked challenges. So and when you look at the definition of a wicked problem, right, like it's like something where, you know, we have many stakeholders, many different symptoms of the specific problem, many different solutions, right? There isn't one specific expert that knows how to do that. You need to have a diversified team in order to solve it. You, the only way that you can actually work on it is through small little experiments where you iterate and adapt, there isn't a linear way that we can actually tackle that problem. So the problems and challenges that we have today are all wicked, very much wicked. And the practices of Agile are perfectly suited to this space because we're utilizing the collaboration of the team. We have to empower the team because we experiment, because we have to slice things into small little things.And we also have to do this at a sustainable pace because these problems won't be solved in our lifetimes, right? It'll be solved in multiple lifetimes. So we need to be able to do it in a way where we can thrive and be resilient at doing that. So that sustainable pace and the way that we've been doing things from an agility perspective has set us up to be able to work on these particular wicked problems. The cool thing though, The ability to kind of like what Joe was saying in terms of cost reduction, we can totally make that transparent, right? you know, we're all about outcome basis and producing the value and making sure that we do it in the most effective and efficient way, right? With people. And we're all about doing, not actually about planning forever. We're into doing action. but in a sustainable pace way, using the word sustainable from that perspective.Gaël Duez (37:39)And I really enjoy the way you wrap it up because I won't have to do it in the conclusion, but also because it's sort of a reassuring that if I'm an agile coach, if I'm a product manager with a good grasp of agile techniques, actually all my tools are not to be challenged. And that's a bit reassuring. You say it's like, okay, so I've got this extra burden But you know, my way of thinking, my way of working, the agile practices that I've honed over time, they're there. I don't have to challenge them. It's just yet another issue, yet another wicked challenges, as you said, that I need to incorporate in into my way of working and I don't know, I find it reassuring. Even if you say that problems will not be solved over a lifetime, it's still, at least this, don't need to change how I work. I just need to incorporate this question and these challenges in a, well-crafted way of working, Am I right also to see it in such a positive way?Joanne Stone (38:46)I would say that the one thing I would add, because I struggled with this too, is how do we bring the planet into what we're doing? there's so many great practices that we can learn from the sustainable area, for sure. Circular economy, doughnut economy, regenerative. There's so many beautiful things that the sustainability experts in this world have been doing.And those things are not incorporated in our practices. So I say, on to our practices and bring together all the other sustainability practices which are out there and how we think about how do we reduce the waste.Joanna Masraff (39:26)I agree and disagree with Joe, because I think, yes, of course the sustainability has added ways of thinking about our product and about the economy, which bring the planet further in. But I don't think the changes that we may need to make to our techniques are… big, if at all. So this is why I call them the twisted techniques, right? And you've mentioned some of the ideas, you know, bringing in Maria Len, Planet as a stakeholder. So that idea can actually be added to a lot of our design techniques that we already use in the product space, right? So your customer journey mapping have a persona who is nature, for example, this can also be applied into your product techniques your and delivery phases.Gaël Duez (40:14)Really interesting. Thanks a lot, Joanna, for adding this other perspective. There is one angle that we didn't discuss that much is putting things the other way around, which is not usually what Green IO does, but it's also make a bit of sense to have this other perspective, the two of you, you work on, you know, agile for sustainability rather than sustainable for agile. have you been using agile techniques to accelerate projects, even if they're not like in IT per se, and even if it's not about reducing the environmental footprint of the structure using them? Because I think that, Johan, when we had early discussions, you mentioned something was a food bank, am I right?Joanne Stone (40:58)Yeah, love to experiment, right? So one of the things that we started to do was work with our local communities. So my first experiment was, OK, let's get in there and try and see if I can work with this restaurant owner who wants to make the restaurant more sustainable. so I brought a team together and I thought, okay, let's just do a little small little slice of that particular problem we can figure it out. But we took about two months of just discussing what sustainability is. this is where, you know, we went, okay, like, is there another practice? Like, what other tool I pull from my backpack? And so one of my friends is a design sprint facilitator, And so what we did is we utilized the design sprint techniques. We found this beautiful, passionate lady not too far away from me who has a local community garden. And she says, well, you know, I have a problem right now. I want to get more volunteers in because I want to produce more food. And if we can produce more food, I can give more food to local food bank. We went, sure, OK, let's try this thing out. So we did the design sprint. And so we have people from all over the world. And they come in. And we interviewed the clients. We interviewed the subject matter experts.Gaël Duez (42:12)Excellent.Joanne Stone (42:22)You know, we had a huge amount of problems and challenges. had stickies like galore of the problems. We sliced it down. We got it into what is a small specific thing that we can do. We created a prototype, right? So we created a flyer would bring in more volunteers, that would attract more volunteers. We tested it out, and then we provided that data back. So this is us in action. Like, Gaël I cannot believe how this is. I don't want to overanalyze. I don't want to blah, blah. But Google and the technique that they have for doing design sprints is Bella. It's brilliant. It's beautiful because it's done within 32 hours. And it has the only interview so many people. You only get just enough information. So that you can test it out, so you can figure out what to do next. So we call it SIPs, Sustainability Incubator Projects. we're SIPsters. yeah. And it was a bunch of women who were actually doing it. So it's been amazing what we're doing. Like I am really excited about it. But back to your point where we talking about earlier, and you brought it up, Gaël.Gaël Duez (43:31)Got it.Joanne Stone (43:41)We have as Agilist a lot of these beautiful skills it's not just scrum like it's not just Kanban right we've done change management we've changed culture we develop software right and it allows us to get right in there roll up our sleeves make a change make see something and then and then allow people to figure out and learn what to do next. By the way, it's been amazing. The success stories are great, and I get paid in hugs and drinks. So I'm really super happy right now. But it's lots of fun, and the people that are with this right now really enjoy it, and they want us to continue to do more.Gaël Duez (44:25)Agilist, get paid in hugs and beers or drinks, Join the sustainability space. Okay. It's excellent, but it's also a good illustration that you can use agile techniques also for doing tech for goodJoanne Stone (44:28)Hiya! Hahaha!Gaël Duez (44:41)Being mindful of your time, I'd like to wrap up. mean, you've beautifully wrapped it up, Joanne, so I'm not going to add on what you've said, but just maybe, is there any resources that you didn't share or that you want to mention?Joanna Masraff (44:56)So the Agile Alliance actually has a sustainability initiative and they created a sustainability manifesto, which is really quite also, Ines Garcia is recording conversations with all of the signatories to try and spread the word that we do have an Agile sustainability manifesto.Gaël Duez (45:00)Okay.Joanna Masraff (45:17)So it's well worth people going and having a look at that. even if you don't agree with it, come and discuss it with us, you know, we'd love to have that conversation.Joanne Stone (45:25)Yeah, the resources that I feel would be really great is in the We Hope magazine. So there's some really amazing stories which are in there. We've just launched the last third edition. And it gets into some of the Agilists which are out there. They're doing different things from leadership to some of the projects that I've done in the past we have some tech people that are there as well. So I think that a lot of those stories that are there are a great, specific resource for people to actually look at as well.Joanne Stone (46:01)including what Joe just said, and that's Garcia's just doing some amazing, amazing work.Joanna Masraff (46:07)Interestingly, the We Hope magazine is on the Agilist for Planet website as well, that also still has, recordings of our old, the last two conferences. if you're interested, go and have a look, there's some great presentations on there. We touch into regeneration. We have the business case for sustainability. We talk about circularity, degrowth. We talk about cleaning up your digital space in your personal kind of digital space as well, your digital data. There's lots and lots and lots of different stuff on there. So please go and have aGaël Duez (46:42)That's a positive trend to close the podcast as well in this episode. So thanks a lot, both of you, for joining. It was really interesting to deep dive a bit more in the agile world and agilist world, which I'm not that familiar. I've used the techniques, but I've never been an agile coach. Thanks a lot for joining.Joanne Stone (47:00)Thank you.Joanna Masraff (47:00)Thank you so much for having us. Lovely to chat.Gaël Duez (47:04)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. We are an independent media, relying solely on you to get more listeners. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with a colleague or a relative would be a nice move. Everyone deserves to get this energy booster than Joe and Joe provided during this interview.In our next episode, which will be quite technical, I will welcome Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki to talk about sustainability in cloud computing using new open source solutions for containers and orchestration in the Kubernetes world. Stay tuned. And one last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Singapore is in one month, and its full agenda is now available. New York is in two months, and many speakers have now been disclosed. As usual, you can get a free ticket on any Greenio conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP.Just make sure to have one before the 100 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

Dawn Baker, CTO of Back Market, shares her expertise on sustainability and tech innovations. She discusses their significant switch from AWS to Google Cloud, driven by sustainability goals and the need for carbon measurement granularity. Dawn highlights the role of FinOps in promoting eco-friendly practices and the balance between carbon reduction and performance. The conversation also touches on integrating sustainability in disaster recovery plans and addressing e-waste challenges, showcasing Back Market’s mission-driven approach to GreenOps.

“Today I learned that we have a sustainability team.Thank you for your effort in this area, looking at results of the team so far, and the ROI of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely”. In 3 sentences, almost 3 years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel archived on the spot. To get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of her digital services, Gaël Duez welcomes 3 of the 4 founders of the original sustainability team: Csaba Varszegi, Nahuai Badiola, and Nora Ferreiros. In their much more nuanced exchange that could have been expected due to the current situation, they covered many topics including:    👏 The power of applause to kick start a sustainability team   🔧 How changing HTTPS check made WordPress save 471 kWh / month   🌱 The importance of having sustainability tools as close as possible to software practitioners tools   🏛️ The subtle art of creating a foundation while keeping control over it via intellectual property     🎁 How to “enforce” contribution in an open source community   And much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conferences are in Singapore (April 16th) and New-York (May 15th). Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Csaba Varszeg LinkedInNahuai Badiola LinkedIn Nora Ferreirós LinkedIn Green IO website Gaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Our guests's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:WordPress Sustainability HandbookThe limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress created by Nahuai BadiolaThe Sustainability WordPress pluginWordPress Sustainability Team WordPress Foundation The W3C sustainability guidelines presented by Sustainable Web DesignClimateAction.TechThe grid-aware websites program of the Green Web FoundationTranscript (auto-generated)Csaba (00:00)So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impactGaël Duez (00:15)Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez, and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech.Today, I learned that we have a sustainability team. Thank you for your effort in this area. Looking at results of the team so far and the return on investment of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely. In three sentences, almost three years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel was archived on the spot. It reminds me of the Elon Musk style when he arrived at Twitter, except that WordPress CMS still powers almost 40 % of all the websites around the globe, with many being heavy traffic websites. And with heavy traffic comes significant environmental impacts. So to get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of digital services now that the sustainability team is gone, I'm glad to welcome today three people who are active members of the WordPress community, especially on sustainability topics. Actually, they were part of the four founders of the original sustainability team.Csaba is a sustainable web designer based in Antwerp, Belgium. Nahuai is a freelance WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator. And Nora Ferreiros is a freelance UX UI designer.and both Nahuai and Nora are based in Barcelona. So welcome Csaba, Nahuai and Nora. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.Nahuai (02:49)Hello.Nora (02:49)Thank you.Csaba (02:50)Hello, hi.Nora (02:51)Thank you forNahuai (02:51)Yeah, thanks for having us.Csaba (02:52)Hi, hello.Gaël Duez (02:53)You'remore than welcome. So maybe before we start, could each of you share what is the main fact or figure that leads you to care about sustainability as a WordPress practitioner?Nora (03:09)Well, actually, Nahuai is the person who led me to care about sustainability in WordPress and in the details sustainability and life in general,Nahuai (03:20)That was super nice to hear, Nora. In my case, the eye-opening moment was a lightning talk by Roberto Vázquez in a work camp that just putting together the energy consumed by data centers and the environmental impact. It's pretty straightforward, but it was the first time that I it was like, okay, this makes sense.Gaël Duez (03:22)Now you have to deal with this.Nora (03:24)It's true.Nahuai (03:48)and I started to go down the rabbit hole. And short after that, I started to talk with Hannah Smith, who has been a key person in my sustainability journey. And yeah, pretty much in that point, I started to research and start giving talks about it. And yeah, probably.Nora (04:06)Yeah, have to say that I was in this talk also, but for me it was later. Nahuai was the one that said to me, look at this, sustainability is important, but I also was in this talk and it was important to me to think about internet consumes energy.Csaba (04:23)For me, it's a bit similar, just like you mentioned, and as you mentioned in the intro, like WordPress having a large market share. So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact and maybe a lot more interesting for other people to...profit from as well.Gaël Duez (04:50)you're right, Shaba, that WordPress is just huge in terms of CMS share and I was delighted to hear about the creation of a sustainability team at WordPress. I've heard, but maybe I'm wrong, that it all started at a WordPress convention with Nora speaking up on these aspects, but maybe I'm completely wrong. Could you enlighten me a bit on this?Nora (05:16)Yeah, it was kind of this way and honestly it was kind of around the situation, it wasn't something planned because it all started at the WordCamp Europe in 2022. This is the annual big WordPress event in Europe and it was also my first international event and I was super excited and nervous because I was about to spend...four whole people who I only could communicate in English. I'm in Spanish, so you can imagine it is a little tricky. So I was talking one day, I was talking with Rocio Valdivia. She's a lead of global WordPress community programs. I had to read this because I have not been able to remember it. So she...Nahuai (05:49)youNora (06:03)blindly believing my newly acquired language skills. And she encouraged me to ask a question during this Q &A session with Matt Mullenberg and Joseph Heiden-Champonsy, who was the executive director of WordPress at the moment. So basically two of the most important people involved in the project at the time. And for some reason I said, yeah, sure, why not? But the thing is, as time passed,I started to panic because I had no idea what to ask about. So I turned to Nahuai and I asked him for help and he rightly suggests sustainability as a topic. So with this in mind, I knew, I yeah, I knew if I ask a general question like, what about sustainability? I would just...Nahuai (06:35)YouGaël Duez (06:36)Ha ha ha ha.Nora (06:56)get a polite non-committal answer like, cool that's interesting we will think about it, thank you. So I decided to directly ask them for a team or at least for a Slack channel and for whatever reason they went for the latter. So I did it and when I returned to my seat 18 people had already joined the channel and are rising but the funny thing is I never intended to.achieve this. My goal was just to, I don't know, get sustainability on the table or maybe use this visibility to draw some attention of some attendees interested in the topic and then maybe connect with them after the event or whatever. But things went unspectral differently and I'm very happy about it.After that, the four people that finally make the team work as a working group for a year and the next WordCamp Europe, we have the support of some amazing people and we could officially became a team. And this is the story. And I would clarify something. I think it's really important. I voiced the demand, but I'm pretty sure thatwas the people who cheer and applaud the thing, my suggestion. That main matter, and Joseph said, okay, let's create the channel because the people want something and we have to do something. So if any of the personnel listening to this, thank you very much for making it possible. And remember that voices lead, but it's the community that moves things forward.Gaël Duez (08:34)Power of applauseNora (08:36)Yeah.Csaba (08:36)Hehehe.Gaël Duez (08:37)so you wanted to put sustainability on the table. You actually managed to put sustainability within the Slack workspace of WordPress. Csaba, were you one of these people jumping on this newly created Slack channel?Csaba (08:55)I think I was actually one of the first people to join because I remember, I remember Nora asking this question, but the funny thing is that I was like kind of falling asleep during the question and answer, not because it wasn't interesting, but then I just heard the word sustainability. I was, what, what? So I started listening and then I heard that the channel was created. I think I was one of the first and I remember.Gaël Duez (08:59)Ha ha ha ha.Nahuai (09:06)ThankCsaba (09:21)Thijs was there as well and we already arranged something to meet during the conference, the after party, let's say, which we did as well. And the other funny thing is that I ran into Nora and Nahuai as well somewhere during a walk. So we actually really met in Porto and yeah, that's where things probably started up. still we had a long way to go.Gaël Duez (09:46)Yeah, the stars were aligned. And maybe for the non-adverted listeners, we talk a lot about the WordPress community at WordPress, but as far as I've understood, WordPress is an open source software, but there is also a company called WordPress. And when we talk about a sustainability team, a lot of people could believe maybe that you're employees atWordPress or some sort of WordPress company. could you maybe Nahuai you clarify a bit this ecosystemNahuai (10:16)Yeah.It is kind of tricky to make sense of it because of the naming. So I will try to keep it simple. you said, WordPress, the thing that we've been talking till now is the CMS, it's open source. And it has a vibrant community doing things because they believe on that open source and democratizing the publishing and everything that is behind the motto or the meaning of WordPress. But then after, and this was...co-founded by Matt Mullenberg and Mike Little. Shortly after this creation, Matt Mullenberg created the company Automatic. And Automatic owns WordPress.com, which is a huge confusion for a lot of people. So WordPress.com is just a hosting company using the CMS WordPress. And that's pretty much all the resemblance between the two of them.Gaël Duez (10:54)Mm-hmm.Nahuai (11:10)And the tricky part to make it a bit more difficult to understand is to the community, we are all volunteers. This is an open source, but some companies are putting people, sponsoring people to contribute. And Automatic was until one month ago, the one that was putting more people and time on it. It was around 4,000 hours in people, the sponsor, to move forward.So some of the teams that are in Make WordPress, that is how it's leader by people on automatic. Okay, because since they have a lot of people contributing, it's more than a hundred people. A lot of teams had someone from automatic having 40 hours week to put into there, which is super cool. The sustainability team...Gaël Duez (11:44)Hmm.Nahuai (11:58)we were a bit different in that sense because we were created in this special way as Nora explained. And the 14 reps were self-sponsored, meaning that we were putting our time because we believe in the CMS and in sustainability and then more people of course joined to the Slack and the meetings. But we were mainly people self-sponsored. There were also some sponsored by companies, butthe sustainability team was quite diverse in that sense. it was not run by, none of the teams are run by automatic, okay, just to be clear, but some teams have a lot of, or had a lot of people from automatic because one month ago, more or less, Matt decided to reduce the time that are putting back into the project. But this is because our legal,battle that we didn't discuss yet, so I don't want to go down there. I hope I made sense a bit of how it's organized.Gaël Duez (12:55)Okay.actually, thanks a lot because it's crystal clear. I didn't really understand what was automatic. And this is not the first time in the open source community that you have actually a software that is sort of maintained by a company, even if it's an open source software. you think about Redbut usually it's a bit clearer because they share the same name and sometimes the intellectual property is even clarified in that sense. Okay, got it. Thanks a lot. What did you do,Nora (13:31)Great question. when we make the team, they ask us to work on sustainability, not just on environmentalCsaba (13:31)Mm-hmm.Nora (13:39)sustainability but also in social and economic part of sustainability. SoWe have been working together with other working groups like Fight for the Future, for example, or the V Groups for Diversity. So we can together cover all the things because it was a big thing. And the original founders, we were more into environmental sustainability and it is the part we work more on. For example,we worked in a handbook for making WordPress events more sustainable. We published it. We were able to translate it to Spanish and to French.And we were actually working on making guidelines for creating a WordPress website in a more sustainable way. It was, for me, the more exciting project because we were making something similar to what W3C guidelines were making, but applied to WordPress.And we were also working in a plugin that I think Csaba and Nahuai can explain better about how it works to help on this about creating more sustainable WordPress websites.Csaba (14:57)Yes, wewere working on a plugin. Yes, plugins are like kind of extensions of WordPress, functional extensions of WordPress. And the plan was to create a canonical plugin, which means that it's supported by the community or even maybe on the long-term be included in core WordPress. So the WordPress software itself. And the idea was to spread awareness about digital sustainability to give people an idea about their websites in the sense of carbon footprints.And the two basic ideas were to surface whether the website was hosted on renewable energy and to measure the home page's weight and carbon footprint and to compare it with data from the website's carbon API, like compare it to other websites, other webpages measured and warn people if their homepage has a too large footprint. And of course give themfeedback or assist them how to improve it. And that's where the guidance part would comeNahuai (15:57)I wanted to point out as Nora said, we were collaborating with working groups, because this is the naming we are using in WordPress. And one of them was with the performance team, which are also working and job, by the way, reducingthe energy that is needed. And one of the things they did because of somehow the synergy between us was a saving, changing some technical part of how to check the HTTPS. But the number was like 471 kilowatts hour a month was saved because of the large market share of WordPress.our idea in the sustainability was to raise awareness. So maybe in the performance team, they are already doing great work to reduce the emissions.But our team, sorry, I have to laugh because our team is no longer alive. it's strange to phrase it this way, but I'm going to continue this way. So our team, the idea was to raise awareness of what the performance team was doing or create guidelines as Nora said. So it was not only reducing the CO2 or whatever, but...Nora (16:56)Yeah.Nahuai (17:15)is spreading the word of the impact that a website has.Gaël Duez (17:19)That's an important point because I was about to ask, but what about other environmental variables or what about using other proxy than just the web page weight? For instance, know, some other tool, they check the DOM size or they check the number of API call, et cetera. But I think if the main idea was really to raise awareness, the simpler you keep it, the better it is.correct to assume things that way.Csaba (17:50)Yes, I think so. funny enough, it's sometimes very hard to keep things simple or just give a quiet, good estimation on what's, what's wrong and what can, what people can do about it. so it wasn't a simple task.And I also have to note maybe that there is a site help feature of WordPress, which is quite a cool tool, which actually gives you information. does a couple of tests on your environment and gives you a couple of things you can improve for your website. And the idea was to include this.into that tool, is a native tool of WordPress Core itself,Gaël Duez (18:27)And today, the plugin that you developed, is it still available somewhere? even if it's not included in the core WordPress, but can anyone still use it?Csaba (18:39)Yes, it's not in the plugin repository, but you can download from GitHub. it probably should undergo a couple of refactoring, but you can try it and use it as it is now.Gaël Duez (18:50)and what were the feedback from the community?Nora (18:54)The feedback from the community, I was thinking about this thing you said about keep things simple. And it was really hard to keep things simple because people were to use two numbers, like what have you achieved? Numbers. And sustainability is kind of difficult to do that if you don't want to stay in the tunnel carbon.Gaël Duez (19:08)Hmm.Nora (19:18)so there were many people interested in I want to do something to make WordPress more sustainable but they were feeling really confused because the team didn't have many resources to make practical things so we were in a theoretical place most of the time creating awareness and so andI think people were interested, motivated, excited maybe, but confused about what they should do to make things more sustainable in a practical way.Nahuai (19:58)and having the aim of touching the three pillars of sustainability, the environmental, the social and the economic, made that even more difficult. Not that I didn't like it because I like the holistic point of view, but it was more difficult to communicate sometimes. So yeah, that didn't help to simplify. as Nora was stressing out, we movedslowly because we were self-sponsored people and that was also something to take into account. And we could just allocate maybe two, four hours a week, but not more because we are mostly freelancers and trying to make our own living. So that was also part of the thing that was not easy to balance, let's say.Csaba (20:42)Also, I think it's important to add that you're also spending a lot of time in searching for how to get things done within the community, how the procedures were, which is not always clear, let's say not clear. so you have to, yeah, you have to dig in and then it takes a lot of time to find that out.Nahuai (20:49)Yep, the bureaucracy.Gaël Duez (21:00)maybe before we move to what happened in the dismantling quite abrupt as I mentioned in the introduction, I'd like and I'm very sorry for this to play a bit the devil advocates here and ask you a naive question. Why do we need WordPress guidelines when we start having W3C guidelines?Nora (21:24)Well, from a point of view as a designer, I am always in the side of the user. So for me, the WordPress guidelines were important to specifically explain people who is not into sustainability What they specifically have to do with their WordPresswebsite in the WordPress world. I suppose all the CMS works this way. There are many users, I think the most of the users making their own websites. So I thought it was important to explain these people are non-developer people, how to specifically set in their WordPress or use their WordPress.to make things more sustainable.from the WordPress perspective aloneNahuai (22:11)I couldn't agree more. I'm part of the group of the sustainable web of the W3C and it's an amazing work. What we are doing, mainly other colleagues, I have to say I have limited time to put into it, but I love it. And I try to do my best on that regard, but it's a very technical and long document. So even if sustainable web design did a great job filtering, because there is an open API, so you can go and grab thedifferent criteria and filter it. It's really nicely done, technically. Even if you go to the Sustainable Web Design, It's website in general, which is super cool, but I think that people that is working every day with WordPress, having something more linked with visuals and things that they say, okay, I know where I can do this or this other, I thinkNora (22:53)youNahuai (23:01)this really helps because it's more familiar. So I think everything we can do to make it easier for people that is interested on doing something, it's a move in a good direction.Gaël Duez (23:13)Fair point.I was expecting that kind of answersbut I wanted to understand how much overlapped was possible there because actually I was wondering if it was one of the reasons why the WordPress SustainB group was dismantled. And maybe now it's time for the three of you to explain what you feel and how you analyzed the, let's be honest, ofbrutal dismantling of the sustainability group as I described in the introduction. hypothesis number one, we've got W3C guidelines, no need for anything specific WordPress. I think you already answered this point, but hypothesis number two was like, is it some kind of a Trump-fueled backlash against everything which is sustainable and...you want to look nice to the new leader of the United States and as some other big tech behemoths just did recently kissing their new ring. So was it like a political move? Was it more maybe some sort of internal feud? What led to such abrupt end of your working group?Csaba (24:24)I have been thinking about it and to be honest, I don't think there was really that much of thinking behind the decision. It was a bit of a one-sided decision without any discussion questions asked. So it happened also very quickly after Thijs has resigned, let's say between quotes. Maybe what strikes me the most about this is that we were a group of individuals, contributors, not sponsored.most of us who were just contributing to WordPress and trying to make it better or at least environmentally, socially and so on better. yeah, it's kind of somewhere surprising, but also not regarding the current situation of WordPress.Nora (25:06)I don't have a clear picture of the whole thing because I wasn't into WordPress drama until it affected me and some community fellows I don't know Madd or his circumstances well enough to have a solid opinion about the why I think it is a personal thing it's not something biggerNahuai (25:20)ThankNora (25:27)I mean, I don't have an explanation, but it's pretty obvious to me that we can draw up parallel between his attitude and that of attitude of other big tech founders also at the moment. But I don't know.Nahuai (25:42)I have an hypothesis trying to be a bit more specific maybe for the people that is not inside the community and the WP drama and everything. So I think we cannot understand this decision without talking about the legal battle between automatic math because both are and WP engine. And this started in September of the last year andThe main reason to keep it simple was that Matt went into the stage in the keynote and publicly said that WP Engine, which is a WordPress hosting that is making a lot of money from WordPress, was not contributing enough. In that moment, they were contributing like 40 hours a week, something like that. And Automatic was contributing around 4,000. Okay. So he felt that it wasn't fair.if every company went this route, WordPress would probably die because there wouldn't be enough resources. So fair point till here. At least all I'm going to say is my vision. Okay. So don't take it as a representation of the sustainability team or anything. It's just now I took it. So after Engine started a legal battle against Matt.basically damaging the brand. Okay, let's say, let's put it that way. And there is more things that Matt say and everything, but I don't want to go down that road. And from this moment to the, probably the sustainability closing, team closing, it has been a different Matt.for us at least, maybe Matt was always like that. But what happened is that Matt asked to the community to take part on this. So he wanted to know if you were behind him or if you were not behind him and his...opinions and the things he was doing, you were against, pretty much, just to keep it simple. So the people that were vocal and going against Matt or his opinions, some of them were banned from Slack or from WordPress.org and things like that. again, my hypothesis is that Matt is...kind of in a battle mode because it's in a legal battle and he needs the community to be behind him. And I think the trigger point in our case, was Thais stepping down as a team rep of the sustainability team because he was not aligned with the new direction that Matt was giving to WordPress okay?And he made it public and he made it clear to Matt directly. And I think this was the trigger point. as I say, don't think there is much thinking about it. I think it was like, okay, these people were doing something. I don't recall knowing about it. Oh yes. I don't know. He said he didn't. And he was another power move. He made other power moves before. So this is my...vision. Of course, it's subjective and maybe it's wrong, but I felt like Matt took it as a little attack somehow. And he said, okay, this is not very dear to my heart either. And so we can close it. Well, he can close it. That's probably the more frightening part is that Matt can do a lot of thingswithout anybody saying nothing and that's the part that is yeah more difficult to swallow.Gaël Duez (29:11)you're actually reading my mind because I was about to say that sort of reassuring that very bad decisions are still taken not because of a grand schema to change the world in my humble opinion for the worst and having like this kind of a techno crazy agenda and all this, you know.movement that we see since the beginning of the year in the US within the tech sector, but just because of good old internal dilemma, feuds and the it should questionany source of open source or community of goodwill trying to achieve something about the governance model? Because how come that so many unilateral decisions were able to be made at WordPress? I mean, maybe the decision to close the sustainability was the right one. don't know. mean, obviously, I believe no, but I was not part of this community. So, you know, from an external perspective, I don't know. But what I do know for sure is thatNora (29:46)youGaël Duez (30:14)when as a manager you take such a big decisions, literally firing people, there is a way to do things, even if different cultures, you do things differently. Usually you don't do it the way I've just presented in the introduction. And you must get all people's opinions and you absolutely need to get all the insights, starting with the people who are obviously the most involved in the situation, who are the members of the teams.and in your case, the sustainability team. that really strikes me. what would you do differently?from a governance perspective to prevent this to happen if you were to work again in a very engaged and good-willing community as the WordPress one.Nora (30:56)Well, for me,as I have seen the community from external perspective is we trust too much in a voice, in a lead or in the vision one person had.But as I said before, the voice is not the community. Contributors are the community. I think sometimes we forget this. I think we have to do the effort to step up the inertia in the communities, not just WordPress, but any other.open source community and reflect on the continuity of the projectAnd I personally think we should go more into a democratic way of managing the thing, as many other people have said, like a governance with few people, not just one people, not because it is mad. I think a huge community or any other community should not be led byjust one person, but for a group of person choose or representative of the community itself. I don't know, for me it's kind of obvious, but when I get into this community, things were this way. So I was like, okay, if you are happy with this, I'm here just for working. So let's go for it.Gaël Duez (32:09)Hmm.So I got your point that even the most powerful voice is powerful because ofthe the community behind But there is something that I still don't understand is what is a governance structure? Actually, what is WordPress? what is the legal even structure of WordPress? Is it a foundation? Is it an association, an NGO? And how come that one person hasall the powerNahuai (32:39)It's tricky because there is a foundation, there is a WordPress foundation, okay? And Automatic gave the trademark. So this trademark, which is a huge trademark, was moved to the WordPress foundation, which is good, okay?Gaël Duez (32:43)Okay.Okay.Nahuai (32:56)And the WordPress foundation, it has a board of three people, Matt and another two members. But even if there is a foundation, the more important part of the community is probably the WordPress.org, which is the domain and everything make and everything and the plugins and everything is behind.Gaël Duez (33:10)Mm-hmm.Csaba (33:15)youNahuai (33:16)that domain and Matt is the owner of that. That's why he has quite a lot of power. Indeed, one of the moves he did was blocking the possibility of WP Engine to access to the repository of plugins, which is a kind of a big deal. Okay. And he can do it because he is the owner of the domain. So that part is not in the foundation. That's why it's tricky. And we discovered this lately because of...Gaël Duez (33:35)working.Okay.Nahuai (33:45)these things that didn't happen before. Because I have to say, I've been following Matt's path and I was pretty happy with the direction that WordPress was going. Mainly because of the community, but also because Matt was going in the same directionGaël Duez (34:00)that's very interesting what you're saying,because you can create a foundation, put some intellectual property within it, even the brands.But if you withhold some strategic assets, such as a domain name or some small pieces of intellectual property, actually, your foundation is still some sort of 100 % under your control. Am I right rephrasing a bit what you say that way?Nahuai (34:25)I think so. Sometimes I have doubts if we understand well enough the structure, because it wasn't clear enough before this storm came. Not the team closure, but the legal battle against WP. So I'm pretty sure that this is the way I described minutes ago. And I think if it is like that, it's not optimal, becauseGaël Duez (34:37)Hmm.Nahuai (34:50)As Nora said, I think these big things like the domain of WordPress.org and this kind of decision should be taken by more than one person. And till now there was no problem because Matt was being quite generous with the time he was putting with automaticians into the, in the community and with the trademark and everything. So till not that much time, it was pretty okay, everything.Gaël Duez (34:59)Hmm.Nahuai (35:16)And this battle kind of put into perspective how much power Matt has.Csaba (35:21)I very much agree upon how Nahuai has explained it. And also I think the bottom line we have learned, we learned a lot of things the last couple of months, but the bottom line is that we are very much dependent on WordPress.org for plugin updates, for team updates, everything that is very much hard-coded in WordPress. And that's something that we should, yeah.Gaël Duez (35:25)Hmm.Csaba (35:44)Think about a bit more if that's the way to go and probably not so.Nahuai (35:47)Yeah.I think Drupal has a pretty interesting structure of how they have the governance structure. And it would be super cool if we moved to something more closer to Drupal or other CMSs or other open source products for that sake. I'm not sure if right now it's going to happen. I still feel like...we are in a battle somehow, kind of in a battle. So I'm really hoping for the legal battle to finish and maybe the dust settle a bit and maybe some of the proposals can be look more calmly because there are some proposals right now. But I think Matt still sees them as a kind of an attack or power takeover or something like that again.My opinion, I'm not sure I don't usually talk with Matt about this, but hopefully if this goes, this inflammation, let's call it, goes down, maybe we can talk more calmly about how we want to move forward. That's my hope.Nora (36:42)Yeah.Gaël Duez (36:56)Nahuai you are a perfect guest because I was about asked what were the repercussions of this battle mode in the WordPress community, quoting you for other CMS providers. And if we could get lessons from other open source projects and you mentioned Drupal. So maybeCould you elaborate a bit on how Drupal is organizedNahuai (37:19)Yeah, probably I'm not the best person to talk about Drupal because I'm not inside it, butI really recall well is a post from the founder of Drupal, which was explaining how they try to reward the companies that are giving back to the Drupal project. Okay. And there is a system of credits on how if you give more back, you can...take some advantages, like being, I don't recall exactly, but maybe being highlighted as a plug-in maker or as a company or whatever. So that was one of the ideas that I found interesting because at the end, the main problem that we started this is that WP Engine was making a lot of money without giving anything back or very little back.But maybe if we put some kind of rewards on people that is giving back, we could solve that part.Gaël Duez (38:15)thanks, Nehru, to clarify this Drupal governance Did you get some feedback on how did people react to the closing of the sustainability teams and what do they want to do now to keep on moving on their sustainability journey?Nora (38:31)Well, something I'm happy this all brings is many people ask, or at least ask me, the question why technology thing, why WordPress, why any other project like that need a sustainability team or a sustainability group working on this. And many people were asking,in a bad way, like, we don't need this, but I think this question is important because many people, like Hannah Smith, for example, were answering this question, or even many people were just thinking about it, like, we don't need this, maybe we do. So I'm quite happy taking into account the situation because this situation with the sustainability team, I think, made people reflect on...If we need in technology groups for working towards sustainabilityGaël Duez (39:28)Thanks a lot. Nora, about the guidelines, are they still maintained somewhere? Did you migrate the working group on climate action tech or any other thought of a welcoming Slack community where you can keep on working or everything has been paused for the moment?Nora (39:46)Everything has been posted for a moment, but some people have asked us like, where are you going to work now on this? I don't have an answer for that because I didn't decide the thing, but we are still open to work on this. So if anybody listen to this says, okay, I'm into this and I want to collaborate, we can create something, but there is nothing at this moment.Gaël Duez (39:48)Okay.Hmm. So it's a hard stop. OK.Nahuai (40:17)same for me. Mymain idea is to keep contributing to the W3C group as far as I can. We are also in a very, very nice project from the GreenWeb Foundation that maybe later Nora can touch on it. And I will also continue to talk about sustainability in my podcast and in WordPress events. And as a plugin and theme maker, I have it.embedded in my workflow and I try to also explain it as one of the key features of the plugin or the theme. So I will continue to be interested and talking about it but as Anora said there is since we don't have an official channel and way of working right now we just paused and let's see where it goes but for now it's paused.Gaël Duez (41:06)And actually, before talking about this GreenWeb Foundation project, which I believe is very closely related to what you've tried to achieve at WordPress. That's true Nahuai I should have mentioned that we are colleagues because you've also got your own podcast. And can you maybe just pitch us for one minute? Because I reckon that they are very valuable resources for anyone working with WordPress tool to become more sustainable. Am I right?Nahuai (41:32)Yeah, yeah, I was lucky enough to be selected by the GreenWeb Foundation the fellowship they have. So as a project, I created a podcast. It's a limited series podcast. So it's just eight episodes and it's about WordPress and sustainability. And I was also lucky enough to have very nice and interesting people like Nora, Csaba Thjis, the team reps, but also Tim Frick, Tom Greenwood.people from the data sustainability and also for WordPress sphere. So I think if you're interested in the topic, could be a nice resource.Gaël Duez (42:05)Got it. And so because the GreenWide Foundation seems to be everywhere with the usual suspects that many of them were and surely will be again in the future, guests or speakers in Green IO or events. Maybe, Nora, to close on a more positive note this podcast, becauseNahuai (42:10)Thank you.Gaël Duez (42:26)just as a side note, I was expecting a bit more of a happy ending, that you've already some sort of bounce back and found an agreement that Matt realized that, okay, maybe I shouldn't close or that abruptly, or you've been welcomed by the performance team or you created already some something else. So it's really a bit of a runes at the moment and I feel...I'm kind of terribly sorry for all the hard work that you put you and hundreds of people, if I just count the numbers on the Slack channel. So yeah, it's a very disturbing thought that so much hard work that aim to go in the right direction with the pro and the con of every project, obviously, is, yeah, cancelled, I would say. But anyway, so to finish on a more optimistic note, Nora, you wanted also to talk about theproject that you are heavily involved within the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's all about carbon aware computing or am I misunderstanding something here?Nora (43:31)yeah, I'm super happy being part of this advisory group because we are working on making grid aware websites. We are trying to find a way to help developers to build websites without compromising user experience.So that's it. We are working on this and I hope this project achieves their objectives.Gaël Duez (43:56)So it's a grid aware computing and not a carbon aware computing. I should have known and sorry, but that's interesting to put it from a user rather than a purely technical perspective. I really like it. Okay. That was quite a long episode for you talking about things that are still obviously quite emotional. So I would like to thank you again a lot for joining and taking the time toNora (44:00)Yeah.Gaël Duez (44:21)pose and reflect on what happened and also share other projects and other potential resources for WordPress developer and designers. Is there any final positive piece of news that you'd like to share about sustainability at large or digital sustainability more specifically?Nahuai (44:43)I would say a general one. Even if the team is closed, I still feel like the people care about the sustainability. for the moment is enough for me to keep going and being somehow rewardedAnd they usually are willing to change something. So yeah, let's keep that as a positive note if we can.Gaël Duez (45:07)No, but the buzz is-Nora (45:07)Yeah, you canshoot down the team but you cannot make people disappear.Gaël Duez (45:12)Yeah.Csaba (45:13)hmm, hmm, hmm.Gaël Duez (45:17)Excellent. I guess that, there is no bad publicity as the marketers love to say. So I guess this buzz will at least help some of us to reach out new people or to highlight how strategic is sustainably within the digital sector. So thanks a lot for joining. I hope this episode will contribute a bit to this.noble task. once again, I'm sorry about what happened. And I feel very honored that you've chosen the Green Eye Podcast to share a bit more in details the story of the WordPress sustainability Team version one. And I hope that we will hear soon about version two.Nahuai (45:59)Thank you for having us, Gael.Csaba (46:00)Thank for having us, yes.Nora (45:59)Thank you.Gaël Duez (46:02)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us 5 stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know it's not easy to find a feature on these apps, but I trust you to succeed.Sharing the episode on social media or directly with anyone working with WordPress could also be a good idea, don't you think? Yes, I know you've heard this call to action a lot, but please do remember that being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. Now, in your next episode, we will welcome the CTO of BackMarket, Dawn Becker,To tell us more about some radical choices she made in the green ops field. And yes, it involves her cloud provider.One last thing, GreenIo is a podcast and much more. 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