This note serves to give some guidance on how we expect to spend our time from 2023 through to the end of 2024. The intended audience is the GSF steering committee and members of the policy working group.
Build our ecosystem by aligning with external groups to collaborate and promote mutual activities to support green software.
We have been working to find shared goals with the growing list of groups working on or around the subject of green software. The GSF includes membership of various types of tech professionals, including those with deep technical expertise that allows the foundation to lead with emerging techniques that shape how organizations can apply software principles and standards that improve energy efficiency and awareness. One example is the design of a carbon Intensity spec that can be implemented against, and another is providing a test bed for reference implementations of ideas like the carbon aware SDK. We’ve found that other groups promoting green software have complementary areas of interest, or perspectives that can help broaden a much larger shared understanding of the drivers for adopting greener software practices from the point of view of a CIO, for example.
In Q4 2023, the Policy WG is scoping out how we might build our knowledge share and cross-promote activities that would benefit our respective members with an external membership-based organization called SustainbleIT. This includes identifying how both organizations own and operate the intellectual property they steward (trainings; code), explore ways to share resources, and cross-promote our resources through an external working group composed of members from each organization. While the GSF may have a default for permissive licensing of code and educational resources as an open-source organization, this is not always shared, and there are discussions to have around attribution.
We have seen a flurry of new laws and directives pass in 2023 which we expect to have a direct impact on how people might practice green software. We even document this in our own State of Green Software report. We’d like to respond to this wave of legislation with briefings for members, to understand the risks and opportunities they provide, and how they affect the drivers for the adoption of green software.
Sessions for members to share questions and lessons learned about navigating the challenges associated with adopting green software.
There is so much to learn in the policy, framework, protocol, and regulatory landscapes and how they impact the promotion of green software as a growing initiative for achieving greater energy efficiency in the tech sector. Therefore, to promote the sharing of evolving challenges and lessons learned associated with the implementation of green software, we are exploring ways to deliver a forum that enables dialogue amongst the membership, where organisations are able to speak frankly about the struggles they have adopting green software practices internally.
There may be queries that members might not be able to ask in a public forum, where the answers might not be within their organisation, and where the GSF’s position as a convener of interested parties is helpful.
These sessions might take the form of moderated virtual or physical events, available to GSF members, and modeled after Chatham house style rules around disclosure - and the focus is around members bringing a problem or an unmet need to discuss safely. We may want to consider inviting members from other organisations (such as SustainableIT) to share their perspectives and learnings.
The evidence of these needs, or problems brought to solve would ideally influence the future projects the policy WG takes up, grounding them in well understood, recurring needs we see in these sessions.