Green IO Newsletter - March 2024
Building a greener digital world, one byte at a time
Hello! And welcome to our very first monthly newsletter!
The rainy season is slowly leaving us here in Réunion Island and the cyclones should hopefully give us a break until next year, our house is getting refurbished (slowly), and the podcast roster is filled until June. What better time to launch the first edition of the Green IO newsletter?
It’s something I have been wanting to do for over a year now, and I'm thrilled to finally get the project off the ground. I don’t think I could have done it alone, but I am fortunate that Jill agreed to join the Green IO adventure. And, voilà!
This newsletter aims to provide responsible technologists direct access to .. my brain. Actually, more to my feeds to all the amazing content out there. But if you are not a full-time practitioner (and even if you are), it’s hard to keep up. Hence this idea of a slow-paced newsletter, nicely curated, on what the Green IO team sees as unmissable. With some news on Green IO activities as cherry on top of the cake.
We have opted for a simplistic design for our monthly newsletter, with only the occasional graphic, as we prefer to lighten the load and concentrate on positive and constructive information instead. All in all, a no fuss, low carbon, good read.
Needless to say that your feedback is much welcomed, as usual. Contact details are at the end of the newsletter.
Gaël DUEZ
What’s been happening this month in Green IO?
Our first edition comes with a 3 month bonus 😉
🕸️Our new low-carbon website greenio.tech is live! Home for all our podcasts, conferences, articles, transcripts and news.
🎙️ Latest podcast episodes
Here are the podcast episodes you might have missed these last three months. No time to listen to the whole episode? Don’t worry, all podcasts come with a wrap-up article and full transcript. Enjoy!
#35: “Cybersecurity and Sustainability: friends or foes?” with Mary Prokhorova & Michael J. Oghia. Listen
#34: “Carbon aware computing: a false good idea?” with Hannah Smith & Ismaël Velasco. Listen | Read
#33: “Is open source and sustainability a perfect match?” with Oliver Cronk & Katie Davis. Listen | Read
#32: “How systemic thinking can empower sustainable design” with Sylvie Daumal & Thorsten Jonas. Listen | Read
#31: “Tackling the green IT blindspot: the ABB Motion use case” with Thomas Mosser & Fiona Leibundgut. Listen | Read
🎧 Listen out too for episode #36 “Sustainable datacenters in adverse environment” with Pr. PS Lee.
🔔 Don’t want to miss out on the next release? Follow Green IO on your favorite podcast platform here or subscribe for email notification here.
🎤 Upcoming Green IO conferences
The go-to places for decarbonizing your tech stack and much more!
April 18th 2024, Singapore
Join us for the first conference in Asia focusing 100% on Green IT!
With Poh Seng Lee, Simon Schillebeeckx, Natasha Ann Lum, Fershad Irani, … Full line-up and registration here.
September 19th 2024, London
Bringing together an amazing community of responsible technologists
Call for speakers has been launched in partnership with Apidays here (select “Green IT and Sustainability") & early bird tickets are on sale here.
December 3rd & 4th 2024, Paris
The most comprehensive line-up combining experts and use-cases worldwide
Call for speakers has been launched in partnership with Apidays here (select “Green IT and Sustainability") & early bird tickets will be available in April.
# Listen # Watch # Read # Study # Participate # Attend
What else has popped up on our Tech & Sustainability radar?
# Listen - We’re all ears
Gaël’s pick: 17 minutes of pure wisdom around a simple question: What if 100 million people used your product (Green The Web). A question which challenges both our eco-design practices but also the very direction we want our digital services to take. Can success be a marker for environmental failure? Food for thought…
And you might also enjoy how to green serverless (Environment Variables) - should we be paying per request, rather than paying per hour?; discussing if 5G is a good thing or not? (World Wide Waste) - knowing that 6G is already around the corner; discovering the scam of plastic recycling (Tech Won’t Save Us), an issue highly connected with e-waste; or taking a step back and reflecting about the The connections we need to see (Sismique) with world-class expert in systemic thinking Nora Bateson.
# Watch - Sometimes video is worth its environmental footprint
Jill’s pick: Dark Matter has produced a second documentary Clouded II. Does Cloud Co$t the Earth? to try and unpick the true cost of the world’s commitment to innovate and digitize with cloud technologies. A great way to open up discussions on GreenTech within your organization or even with your stakeholders.
And you might also have a look at How an Infomaniak datacenter heats an entire Genevan district which might become the norm in the EU thanks to the EED bill [video in FR - EN subtitles available), or why the Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old which is a great dive-dive in network infrastructure environmental footprint.
# Read - Our coffee break reading this month
Gaël’s pick: If you have not yet had a chance to read the report by the Linux Foundation on The open source sustainability ecosystem, it’s well worth the read. This meta-analysis attempts to provide the first comprehensive analysis of the open source software ecosystem in the sustainability and climate technology field.
Other interesting readings could also be Fershad Irani’s blog piece last month about understanding the differences between measuring and estimating carbon emissions, and between attributional and consequential modeling. And you might want to check one of the reason why AI boom is slowing down the transition toward low-carbon electricity in the US, why the Green Web Foundation (among others) endorsed the US AI environmental impacts act, or the surprising effectiveness of Sustainability as a KPI.
# Study - We’re never too old to learn
Gaël’s pick: The much awaited Luccioni et al. paper “Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?”, which compares the ongoing inference cost of various categories of ML systems, is packed with insights starting with that multi-purpose, generative architectures are orders of magnitude more expensive than task-specific systems!
And you might also be interested in Estimating the environmental impact of generative-ai services using an lca-based methodology, exploring a software sustainability analysis framework, checking an ACV analysis of a bitcoin miner, Modeling 300mm Wafer Fab Carbon Emissions, dissecting the software-based measurement of CPU energy consumption, or investigating the Energy Consumption in Data Centres and Broadband Communication Networks in the EU.
# Participate - One byte at a time
If you want to get involved in building a greener IT world, you might consider entering the discussion between the W3C Sustainability Guidelines contributors about Manual vs Automated testing of the guidelines, or contributing to Branch Magazine Issue 8 (Spring 2024).
# Attend - Meet fellow responsible technologists
CloudNativeHacks, Paris, 19-20 March 2024
CNCF’s first-ever hackathon focusing exclusively on advancing the delivery of the UN SDGs.
Carbon Hack, Online March-April 2024
The Green Software Foundation annual hackathon
GreenDays, Toulouse, 27-28 March 2024 (FR)
Explorer les multiples facettes de la sobriété numérique
Evintel, Amsterdam, 18-19 April 2024
A premium-priced conference about IT Sustainability, Innovation, and Environmental Stewardship
Eco-compute, Munich, 25-26 April 2024
The first engineering conference on sustainability in hardware & software in Germany
One last (positive) thought…
Sometimes you don’t need AI or drones to achieve massive results in GreenTech. Wise-tech rocks! Here’s a great example of a good blend between low-tech (planting) and high-tech (hydrology and weather simulations) with the ‘Just dig it’ project in Tanzania, which hopefully will inspire similar actions across the world. (Thanks to Maxime Blondeau for pointing this out to us).
See you next month!
Gaël DUEZ, Jill TELLIER & the Green IO Team
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