 Hello everyone, my name is Chris Lloyd-Jones. I work for Avonard as the head of Open Innovation and I also volunteer for Open UK as the Chief Blueprints Officer. I'm passionate about sustainability in general so in the context of this event, particularly the Linux Foundation energy event, I'm also part of the Green Software Foundation. You might have heard the word software there, spoiler alert, I'm not an embedded engineer however I will be talking about the applicability about blueprints to embedded development in general and the focus of this particular summit. But I'm not going to talk more about myself. Today I'll be talking about the concept of blueprints and their significance in solving thorny problems to drive creation and community collaboration around efforts which need a strong focus from groups like this. I'll start with some background on Open UK and blueprints and what they are. Then I'll talk about the two blueprints which we've already made so far at Open UK and their relevance in general. Open UK is a not-for-profit company which champions open technology, open source software, open hardware and open data in the UK. But vision extends beyond the borders of the UK and we believe in the power of global collaboration to create a more open and sustainable digital world. We also collaborate quite closely with Open Forum Europe, the Open Invention Network and other organisations around the world. So keep the global collaboration section in mind as there will be some more examples as I talk through. So using an open definition according to Wictionary, blueprints are architecture or engineering by extension and there are detailed technical drawing now often in some electronically storable and transmissible form. For Open UK blueprints are a comprehensive guide or a roadmap for creating sustainable and standardised technology infrastructure. It contains a detailed plan of the required components that an industry think they need and describes the impact that the components create. It's formulated based upon the principles of open source software, open source hardware and open data and each blueprint is created with a diverse group of volunteers from the private and the public sector and I'll talk through who some of the members of the various blueprints were in both various different governmental organisations and private partners. I'll be talking about two blueprints today, the Patchwork Kilt blueprint for sustainable data centres and I'll be talking about the electric vehicle charging blueprint both available on our Open UK website and on our GitHub. But stepping back for a second about why we created these blueprints, think about the technology industry as a whole or even technology practitioners. If we think about people in government, the public sector, private sector and people in the third sector NGOs, we know particularly the people at this conference that technology is driving change, is driving transformation but there are still significant challenges. Some of those challenges involve collaboration even in open source and not invented syndrome, a desire to recreate the wheel. We see this when an organisation spins up a new project at a particular Linux foundation and might not look either side of it to see if that project already exists. We see that in various different countries when a particular local organisation might spin up a project and they're almost dividing the value of what they can do because rather than contributing to something bigger they're creating yet another standard, kind of like the XKCD cartoon which I missed the opportunity to get up on the screen. So we see struggles with standardisation and whilst open standards are increasing in popularity we saw IEEE sponsored some conferences last year, we've seen the ISO organisation others get involved in open source. It's still very new. It's common for new projects to create competing standards. We can think of the green software foundation standard for software carbon intensity. We can think of some of the standards from CNCF around how they might measure carbon and I can think of the same from various different other projects. So there are competing standards and inflexibility towards merging their differences. Finally, the technology industry historically hasn't really considered sustainability at least until the last few years when it's become more of a pressing matter with projects like the open charge point protocol and as I mentioned the CNCF sustainability group and green software foundation. So those challenges can stop innovation and create inefficiencies and these challenges go beyond just the innovation and the environment they also have broader impacts on society. Inadequate collaboration and standardisation can lead to a waste of resources because people are working on similar projects and silos leading to duplication which I've already mentioned. So I've talked about the first one and the not invented here syndrome also causes companies to avoid adopting solutions that have been developed outside their own boundaries even if they are superior and that mentality doesn't just harm cross-pollination of ideas but again we have those inefficiencies and duplicated efforts and if that continues to be the case this will have direct negative environmental implications because as we know data centres are one of the largest consumers of electricity worldwide and if they are left unchecked then the energy consumption and the associated carbon emissions will contribute significantly to climate change and as we roll embedded technology on the edge from automotive grade linux to deployments via T devices in the wild they themselves will have an impact from both carbon emissions, embodied carbon and the energy they themselves are using. So basically we need to tackle these issues head on otherwise we're going to not only impede technological progress but we can also exacerbate environmental issues and slow down much needed transition to more sustainable energy solutions. So this is where the blueprints from Open UK come into play. So we decided to create blueprints to acknowledge and address these problems and then actively try and address them. They address these issues by looking at what's already out there creating clear guidelines and fostering collaboration and I'll talk about exactly how we do that in a second and these blueprints are developed as open source meaning that anyone can pick them up, adopt them, contribute to them and use them for their own projects. An open source and open is more than just code it's about the communication, the collaboration and the transparency it's about breaking down barriers and fostering innovation So our role in these blueprints going back to Open UK's aim is to encourage global collaboration to foster the environment where knowledge is shared and those disparate efforts in various different countries, regions and projects are brought together to create a unified set of solutions. So our general progress process before I talk through some blueprint examples is number one we create a comprehensive guide or roadmap we create a detailed plan of components and sub-components to identify the impact those components can create probably sounds a bit vague, a bit wishy-washy when I get one up on the screen that'll make a little bit more sense and each blueprint is involving all those various stakeholders that I've already mentioned. We identify the metrics they might want to measure so for example what might some of the governmental organisations be trying to drive they might be trying to improve the adoption of technology for their community what might energy companies be trying to drive reduced usage of fossil fuels so we identify what each stakeholder is looking for so that we can then figure out the key metrics for measuring progress and success A blueprint is intended to be created globally and adopt and modified locally so to transcend those regional barriers and it provides a clear and concise view of the community's goals and objectives of the project it represents for example electric vehicle charging sustainability and a blueprint is developed through an iterative process of sense-making, design thinking, drafting, critiquing it takes a very very long time particularly with the members of the government and others that are involved who need a lot of sign-offs and review but the blueprint workstream is not responsible for implementing the components that we identify its aim is to identify where there might be gaps and those gaps can translate into potential new open source projects where there might be overlaps, projects that might want to collaborate and come together to adopt sustainable practices in the technology industry and again, I said at the start I myself am not an embedded engineer so you might be thinking why does that actually matter here in Prague at the embedded open source summit well the challenges that we're focusing on particularly around sustainability are often those that involve the embedded community from energy consumption to the electrical vehicle charging network we don't actually have a lot of the expertise that we need from people like you so one of the reasons I'm here is to ask for your support to actually review these blueprints and identify where we might have gaps from our lack of subject matter expertise and these blueprints are blueprints in that traditional sense of things that haven't been built yet there's often infrastructure or components that are missing and the focus of this standardisation allows us to again avoid those pitfalls of duplication the patchwork kilt sustainable data sense of blueprint for example outlines how to construct and operate data centres in a way that significantly reduces the environmental impact and that may well incorporate things from the open compute project for example and various other sustainable data centre projects so on to the blueprints we've launched two blueprints today the patchwork kilt sustainable data sense of blueprint and the open technology electrical vehicle charging blueprint both of those were selected because of the pressing issues one around the rollout of electrical vehicle infrastructure and the various state subsidies in various different countries that may have led to distortion in the market EV charging points that are always broken, never working and data centres aren't properly recycled where energy consumption isn't measured and the global collaboration comes into play because they weren't just created by a group of people they were informed by members of the open compute project the sustainable digital infrastructure alliance IT renew, Scottish 5G centre the octopus energy centre for net zero Eilard out of the Netherlands we had members from the European Commission from various devolved governments across the UK as well as folks out of China and the US the idea is that each organisation can bring their own unique perspectives and expertise to the table resulting in robust, comprehensive and innovative blueprints for technology and a clear idea of where there are not open source projects and where we might need them so one of the first blueprints and it does not look very good in this blue background one of the first blueprints is the patchwork kilt blueprint and that was aimed at reshaping the way in which we think about design data centres for a more sustainable model and the idea is that we could convert direct retail and office spaces into 5G connected edge data centres to help the server farm industry reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80% the idea was also to encourage hyperscale cloud giants to recycle their underutilised but quite high end data centre hardware so that we can refurbish it, extend the lifespan re-certify it and allow other operators to make use of it the idea is that we don't just take into account the technical requirements as well we also look at the environmental impact so on the left you can see an overview of the life cycle of the hardware you can see our aims and on the right hand side you can see a very high level diagram of the components that we identified the building, energy, hardware, regulations and then the sub-components so for example how we might repurpose and how people might be involved for the operations and here is slightly larger and historically data centres have been one of the largest consumers of energy and as I mentioned that means that if we assume that energy is a proxy for carbon because energy has to convert it into fossil fuels in most of the countries in which we live that can generate a certain amount of CO2 emissions so the blueprint includes everything from what are the most sustainable construction materials what is the most energy efficient hardware to re-certify what are the most efficient cooling systems what renewable energy sources should we be looking at how might we include software that optimises energies and the idea and thus the name of the blueprint is that we create a patchwork of best practices woven together where each patch of the kilt represents a component of a data centre so we have a comprehensive holistic plan for sustainable operation and also once we know what components we need for a sustainable data centre based upon the community involvement we can also colour code these by where there might be gaps after we've identified the key components on the sub-components for each part of the blueprint re-identify the approach how would we implement this in practice if you wanted to run a data centre what might you need to do what could the potential impact of doing this be and again you can see on there the embodied carbon savings of up to 80% you can see the resources the various different open source groups that exist the various different articles that exist describing how you might be able to implement a re-purpose building how you might need to navigate planning permission or current rules in various different countries and locations so this first blueprint was launched at our open technology sustainability day in Glasgow and that was a fringe event back at COP26 the blueprint is still a living document and we're still encouraging people to contribute to review and collaborate to identify new buckets or patches being added to the kilt over time and we're also building out the approach we're building out the resources as we identify new open source communities so think of this as almost a cross-organisational landscape like the CNCF cloud landscape landscape from the to-do group trying to identify all the relevant parties in this area the second blueprint which was launched mid last year was the electrical vehicle charging blueprint which was produced to solve the challenge of sustainability in electric vehicle charging it builds on the work of the open charge alliance and the launch of the open charge point protocol beyond the initial charging infrastructure and if you're not familiar with OCPP if you plug an EV into basically any charge point anywhere in the world apart from possibly Tesla I'm not sure about them nearly all the others are using this standard from Eilard and the open charge alliance so the idea is that beyond the standards we also need to identify the environment needed to support the uptake of electric vehicles through a joined up charging infrastructure and that the OCPP is already looking at how might we share data between vehicles, between energy providers to support communication between all cars charging stations and back office systems in the same way if you can't quite read that because it's a very detailed diagram it's on the open UK site and also these slides have been sent over to shed by uploading as well creating the EV charging blueprint as I said took a lot of time this crazy spider diagram which you'll probably need to look at virtually on the slides was all about engaging stakeholders to identify all the different relationships between people in the electric vehicle charging ecosystem because we can't develop infrastructure in isolation we need to involve all the various different parties so we invited stakeholders that we knew to identify further stakeholders we had local governments across Europe various different countries so it didn't have just those involved in EV charging such as vehicle manufacturers we also had charging equipment manufacturers we had grid operators we had Intel Contribute we had those in adjacent areas like policy makers regulators, consumers sustainability experts and after we reached out to those we ran a series of workshops over the last couple of summers to foster a holistic view of the EV charging ecosystem and we settled on charging point operators because those people provide the infrastructure to EVs in various locations vehicle infrastructure providers because they provide the EV charging and battery installation within a vehicle communities the work between organisations, companies and communities end user services so those might be people that provide services alongside infrastructure so coffee shops service stations we call them in the UK and regulation and planning the standards that we have we identified a number of different key themes in the areas of designing for circularity and sustainability engaging local community and collaboration across sectors and we identified key themes across people, process and governance so the idea is that we wanted to look at the key ideas we had from the stakeholders in various different ways and we identified that any process that we implement should engage the local community effectively so EV charging points should not only serve a practical purpose but also provide benefits to the communities in which they live to engage and promote acceptance of EV charging points usage of EV charging points and contribute positively to local development and environmental sustainability and to ensure that our effort is actually bare some fruit we also need supportive policies and regulations so that might mean in some countries now mandating that you take contactless car payment when you go up to a charge point so you don't have to just download an app that if a charge point is already present there's not some kind of land grab so that mean we've often seen that if one electorate vehicle operator notices an empty site they will install a charge point there they might not keep the charge point working or up to date the charge point may well not be working but they bought that land so that their competitors cannot install a charge point and if you had a traditional fuel burning car such as petrol or diesel there are regulations across the world that mean you have a guaranteed amount of uptime generally that's around 90% in most countries that means your petrol pump if you're advertising fuel must actually be available to take payment during advertised opening hours we don't have that for EV charging so we looked at what local regulations might we need to copy from petrol vehicle stations so that people can go to an EV charge point know they can plug in their car and know that they can keep driving so it's not just about the technology it's about the people, the process and the governments yep so in no country like in UK for example is there no regulation for the companies to actually do that so they didn't just turn them off and people don't have to kind of charge their cars so you asked if there's regulation in countries already compared to traditional petrol cars it varies around the world in most countries now there is regulation about where you can cite your charger because we don't want to overload the electricity substations there's usually now regulation about whether or not and how you install the charger it must be done to a certain standard but there are generally in many countries not regulations about uptime so that means you can advertise an EV charging station it won't be open it will be faulty there's actually supermarket near me worth about a year now the EV charging stations have been broken and down and there's no regulation forcing that to be online so we want these blueprints to be policy ready as well and we identified key themes as well as the key stakeholders infrastructure, regulation and planning vehicle infrastructure and user services charging operators and community engagement so those final use cases translated into the components of the blueprint and the approach ensured that the final EV charging blueprint incorporated a wide range of views and considerations I think it's a comprehensive plan to address not only technical but also economic policy as well as environmental challenges associated with the infrastructure the stakeholder identification process shows I think the blueprint's emphasis and collaboration, inclusivity and openness and this is why again I've come here to ask more people to try and become involved so as I begin to wrap up I'll share our mixed steps number one our blueprints provide a solid foundation for addressing some although not all of the issues played in the tech industry they offer a model for collaboration, standardisation and sustainability as you probably saw from the pictures though our blueprints are currently locked away in slides and power points even though they're in a git repository so we're now working on making the data machine readable so can we look at the visualisations can we automatically identify changes to some of the resources that we identify to improve the accessibility and utility of the information and again embedded software practitioners are on the cutting edge of a lot of this innovation so you're creating the code that powers our vehicles our devices and our data centres so we really do want your involvement I cannot emphasise that enough we're also in the process of revising our blueprints at the moment for an event later this year our open UK's upcoming sustainability technology day and I'd like to invite you to join the event either in person or remotely to learn about these updates and how they can impact your work and also take part in sessions to help us to refine those blueprints the open technology for sustainability day takes place in Edinburgh on the 14th of September later this year the event is sponsored by Intel on the open compute project if you'd like to attend or sign up for a new schedule then we have a QR code there and I'll keep it up for the final slide which you can scan really interested if you have a time please go on to our website on twag it hub, add some issues add some pull requests if you don't have the time and you don't want to dive into anything beyond the code feel free to turn up on the day take part in some workshops and give us some of your experiences so I've had one question I'll be around for the last few sessions of the LF and Energy Summit alright thank you thanks very much so any question for Christopher you can find me on Twitter you can find me on Discord thank you very much for listening, cheers thank you