Hello, you all. Morning, creatures. Good morning. We are about to start the talks of the day, and I will leave you with Tobias Augspoer 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 with different 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 realised, 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 could 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 SUBAK, that is an accelerator programme 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 on the right-hand side an atmospheric simulation by the open source project called

CREAM, they are investigating how does the content of water vapour change and how does water vapour actually change the climate in the future when our earth is heating up, because when the earth is heating up more water vapour will be in the atmosphere,

and this is a huge problem because it actually accelerates climate itself, because water vapour 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

all open 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 environment is actually open to the public and you can process it, there's a lot of open source tools and with this multi-spectra

and also with images and with the high 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 on our cities.

You can measure but also and it's very important point source emissions that that means who is actually creating emissions and you can directly point it 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 taxes 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 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 does we lose how do we lose our urban vegetation and it's all but in combination with the heat islands because where we lose our urban vegetations you have at the same time so called heat islands that means with climate change it will get very hot in these 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 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 what we actually did is a methodology

that I've from my analysis nobody did before in 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 and also gitlab projects are every kind of repository where people can participate into and

um 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

within all those domains we investigated and the domains actually were derived within the studies so this is not um this is our let's say perspective on this ecosystem and the namings that we we use there and you see here in the middle that's actually the core project open sustainable technology and around this 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 this investigation so here's the overview of the data set and you can see we have in total

1339 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 and get lab 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 um on on github and actually on github we also found most projects um you see here also that we we list here 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 um commit and that are documented and have a certain kind of quality so we did a small qualitative 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 within the investigation and um yeah you can see here we derived the total number of stars and the total number of contributors but also other quantities to just show give you an impression about how is the ecosystem in itself um how to how in this direction

does it go um what you can also see is that we list here some inactive projects so actually and this was the hard part of the study as you maybe know most open source projects die very soon

so uh 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 inactive i have no clue numbers but i think it's more than 90 of the projects we investigated were inactive

they were just academia projects where somebody released the 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 environment sustainability so even it 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 uh trendy we could couldn't could just find free projects that have more than 1000 stars and in total on github you find uh 38 000

projects that have more than 1000 stars so it's just 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 worldwide so on the left hand side you see actually the 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 comet that is just we you take the number uh the comments of the strongest contributor and divide it by the total

comets and you get an impression how much does this project actually um depend on one developer or is there actually really community behind it and you see um the ab street that is the most popular project is really one man show that's actually a project where um somebody's tried to

gamify to do a gamification of cities to improve our um 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 um we still see project like open farm or that or the ska fundra 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 um on our ecosystem let's say

models like or let's say earth science models and frameworks like pangeo and uh it's or various models that are actually also very important like the wrf so on the right right hand side you see the 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 impression or give you a number about when

i'm consuming this amount of electricity at this point on the earth how much carbon do i actually release to the atmosphere um by this power consumption and this is what's really let's say

one of the very few larger communities that we could found where a lot of academic and for-profits and different organizations were coming together to create this um the another project is actually the open food network where people try to create trustable knowledge and information

about how and what what is the 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 the screen project a very larger atmospheric project but in general you see the total numbers

of contributors if you compare it with our open source projects are quite low it's not that big and for me personally actually the um the so the this project itself has uh one thousand three

hundred uh stars so we are actually one of the most popular open source projects in the environment 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 no 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 in 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 um 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 um but what we also could find is that with the data analysis we could not always

really invest automatically investigate what is actually the license of the project so um 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 and we need to go with such approaches into commercial projects if we don't commercialize um environmental sustainability you 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 um

uh on the top I can imagine that you see that you expect Python here but also R is here very prominent because um in other in environmental sustainability it's a lot of about statistics and processing a lot of data but we can also find here Fortran and C++ and those languages are

used in the large scale um 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 Fortran shows us that many of those software projects are quite old this is really uh sometimes coded as 20 30 years old where our earth or and our atmosphere biosphere hydrosphere has been simulated and this code has been reintegrated into new software projects

yeah another uh like javascript is here not that important so but that's what we also did is um from the we actually derived um from the projects um

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 um actually the

location but also the the um the the continent of those um organizations and we see there's let's say Europe has quite a good uh standing here and also North America we found a lot of projects that considered themselves or 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 where is really an organization behind it it doesn't mean that there are not people involved into this I 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 when there was no legal structure behind it just some people coming together doing stuff um this was considered community and after that academia has a very important role there because they they did a lot of this research and investigations in our

environmental sustainability but also government agency are very important in this domain unfortunately I have to also to say um for profits and that's a general trend are not that prominent we did I did a lot of investigations into the kind of um

do we find actually um 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 and 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 has 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 uh development

but we're missing there totally in in this domain so you can see here this is all project that we mapped um scattered over the project age you see here the topics

um 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 um climate data processing and the climate models

actually climate science I would say it in general would be the most strongest area um but also what was quite interesting is that actually hydrosphere 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 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 um 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 most surprisingly for me um in the area of sustainable investment because sustainable investment is really something

that is data driven there's a lot of huge companies behind it that gather information that a lot of um 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 bit disappointing um other areas like also carbon capture and um and carbon offsets were also not that prominent and um 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'll 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 um into the

suggestions into the recommendations that we derived from our analysis and from the interviews and from the people that we talk to and also i must say the discussions we had within the group lead to a lot of interesting aspects and

um recommendations so sustainable rating and investment is really getting a huge and important topic and it influenced all of you because this is where actually your future is going into

that means there's actually the united nation principles for responsible investment this was created you see here 2006 and that created some really baseline for what and how do we actually do sustainable investment and you see here that

actually in 2021 we are now talking about 100 uh 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 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 um you have some sustainability reports that are actually self-reported by the companies and then are um there's a lot of news about sustainability of companies and a lot

of marketing that you know and this has actually been 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 um 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 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 has been 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 digged a little bit into this and i realized oh uh there's a lot of scientists that realized 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 um ratings and if there would be in the ideal world 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 is saying addressing esg rating that means environmental social governments because this is actually a little bit a combination of different kinds of ratings they do environmental

but also a social um sustainability rating and government's rating um divergence 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 uh 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 see this on the right hand side is actually the carbon cycle that is driving the um the co2 into the atmosphere it is actually a natural let's say

there's a natural cycle that actually is going on and this the cycle was created by uh actually uh 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 a 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 percent of those carbon offsets people are claiming for actually claims that's what the guardians is saying here but you see another problem guarding is the guardians just showing you a 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 i the 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 um 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 in simple python you can but you will also find uh larger um

open climate science and projects that you can um just uh 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

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 the repositories create an issue or deal with the software that you find there um so opens the 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 no open source software 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 um 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

um 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 and what they did in uh in actually in the energy modeling

so the this pipes are project actually i showed you at the beginning they released 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 there um it's um that you you need to understand that you can actually prove how much

conclusion is actually been open and traceable you just have to see how much open data is there and is there uncertainties actually also in the data that 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 executions so it's 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 has he done this and is this um 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 um 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 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 calculate it why i think i am sustainable this shows sustainable intention and this is what we need today because

then you can go into and discussion you can go with people into some um maintenance of code you can improve your own code and that's why actually openness itself is the core and it's really the key indicator for um for sustainability itself um you see also despite a picture this was

uh this shows the the um standing on the shores of giants what from my perspective really describes very good open source um 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 their environmental sustainability so does all those software um in um in earth observation all those open source software there's a huge amount of

open source software and earth observation can be used by um rating agencies and all of us to actually track down companies on their environmental impact that's not that hard and there's actually an oxford a group um that started the spatial finance and what they started

with is they created a map of the whole um fossil fuel industry where you know the whole supply chain so where are they located where is the fuse of 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 you have suddenly a sensor that is measuring the sustainability and that is needed so here's my let's say uh 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

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 exomobile 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 uh to to to really measure sustainability

within a company because so far this is all a 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 we're 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 um i just showed you two of them in combination actually so um 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 um 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 um well thank you to buy us for your um it's a brain exploding presentation

we have um 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 hands again please

uh to this 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 um yeah i think uh what is really missing is the community behind

it that is cross over the topics actually conference you need 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 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 good connected with each other

that's why this list is so successful they could not find each other um to be as you mentioned that's a very low for-profit organizations currently yes but this if they

increase we have also the lobby isn't 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 scope 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 depending on topic um and a climate model should maybe not be in an for-profit but if it is maybe about the rating

yeah there should be a company behind so sometimes it really depends on the kind of projects 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