Carbon Hack 24 Hackathon with Asim Hussain

This is Textron tv. Welcome to techron tv. I'm Bonnie Schneider, and today I'm pleased to be joined by Asim Hussain, executive director of the Green Software Foundation.

Aseem, it's great to have you here. It's wonderful to be here again, Bonnie. Well, Asim, I'd like for you to share for, uh, people that are unfamiliar with the term green software.

What is it? And also what led you to this new position at the Green Software Foundation? Sure.

So green software, as we define it, is software that is carbon efficient. So everything we do emits carbon into the atmosphere, including software. And what we say is, for every unit of value or usability that a piece of software gives you, it should really be emitting the least amount of carbon possible.

And that's what we call carbon efficiency. And there's actually three ways we say that you can be carbon efficient as software, and that is to be energy efficient, use the least amount of energy, possible hardware efficient, which is use the least amount of hardware possible. And the third one is carbon aware computing, which is use electricity, um, when it's the greenest, use more electricity that's green than, than dirty electricity.

That's called carbon air computing. What led me to the Green Software Foundation? Well, I've been looking at the space of, you know, the intersection of sustainability and software about five years now and about three years ago, um, I would, I've been writing, I've been talking, other organizations have started to write and talk about it.

And we all just kind of came together and we realized that actually we should all be collaborating in this space rather than perhaps not necessarily competing, but working independently. And so we formed the Green Software Foundation. It's actually a, a foundation, uh, governed or, or, or, or we have the guidance of the Linux Foundation, uh, above us.

We have a lot of structure here and we work on open standards, open source, um, community events and, and teaching and training and also kind of policy and, and, and work in that space as well. Um, I was working at Microsoft. I used to work at Intel.

I used to work at various organizations and I'm very glad to say, um, about a few months ago I managed to transition full-time as, as the executive director of the Green Software Foundation. So, uh, that's been a, a wonderful, uh, transition for me. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to accelerating green software in this space moving forward.

Well, congratulations. That is, that is a terrific opportunity there. And speaking of opportunities, I understand that you have a big event coming up that involves, uh, carbon hacking.

It's called Carbon Hack 24 Hackathon. Can you tell us all about that? Yeah, so we ran our first, uh, hackathon in 2022 and it was very, very successful.

So now we're running another one in 2024. Um, hackathon is just a, um, a friendly competition with developers all over the world. And the theme for this year is, is software measurement, because that's actually a, a big theme for green software in general.

And so we built a piece of technology called Impact Framework, which helps people measure and, uh, verify and audit, you know, the emissions of software. And so this year's Hackathon is all about measuring, using the impact framework. We've, last time it was very much kind of developer focus and this time we've even got contributions from a non-technical developers.

If you're somebody who's good at writing or explaining or or, or or writing case studies, there's even prizes for you there as well. It does sound exciting. Uh, when is this event going to take place?

It's going to take place, it starts off next week and it runs for about three weeks. So it finishes on April the eighth. org/hack.

Okay. Um, that's the website to go to it. Oh, we have like, we have prizes, we have, um, a number of wonderful sponsors.

Um, and we've got a prize over 40,000 I think is the, is the, is the price fund right now. We've got sponsors from Accenture, Amadeus, Aviva, BCGX Century Software, Infocom Media Development Authority in Singapore, Ned Back, South Africa, entity Data. We've got like a lot of really great sponsors who are all just also really 'cause like who's sponsoring this space?

These are the organizations that are really interested in, in software measurement. And the judges are the ones going, I really wanna see what people solve in this space 'cause we've got this problem and what are people, what are people gonna build because we want, we need to improve our software measurement. So yeah, everybody's really excited about it, including me, That, that is, and it's kind of perfect timing.

You know, one of the things, um, I know you're based in the EU and I I'm in the US and one, we had some big news that came out recently from the SEC, um, finalizing their rules for carbon disclosure for public companies. And it seems to be part of a greater movement happening globally where we're seeing, um, more governments causing attention, bringing attention to this issue and seeing what companies can do to be more transparent with their emissions. So how do you see this influence, uh, of, uh, on the global, on the Green Software Foundation going forward?

Yeah, so we get asked about this a lot and in fact, kind of the policy working group is working on a policy manual because there is so much 'cause as well as the SEC one, there's the, there's EU rule, EU rulings as well for carbon disclosure, for much smaller organizations, various other regulations that are coming through the pipeline. There's an AI regulation as well that's being proposed in the us So there's a lot of people know there's regulation coming down right now they're asking questions, what do we need to do? What, what, what can we do now that actually meets the guidance and that regulation?

I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done to actually flesh things out and provide that guidance because when you look at these regulations, they're, they're great, they provide direction, but you need to scratch, you don't have to scratch the surface too much before you're like, what do I exactly do you need me to do to, to, to reveal his mission? So that's, I think something that's, um, that's, that's needs to be figured out moving forward. I really love the word that you used though just then, which is transparency and that's the word that I use a lot these days as well because I think the real key to a lot of this is actually transparency.

When we hear, one of the things I say is like, if, if, if you are being fully transparent, you can't be accused of greenwashing, you can just be accused of having a different opinion or being wrong, but you can't be accused of greenwashing. So it's really important I think, in the future to be much, much more transparent about this. That's one of the things what we're working on with the impact framework is how do you actually write out your information in a way that is transparent that somebody else could go, ah, oh, I see what you use there.

Oh, that's interesting. We wouldn't use that. Or for the SEC, they actually prefer these models and these assumptions.

The EU prefers these models and these assumptions. Let's be fully transparent. What are we measuring?

How are we measuring, what are the, what are the impacts of some of those assumptions? So I think transparency is really, really key in the future to, for, you know, meeting a lot of these regulations. Also understanding what that even means when you meet a regulation.

I, I agree. And I know that, um, you mentioned impact framework, but I'd like to take a deeper dive into this. Um, how it's new open source software, a measurement tool.

Um, I think it's gonna be in demand going forward based on what we were just discussing, but I'd love to hear more about the interest cases of that. Yeah, so I think people see how excited about Impact framework and, and, and I think the thing, I've been on this cutting edge of this cutting edge for like so many years now that I really, truly do see more excitement about this thing than I've seen about other things that have then grown up to be even larger than they are, than they were. So there's a lot of interest in it.

The big pain point that every organization's been feeling is, is measuring, but really it's more than that. It's about how to understand the results of that measurement. Because a lot of the time you, you spend all year and you, you you, you calculate one total number and then you pat yourself on your back and you meet yourself again the team next year again to do the same.

But how do you turn that into actionable insights? What do you do? The only way to do that is to really break down that number into nitty gritty, exactly what does this process consume, what did that team do?

How, who's responsible inside your organization for the most, um, emissions. And that's where you can target the effort and you know where the investment needs to go. One of the things that I think has been a real revelation to me and to the whole team over the last, you know, two years or we've been looking and investigating this space, is that we've all kind of historically been waiting for organizations and everybody to, to tell us what our emissions are, tell me what my emissions are, tell me what my emissions are.

And it's really challenging for organizations to actually like, give you that number 'cause it's actually very hard to calculate it in a way that makes sense to you. So what we've seen happen in the open source ecosystem at least is people have started taking things that they can observe about their software. Like I might not know all the emissions of my software is, but I know how many gigabytes I saved into that database.

I know how much money I spent on that spent on that cloud bill. I know how much I, how many uh, page views I had on my website. And they then have been building these models which take those things you can observe and convert them into impacts.

And that's really the real kind of aha moment was like, oh, let's do a lot more of that. And that's what Impact Framework does. If you can, we, if you can observe something about your system, it can then take the observation, turn it into an impact, and it really empowers everybody all of a sudden to measure all of their impacts.

'cause you're not waiting anymore for somebody to release emissions data. You can calculate it yourself from stuff you can measure yourself. So it's really empowering a lot of people to, to measure missions and, um, yeah, a lot of people excited about it.

That's great. Uh, well the Green Software Foundation talks a lot about a trusted ecosystem in software development. Can you elaborate on what that is and, and how it can be implemented?

So I think this is again, really important because like if you, if you go back a couple of years, everybody was starting to talk about green software, but there was a lot of stuff out there and organizations didn't really know who should I go to? Where should I, which, what should I read, what advice should I take? What standards should I follow?

And that kind of fractured ecosystem doesn't give you a lot of trust if you're like a a c-suite inside an organization and you wanna invest in something or do something. So what does creating a trusted ecosystem mean? Well, one of the ways that we've done it in the Green Software Foundation is just by working through consensus, but now 60 member organizations.

So if 60 member organizations can get together and agree on a standard, agree on a standard, then you can trust that standard more than if it was just built with one organization with all the best of intent, um, and release it themselves. That's one way you build a trusted ecosystem is through, uh, consensus. And also now, now we've kind of moved on a little bit.

There's a lot of case studies, there's a lot more examples where large organizations, how they've applied some of these, how have they done it, this is how we did it, this is how we calculated, uh, our emissions using open, open tooling, open standards being very transparent about. And that again, builds that trust also. Um, but I think we're very different now than were three years ago.

There is a bit more trust in the ecosystem now and people do know more about where to go to. Yeah. Well, and um, in your experience, what, how do you view the, the reaction of people in terms of the challenges they're facing, um, in implementing these changes?

And and what would you recommend, uh, people do to overcome them, especially people in IT departments as our tech strong audience is, has is filled with people that work in it? Yeah, so, um, I mean the very first thing I would say is, is become knowledgeable on the space. So we actually have training on our, on our website.

It's very quick. It's Learn Green Software Foundation. About 70,000 people have taken it now, and that helps you get the language so you can actually start communicating this internally.

One of the things we added in the training, which I, we added in the latest iteration 'cause we thought it was that important, was understanding climate commitments. So if your organization has actually made a climate commitment, there's different types of commitments. And then if you understand what that commitment is, you can then understand what you need to say to your leadership in order to move the needle on what their public commitment is.

So if your company's made a public commitment, understand what that is and then you, then you can draw a line between what you are doing to that and then make some suggestions. And if your company hasn't made a public commitment, I would honestly say that is the very first step that you need to do. It's very hard to make any change inside an organization unless it's made a public commitment and, um, you know, you can read the training.

There's also great advice from other organizations, well, climate Action Tech has some great advice, is then it's more of a grassroots internal employee effort to, um, speak to leadership, talk to 'em about the benefits of making these commitments and, and, and, and start off there. But it has to, it has to be a combination of the top and the bottom of an, of an organization. It will never just be the leadership saying you wanna do it with no grassroots support and it'll never be just grassroots support without the leadership.

We really have to have both. And then soon as that's there, that's when we start seeing momentum and, and changing inside an organization. That's great.

Uh, well I'm wondering now, you know, we are, we're in 2024 and moving forward, what, what do you see the future of Green software? Where do you see it going, uh, in the year ahead and really in the rest of this decade? So, um, surprise, surprise.

I think ai, uh, has taken us all by surprise, um, over the last year. I think there's a really interesting stats that we used to talk about. We used to talk about the fact that, um, ICT and kind of software's major driver of that was about four to 5% of global emissions, um, or three to 5% of global emissions.

And then there was also studies that were done, which are talking about how if we carried on the current trajectory, because software is a big growth industry, we would be about 14% by 2040. All those studies were done pre this AI shift that we're having right now. And I think there's a lot of questions we're asking ourselves inside the foundation.

We're forming a green ai, green AI committees to kind of start figuring out what's, what's going to happen. I think some of the hints from like the International Energy Agency released some data where they, they doubled the estimate for energy consumption because of ai and everybody was like, are you sure? Is that they, yeah, yeah, we're pretty, we're pretty sure.

So, so I think there's a lot of open questions right now, how the impact of AI is going to drive this. I think it's, we are not looking at 14% by 2040 now. We're looking at something significantly higher.

Um, so that's kind of a focus for, for Green software now moving forward is going to be, well, how, what is the story? I don't know. I don't know, I don't have answers for anybody right now, but it's like, what is the story?

What is the questions? It's a big juggernaut that's happening and my kind of philosophy is like, you know, you have to figure out how to shift that juggernaut a little bit, not shut it down. 'cause we're not shutting down this juggernaut.

It's, it's happening and it's moving. How do we make it shift in a way so it's not 30% of emissions by by 2040? So that's kind of like where the challenges are, I'd say even in the next year, but definitely in the next five years that, that's I think gonna be a lot of questions around that.

Oh, well, thank you so much. This has been so informative. Asim Hussain, executive director of the Green Software Foundation, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Bonnie, for, for having me. Great. Well stay with us on Techstrong tv.

We're gonna have a lot more coming up.