Event overview
Green Tech South West presents an online event with the fantastic Sara Bergman, Senior Software Developer at Microsoft. Sara will be talking about the Green Software Foundation and their Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification tool.
Building green software with the Software Carbon Intensity Specification
There are two broad ways of looking at software: software as part of the climate problem and software as part of the climate solution.
Building green software and doing it at scale requires the creation of a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices. The mission of Green Software Foundation is exactly that.
In this talk Sara will cover some of the work the Green Software Foundation is doing and some of the tooling, like the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification.
The SCI defines a methodology for calculating the rate of carbon emissions for a software system. The purpose is to help users and developers make informed choices about which tools, approaches, architectures, and services they use in the future. It is a score rather than a total; lower numbers are better than higher numbers, and reaching 0 is impossible.
About Sara
Sara is a Software Engineer at Microsoft Development Center Norway working in a team which owns several backend APIs powering people experiences in the Microsoft eco-system. She is an advocate for green software practices at MDCN and M365.
She is a member of the Green Software Foundation and a chair of the Writer’s project which is curating and creating written articles on the main GSF website and the GSF newsletter.
When not working you’ll most likely find her hiking or trying to figure out how to grow chilies in sub-zero temperatures.
You can read our short interview with Sara ahead of her talk.
Watch the event video
👋 8:41 – A welcome from your meet-up organisers, Ellen, Hannah and Mike with a brief overview of GTSW and what we’re about
📢 15:40 – Our famous 60 second intros – a chance for attendees to introduce themselves, ask for help and tell us about something the group might find interesting
💚 23:58 – Sara’s talk
❓ 53:10 – Q&A session
🗓️ 01:05:26 – Round-up, other community notices and next event announcement
Resources and links
One of the perks of holding events online, and having such a wonderful and engaging community, is we share a huge amount of useful resources and information throughout the event. Here’s a summary of what we unearthed.
Sara’s slides
Browse Sara’s slides below
Sara-Bergman-Green-Tech-South-West-slidesLinks and resources
- Green Software Foundation
- Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification
- Our Ecologi forest
- MMU Green Your Compute
- leif app
- Engi
- Greener Hours
- Greener Hours GTSW talk
- The Linux Foundation
- This is the green software practioner course
- The green software patterns directory
- The carbon aware SDK in github
- CarbonAware.WebApi Docs Sara mentioned
- Write-up of the carbon hack entries and the winners
- What makes green software
- Our data world – which countries get the most electricity from low-carbon sources?
- Electricity maps
- The UK grid’s carbon intensity API
- co2.js – API by the Green Web Foundation
- Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations
- State of green software survey
- GTSW talk with Cistor about reusing and refurbing network software
- ClimateAction.tech
- Green Compute from CloudFlare
Community 60 second intros
An opportunity for you, our community, to (very quickly) share something with the rest of us. This can be anything from a green tech project or initiative you are working on, a request for help or guidance or even some knowledge/resource you’d like to share with others
Michael Bane – Software engineer and lecturer at MMU where he’s kickstarting the Greener Compute Club – a club for students at MMU to get involved with looking at ways to reduce their carbon footprint individually as well as in the IT services within the university. Michael is also doing a lot of research with the UKRI’s on one of their net zero projects around new technologies which use less energy to help us make greener choices in software engineering. He’s really keen to hear from anyone who is interested in this research or the Greener Compute Club – so get in touch with Michael at m.bane@mmu.ac.uk.
Dave Parr – Currently going through a start-up incubator, Dave is working on a project called Engi.ai – a project which aims to make an impact in peoples energy use in buildings without needing to do a survey of the building with help of machine learning. Check it out!
Tim Stone – Developing an app called leif which helps track your carbon usage while you’re using your computer. Take a look!
Dan – Software Engineer currently working on a home automation system tracking % of fossil fuels used by the grid at any point with the aim of identifying the least carbon intensive times to use appliances.
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