Green IO

Why is the model of a Nobel prize winner not necessarily good science? What is “good” modelling? Is access to information enough to change a system behavior? This episode is the second part of a long interview with Laetitia Bornes, a Doctor in Human-Computer Interaction, Systems Engineering and Systemic Design who is one of the co-authors of a research paper investigating the claims made by the second hand digital platform Vinted about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to its operations. As presented in the first part, their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced! In this second part, Gaël Duez and Laetitia Bornes moved away from the Vinted use case and discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general. You can enjoy this discussion without having listened to the first episode however we would suggest you do so to enjoy all the references, especially to the Vinted study. Among the topics covered in this second part are: - An impressive transparency exercise about the limit of the model used for the Vinted use case, - Why models are “wrong” and how to still use them purposefully, - Why a Nobel prize modeling in his lab without publishing isn't doing science (yet), - Access to information and its connection to the four main categories of leverage points, - The concept of protopia, And much more! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday! All the references, the link to get free tickets, the wrap-up article and the full transcript is on Green IO website here: https://greenio.tech/blog

Can a digital company be “carbon negative”? What should we think of these claims of “tons of carbon avoided” coming from 2nd hand platforms such as Vinted or Back Market? Dr Laetita Bornes conducted research on Vinted claims, investigating its data sources and the methodology used with her colleague David Ekchazer. Their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced! Among the ones she share with Gaël Duez in this first part of the episode were: - The pitfalls of assessing "Tech for Good" even using Life-Cycle Analysis, - The complexity of rebound effects and other indirect effects, - How to improve things as a Designer, … and as a CEO! - The need for a systemic perspective and some tools to build it, and much more! And because this conversation was so rich that it couldn't be reduced to a one hour discussion, this episode comes in 2 parts, the first one focusing on the Vinted use case and the second one where we discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday! All the references, the link to get free tickets, the wrap-up article and the full transcript is on Green IO website here: https://greenio.tech/blog

“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 episode recorded live from the Green IO Singapore conference with Gael Duez were our imperfect, incomplete and unpredictable knowledge on AI, the fit for purpose approach with the right mix of cooling solution, dealing with legacy datacenter infrastructure, the moratorium on new data center and the other tools used by the Singapore government to cap energy consumption, and much more!

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:

Did containerization 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:

"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:

Changing its Cloud provider is never small potatoes, especially when a platform operates up to 40,000 containers and has about 4 million unique visitors a day to its website. Yet Back Market made the move from AWS to Google Cloud Platform motivated primarily by … sustainability concerns! In this episode its CTO, Dawn Backer, chats with Gaël Duez and covers a wide range of GreenOps topics such as: ☁️ Why they switched from AWs to GCP

“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:

It's a 252 pages report with the foreword of António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, talking about digitalization and sustainability. And, for once, it's not another report from the UN stating “let's digitize everything to boost sustainability”. Quite the contrary as it states a “unequal ecological exchange between developed and developing countries regarding digitization”. To discuss this “scientific report based on an ethical approach” as he described it, we welcome one of its contributors, Pablo José Gamez Cersosimo, based in the Netherlands. Another contributor, Paz Pena Ochoa, based in Chile, joined us to share her unique perspective on Latin America.

Moore's law is dead! Long live Eroom's law! This provocative statement from Tristan Nitot highlights the pivotal role of software engineers in our journey as an industry toward a sustainable and more frugal digital world. The majority of our old devices, from smartphones to desktop, still work. How come that we waste such a massive gathering of precious resources such as minerals, energy, water and even our human time which we use to manufacture and maintain them? What should we do to break the trend of electronic waste and the ever-increasing footprint of the IT sector on our physical world? Gael Duez sat down with Tristan Nitot to start answering these questions in this Green IO episode where we covered: ⚖️ Why Wirth's law matters more than Moore's law

Have you ever heard “The complaint of the lonely sustainability champion”? Its IT sector version? Here it is “I listen to the Green IO podcast and others as well, I read newsletters and articles from CAT, GWF, Boavizta, Greenit.fr, GSF, etc. But I'm isolated as a green software champion. I have the feeling that I cannot achieve much by myself. How could we actually do green software in my company?” This episode is all about sharing one concrete use case of someone, Annie Freeman, who achieved to build and deploy an internal tool monitoring carbon emissions in a SaaS company, Xero, with more than 4M users of its accounting software across a dozen countries. This achievement, among others, has won her to be named a finalist in the New Zealand Sustainable Business Network Awards in 2024 And she started it all by herself when she raised her voice in 2022 at a Xero's internal technology conference despite having joined the company as a software engineer just a few months ago. In this episode, Annie Freeman shares great insights with host Gaël Duez on:

3 billion gamers worldwide, billions of devices, terabytes of data streamed, the gaming industry comes with pretty big numbers starting with its $455 billion sales in 2023. Is its environmental footprint as big? (Not) fun fact, not a single executive in this sector could answer the question. A new non-profit initiative, the Sustainable Gaming Alliance, is trying to get these numbers right and to equip the industry with the right framework. Its Managing Director, Maria Wagner, and its Research and Standard lead, Dr Benjamin Abraham joined this Green IO episode where great insights were shared on:

They both went to this job interview to hone their skills, and got a dream job at Microsoft! In its fast-growing and AI-pioneered Azure division. With a romance on top of it… Yet several years later, they decided to both resign. Why? On sustainability ground, and more specifically for the lack of support on “enabled emissions” issues. Holly and Will Alpine are now the Bonnie & Clyde of Azure and give us insider perspectives, in a nuanced and well-documented way, on this “elephant in the room” about sustainability claims in all big tech companies. In the final part of this 2-part episode, great insights were shared on :

They both went to this job interview to hone their skills, and got a dream job at Microsoft! In its fast-growing and AI-pioneered Azure division and with a romance on top of it…

Today, we don't have 1 or 2 guests but 12! In partnership with the YouTube channel Architect Tomorrow, we are glad to share with you snippets and interviews of the speakers who made the latest Green IO Conference in London a huge success last month. I have no idea if you have some appetite for this kind of content so feel free to come back to me at contact@greenio.tech or just comment on our posts on social media. One last thing, the audio quality is ok but not great because of the noise at the venue. If this episode gets some success, we will try to find a quieter place and better gear for the next editions of Green IO starting with Green IO Paris on December 4th and 5th. Still, I hope you'll enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed crafting Green IO London 2024 for its attendees.

In the early 2020s, companies started facing a big question: how could they be more responsible in the digital world? Could something similar to CSR exist for this virtual and yet highly materialized world? Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) was coined to offer some much-needed guidance.

☁️ What can AWS users achieve today in terms of decarbonization? And what can they expect tomorrow?

⚙️Cybersecurity and sustainability do share a complex relationship! The two approaches share commonalities, such as grappling with resistance from teams and executives and prioritizing resilience, but they also seem to split in notable ways such as constant updates in cybersecurity impacting bloatware and equipment obsolences.

How can we make systemic design operational for sustainable design?

How do we tackle the Green IT blind spot?

0.9g of CO2e. It's pretty ridiculous when you think about it. According, the French SRI association this is the carbon footprint for a 10K prints digital campaign with a 200k image. So not a big deal? Not that simple because we're talking about volumes in trillions per day here. So maybe it's a good idea to dive a little deeper on the environmental impact of digital marketing after all. Hence we brought 2 experts in AdTech with a soft spot for Sustainability: Diarmuid Gill is Criteo's CTO since 2019 and has been in Digital Advertising for more than 15 years. Audrey Danthony has also a long career in AdTech, she started her first company, Oxeva, during the dot-com boom when she was still a student at engineering school. And 2 years ago she pivoted and founded with 2 partners Impact+ with the aim of reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions in digital advertising. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

We don't always need a science-fiction device "à la Star Trek" to get transported somewhere else. Discussing with Maxime Blondeau results in such a journey where I discover how anthropology, geography, and cosmology can help us understand better digital technologies and more specifically:

Meeting Asim Hussain, the Green Software Foundation's Director, is always an uplifting experience and this episode makes no exception. A patchwork episode where we talked about: When we finally have the chance to meet with Asim Hussain the Director of the GSF, the episode becomes a crazy mailbag one where we talked about:

This episode is not in Spanish or Portuguese but it might have been

What if you could get sued if your website is not low-carbon enough? What if you would be barred from many call for tenders if your digital services don't hit minimum sustainability requirements? Science-fiction? This is what people said on 5 May 1999 when the first version ever of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines was released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 20 years later, these pitfalls are day-to-day concerns for many digital companies and digital service providers. On August 31st this year, the W3C released its first ever Sustainability Guidelines (draft version). Ines Akrape and Lukas Mastalerz, two of its core contributors, share insider insights in this episode on how it will impact the way of working for millions of web developers, designers, ops and data folks. And why we will certainly not wait 20 years for this to happen… ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

How do you decarbonize your operations when most of the action takes part outside of your organization?

Our regular Green IO host Gaël Duez meets Harriet Kingaby and Mathieu Jahnich to get the low-down on greenwashing, and, more importantly, how to avoid it. Mathieu Jahnich is a consultant and researcher, and also a lecturer at Sciences Po, Paris, where he teaches responsible communication & marketing on several Masters programs. Harriet Kingaby is a strategic communications expert who focuses on responsible marketing and communications at the intersection of advertising, human rights and climate change. Together they cover multiple questions: How do you define greenwashing? How can companies effectively talk about their CSR actions and their move towards sustainability without falling into the trap of greenwashing? ... With concrete examples of best practice, and real-life case scenarios, Harriet and Mathieu also touch on the legal landscape, and the current and forthcoming changes that all businesses must be aware of. Don't want to fall into the greenwashing trap? Listen in to find out more. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Why this podcast? What to expect in Season 2? Take a 5 minutes walk-through with our Host Gaël Duez

A special (northern hemisphere) summer one! An uncut, raw, spontaneous episode where Perrine, Tristan and Gaël discuss about podcasting in Sustainability, in Tech and in general!

Are you ready to take a closer look at the environmental impacts of our code and join the movement towards green coding? What actions can we take to minimize the harmful effects of software development on our environment from an engineer stance as well as at company level? That's what we discussed in this episode on Green Software! Join Gaël Duez to meet : Arne Tarara, CEO of Green Coding Berlin in Berlin & Anne Currie in London, writer of the much looked forward O'Reilly book “Building Green Software”. ➡️ Arne and Anne shared their insights on green computing practices. We tackled various topics related to : - green software, including grass-root efforts, - integrating sustainability in training, - tools for reducing environmental footprints. ✅ Don't miss this episode to explore "Green Software" and gain valuable insights on the tech industry's environmental landscape and web sustainability. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

What about the 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste generated worldwide ? Is it time for a global commitment to tackle the alarming 82% of e-waste that remains unrecycled? And how can we, as responsible individuals and global citizens, take action to address this critical issue? That's what we discussed in this episode on e-waste ! Join Gaël Duez to meet : Jacqueline Mukarukundo, co-founder of Wastezon in Rwanda and Vanessa Forti, Associate Programme Officer at UNITAR. ➡️ Jacqueline and Vanessa shared their insights on the complexities of e-waste and the steps needed for a more sustainable future. ✅ Don't miss this episode if you want to explore e-waste and gain valuable insights on creating a more sustainable future. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

What would be the three most harmful website design practices ? What are the actions that you can't take without the client's approval ? How could you convince your boss or customers on this sustainable journey ? That's what we discuss in this episode on sustainable design ! Join Gaël Duez to meet : Michael Anderson, Frontend Web Developer at Initiva AB & Founder of Sustainable WWW in Sweden and Sandy Dähnert, experienced designer and host of the Green the Web podcast in Germany. ➡️ Sandy and Michael shared their insights on how to face the challenges regarding creating sustainable websites through the lens of Green IT. ✅ Don't miss this episode if you want to learn practical advice on how to create sustainable websites and how to convince your clients of the importance of sustainability in website design. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

Can you deploy an impactful Sustainable IT strategy under market pressures? What if metrics are not there? What if your customers do not care? .. To get feedback on these questions, join Gaël Duez to meet two great leaders : Drew Engelson, Starbuck's Director of Engineering in Seattle and Dominique Buinier, OCTO's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer in Paris. ✅ Yes, raising awareness and training teams is key. No eco-design is not more expensive. Yes, many side-benefits can be leveraged on the road to sustainability. ➡️ Dominique and Drew gratefully shared their experiences and their views on the do and the don't when implementing sustainability in a Tech company. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

Ready to explore the digital sustainability landscape of Singapore? Travel there with Gaël Duez to meet Thibaut, the local representative of both the Climat fresk and the Digital Collage in Singapore and Ian, founder of Greenie web. ➡️ Join us for an insightful discussion as we delve into the Singaporean tech ecosystem and its sustainability landscape. ✅ Our guests share their views on the evolving domain of digital sustainability, achievements, and trends in IT sustainability in Singapore and in South-East Asia, as well as their perspectives on the main environmental crises. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

What if we unveiled the often overlooked environmental impact of data centers together ? Travel with Gaël Duez to Sweden to meet Life Cycle Management expert Stanislava and to France to meet Benoît, co-founder of Hubblo and NGO Boavizta who works on impact evaluation and energy/material efficiency for businesses. Join us for an eye-opening episode on how data centers can play a crucial role in building a sustainable digital future. Together, we explore: ✅ The definition of data centers and their various types, including hyperscalers, enterprise data centers, and colocation data centers. ✅ Top tips and insights on how to make your data center operations more eco-friendly and reduce energy consumption. ✅ The automation and democratization of impact evaluation. ✅ The controversial topic of... cloud! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, or stay connected in your own way so you never miss an episode!

Did you know that 81% of a laptop's lifetime energy use will be consumed before its end-user turns it on for the first time ?

In this episode, we went across the world for Digital Cleanup Day. Our first guest, Ingrid Nielsen is based in Tallinn, Estonia and she has been working with Let's Do It World NGO for the last years in different capacities, as the head of Global marketing and communication, running initiatives regarding digital waste and other projects. “Let's do it world” is the mother NGO of both World Cleanup Day - 50 millions participants worldwide and counting- and its digital offspring which is the Digital Cleanup day. Our second guest, Oliver Vergeynst is based in Brussels, Belgium and he is the Director of the Belgian Institute for Sustainable IT since 2020. Together with the French and the Swiss institutes, they spearhead a lot of the research on Digital Sustainability while grouping both academics and professionals. We dive deep into the thought process behind digital cleanup day, how to get buy-in for digital cleanup, how best to do digital cleanup, and who are the targets of this ambitious project. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

In this episode, Gaël Duez stayed home in France to discuss gender equity in IT and building sustainability teams in large companies. His guests Lucille Vannier is one of the strongest voices in the French IT sector for gender equality. She is also the Strategy Deputy Director of the Sustainable IT Institute, which is the academic body spearheading most of the research in France on Digital Sustainability. She provides serious advice for anybody who wants to follow her lead in advocating for a sustainable and equitable future in the IT space, with lots of resources to check out too!

In this episode, Gaël Duez went to Argentina (or did he?) to discuss digital agencies. Guests Vineeta Greenwood and Gavin Shinfield share a passion for communicating sustainability in ways that their clients can connect to. Veterans of the B-Corp movement, they also prize collaboration and honesty, two keys to their success, and indeed our collective success in reaching our sustainability goals. Gaël invites them to play a short game that leads to long and meaningful answers … stay tuned