Hello, you all, morning creatures. Good morning. We're about to start the talks of the day
and I'll leave you with Tobias Augspurge, who will be talking about how open source
can leverage more sustainability in the technology. So welcome, welcome.
Yeah, welcome also from my side. So I'm actually working in atmospheric science.
So by education, I'm an aerospace engineer. I'm in my day job calibrating satellite instruments
for atmospheric science. But let's say in my private time, I do this professional hobby,
so I'm actually investigating with some other people how does open source can have a significant impact
on environmental sustainability. And we created this project within a small community called Prototypes
that is actually investigating multiple ways how to increase the sustainability of our environment
open source projects. And this project was started with a friend of mine and me about
two and a half years ago within a pandemic. So we had a lot of time and we realized, okay,
there's actually no overview about what open source really means in environmental sustainability.
And so we started to create a huge list, an awesome list. I think you know what this is.
That actually lists all projects that we can find in this domain. And quite soon,
Irene joined this project because she did a similar development four years ago.
And we were thinking about, okay, we created now this huge list and let's make a study about this.
How can we quantify and how can we also find quantitative ways to investigate what actually
open source means in environmental sustainability. So Irene was actually funded by SUBAC,
that is an accelerator program to open up data in climate. And after that,
Josh Hopkins from Open Corridor joined us. He is interested to integrate multiple of the projects
we investigated in a larger software project also for environmental sustainability.
So what does environmental sustainability in general means? It is actually the goal
to preserve the natural resources that we all depend on for future generations.
But what does it actually require? So it requires the intelligent intention to understand,
predict and manage the stability of our natural resources. And that means that you need to
understand that actually we depend on nature and the natural resources that have been created
over a million of years by the nature itself and the natural earth systems that we see here.
For example, you see here on the right hand side an atmospheric simulation by the open
source project called SCREAM. They are investigating how does the content of water vapor
change and how does water vapor actually change the climate in the future when our earth is
heating up because when the earth is heating up, more water vapor will be in the atmosphere.
And this is a huge problem because it actually accelerates climate itself because water vapor
is itself a greenhouse gas. So we see there an actually accelerating process and software
is there very important to actually predict and to understand how this will be in the future.
So the core question of the study and analysis that we did is what enables open source software
and environmental sustainability? So I think you know that open source is now dominating
our software industries worldwide and there are studies from synopsis that shows that actually
in 79% of the code bases worldwide you can find open source code and they did it because
they do security auditing and they look into the code and they see okay we find it everywhere
and it impacts all our software that we depend on worldwide. So what we did in our study is
we started with the state. So what is actually the state of this ecosystem? And we created
by multiple insights but we also wanted to derive some principles based on the multiple
projects we investigated and interviews and people we talked to. But we also wanted to
create some visions. So what are actually opportunities? What are strategies? What is the
potential that we are missing that actually open source delivers us in environmental sustainability?
So let's have a look about what are applications of environmental sustainability in open source
and one very important aspect there is the environmental intelligence. So you get satellite
data all around the world from multiple satellites, from NASA satellites, from ESA satellites
and most of this especially satellite data that deals with the environment that is really
looking at the environment is actually open to the public and you can process it. There
is a lot of open source tools and with this multi-spectra and also with images and with
today also spatial resolution and temporal resolution of those satellites you can derive
multiple aspects of our environment like the air quality but also how our forest changed
and also how noise actually is changing with our cities. You can measure but also and it's
very important point source emissions that means who is actually creating emissions and
you can directly point at this is the company who creates this amount of emissions and this
is getting more and more an important topic because we have now multiple aspects that
are coming like CO2, Texas and carbon trading where we actually need traceable data about
what is the amount of emissions somebody created but on the other side there's also things
like biodiversity that you can measure like satellites create images with not just RGB
but they have a huge amount of different colors that they measure and if you combine those
colors you can actually derive the change of biodiversity of forest or any living being
on the planet. Another important topic is also the urban vegetation so how do we lose our
urban vegetation and in combination with the heat islands because where we lose our urban
vegetation you have at the same time for the heat islands it means with climate change
it will get very hot in this areas. So but there's also the application directly in our
real world technology that we're seeing and we found very amazing projects like a complete
50 megawatt wind turbine that was being released open source so that means there's the blueprints
how to build this wind turbine there's the simulation so all the software that actually is
needed to design this wind turbines has been open sourced and in combination with multiple
American and European organizations but you will also find interesting software libraries
that help you to predict where do you place your photovoltaic and what is the perfect orientation
of your photovoltaic in relation to the sun so that you have the most efficient of those solar
panels but and there was also a talk about pipes yesterday we have now with open source
it was we have now a complete simulation of the world energy grid and all those energy systems
that are within this huge network of different power plants but also of the renewables and
you see here for example the power grid of India how it was simulated with pipes so
so what we actually did is a methodology that I from my analysis nobody did before an open
source in general so the first thing we did is we compiled this list and it took me two years
and I think more than 500 hours to investigate all those projects worldwide and we used multiple
ways how to do it and you find it in the study in the report that we released some weeks ago
it was a combination of researching on GitHub, GitLab, searching on different papers doing
data mining but we also just looked on the stars of different people on GitHub so what are
the people starring actually that are working in environmental sustainability so this was a
huge effort but also the community helped us a lot so we had about more than 30 volunteers
that contributed to the list and helped us to curate this list but and we really were focusing
on projects that were aiming on environmental sustainability at their core. The core idea
was to keep the list in a way that it is possible so we really try to list GitHub projects
because GitLab and also GitLab projects are every kind of repository where people can
participate into and so first step was creating the list and after that we created some scripts
to automatically gather the metadata of all those projects and we created some targeted
interviews with all those domains we investigated and the domains actually were derived within
the study so this is not, this is our let's say perspective on this ecosystem and the
namings that we use there and you see here in the middle that's actually the core project
open sustainable technology and around us are the fields and within the fields are different
topics that we put the projects into and after that we did the cooperative report and
cross-validated actually the qualitative and quantitative insights that we derived from
this investigation. So here's the overview of the data set and you can see we have
in total 1,339 projects, this was quite some work and most of them were actually GitHub
projects, some were GitLab projects and I must say actually the numbers here are all
dealing with the GitHub projects. We could not integrate so far the GitLab API into the
study, I hope to do this in further studies and also to integrate other platforms but
to keep it simple the first study was really focusing on GitHub and actually on GitHub
we also found most projects. You see here also that we listed the active project so
within the study we tried only to list projects that had one closed issue in the last year
that or one commit and that are documented and have a certain kind of quality so we did
a small quality analysis of the project is there some documentation can people actually
build the software by their own and use this in their own projects this was very important
in the investigation and you can see here we derived a total number of stars and a total
number of contributors but also other quantities to just show, give you an impression about
how is the ecosystem in itself, how in this direction does it go. What you can also see
is that we listed some inactive projects so actually this was the hard part of the study
as you maybe know most open source projects die very soon so within the project actually
192 projects actually got inactive and this was also my impression when we do this analysis
most projects were really inactive. I have no clear numbers but I think it's more than
90% of the projects we investigated were inactive they were just academia projects where somebody
released a paper and then it's just over that's it it's like throwing a open source project
to the wall and hope somebody maybe can use it but this is not where we want to focus on
we really wanted to focus on a project that you can use and that you can reintegrate into
newer projects. So the first thing that I realized when doing this investigation is
there's quite a low popularity in environmental sustainability so even if it is a hot topic
and you see it multiple times in the media and everybody is talking about it and yeah
it sounds very trendy we could just find three projects that have more than 1,000 stars and
in total on GitHub you find 38,000 projects that have more than 1,000 stars so it's just
not and that's also what's my impression so most people are really not appreciating those
climate models or for example those biodiversity models that have been created and that are
actually being maintained by different organizations both white. So on the left hand side you see
actually the color bar that is a community health index that we created it's called the
development distribution score and we realized that actually the most important aspect of an
open source project is how much is the knowledge and the development distributed within the
project itself so we created just a very small number by the comment that is just we you take
the number the comments of the strongest contributor and divide it by the total comments and you
get an impression how much does this project actually depend on one developer or is there
actually really community behind it and you see the AB Street that is the most popular
project is really one-man show that's actually a project where somebody is trying to do a
gamification of cities to improve our transport system to do it more sustainable. After that
it's a very famous project and also it is a for-profit open source project that is called
electricity map and after that we still see project like open farm or that or the scarf
under that is actually a green software project so they are all dealing with different kinds
of aspects how do we investigate and create knowledge about our environment and how can
we improve our society so that we create less impact on our ecosystem let's say negative
impact but you see also there some in popularity some climate models like or let's say earth
science models and frameworks like Pangeo and it's or various models that are actually
also very important like the WRF so on the right hand side you see the contributors so
the total numbers of contributors that we could find within a project and electricity map
there is again the let's say dominating project and electricity map is actually they combine
the so-called carbon intensity of all different electric grids worldwide to give you an impression
or give you a number about when I am consuming this amount of electricity at this point on
the earth how much carbon do I actually release to the atmosphere by this power consumption
and this was really let's say one of the very few larger communities that we could find
where a lot of academic and for-profits and different organizations were coming together
to create this the another project is actually the open food network where people try to create
trustable knowledge and information about how what what is the information of food itself
so that you can have trustworthy information and this is also a huge community project
quite old and you can also see here just green project and very larger atmospheric project
but in general you see the total numbers of contributors if you compare it with our open
food projects are quite low it's not that big and for me personally actually the so this
project itself has one thousand three hundred star so we are actually one of the most popular
open source projects in the environmental sustainability and this is not a good sign
but because I'm just we are just some random dudes it's we are we are actually we have
a foundation we are just a community and people were coming together you know and that's what
I wanted to show with this slide so within the open source community there's a lack for
of popularity in environmental sustainability so if you look at the license and language
of projects we see there's a lot of MIT license actually so it's actually easy to integrate
those projects into for profit not that hard but there's also let's say a good portion
of a free open source license like gpl 3.0 but what do we also could find is that with
their data analysis we could not always really invest automatically investigate what is actually
the license of the project so that's the custom license and this is always problematic so if
you release open source code use a standard license that people know about they don't need a
lawyer to actually see if they can actually reintegrate the software into maybe a commercial
project because we want to when we need to go with such approaches into commercial projects
if we don't commercialize environmental sustainability we will never achieve environmental
sustainability on the right hand side you see the portion the proportions of the programming
languages and here we can see that actually data analysis and data driven languages are
really on the top I can imagine that you expect Python here but also R is here very prominent
because in environmental sustainability it's a lot of statistics and processing a lot of data
but we can also find here Fortron and C++ and those languages are used in the large scale
simulation of our earth so if you want to really be efficient in your calculations that's the
programming languages that you use and the high portion actually of Fortron shows us that many
of those software projects are quite old this is really sometimes code that is 20 30 years old
where our earth and our atmosphere biosphere hydrosphere has been simulated and this code has
been reintegrated into new software projects yeah another JavaScript is here not that important
so but that's what we also did is from the we actually derived from the projects all the
organizations behind it so what is actually the namespaces of the projects and from the namespaces
of the projects we had a little bit smaller list and this was actually hand labeled so we went
through all those organizations and created actually the location but also the continent of
those organizations and we see there's let's say Europe has quite a good standing here and also
North America we found a lot of project that consider themselves organizations that consider
themselves as global so but unfortunately I have to say actually from Asia and I did a lot of
investigations I could not find a lot of open source projects that actually originate from the
Asian continent whereas really an organization behind it it doesn't mean that there are not
people involved into this just wanted to say that we could not find it and I did there a lot of
research on this yes what we also did is we labeled the forms of organizations behind it so
and it was surprising for me that actually the community based projects like we are the strongest
so community we labeled when there was no legal structure behind it just some people coming
together doing stuff this was considered community and after that academia has a very important
role there because they did a lot of this research investigations in our environmental
sustainability but also government agency are very important in this domain unfortunately
I have to also to say for profits and that's a general trend are not that prominent we did
I did a lot of investigations into the kind of do we find actually commercialized or for profit
applications of this kind of software and I told you about electricity map that's maybe let's say
the most one really successful project that we can find but besides that there is Microsoft is
actually doing some good open source project in environmental sustainability like the planetary
compute framework and so there's some other good developments but compared to the problem that
we are dealing with this is a little bit disappointing so it cannot be that this is just
been an academia community thing with some maybe some government agencies so there needs to be
more for profit organizations and I think we see this also now with commercial open source
software is becoming more and more important and there's really no billions of dollars going
in this kind of development but we're missing there totally in this domain
so you can see here this is all project that we mapped scattered over the project age you see
here the topics and they are actually ordered we also created a size score so that we can order them
you see the strongest was actually biosphere but this was also because we not separated
actually biosphere so strongly if you would combine climate data processing and the climate models
actually climate science I would say in general would be the most strongest area but also what
was quite interesting is that actually hypersphere so the people dealing with our water resources
they were also very strong we could find a lot of strong projects there it's all the same for soil
it's all about air quality it's about agriculture and nutrition so really that what is really
describing the state of our environment there we know a lot there's a lot of information about
what is actually the state where we are going but if you go more into let's say the technology area
if it's if you're talking about batteries if you're talking about hydrogen, bioenergy, carbon capture
and removal there it was super hard to find good projects that we could list and also more
surprisingly for me in the area of sustainable investment because sustainable investment is
really something that a starter driven there's a lot of huge companies behind it that gather
information that a lot of they have a lot of models and ways how to consider what is actually
sustainable in our investment and there was actually two or three really strong projects
but they were also at the beginning and compared to the problem we are facing this was also a little
bit disappointing other areas like also carbon capture and carbon offsets were also not that prominent
and I would say if you're more interested in the quantities that we created we created much more
about the growth about the different kinds of communities and we created a lot of quantities
and plots for you you will find us in the report so I would stop here to talk actually about
let's say the quantitative analysis and go more into the into the suggestions into the recommendations
that we derived from our analysis and from the interviews and from the people that we talked to
and also I must say the discussions we had within the group lead to a lot of interesting aspects
and recommendations so sustainable rating and investment is really getting a huge and important
topic and it influence all of you because this is where actually your future is going into
that means there's actually the United Nations principles for responsible investment this was
created you see here 2006 and they created some really baseline for what and how do we actually do
sustainable investment and you see here that actually in 2021 we are not talking about 100
around 140 trillions of dollars that are invest invested based on those principles so there's
a huge amount of money going in this direction that needs to be because we actually want to
transform our economy to a let's say sustainable system so the problem is that how I was very
interested in this domain and I did a lot of investigations I talked to people about this
and we analyzed how this is done so how is actually sustainable rating and assessment
being done and actually it is a big black box to summarize it you have some sustainability
reports that are actually self reported by the companies and then are there's a lot of news
about sustainability of companies and a lot of marketing that you know and this is actually
being combined in so-called sustainability assessment and there are multiple companies
that are doing this and there's really not so much known about really how this goes and you see
here also how actually greenwashing works it's very easy you create very beautiful reports that
really look very good nobody is really trace is really assessing if they are really based on
science it's really that you do self reporting about your environmental sustainability and then
this sustainability assessments also take into account news about those companies actually so how
is there good news about the environmental impact of those companies or bad news and they also take
financial news about those companies and this is all is being combined in sustainable sustainability
assessment and then there comes a magic number and based on those numbers 140 trillion of
dollars are invested somewhere okay that's crazy from my perspective and I dig a little bit into
this and I realized oh there's a lot of scientists that realize that actually this is like throwing
the dice what this rating companies are actually doing you see here on the bottom that's actually
the value of the benchmark rating from one company called system analytics and then you see here the
divergence of this ratings and if there would be an ideal word this would be one line okay they
would all agree on environmental sustainability but and actually they do not agree so you just
have to go to the right rating agency and you can make every company actually sustainable today
very easily been done and you also have to see that actually the rating itself has some so you
don't get normally the very bad rating or the very good rating right so in general it is you just
have to throw the dice and also the offer saying addressing ESG rating that means environmental
governments because this is actually a little bit a combination of different kinds of ratings they do
environmental but also a social sustainability rating and governments rating at diverges requires
addressing ESG rating divergence requires one to understand how the data that underpins ESG
ratings are generated so nobody knows how this data is generated and I think you know already the
solution so when nobody knows our data is generated and we have a big black box yeah then
you normally take open source but this is not happening because people are also doing the same
thing in the so-called carbon offset so if your company is actually creating a lot of emissions
and you want to be carbon neutral and you see this labeled all over the place now everybody's
carbon neutral and it's great that they all actually want to be carbon neutral but there's
actually a study being done by the Guardian and they investigated how much of those carbon that is
actually released in the atmosphere is actually being stored back into our soil and into our
ground and you see this on the right hand side there's actually the carbon cycle that is driving
the CO2 into the atmosphere is actually a natural let's say there's a natural cycle that actually
is going on and this cycle was created by actually it took millions of years to stabilize our
atmosphere by this carbon cycle so that we have a low portion of carbon within our atmosphere
and this way a stable weather and stable climate and the predictable earth systems that we all
can depend on but yeah the Guardian found out that the real emissions that are actually stored
in the ground are much lower than actually what they are claiming for so actually they say that
over 90% of those carbon offsets people are claiming for actually claims that's what the
Guardian is saying here but you see another problem Guardian is the Guardian is just showing
your plot and that's actually the core problem of all of this they just at the end show your
plot and then you believe my plot I did great science behind it just trust my science and
that's let's say the core problem I want to investigate with you a little bit more so
because we're talking about here about safety critical decision making the we know exactly
and I showed you this also with the topics and with the numbers of people that are investigating
we know very good with open science that is traceable for all of you you can go into this
climate models and they're very good examples for in in in simple Python you can but you
will also find larger open climate science projects that you can just run on your machine
and they all come to the same result that we are actually on a very bad path on with
colliding with the earth actually and this is very clear to us so there's no doubt so
if you if you don't trust into climate science just go into repositories create an issue or
deal with the software that you find there so opens the problem that we are facing now
is that the decision making the assessment of sustainable and sustainable investment there
we have no clue what we actually do and there's no open source software and not much open
source software that we could really find so but there's help and especially in the energy
sector we found a lot of good projects that that that really understand how to get rid
of those problem of traceability because when somebody just is showing you a plot I think
hydrogen will be the future of energy of the energy sector and there comes somebody else
and shows you another plot this cannot really come you cannot really create a discussion
about this and this is really everybody needs to be at least able to discuss about this right
now and what they did in in actually in the energy modeling so the this pipes up project
actually I showed you at the beginning they release those models and in this way you can
create proof and show hey I calculated this if you don't agree with me show me your model
and if you don't show me your model I don't trust you that's that's how it goes and this
is really let's say a very important idea that I found here it's that you you need to
understand that you can actually prove how much conclusion is actually being open and
traceable you just have to see how much open data is there and is there uncertainties
actually also in the data that is comes with the data is there open source models are there
is there actually an open execution possible of those models do you find open results of
those execution so is the artifacts actually create by its simulation is this actually
also open source is there a way to participate can you go into the GitHub repository can you
go into a conference and ask the question how you had has he done this and is this conclusion
with uncertainties at the end so is there a plot that shows what is actually my unknown
my uncertainty what or is it just a single number and if it's just a single number it's
a problem and we can propagate the uncertainty through such a thing and that's very important
for traceability then what we found out that actually openness itself and that's let's say
one of the core findings of the whole study is the is the indicator for sustainability
itself so if you want to know and it's very important to understand we sometimes don't
know today what is actually sustainable but if there comes somebody and says I personally
don't know if I'm really sustainable but I show you how I calculated why I think I am
sustainable this show sustainable intention and this is what we need today because then
you can go into and discussion you can go with people into some maintenance of code
you can improve your own code and that's why actually openness itself is the core is
really the key indicator for sustainability itself you see also despite a picture this
was shows the standing on the shores of giants but from my perspective really describes very
good open source open source or let's say the technology that we built that is this
blind giant and we are standing on the shoulder but we can see farther by the giant but you
cannot but the giant itself is blind but we can see much much farther and we can and
the giants get bigger and bigger and we can see and predict the future in a much better
way and that's why open source and actually the math and the models that we create there
are so important to predict the future so one interesting aspect that I found to get
rid of this problem is actually spatial finance it's the idea that we can use those
whole earth observation data that we have to track down companies about environmental
sustainability so all those software in earth observation all those open source software
there is a huge amount of open source software and earth observation can be used by rating
agencies and all of us to actually track down companies on the environmental impact that's
not that hard and there's actually an Oxford group that started the spatial finance and
what they started with is they created a map of the whole fossil fuel industry where you
know the whole supply chain so where are they located where is the fuel supply chain that
helps you to on the one side simulate it but also to check satellite data and track down
okay this company has a claim that they're actually sustainable let's have a look and
you have suddenly a sensor that is measuring the sustainability and that is needed so here
is my let's say that's how I would actually improve the rating of environmental sustainability
and how we can actually get rid of those problem is to actually integrate earth observation
into this processing chain and very importantly where the assessment happens we need open source
code and that's actually just one from the Leung's Foundation one project that is starting
to do this but this is really everything very early stage and then suddenly we can maybe
in the future get sustainability ratings about companies that have some uncertainties but
it would be also very great if companies itself would use open source code to do environmental
sustainability rating within the company so for me personally I would like if ExoMobil
would say we would go open science now or every company that goes open science about their
own environmental sustainability would have such a massive impact on the industry because
finally you have the information and data to really measure sustainability within the
company because so far this is all the black box for us so yeah I would like to say that
open source is from my perspective the most underestimated climate strategy or climate action
it is there's so much opportunity there that we created a whole list of recommendations
how open source can have a significant impact so actually we were thinking about what could
be follow-up projects and we had so many ideas about follow-up projects that we just were
starting to list them all down as recommendations I think there are more than 50 now and I just
thought you two of them in combination actually so and yeah my final words would actually
be and that's I think we need to understand we need to build an operating system for environmental
sustainability it is for this for things like carbon offsets or the rating of the environmental
impact of companies you need to connect all the spheres all those open source projects
together to get one to bet get a better conclusion about what is the state of our environment
and that's why and that's I hope and that's what we hope to start and hope to build in the
future is really such kind of an operating system yeah thank you so much
well thank you Tobias for your brain exploding presentation we have you can type your questions
in matrix or you can just raise your hand and I will bring you the microphone oh gosh okay
I lost you in the crowd again again please Tobias thank you so much for very inspiring
presentation can you hear me and I absolutely agree that open source is very much underestimated
as source of sustainability and a question can you suggest any ways how can developers
collaborate better so for example I know that there are some gaps in climate modeling in
bridging between climate modeling and energy modeling and it would be very helpful if energy
modelers would know better about climate modelers and vice versa do you have any ideas can you
suggest something to improve this situation can you hear me yeah I think what is really
missing is the community behind it that is cross over the topics actually conference you
meet somewhere where these people meet and talk to each other that's what is missing and
we realized and that's why we actually would and also the topic of environmental sustainability
is always a side topic in open source conferences somewhere but we really need a conference
actually there that's the point where this this connection between the software projects is
starting at the beer in the evening maybe where these people are connecting they are not really
connected with each other that's why this list is so successful they could not find each other
Tobias you mentioned that's a very low for profit organizations currently yes but this if they
increase we have also the lobbyism problem again because they are much more trained to get
money for their already existing projects do you see some chance that new open source projects
in this group will also get paid contributors this is also an opportunity yes it's not I'm not
the biggest fan of commercial open source software I see there's some opportunities there are
good ways bad ways it depends on topic and the climate model should maybe not be in for profit
but if it is maybe about the rating yeah there should be a company behind so something it really
depends on the kind of project we are talking about so for example if you if you want to create
a wind turbine right a wind turbine that is open source completely you need a company that
maybe gives you 40 years of maintenance and it needs to be sure that this is maintenance and
miss maybe this is better with a for profit but depending on the project maybe on with a
non-profit it's not an easy question what is the right organization for an open source project
it's very complicated