 Hello and welcome to this session. I am Nusie Jarbe, working at IBM in the tech world and passionate about sustainability and working to fight climate change. Today I will be talking to you about responsible computing and how you can start to implement it at scale within your company. As you probably know already, if you came to this session, we need to start thinking differently about technology. It's all about our media and your sources. We have Cambridge Analytica, the dark side of social media, and Bitcoin, data centers, and AI using up towards energy. The way IBM decided to address this was through the responsible computing framework. The framework is split into six main categories, three about social topics, so impact system and data usage, and three more about technology, so data center, infrastructure, and code. My focus was on code and I'm guessing yours would have been too. So what is responsible code? Responsible code is to be aware of the potential environmental, societal, and economic impact your design and requirement choices could have and how you can minimize their negative impact. Now, we've seen already some of the negative impact of technology, but I still want to spend a minute on the impact of IT on our environment. Indeed, digital services amount to 4% of the global green house gas emission, so trace that of aviation and it's important to understand where most of our work is if we want to reduce the impact on our environment. So first, what are the kind of impact IT can have on our environment? So obviously there is the energy use and green house gas emission associated to it. We have the water consumption to create new equipment and the depletion of resources again linked to the creation of equipment. And out of all of this studied by Green IT ranked by categories with numbers. It's an approximation, obviously as you can guess, these are numbers that are quite hard to estimate precisely, especially since we have spread around 4 categories. So as you can see, data centers created as a billion are at the bottom of the impact here are here for digital services, both at the energy consumption and manufacturing level. It doesn't mean we don't have to do things that we do in impact, but it shows that we can have a good impact at the user level, especially regarding the manufacturing of equipment. So the manufacturing of user equipment is responsible for more than half of the impact. As developers, our biggest focus should be around making sure that our software and apps are fast and might to remove as much as possible the need for user to upgrade their hardware to match our software needs. So now let's talk about how we can reuse the impact of code on our environment. Step one is to remove unnecessary features and code. The same way you would say the best is the one that does not exist about pollution, you can say the same about code. So the best code slash feature is the one that does not exist. Removing useless features in your code will inevitably reduce the impact of your app obviously because we will need less computing power, less energy to run it and less data will be hosted. An example of the same choices that you need to always remove is auto play because you use data and energy to run the video that might not even interest the user. And also if you have users that are visually impaired, it might mess with their experience on your web page. So you can also think about removing the requirements. So for example, if you use an AI model in your app, you might have seen that training them is quite resource intensive. So switching maybe from a 98% recognition to a 95% or 90% might be enough for your use case and usually 90% are the other ones to get so low in the bar can save quite a bit of energy. And while designing your app, you want to really keep only what is necessary. So rethink all of your ideas track what feature users use and don't use to only keep the best and most interesting feature. So that is digital minimalism. So now that all unnecessary things are removed, you want to make sure that the code that is left is a certain agent that will help on social, economic and environmental areas. So first off you want clean and reusable code that way the resources you spent while developing your code so human and economic and computing resources will not be wasted because you have to redevelop your app. Second you want code that is inclusive. Think of everyone with disability. We are lucky enough in the web area to have a standard code called the WCAG 2.1. So you just need to have an AA rating on this one. ABM also made a website available for you with tools to test accessibility of your web page. And you also want your code to not favor the digital divide, meaning make it work for people that are not as technology savvy as you are, or have a bad internet connection. And finally you want inclusivity in your illustration, videos and forms so that everyone feels including on your website and stay wary of biases in AI models, APIs or datasets you are working with. And once you've done all that you will need to optimize your code so asset previously must have the impact of digital services happen in the creation of different terminals. So the best way of reducing our impact is to fight against obsolescence and having to upgrade hardware to match software needs. So when we use more RAM and CPU our computer usually goes slower and that drives the want in consumer to upgrade to a new and faster computer which is the main issue we have right now. So optimizing your code and looking at KPI such as cycle count, CPU consumption, memory usage, network calls, size of your page is the way to go to give resources usage as low as possible and to fight obsolescence. So now I will show you a few tools that you can use right now to give you insights on your webpage and what you can change so it goes from seeing if your site is fast to best practices that you might want to implement. Another way to optimize your code is to use well-known and certified libraries. Usually they already are optimized to the best of what is possible out there so you do not have to spend your time optimizing the code yourself. However, if you do use that just stay careful of possible databases when using public libraries. Now that we have looked through all of this, you might think well, it's all fine and well but I'm not alone in my team and I do not have the full creative power of our application. That's true and that's what we focus on for the rest of the presentation. So how do you get everyone to be on the same team? So let me tell you about my story and the way I studied acting to make sustainability more of a common topic to be discussed so that everyone in my team thinks about it, not just me. So when I first started working within my company I looked around and I saw so many things that could change and I think we all do. One of that things was about a very specific topic on sustainability and lucky enough I found someone else that wanted to do something about it around a coffee machine so we started getting in touch with the person in charge of such things to discuss possible changes and while talking to them we found out that they had been approached by two other people on that topic. So I wasn't alone trying to change things all I needed to do was to find others like me and start working on things together. So as we all gathered and we started talking about all the things we thought needed to change and let me tell you we were creative and had big ideas. The thing about big dreams is that you need to put in the rock to make sure that you can reach them. The first thing to us that matter was that we needed to be taking seriously and not just as idealist as might be the case when it came to sustainability a few years ago and still do. So we worked hard on making professional presentations the same way we would do if we were talking to a client even if it was all about internal topics and not a business-fated one. So we started by creating a structure that could scale to get more people in and then we made branding so we had a logo and a catchy name that was coined with our company's brand name. So if you do the same make sure that the people in charge of the brand for your company know about your project otherwise you might get in trouble because there is a lot of legal aspect linked to branding so that's why we chose to keep our branding internal and I'm not showing it to you right now. Then we chose a project that we knew would be achievable and that we were involved. That way we will be starting to have an impact and not just be about talking but also action. We believe this would also give us more credibility when presenting our project later especially to executives. Once we had a solid base we started expanding and finding people like us that were interesting about sustainability and wanted to act that way we started to grow and work on more projects and we ended up with quite a big community. So now if you want to do the same I can give you some advice of what I found and learned along the way. So first start small then scale. This is key because in the beginning you will encounter a lot of setback and it will require a lot of ontoprock so you will need to be passionate about what you are doing in order to not lose interest and motivation. So focus on one project with people you trust and make it become a reality. That way you will learn a lot about the internal dynamics within your company. You want also to create a structure that will survive skating. You want to create a brand to have more impact. You want to find leaders and people in position of power that will support and help your project and community. Otherwise again you will not go far. And once you've done all of that you will then want to find more people to work on your project. So now let me go into the final tips and tricks to creating your community. So in the beginning do not count your hours creating community takes time you have to work on building structure, presentation you also need to onboard new people and find sponsors. As you can guess it takes quite some time. So most people who will talk to when working on project will be onboard to help you but most of the time you have to remind yourself that you are adding to their workload. So if you want your project to become a reality you will need to help them as much as possible. You also want to be really professional and treat it like you will treat any other business and when you are talking to other people within your company to get their help or support make sure to personalize your presentation to the audience a presentation will not be the same for HR than it will be for a business leader. Because as you can guess they will be interesting in different metrics, different KPIs which is another thing. Make sure that whenever you discuss your project with someone the person you ask for help will benefit from your project too. Always involve the person in charge of a topic in the discussion trust me on this one it will save you a lot of time. Also make sure that you have a way of onboarding people and giving them clear ways in which they can act indeed most of the time people want to help they just don't know how or where to start. Also most of the time what you are doing with your community will be on top of your job and it will require a lot of work so you need to remind yourself that you need to keep it light and enjoy what you are doing otherwise you will lose interest and motivation quite quickly. To me the benefit from this community are multiple. The first one was obviously to find others within our company that wanted to act and we started using our energy and passion towards something that was productive we ended up working on quite a few projects and presentations to teach our colleagues more about sustainability. So this all led to the topic being more and more discussed in regular meetings and everyone starting to think more and more about it and also our executives, our employees speaking on this with a common and bigger voice so they know now that it really matters to us. So now I let Stefan work her through his parts on how you can engage your team towards the coming one. Wow Lucille thanks for your presentation that's really so inspiring to hear it. This is a great example to follow how to actually make something happen and create enthusiasm and motivating people to bring change and also all those guidelines I think we should really look more at those. I really see myself as a developer that sometimes I forget those so always a great inspiration. So the next point that comes when you have created a community and people are eager to act and just expertise how do you actually manage to bring change in your product when you're offering what you're actually doing for work and this is very often where it gets difficult. But why is that actually so difficult to make it happen? Well one thing is that the dimension keep increasing you have to take care about efficiency you have to make your code secure accessible your solution has to be ethical and so many other things that are privacy it keeps getting more complex to solve this is really a major hurdle and also whether you want it or not regulation is coming this is an example of a GDPR here but on the climate side as well things are not slowing down at the opposite they are getting faster and faster and the goals are getting stronger each year so we really have to take new methods for that we cannot just do it the old way and just say look we'll optimize a bit the front end and make the database a bit smaller whatever clean up a build no you really have to go to much greater length and rethink the way you work one thing that I noticed though is that bad decision are less visible at the granular level and very often they are you know they are full of good intention for example you have this library that improves user experience weights only 30 kilobytes our page is already 1 megabyte so this is not a big deal and indeed it would actually not be a big deal if that was the single thing happening but there are 5 other teams that are changing their package and so this is where you land with a 2 megabyte page so this is really you know the way the team works and the decisions are taking are just not helping a lot so what you see here is that responsible computing is very much about discussing trade-offs recently I also remember on the forum someone saying you know how to make code efficient it's just a marketing team that comes after them that pull all those trackers and advertisements and this makes the page then slow that was an interesting thing for me because this made me think there seems to be a problem of alignment with the rest of the team not the whole team is aligned on those goals and if you have only the developers who care about this it doesn't work and it looks to me like this is often a problem that happens in the team you have either the developers or a special group of interested people around ethic around sustainability around accessibility depending on their own interest but that doesn't map to the whole team and so here in the last decade working with designers I really learned a lot about how they think and how they have different methods for getting to success and developers probably in my view have a lot to learn from this so what do designers do generally they don't accept to work on a single unit problem they most of the time take a look at the bigger picture as the overall context of the problem so for example you would like to you would never ask an interior designer in your apartment to redo a door color you would at least ask them to redo one room and then what they would do they would look at the way you live your style preferences your budget your house environment and all that and come up to an overall solution and so what about if we had the same view on those coding topics as well those topics that actually we thought just touch the code but actually they don't they touch the whole team and I think that's a general a general thing in software right now that software actually touches the whole society so it's not a thing that's hidden anymore so we have to rethink a bit about our responsibility in the world so how do a designer work well they have different methods for example design thinking that you might have known or touched or tried together already but in our organization we have this fantastic guy called Tom Dayton and he used to work at the NASA and he used methods very similar to design thinking for working with engineers and project managers to actually clearly define a requirement across a broad set of organization and specialties and he taught me the word collaborative methods and so I search a bit more about this and this is very interesting collaborative methods according to Wikipedia the conversation that relate to the collaboration between individuals this method specifically aims to increase the success of teams as they engage in collaborative problem solving well this sounds very interesting this is really about bringing the whole team together and having common decision in a way that's the most effective that brings the best results without wasting too much time but at the same time not letting so what are the base principle to make actually this work well one of the things that at first everyone has an equal voice this is him at flattening the hierarchy so of course you cannot change everything loud people will probably stay loud quiet people will probably stay quiet a bit but many of the process and methods in collaborative methods are actually made to to drastically reduce those kind of differences also the facilitator has a big role to play in that at helping this flattened hierarchy to stay but still mainly having those new exercise those new way of work that are not familiar to most of the team members is usually a good way to reset a bit the expectation so that's the first thing the next thing is that also your ideas should be additive means anyone's idea anyone's idea can be produced and put on the board and if you disagree with an idea just write your own idea but don't try to talk down the other ideas and again here the facilitator is here to prevent that kind of misbehavior and with that context the flattened hierarchy the additivity of the ideas you create a very safe environment where everyone can feel safe to be creative and propose things that it wouldn't have proposed in traditional meeting models and so people contribute to a common board artifacts or present the artifacts on a regular basis so that everyone knows about what the other are doing on a permanent basis that enables everyone to learn on each others and everyone can iterate much faster because when you have 10 persons iterating at the same time and quickly presenting what they have done the learning effect in the team is way faster than when you wait just one day or even one week or two weeks as I see in some teams and finally clustering and voting but there are also other methods help selecting the better ideas and that really helps alleviating the conflicts because when an idea gets the clear majority usually there is no big discussion on that that this is actually a valid point to be brought forward at least analyzed and validated to the next step so what are collaborative methods that we can use? Well there are quite a few of them so this is a very short list here but look at design thinking for example I'm personally very proficient with design thinking working with it for the past 6 years it served me very well and it's always great with teams it's very post-it oriented as probably most of you know but the name is a bit misleading it would be actually more something like collaborative idea thinking liberating structure offers a wide range of exercise that sometimes are pretty much different from design thinking sometimes a bit more similar but they have also formats like one-on-one interviews and you know like a model for ideas to bubble up some kind of one-on-one discussions so it's really interesting as well and LEGO sales plays also are very fun and interesting maybe a bit more oriented toward team organization problems and so on but still very interesting and I think actually usable in a lot of different ways please don't call them workshops workshops it has some connotation and especially one that I think is detrimental is that it make you think you're going on this maybe one week retreat also and doing a workshop and then you're done and this would be like saying that you would work on your continuous integration for once print and then you just let it as is and don't work on improving it anymore you will be leaving a lot of potential on the table in that case so my recommendation is you try to use it on a regular basis maybe I don't know once or twice a week at least but in small burst of one to two hours so people don't get burned out by it because believe me when you are really into such kind of activities this is very demanding you have to be fully there and so many people are not used to that you constantly have to analyze the input of others and be creative so this is really demanding very demanding you can of course start with a short workshop it's always good for the basic education for getting the ball running at the start and setting the right goals but then afterwards you should really make it a process inside your team so at IBM we actually use even design thinking for designing AI concepts we personally in my team we used it for designing the Overwatch power ranking with IBM Watson for example so this is a method that I know works really well and the advantage of that method is that you bring everyone together the product managers, the designers the data scientists, the developers the marketing and you discuss together about the feasibility the pro and cons of each ID and you try to be creative and bold and then bring it back to what's actually doable and you also look at the ethical aspect of the solution what could go wrong what could be the detrimental aspect of the business and also for the society as a whole so for me this method is a great guideline on how we could build it out and actually use it for all kind of responsible computing topic so collaborative methods are still no magic I think they are very useful they are a major tool and very important but they are no magic for example they highly depend on the facilitator you have on board but still they will help you become a responsible team faster and how actually by taking better decision because they will look at the full picture in your own context so you will really be able at designing and crafting the best solution for you and actually accomplish and will allow everyone to look in the different dimension and also those methods are very fun so usually they improve the team spirits and they allow everyone to have a voice they allow the whole team to know who's strengths is in what area and they improve the network inside the team so very often they shorten the communication path afterwards and also the decision path in the first decision so they have really good side benefits so with that known I hope that you are able now to make better progress on your quest to become more responsible and sustainable and let's do that together thank you all