 We are collaborating on KDE protests with another KDE contributor, Emmanuel, which is a tool for automating energy scenarios based on X-Tutun and Python. I feel that as we are growing, it is really important to us that we don't draw not only software but energy efficient software. When someone uses free and open source software and finds out that software is energy efficient but it helps prolong the lifespan of hard work and also helps the environment, this excites me and I think KDE co-serves a purpose here for me. I think that's all about me. I'm Karanjot Singh. First I would like to thank KDE and organizers for providing me with this virtual way to present my views today at the panel discussion. As due to visa issues I couldn't join in person in Barcelona. So currently I'm pursuing my bachelor's degree in computer science from JP Institute of Information Technology in India. I'm currently working as a security researcher. I'm very passionate about force, solving problems and improving process efficiency. I've been a contributor to open source for a while and I enjoy exploring and learning new technologies and building things for socially useful causes. I worked as a mentee in the session of KDE 2022, that is KDE's annual open source program on preparing usage scenarios to emulate user behavior when measuring software energy demands. At the end of this program I was able to prepare standard usage scenario for KDE using XTO2 and that is being measured in the lab. This program helped me get introduced to KDE's Ecos initiative and the concept of energy efficient software. I'm glad I was able to contribute to this and I'm currently collaborating on KDE with another KDE contributor, Manu, which is a tool for automating energy scenarios based on XTO2 and Python. I feel that as we are growing it is really important to us that we don't draw not only software but energy efficient software. When someone uses free and open source software and finds out that software is energy efficient, that it helps prolong the lifespan of hardware and also helps the environment, this excites me and I think KDE co-serves a purpose here for me, I think thank you, I think that's all about me. I'm Karanjot Singh, first I would like to thank KDE and organizers for providing me with this virtual way to present my views today at the panel discussion. As due to visa issues I couldn't join in person in Barcelona. So currently I'm pursuing my bachelor's degree in computer science from J.P Institute of Information Technology in India. I'm currently working as a security researcher. I'm very passionate about force solving problems and improving process efficiency. I've been a contributor to open source for a while and I enjoy exploring and learning new technologies and building things for socially useful causes. I worked as a mentee in the session of KDE 2022 that is KDE's annual open source program on preparing usage scenarios to stimulate user behavior when measuring software energy demands. At the end of this program I was able to prepare standard usage scenario for KDE using XTO2 and that is being measured in the lab. This program helped me get introduced to KDE's Ecos initiative and the concept of energy efficient software. I'm glad I was able to contribute to this and I'm currently collaborating on KDE Contest with another KDE contributor, Emmanuel, which is a tool for scenario space in XTO2 and Python. I feel that as we are growing it is really important to us that we don't dwell not only software but energy efficient software. When someone uses free and open source software and finds out that software is energy efficient, that it helps prolong. So we'll have an online presence as well, I'll be following that and we'll be discussing KDE ECO and sustainability. Take it away please. Thank you, Abe. Is this mic on? Maybe. Maybe. Yes? Very good, cool. All right, we're going to talk about KDE ECO, which is a very exciting program that KDE ECO and many people in the KDE community have been working on over the past many months. And how about we start with a bit of intro? Can I just say one thing? Yes. Very briefly, just by being heartfelt, thank you. Yes. We didn't have to do a lot of spontaneous, honest, fun decisions about how to do this because of the fact that the panel has become a very hybrid sort of situation and they've been very flexible and helpful. Indeed. Thank you very much. Also, I just, you know, I'm really interested in testing your graphic, so the whole website football has been tested. Do I need to, okay, thank you. So if you didn't hear that, thank you Kenny and Albert for your help. And I also, I looked up the origin of the word panel just to see if there was some way that we could make this a panel, despite the fact that it's only a couple of us here. And the word actually comes from the word signpost, like a panel, like a board. And in some sense, I think this presentation today is a sort of signpost for where we want to go with KDE ECO while also taking a look at what we've done so far. So it is a panel in a maybe extended sense. It's quite just a 101 for you. Let's maybe start with a bit of intro of KDE ECO and what it means to you. Joseph, do you want to talk a bit about what it is and why you care? Yeah, so for me, I've learned a lot in the past year and a half about the state of the world in terms of the ICT sector. And there is some estimates that the ICT sector contributes between 2 and 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is considering everything in the ICT sector from hardware production, transportation, proof of work systems, usage of devices and things like this. And as a point of comparison, the aviation industry is at about 2.5 percent. So we're roughly in that same ballpark if not exceeding it. And it's only supposed to increase. So there are many parts to this. The KDE ECO initiative is focusing on what we can do something about, which is how efficient our software is trying to make it so that we're consuming less energy when getting the same stuff done, as well as trying to keep devices in use, which is a given in the free software community that we support devices when vendors have long abandoned them. These are things that have actually major contributions to reducing some of the energy consumption driven by software. And for me, this initiative is I'm a huge free software fan. And many of the things Nate was talking about, about most people having the experience of ads and devices they don't control and things like this. To me, it's wonderful to see that not only is that good for privacy and for user autonomy, but that's also good for sustainability. So that's one of the main things that motivates me in this project. Technical Ferries, can we get either Nicholas or Karen Jobs' video on the screen? And thank you to the audience for your patience. This is an adventure for all of us. Is there any sort of, do you have any indication of if things are, no? Is there any indication that things are, should we continue or should we wait? While we wait, maybe we can continue with some of the achievements that we have gone through over the last month since we started to work on KDEco. Because there was quite a lot of stuff you did, Cornelius did, Fokker did, Niko did, Karanjo did, and many, many more that we should talk about. So the just very, let me two sentences. The ECO initiative started with this project, the Blower Angle for FOS, which is a project initiated and supported by the German Environment Agency, which now ECO certifies software. And the Blower Angle for FOS is spreading information and collecting information related to ECO certification for software, particular for the FOS community. And we also have in the KDE this free and open source energy efficiency project, which is a bit bigger than that, trying to find various ways to look at energy efficiency, energy consumption related to software. For the Blower Angle for FOS project, we have as one of our goals to set up a measurement lab, so that software developers who are interested in ECO certification, or just interested in measuring their software in terms of the energy consumption for their own, so they can decide where they want to focus their energy, no pun intended, to reduce the energy consumption. We have set up a lab in Berlin, a KDAP Berlin. This is work that was done together with a number of people, several who couldn't be here, unfortunately. So Niko, who is hopefully going to join us at some point in the BBB room. Foko Kaoza has been fundamental in setting this up. Of course, the KDAP people, so Bjorn, don't remember his last name. He also has been very helpful getting this set up. We've had people who are also working on adjacent projects. There's the Green Coding Berlin project. Arna Tata has been very active in getting the lab set up and helping us out with some of the technical aspects of it. And then we have several other people who have joined, contributed for an afternoon, and we're very thankful to all of them as well. So this is one of, I think, a really big achievement. It took a bit of time, COVID intervened, as it has for all of us over the past two years. So it got delayed a few months. We have now, we have had three sprints and it's now, as of August, everything's ready. It's still a work in progress. There's some open questions related to the power meter, for example. If it's, if we want to get a higher resolution power meter, we still have some of the required devices, the hardware for eco-certification that we want to get there. But right now, it's already in ready for use. And yes, we want to welcome free and open source software developers, KDE developers, to get in touch if they're interested in measuring their software, and we can help with that. So I would say that's one of the big ones. I can continue. I don't know. Yeah. So I have, I have like three or four in mind. Another one, which is actually, this is where we can get Karanjot back in. So scripting tools. So if, if we have video capability and we can play the second video that Karanjot recorded, he worked on scripting tools for the season of KDE 2022. And if we can get him, again, thanks for your patience. Can, can they hear us back there? Can, can we get the second video? Is that possible? And, okay. And, and do we have the BB room? Is Nico going to be able to join us? I'm not sure. I think trying that too, but okay. And again, thank you to the technical fairies that they're the term of art. Really important part of measuring energy consumption is preparing standard user scenarios. A standard user scenario reflects typical functions of an application, how a normal user interacts with the software. So to prepare, I would say let's continue. It's okay. Let's continue. So I can maybe say a couple of sentences to what Karanjot might continue to talk about. So part of measuring software is you want to have reproducible scenarios and you want to emulate user behavior that represents typical user behavior to get a sense of what the, the energy consumption would be for a typical use. And Karanjot will now tell us more. Part of measuring energy consumption is preparing standard user scenarios. A standard user scenario reflects typical functions of an application, how a normal user interacts with the software. So to prepare the standard user scenarios, I needed to know which tool would be better to create and automate the scenario. So during my session of KDP rate, I tested various automation tools like XTO tool, ActionR and XNE out of which I found XTO tool which uses X11 extension to be most useful as it allowed keyboard driven actions. And I'd really like this tool because it was based on command line, while action is based on mouse clicking and GUI. So you basically write a pass script and automate the script using XTO tool. Nico's thesis on XTO tool helped me a lot in understanding working with XTO tool. Another KDP contributor, Emmanuel Charao, came up with the idea of combining XTO tool with Python, creating a KDP ecotest, KDP ecotest creator to make the process of preparing standard user scenarios more robust and easy, which I'm collaborating on with KDP ecotest creator, you can create a script using KDP ecotest creator and then automate them using KDP ecotest. So you can easily transfer these scripts to another computer and run it. We have G compressed script written in XTO tool by Emmanuel, which is currently being tested at the measurement labs. So KDP ecotest is something which I think will be really helpful in measuring standard user scenarios in future. There's a state of lot of work that is left to do. So if anyone wanted to contribute, can help me with this project? Thank you. Just to answer the question, yes, we do want the video from the BBBB room if possible. And maybe I'll just give some context. So before this project, the KDP ecotest initiative started, the tool that was used was not very robust. And in the project with help from Karanjot and Nico, the work that they did, we've now developed a couple of tools, one of which is we're calling KDE ecotester. It's from Emmanuel Charu who works in G compressed together with Karanjot to make robust scripts that are easily transferable from one system to another and are easy to implement. So hello, Nico, it's great that you've been able to join us. Hey, I see myself. Can you hear me? Awesome. So I chose the eco-friendly method of attending and by choice, I mean some virus chose for me. Otherwise, I would be in Barcelona with you as well. But well, we'll have to do it that way, I guess. Thank you for making this possible. We were talking about achievements and scripting tools just now. And we saw Karanjot's video. Do you maybe want to add a bit about the lab setup or other scripting pieces? Sure. Maybe I start with a very quick introduction of myself and how I got involved with all of this. So I've been a KDE developer for like five years now. And when the KDE eco initiatives were announced, I thought, that sounds interesting, both from a like eco-social point of view. So doing something good by reducing carbon emissions and also from like an engineering challenge because I'm an engineer. I like to do engineering stuff. So that's how I sort of got involved in some of the early discussions. And then I'm a computer science student at university. And it was time for me to write my master thesis. And I thought, hmm, at the chair of software engineering at my university, there's a guy doing energy efficiency stuff. And KDE is doing energy efficiency stuff. And I like doing KDE stuff. So why can't we combine that? And then I did that and wrote a master thesis where I compared some of the measurement approaches and automation approaches to measuring KDE software. So I have some practical experience implementing some of these approaches, which I've also obviously shared with the community. So we have a couple of ideas on how to approach such measurements in a reliable and repeatable way. So that was basically my main contribution and also helped with some of the practical aspects of setting up the measurement laboratory. Thank you very much. And we have another achievement I think that we even can show. Do you want to show it? Yes. So I'm going to combine two achievements into this one. So we've collaborated with several different groups. One is the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance, which is trying to bring together several people to work on making the ICT sector carbon neutral, green coating Berlin. Very importantly, the Umfeld Campus Birkenfeld, the environmental campus in Birkenfeld, Germany, who measured several KDE applications, including Ocular. And with those measurements, we, as KDE with the help from Cornelius in particular, submitted an application to become eco certified through the Blue Angel eco label, which is the official eco label of the German government. It's the oldest existing eco label. And on Wednesday last week, we had the award ceremony at the Enviro Info Conference in Hamburg, Germany. And I'm very proud to show off our award certificate as the first ever eco certified software product. So yeah, hands up for Ocular and KDE for this achievement. It's the first eco certification for software, not only for the Blower Angel, but also of the 30 organizations, the global eco labeling network, which the which the Blower Angel is part of. So this is a an achievement that we're very proud of and we'll celebrate after this panel discussion. And this is now the first certification we've done for Ocular, but it's sure not going to be the last. So in the future, talk to us about getting more applications certified where it makes sense. All right. So we've talked about some of the achievements. Let's talk about some of the impact KDE eco had so far. Do you want to get us started? Maybe we'll start with Nico and some of the efficiency improvements and in the development side. Let's do it. Sure. So measuring and certifying things for eco energy efficiencies, of course important, but it doesn't get on any environment's own because there is also the practical aspect of you need to actually go and optimize our software. That is something that we've kind of always done because we've always cared about performance and there's a very strong correlation between energy efficiency and performance. But I think the whole initiative around KDE eco sparked a whole new force behind that. And so during the time we've had KDE eco, there were quite a few changes to plasma and applications and all around the code base to improve performance and energy efficiency. We also introduced a energy efficiency label that people can attack their merge requests with when they do something around energy efficiency. And that gives us a very good overview of what kind of work is done. And I would just add the last time I looked in GitLab we had, this was about a month ago, 130 plus efficiency merge requests in plasma since last year. So less than one year already that many. Very cool. And if you're doing work around optimizing our software, then sure think about adding that tag so we get a better overview of how things are going. But that's not the only thing, right? No. So another achievement is we've been pushing a conversation not only within KDE about sustainability but also beyond KDE in other false communities. We have ongoing outreach into various groups like GNOME, Qt, the Document Foundation, NextCloud, I have a list here because I can't remember them all, that's how many there are. And we've Mozilla, Firefox, these are all ongoing. So we've started conversations, planned to continue them. We've been giving presentations at numerous conferences and workshops. SFSCon, which we will be presenting again in November, CCC, Linux App Summit, the Fedora Nest, Qt DevCon, Green Coding Berlin workshops, etc. So we're really trying to push a conversation about sustainability and energy efficiency in software development. We've had several articles in newspapers and blogs, including an article in the Tots, which is a German journalist collective in hacker news, had a post about us, linuxmagazineopensource.com, a print magazine called Transform, which doesn't normally do articles on software, but because of the sustainability angle, we're interested in discussing this. So it's had an impact on pushing a conversation, which if you're interested in learning more about this, Cornelius Schumacher will be giving a presentation tomorrow, which you should watch afterwards into Academy. We'll also be happening at the Bits and Boima conference about developing a culture of sustainability in free software communities. This will be at 2.30 tomorrow and will be recorded, so you can watch it next week after Academy is over. So yeah, so we're trying to move this conversation outside of the normal bubbles, I would say. And one thing that's important to me is, as I said at the very beginning, recognizing that the characteristics that are inherent to free and open source software also make it sustainable in a sort of larger, holistic perspective. Being able to keep devices in use and not throwing them away because they're no longer supported by the vendors, being able to choose how you use your software so that it's not just a vacuum for your data, which also is very energy consuming, but you can choose how your software is actually running. These are parts of the conversation that we're trying to push, that free software is not just the best software because of the four freedoms and control and privacy, but also for sustainability. Yeah, and for me it's also really good to see that we're finding a lot of what I would call natural allies in these other organizations and reaching groups through them also for KDE's messages that we would probably not otherwise very easily reach. So that's a really cool thing. All right, now we've talked about all those things that happened. Shall we talk a bit about what's still to come? What more do we want? I think that's a great idea, Lydia. Let's do it. Should we maybe, Nico, if you would like to start with some talking about some data-driven development approaches? Sure. So of course something that I want to continue to do in the future is optimize our software, but some famous scientists at some point said you can't optimize what you can't measure, so that's why having a measurement setup and measurement laboratory and measurement infrastructure is so important, because otherwise quite a lot of times we are doing guesses in the dark, what could be inefficient or could be efficient, and we have no real way to back that up. And we call ourselves software engineers, so we should apply some engineering principles, like verifying that what you want to do is actually how you achieve it. And quite often we have conversations like, oh, we can't do that or we should do this because efficiency and we have some tools to verify the performance characteristics, but until now we don't really have the tools to do the same for energy consumption, and having those tools available would really open a whole world of possibility of data-driven decision making, which would be really valuable there. Yes, and related to the lab, one of the goals we also have is to make the lab remotely accessible, so right now you have to be in person, which if you're interested and you can't be in Berlin, you can certainly reach out to us and perhaps we can support you by being your hands in the lab, but we want to eventually make it so that there's an upload portal and we want to automate the process as much as possible, so you define your usage scenario script, the software you want to test, upload it, the tests are run and then you get a report back, which can be for data-driven decision making purposes or for eco-certification. It's wonderful to have a bunch of developers in a room because you can help us. If you're interested in this topic, please feel free to get in touch. We want people to help set up this portal, set up the lab so people can access it remotely. There are many ways to get involved if you would like to. One is to join our monthly meetup, which is every second Wednesday of the month at 7 p.m. CEST or CET, so Berlin time. That's one of the goals, is the remote access to the lab. Another is to write a handbook so that if you're interested in setting up your own lab, you can look at our handbook, which hopefully will come out at the end of this year or the beginning of next year, and follow a how-to for setting up a lab, the scripts you need for reading from the power meter, all based on free software, how to write a standard usage scenario, et cetera, et cetera. This handbook hopefully will help make more labs accessible around the globe. This handbook is we want to have a curated, maybe bi-yearly release with the state of the art. The first one will be hopefully the end of this year. However, we want the website where the manual will also be presented to be a living document. If you want to find out what's happening right now, you can go to the manual, see what we're working on, see some of the tools that are being worked on and developed, and then hopefully with a two-year release cycle of a curated version of that online manual. So these are some aspirations going forward. Let's see, maybe Niko, maybe we'll wrap up slowly so that other people can ask questions, but I believe there was a, maybe Niko, if you would like to talk a second about the Selenium scripting or other scripting tools that are of interest and have overlap with the accessibility goal. Sure. So somewhat recently, Harald wrote a proposal to a couple of our mailing lists about a way to automate testing of various applications using a tool called Selenium and using accessibility APIs in the applications to do some kind of test automation, which in his mind wasn't really related to what we're talking here at all. And I thought, this sounds useful for us too, because we also have the same problem. We want to reliably and repeatedly automate the interaction with an application to make the application do something that we can measure. So I think there's a lot of potential overlap between those initiatives, because we're basically solving the same problems. And as a nice side benefit, since this proposal from Harald relies on the accessibility APIs in the applications, we also have yet another incentive to improve the accessibility of our applications, which is also a big topic at this academy, not the least, because we selected accessibility as one of our new goals. So I think there's really a lot of potential for cross-collaboration and making nice things happen. And to add another benefit is that right now the tools we're using for scripting are X11 based, and this would open up the possibility of measuring on Weyland, which is of high interest for efficiency purposes. All right. How about we wrap our part up and ask some questions. Can I add maybe one extra thing, just because I find it to be an interesting idea. At one of the sprints, we were discussing with the Green Web Foundation, which is trying to make the web carbon neutral by 2030, the idea of sustainable cron jobs as a way to think of it. So you can get some information and hopefully more over time about what the current power mix is in the grid if you have a more renewable energy sources at a certain time of day or not. And one of the ideas is to incorporate that information into, for example, updates, which can be computationally expensive so that you can have updates at times of day when there are more renewable sources in your power feeding your computer. So these are an idea that we hope to apply for a short-term funding for and to collaborate with the Green Web Foundation and hopefully other distros to incorporate this into update systems across the Linux ecosystem. This would be something that would be very exciting. Very much so. Okay. We are officially out of time, but maybe we have time for one question before we get to the very exciting part of the day. We have time for questions. There are still online questions though for you. So the room is going to have to amuse us. It's a nice initiative. I was just wondering, regarding the ocular certification, how does it work? Do they compare different applications or how does it work? That's a very good question. So the Blue Angel does not directly compare two different software applications. And currently it does not have a minimum threshold in terms of energy consumption. The criteria require that you are transparent about how much energy you consume and what the usage was that led to that consumption. So you have to be transparent about your energy consumption. Plus you have to fill other criteria. And the other criteria are support for hardware that's at least five years old. I recently recommend they should up that because I think 2017 is not that long ago. And I think we can do better than that. But that's their requirements at the time right now. And the other category is user autonomy criteria, which is various criteria related to factors that contribute to energy consumption. So can users use the software without advertisements and without other forms of tracking? Does it support open standards so that if a user wants to switch software products, perhaps to one that is more energy efficient, is that possible or are they locked in? And if you meet these other criteria, many of which for us are a given. Like this is obvious stuff that free software already does. But it's recognizing that these are factors that can contribute to a sustainable digital ecosystem. And those criteria also have to be fulfilled. But there is no direct comparison by the blue angel between products. Now, of course, once that information is transparent, users can then compare if they want. I think we want to move questions to what we're doing now. So what we're doing now is we have something to celebrate with this certification. And every proper celebration, of course, has cake. So we want to go outside and eat the ocular celebration cake.