 So, I'm going to talk about sustainability in a slightly different way now. I'm going to talk about the energy and resource consumption related to software and how to recognize energy-efficient software with Blower Angle ECO certification. I'd also like to announce that we now have a website that launched today, eco.kde.org. You're welcome to check it out. An overview of what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to first present the KDE ECO projects as well as the Blower Angle ECO label. And then I'm going to go through three steps to obtaining ECO certification for software and then wrap it up with looking to the future. If you'd like the slides, I have a lot of links that are in here. If you'd like them, you're welcome to download them from GitLab at invent.kde.org slash Joseph slash BE for FOSS. I will have that link again at the end of the slides. So to frame the conversation, I'm going to first present a discussion of software bloat from the Blower Angle award criteria which were released last year in January 2020. They write, the availability of more and more powerful hardware has resulted in software becoming more and more bloated from version to version so that more resources are required for only minimal or even no enhancement of the functionality. To illustrate that, here's a bar plot. The access is various software. I'm going to focus on the far left, two plots here, on the y-axis you're looking at the watt hours. And this is comparing in the green word processor one versus the blue word processor two. These are word processors running on the same hardware doing the exact same task. And the word processor one has about four times the energy consumption of word processor two. In some sense, you can talk about sustainability here as being the relative sustainability between the two word processors. Word processor one requires less resources and is therefore more sustainable. To compare this to other things like light bulbs that you might know, running a 50-watt light bulb for half an hour would be the equivalent to running word processor one for only seven hours in comparison to word processor two, which you get 27 hours of use time out of that for the exact same tasks. So this is to illustrate that there's an interdependency between software engineering and environmental issues here, resource consumption. It's not just the energy consumption, it's also software bloat can result in hardware becoming obsolescent, meaning that the perfectly functioning hardware, as Eric talked about earlier, can then become unusable because the demands get higher and higher with new versions of software. So KDE ECO is a new project. We're looking to explore the energy efficient software world in various ways. One is to push a conversation on the environmental impact of software. We want to be pioneers in developing energy efficient software. We want to promote tools for measuring energy efficiency, which I'm going to talk about today in terms of energy consumption labs. And we want to certify free and open source software with Blower Angle ECO certification. So in general, our goal is to put free software at the forefront of energy efficient software. And we have many channels to get involved. We're going to have two sprints coming up in the next few months, one in December to set up our community lab and one in January, February 2022 to start measuring free software. We have a mailing list and a matrix room to have conversations about the topic of energy efficient software, a forum channel, et cetera. And I will present a list of various ways to contact us at the end. So KDE ECO is made up of two projects. The first one is a community-driven project that's the FEAP project, the free and open source energy efficiency project. And the goal here is to collect energy consumption measurements and integrate these measurement tools into the development process. The Blower Angle for FOSS project, the project that I'm working for, is supporting FEAP by collecting summarizing and spreading information about ECO certification with Blower Angle and energy consumption measurements. And one of the main takeaway messages I want to have today in the talk is that free and open source software is particularly well positioned for obtaining a Blower Angle ECO label, as we'll see in the three steps to getting ECO certification. So what is Blower Angle? I imagine some of you might know it here. It's a German ECO label for environmentally friendly products. It's the oldest in the world since 1978. It's recognized by 92% of Germans and highly regarded internationally. And it's awarded to a variety of products. So most Germans, when you talk about Blower Angle, they immediately think of paper. That's probably the most common association. They award it to various products, including laundry detergents, cleaning services, as well as construction products, et cetera. And since last year, also for software. International perspectives on the Blower Angle. So 15% of the recipients are outside of Germany. So it's a German-based and German government backed ECO label. But the recipients are international. One of the nice things about this ECO label compared to other ECO labels is there are no requirements on where a product that receives the label can be marketed. Worldwide it's seen as a mark of quality or quality insurance. For example, if a company is building a building in another country, they might choose Blower Angle products because they will be more assured that it's environmentally friendly and of a higher quality. For companies, the award criteria of the Blower Angle are seen as indicators of the direction of the European Union market, as well as a potential guideline for optimizing their own products, whether or not they apply for the Blower Angle certification. And the Blower Angle is a member of the global ECO labeling network, which is an international cooperation to define common core criteria for ECO labels across borders. KDE is very interested in Blower Angle. We already have the KML email client and ocular PDF reader measured, and the application is ready to submit. The digital painting program Krita has been measured, and we need to prepare the application. In early 2022, we're going to have a measure-a-thon. You all are welcome to join. We're going to measure the text editor more, Kate, as well as the educational software G-Compre, and we're open to other projects, free and open source projects, if you're interested. Why are we interested in Blower Angle? Well, there are many benefits to it. One is it recognizes, when you receive the ECO label, it recognizes that you have high standards in environmentally friendly software design. It differentiates KDE and free software from the alternatives. It increases the appeal of adoption for users and institutions. For example, the green public procurement, and it shows transparency in the ecological footprint of the software. What is green public procurement? It's the process whereby public authorities seek to procure goods, services, and works with a reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle, meaning that this might increase the adoption in institutions of software in official capacities. Now, let's get to what I'm calling the ABCs of the Blower Angle ECO label. There are three main categories in the award criteria. The award criteria now are only for local software. In future revisions, they want to include client-server software, as well as mobile phones, but at the moment it's only local software. The three main categories include resource and energy efficiency, similar to what we saw at the very beginning with the bar plots. How much does the software consume? The potential hardware operating life that's related to things like upcycling and other ways that software can influence the hardware life cycle, as well as user autonomy. So in a bit more detail, today we're going to focus mostly on the hardware performance and energy consumption part, but the other requirements include things, in particular under user autonomy, things like does it support, does the software support open standards, can you completely uninstall the software without leaving a trace other than the user generated data, is that documented somewhere, is the software open source, is there a continuity of support, can the user decide to install only the essential functions without all of the other functions that they may not need or want, and can the software run offline and can the user choose not to have advertising, which is also a drain on resources. So we're going to focus on this for right now. So three steps, measure, analyze, certify, measure energy consumption at, for example, a community lab. We're going to set one up in December in KDAB Berlin. Once you have the results and the data, you can use a tool like Oscar, the open source software consumption analysis in R to analyze the data and get a report, which can then be used for your application for a Blaua Engel, and then you can certify it by submitting a full report with the ABCs of the Blaua Engel criteria. What do you need for a lab? You need at least two computers and one power meter. The primary computer is the system under test. This is the computer that's going to be running the operating system that you choose with the application installed. And then it's going to be connected to a power meter as well as a data aggregator. Power meters, high powered power meters are expensive, and a KDE community manor, Kakaoza, has hacked a cheap power meter, cost about 10 euros compared to perhaps 300 plus for a more powerful power meter. The data, the sampling rate is lower. You get about five samples per second compared to a more high powered power meter where you get up to 1,000. But for 10 euros, you can do quite a bit with that already to get a sense of how much energy your software is consuming. You get a visualization of the lab setup. You have the system under test connected to a power meter, and the power meter and the system under test are both connected to the data aggregator. The system under test will also be collecting data, which then will then be used to analyze, which includes the performance data, the hardware performance. That includes things like the CPU, the memory, the disk, and network data. There's a free and open source tool that can do this, collect all, and the power meter is collecting then the energy consumption. One of the recommended power meters is the Gouda Expert Power Control Meter. This is recommended by the Blaue Engel. There are others that you can use. Janitza is another one. Then what do you measure? So there are three different scenarios to measure. One is the baseline measurement. This is just the operating system running without anything happening. It gives you the underlying power consumption of that OS. You have the idle mode, which is the operating plus the application running, but nothing happening. This gives you, when you subtract out the baseline, you get then the energy consumption of just that piece of software when it's not doing anything. And the standard usage scenario, which is the application being used, and it should represent typical and frequent functions of that software. This is a step that needs to be defined before you measure, obviously. And there are many ways to emulate this. Right now there's a lot of discussion in our matrix room about, so, okay. So there are many emulation tools, one that's been used by some researchers in this area as axionauts are quite easy to use, but pixel-based tool. Pixel-based means if you change monitor sizes, you might have problems reproducing the tasks because the pixels have changed relative to the monitor. But there are various other tools, and right now we're in discussion about which of those tools we want to use in the sprint in early 2022. If you want a summary of the various tools that can do this emulation of the standard usage scenario, there's a list here at the GitLab repository from one of KDE's members, David Hurko. At the moment, these standard usage scenarios are freely selected for blower angle certification. In the future, they may become standardized. And one thing to note is that for blower angle certification, you will need a log file of what actions were taken. So the kinds of things that you might expect, for example, when measuring something like an email client is opening an email, sending an email, adding an attachment, reading through the email. These are all standard usage scenario tasks that then go into the standard usage scenario that goes into the energy measurement. So that's the measurement part. Step one, step two is analyze. The Umbet Campus Birkenfeld has developed an online tool to produce reports automatically. You need a log file of the actions taken for both the idle mode and standard usage scenario, as well as the energy consumption and hardware performance results. You feed that into OSCAR, the open source software consumption analysis in our tool. And what you get back is a full report with the energy measurements, the hardware performance, et cetera. Here is just an example of the K-mail report. This is a standard usage scenario. And the gray lines here represent 31 repetitions of the measurements, and the importance of doing that is so you have a statistical valid data set that you can then use for analysis. Each of those gray lines represents, at each second, an average over 1,000 measurements with the Yanica power meter. And if you look here, what you see here is the power consumption over time. And this is, for example, at the point when sending an email and you see that the power consumption goes up. With this report, you are now done with the first part of the resource and energy efficiency component of the award criteria. What's really nice for us as free software enthusiasts, developers, et cetera, is that everything else here, free and open source software, already does in most cases. All that's missing, if it's missing, is documentation. So we're in a really great position here to get recognition of environmentally friendly software design once we have the energy consumption measurements. Looking to the future, we have the idea of doing a KDAB community lab. This is already in progress. We have a planned sprint in December. And again, you're all welcome to join if you would like. Long-term vision is to have a software upload portal where steps one and two are done automatically. You specify the hardware you want and you get a report back. The short-term goal for now is just to get a lab set up. We're going to document the entire process. If you would want to set up your own lab, you can either look at our documentation or get in touch with us. We'd be happy to help get more labs set up to measure the energy consumption of free and open source software. There are many other ways to help. Started labeling in KDE, bugzilla, efficiency bugs. Those are bugs related to CPU spikes, delays, hangs, et cetera. You can provide support for statistical analysis tools, submit Blower angle applications, help with promotion and outreach. Give us feedback for revised criteria and help develop automation tools. Okay, okay, I'm actually almost done anyway. So for the last point, the development of automation tools, there's another project also funded by the Bundesamt, which might be of interest, is the Software Project. This is a project between the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance and the Öko Institute. And they're specifically focused on developing CI tools to bring energy efficiency measurements into the CI pipeline. And they're very interested in getting community support, and they have various hackathons and workshops planned for the next two years. And just to point out that if you want to learn more about this project, there's a conference presentation coming up in February. If you'd like to get involved, we'd love to have as many of you join us as possible. You can contact me at josephatkde.org. It just started a Master Don account for the project. We have two sprints, as I've mentioned several times now, one in December, one in early 2022. We also have a regular monthly big blue button meetup on the second Wednesday at 7 o'clock CET. Contact me if you'd like to join us. We just had our meeting two days ago, and it's been lively discussions about things, for example, which tools do we want to use to emulate the standard usage scenarios? We also have an energy efficiency mailing list in a matrix room. And there, again, you're welcome to join and then join the conversation. And then if you want some community support in general, we have a forum page. Here's just some more links, the GitLab repository for Feep and for Blower Angular Foss, as well as our promo. And the Blower Angular applications that we have completed, you're welcome to take as a template for your own software, and hopefully we can get as much free software certified as possible. So that is it. I just want to note that this was funded by the BMU, which is the Federal Ministry for the Environment and Natural Conservation and Nuclear Safety, as well as the UNVEB Bundesamt. And we are responsible for all the content. So thank you. So thanks for this presentation. I was wondering, does it really make sense to have pure CLI tools also to be satisfied? Or is it rather focused on desktop software or user facing software? Like what's the threshold where it really makes sense to make a software having Blower Angular? So at the moment, measurement labs are the way to get the reports for the Blower Angular. And the CLI tools is more of a long term to bring energy efficiency into the development pipeline so that we can get a sense, as we're making commits, if we're changing the energy consumption. I think I was perhaps actually like CLI tools, like pure console tools, like which you have in the terminal. So does it make sense to have it certified? So as far as I understand, that's not part of the award criteria for Blower Angular, that they would require external measurements. And I think part of that is because there are things that don't get picked up by the CLI tools is one of the issues. Another one is that itself is going to be creating some energy consumption. But I think the main one is that having this external, you have an objective measurement of the energy consumption. Naturally, that's going to be when you don't have a battery that could also then create issues. So laptops might cause problems because there's other kinds of energy management that's happening. But you want to have this sort of objective measurement that's external to the computer itself. But for the Blower Angular, as far as I understand, they need this kind of report at this point. So having the command line tools may not be enough. OK. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for the question. Thank you. Are there any other questions in the audience? Eric, please. Could you come? Thanks a lot. Is there already software that has the blue angel, or when do we expect the first to have it? That's a good question. No, not yet. And this is something that we're excited about because fingers crossed if we get these applications in in the next few weeks, that maybe KDE can be the first, which has a certain symbolic value. When do you think that could be? So we plan to submit by the end of this month, early next month, there are just a couple of things we still need to work out in the reports to make sure we understand what's happening and what the values are that we're reporting. Yeah. And on that note, whenever the Blower Angle awards a product for the first time, they have a big event with various politicians and whatnot. And it also would be nice publicity for free software.