Accessibility and Green Software

This episode is taken from a recent panel discussion from the Green Software Foundation’s Global Summit of 2022. EV regulars, Chris Adams and Asim Hussain are joined by Anne Currie, Chris Lloyd-Jones and Elise Zelechowski as they discuss Accessibility and Green Software. What’s driving interest in Green Software? What ESG principles are being adopted by companies and what is needed to drive accountability and accessibility in this sphere? Where does the main driver for Green Software come from within an organisation?

Transcription below:

Elise Zelechowski: I am excited about the Green Software Foundation for the very reason that I think this is about a movement of technologists who are really sort of coming up with innovative creative ways to address this problem. And so the way we need to take this forward is get CIOs to the table and say, now, how do we sort of come together and think about mutual benefit?

How do we sort of make this a systems approach within the organization to tackle all the different parts that we need to tackle?

Asim Hussain: Hello and welcome to Environment Variables. Brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software and your host Asim Hussain.

Chris Skipper: Hey everyone. Chris, the producer of Environment Variables here with a quick note to say that the following episode of the podcast was taken from a panel discussion from the recent Green Software Foundation global summit. If you would like to hear and see an unfiltered raw version of this discussion, head on over to our YouTube channel and look for the video entitled GSF global summit closing ceremony, 2022.

In fact, I'll do you one better and add a link below in the show notes of the podcast. So head there, click the link and you can check out not only that discussion, but all the other episodes of the Environment Variables podcast too. Now on with the show.

Asim Hussain: Welcome, my name Is Asim Hussain and I'm excited today to host a panel with guests from the Green Software Foundation.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: I'm Chris Lloyd-Jones.

Chris Adams: Hi there. My name's Chris Adams. Oh, sorry, Anne.

Anne Currie: hi, I'm Anne Currie.

Elise Zelechowski: Hi, Elise Zelechowski.

Asim Hussain: Awesome. I've got some wonderful, uh, interesting questions, hopefully for all of you. And I'd love to hear your opinions. Very interesting topics around green software. My first question is, you know, what's driving, I personally have experienced a lot more interest in this space in kind of the last year, at the very least.

What do you, think's driving interest in green software in, across the industry, Chris Lloyd-Jones. Why don't you go ahead with that one.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: So for me, I think it's the growing understanding from individuals that our way of life needs to be greener, to be sustainable and be resilient. And now there's a lot of talk from governments and around setting targets and policies, and those are very important, but green software lets every individual make an impact and make a difference, which I think is a differentiator from all the other initiatives that are going.

Asim Hussain: Mm. Yeah, really good point. I, I, I feel there's a ground spell movement across the world as well. Yes. Elise, what's your, what's your thoughts on that? On that question?

Elise Zelechowski: I would, I would echo that and just say, I mean, I think that technologists today are, are, are growing up with more and more real sort of impacts from climate change. They're seeing them manifested in ways that are really impacting how they experience the world around them and how they think about their future.

And organizations like the Green Software Foundation that really provide a forum to take action and to feel like you have agency to really make a change and sort of really not just make a change broadly, but make a change in what you're building every day really gives people a sense of the power to change.

And I think that that is one of the, the most exciting things about the, the Green Software Foundation. I also just think that, you know, Organizations are increasingly adopting ESG frameworks. I think there's more and more accountability expectations around that. And of course, organizations that, that have an outsized emissions footprint from their it right, are gonna be looking at green software as one of the big opportunities to make an impact.

Asim Hussain: Wonderful that, that that's. Yeah, that's definitely aligned to my thinking as well. So given the fact that organizations. You know, they're interested in green software, but they need to adopt, you know, processes, principles, patterns of, of engineering in order to greenify their, their software and reduce the emissions of software, what what's needed in your mind for organizations to, to adopt these patterns and principles, Chris Adams.

What's your thoughts in that area?

Chris Adams: So what really, our big, big one, right. Is capacity, like organizations having the skills in house to do this. And you know how, when like Ruby rails might have come out and then people are saying, I want a Ruby rails developer with 10 years experience. When the frameworks only a year old, we are kind of seeing something a little bit like that right now, where various organizations are trying to hire and ask for this stuff.

And they're not quite sure what they're after and we have this kind of shortage right now. So if anything, there's a real. Need to have some kind of way to provide, to kind of get this level of, of, of skill and competency up quite high, actually. And, and, well, I think this is something you've spoken about quite a lot, actually, as.

Anne Currie: Yes. Yeah. Cause we have to make sure that being green doesn't conflict with developer productivity in anybody's mind, because in the end developer productivity will always win. There are hardly any developers that compared to how many we need in the industry, we need more. And so everybody wants to use them to deliver on business goals, not kind.

Climate goals really. So one thing that I think will really help and is definitely helping at the moment is where you get open source or cloud providers who are offering services that are both good for developer productivity and also greener. The more we can, we can raise the profile of that and push it.

The more likely we are to get, take up, because what we cannot ask people to do, because they will not do it. I've asked them so many times over the years, we can't get people to rewrite their applications in sea or rust or making things more efficient is too expensive for people in terms of time. So we need to find services that will do it for them, make it the, the default, make it no or effort for them, or in fact less effort for them to choose those solutions.

Asim Hussain: Know, I do. I do think that one of the challenges is that we're either talking about software that hasn't been written. and the vast majority of software, which needs to be written has not been written yet. We are very, very early stages in this whole industry we're in right now, but there is also this legacy software that exists that we just have to figure out how do we manage that?

And rewriting that in a new language is not an option that, you know, that flies these days, but there is new development's happening, or maybe some of that stuff will. Will fly. Who made those choices early on? One of the things Chris, I just thought, I D dunno if you have any opinions on this or whether you've seen anything else on the horizon.

I, I was very, very delighted to see, I think just yesterday, the day before there were, there are several, you know, job roles out there. I saw some for Amazon. Of a sustainable solutions architect and I'm starting to see a more and more and more. And I know some of your organizations have roles, you know, with the title, agreeing the title.

I mean, what's, what do you see in terms of the job market regarding kind of our space? Do you see a lot of growth in this area?

Chris Adams: is definitely interest in this often at a kind of executive level and often at a kind of developer on the, kind of in the trenches level. But. The part in the middle people, aren't quite sure how to kind of prioritize it or even ask for, or even specify it right now. So like people asking, well, how do I buy a green, a greener version of any kind of service right now?

There's a real gap there right now. And I think even at the architectural level, we don't really have the language yet. Or it's not that common to really kind of talk about the trade offs you might be doing. So like, I could do one thing here, which takes advantage of how the energy markets have totally changed over the last 10 years to, to change the economics.

Right. But I dunno how to talk about the, the tradeoffs that might be, that I might make in order to unlock that stuff. And I think you kind of need this capacity or these abilities at the design level right now, before you can kind of get to the implementation part. That's what I feel is a real kind of.

Gap right now until we have like an iron triangle for things like greener software, for example, or this stuff here. I think we're gonna struggle to have like, informed decisions about how you're gonna spend a developer's time budget or an actual cash money budget on things. That's probably one of the big gaps I see in the next six to 12 months, that needs to be kind of plugged, I suppose.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: I just wanna weigh in on the chasm there. One thing that I've noticed is that some organizations are starting to see this as an either or that you either focus on sustainability in your business model and secular economy, or you do green software. Whereas actually the personas and the people doing these things are very different.

I think you can have sustainability in your technology and sustainability with technology. And I think organizations don't need to take that kind of zero sum approach to focusing on where they need to change.

Asim Hussain: great point, great point. And I think that's that's. The interesting question is, is. There is a gap. There's a gap between different types of roles, but there's also a gap between, as you mentioned, Chris CIO to, to, to in the trenches, they're in the middle, there's kind of this, this knowledge gap. And once that gets filled, then the rest of the roles and the understanding will spread throughout an organization.

But then that leads to one of my favorite questions, which is where will change come from? I think there's been lots. Attention thought strategy attempts in the past, going kind of top down, CIO CEO, down to the, down to the further down organization. And there's been other attempts going from maybe more. I call it in the trenches on the front lines, let's say, oh God.

So all these awful war metaphors, we need to stop using them up, up, up, up the chain. Where do you think the kind of main driver for adoption of green software come from? Which direction I'm gonna ask at least this question first.

Elise Zelechowski: Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's right. Sort of one of the unique features of, and, and, and, and there is theory of change right at the Green Software Foundation is that we can create kind of a groundswell movement here of technologists who are really driving, driving change. But of course there needs to be support structures in place, right.

And there needs to be enablement from CIOs and other members of the team. And to the point that was just made. You know, there needs to be kind of a systems approach. Think about things as integrated, right? This is not, you know, an either or scenario. We need to kind of look at strategies that embed sustainability approaches throughout the entire space within the company.

But I think that CIOs are increasingly understanding that they play a role in an organization's sustainability ambitions. I think, as I mentioned earlier, I think ESG is, is part of that regulation sort of driving. Expectations around environmental performance. But I think that I am excited about the Green Software Foundation for the very reason that I think this is about a movement of technologists who are, are really sort of coming up with innovative creative ways to address this problem.

And so. The next sort of step or the, the way we need to take this forward is, is get CIOs to the table and say, now how do we sort of come together and think about mutual benefit? How do we sort of make this a systems approach within the organization to tackle all the different parts that we need to tackle?

Asim Hussain: Yeah, a holistic approach. We need everybody at the table, but yeah, they're definitely there. The, I know you have certain opinions.

Anne Currie: do I, I'm a big, I'm a big believer in the middle. Managers as being the, kind of the secret key to this, because 10 years ago in the financial services industry, when they wanted to try and stop everybody being Cowboys, and there'd just been a huge financial crash, whatever, and they wanted everybody's behave a bit better.

They realized that actually the key to that was the middle managers because. People at the bottom have, might have enthusiasm, but they didn't really have the power to make any changes. And they were all together. They didn't how to do it. People at the top would quite often get on board and say, yeah, we wanna do this.

But everybody assumed they were just lying in the middle and would just stamp on all the projects as soon as they, they go anywhere. So we it's, it's kind of senior architects, middle manager, other, otherwise they have a tendency to just kill everything. For good reason, because they know that loads of projects get kicked off that are actually banned for the business.

And their job is usually to keep the business alive and running and, and operating and not easily. No, not because somebody's NA the CEO's neighbors once said that they thought this was a good idea. So everybody has to drop everything and do it. They're there to protect from that and, and kill those projects.

So we need to persuade them. Otherwise everything's killed is stone dead. So yeah, we need it's. As Elise said, it's holistic. Everybody has to be convinced and we can't leave them to the end or they'll stop.

Asim Hussain: to Anne, we should fire all the CIOs and middle management jobs to say no. Got it.

Um, Chris Adams, were you about to put your hand up?

Chris Adams: Yeah was indeed. Yeah, like a little school, boy. I think there's actually. I think it's worth looking at the role that policy makers have been playing in this in there. And we can also look to other places where people started introducing things like what you might refer to as well. Not really non-functional requirements, but like other kind of key kind of indicators of quality.

And you might think about things like, say accessibility, if you look how accessibility was something, which is now become relatively mainstream in terms of like working. Yeah. You had a push. At a kind of regulatory level where people would say every single website built with public sector money now has to meet a minimum level, but you also needed something like ways to convert those ideas into something that people can act upon.

Like, if you have like a Web content, accessibility guidelines, you got poor, which is like, you know, perceivable. Understandable robust. You kind of need something like that for green software right now to make it a bit easier for people to manage success in this. And so like basically a product manager or someone is able to kind of accept something and say, yeah, this is actually meeting these criteria here.

And right now, We don't quite have that, but it'll be really lovely to have something like that to make it a bit easier for the people who are at that mid-level to essentially guide people along the way, or at least tell when something is actually hitting the targets, they think it's supposed to be hitting, for example.

Asim Hussain: We need a C level to say, yes, we need the middle middle management say yes, but also have the knowledge and the tools and the information to be able to guide and drive and, and, and drive work in, in, in the right direction. I also think it's interesting about the accessibility aspect of it. A lot of people assume that, you know, a lot of accessibility arguments.

Don't have financial benefits. There's huge financial benefits to accessibility arguments mean it's like on some circumstances, it's, you know, significant percentage of your customer base is someone who is, you know, differently. And because it can also be temporal as well, like cuz you can, you know, Maybe have a baby.

So if you don't have a one arm for like six months. Yeah. Well, this is the thing actually seemed like, I mean, so Microsoft did have some stuff like this, which is quite helpful when they spoke about things like situational positional kind of disabilities that is actually really useful in having the vocabulary to actually realize that there are benefits in lots of other places.

We don't quite have that language in. Technology right now, but it does exist. People do talk about co-benefits all the time. You can talk about greening electricity, for example, and saving literally millions of lives each year, that would otherwise be cut short with like particulate matter. There's all these things you can talk about.

And there's arguments you can make to say, well, maybe your staff might wanna hang around more. If they feel like they're part of the good side. For with using advanced humane things, rather than this really, really weird 20th century kind of stuff from before. There's all this stuff that we could be talking about.

And I don't know about you, but I think most developers would rather build star treks than build mad max and.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: I'd say that even with the code benefits you're talking about, I mean, that's kind of the values driven. It is the right thing to do. I think the thing around green software, there's almost a pragmatic business case without kind of wanting to relate everything back to money. If you reduce electricity in a data center, you reduce spend, right?

If you reduce consumption in the cloud, you reduce, spend as much as I think we should do this. Cuz it's the right thing to do. If it does come down to a business case for the bottom line for the pound, the dollar, the Euro. There's also, it can be a very strong, almost linear correlation between reduced carbon and reduced money.

And you can invest that in training, I think to then help those middle managers stop squatting all these projects. Yeah.

Elise Zelechowski: Yeah, no, that's right. The optimization is, is key. And I think that gets back to that point where, you know, companies with sort of outside impact from their, it are moving more quickly to kind of look at where those opportunities are. Right. There's sort of environmental benefits. Right. But there's also that, that big cost saving opportunity when you take this on.

Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Adams: this is the thing, though. Again, we can look from other sectors that do things like this. Like if you value. Then you can literally value it. You can price it. Like you see organizations doing this all the time. Like I'm gonna point to Microsoft because they have done things like this. They have like an internal carbon price.

So you've got a kind of carbon war chest for this cool green stuff. But they've also got things to say, well, maybe there's something which is the. Actually we're struggling to kind of bring down the emissions, right? For example, like an aviation, that's got a different internal carbon price. So you can price things to actually do this.

And like, this is literally what Boeing have been doing for like 20 to 30 years to achieve weight savings. They basically automatically give any engineer a kind of. Budget that they're, they're able to spend to buy weight savings. And I think you can do these kind of, if there's all these management patterns that are, that are like used lots of places, which would work really well in this field.

And now I'm gonna hand to Anne, cuz I think she's got something to say here as

Anne Currie: Yeah, because I, I totally disagree with all of you. So, so this is a good thing on the panel. I totally disagree with you. I don't think, I don't think cost savings sell to enterprises because they don't because for. Them the cost of developers exceeds cost of operating data. They, that's why they move to the cloud, cuz they're willing to pay more in order to give their developers less work to do so.

I don't think that's an, an argument that lad, how having said that, I think it is an argument that that can be made and it is convincing if you operate a data center because there electricity cost is a really key part of your business costs. So aviation. Aviation fuel is a really key part of your business cost.

You will go outta business if aviation fuel, if you spend too much on aviation fuel, but it's not, you will not go out business in the tech industry because you spend too much money on your data center. You go out business because you key business would a business, whatever it is, isn't generating the income you want it to.

It's not your number one priority.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: I think it depends on who you're speaking to though the C-suite level, for sure. That's not gonna make an impact, but again, I'm gonna use your analogy of middle managers. If you are looking at your spend and you look to what the spend was before, and you are seeing your use of function. An Azure or Orlando function, spiking.

And you see your app services. I think even if it might not materially impact the business, those people panic. So having a way to see that they can keep their cost in check. Then also, I guess, sell upwards, manage upwards that they're being green, doing the right things. I'm not actually saying it's a key business driver that helps those people make decisions, which might be a bit Machavellian.

Maybe

Asim Hussain: think, I think it's a co-benefit. And I think that's one of the things there has to be. There's multiple vectors in making decisions. I think I do. I do agree with Anne to a certain degree that I think if it's the only yard when you're putting forward, it won't, it won't land. But if you're saying it's, it's got this benefit, this benefit, this benefit, it is greener.

It's faster. It's more reliable. All those things added together. I do think, I do think it adds it's not nothing.

Chris Adams: When I talk about pricing something, I'm not necessarily saying the cost of a computer, for example, you can cost things in all these different. And there's a whole set of management theory, all around cost of delay, which is like, what is the cost of, of us not shipping this product, for example, the day before, okay, let's choose a bad example like black Monday or something like that.

Right. That is a clear cost of doing that. Right. And that's what I'm talking about. We price things accordingly. And if you're able to talk about this and, and then, and if you, if you accept that in many cases, organizations are driven by numbers. If you can translate these into that, Incredibly reductive single one dimension that helps you get, make it argue for something.

Then I think that's actually useful and we have patterns for doing this kind of stuff. So it's not necessarily the cost of compute. It's the cost of the opportunity cost of what you could be doing. Otherwise, for example, you can express these in numerical form and people make lots and lots of money building models and designing that and managing this way anyway.

So I think that you could apply this to carbon because there are absolutely. Consequences while the science spells out, there are consequences for us not pricing in carbon into how we work.

Asim Hussain: If you're working for a for-profit organization, it's it's money it's, you know, that, that's what that's the purpose of the organization is to, is to make a profit it's a for-profit organization, but there's other aspects of the world. You know, we have these free markets, but then we, hopefully we have regulations and regulatory authorities that work that temper and control the access is perhaps of, of a free market economy.

So we talked a lot about, you know, if, if there was just the money argument, Just the market driven money argument, you know, what, what, what could happen? What are some regulatory policies that if it, if they came out would help accelerate the adoption of not just green software, but you know, more sustainable tech solutions.

Anne Currie: Cast our mind back that we talked earlier about accessibility and, and you know, that that that's useful for generating additional customers and things. But actually, I, I, I remember at the time I was head of it for a company and the main argument for why we should make the site accessible. Was that the SEO was better.

Google used to give you an SEO boost if you were accessible. And that was one of the key performance indicators that they had, which was where are you in Google? That was a top line item for every C-suite business discussion. So you could easily say, well, we have to be accessible because it'll move us.

Through Google. And that was the reason why, you know, it was clearly measurable thing. And I think people really cared about, and I also used to work for companies like Microsoft and for them, the reason to go for accessibility was that there were government mandates on accessibility standards that a lot of applications had to pass.

So that was, well, you just cannot sell into the us government, which is a key customer that you want, if you don't meet these levels. So if we had. Something like that again, that would be effective, um, in the past that was effective and I think it would be effective again. So how do we get those kind of like both business?

So Google provided the push through the SEO and government provided the push through. You have to have these meet these standards in order to sell to us. And that was effective.

Chris Adams: like this is currently happening in Germany and in Hong Kong we're already. So I think last month, the first ever eco certified software was granted. Blauer angle or Blauer Engel certificate. And one of the reasons that people were doing that was because in government, which had many cases have legally binding targets to reduce emissions, they need to have a thing to ask for.

So now you see that and there is now a German project called software. Which is like soft aware, but with a kind of German accent, what that does, that's basically something a bit like continuous integration checking every single time. Are, are you making, are you moving forward or moving backwards in terms of the actual missions associated with any of the things you're doing?

So there are loads of efforts like this, but it's still early days. There's Germany and there's Hong Kong, but no one else has new certifications yet. But there's like a loose network of like 28 different countries who are trying to figure out what to be asking for so that when they put a big fat procurement tender in, they can say, I need this to be, I don't know, instead of perceivable, operable understandable and oh, Christ robust, maybe green, open, lean, decentralized gold, something like that.

We need to have things like that for it really.

Elise Zelechowski: And I'll just add, I think that's, I mean, that's right. The role of the Green Software Foundation, right. Is, is we have this forum to help drive and sort of bring kind of. It right to this question of like, what does good look like and what should we be really aiming for as a community? And our, I think our approach and our processes, you know, are based on transparent principles, right?

And, and really about let's get everyone at the table and really talk about this in an open forum. And so I think that regulation is key, but we need to sort of get to a place where we start to, to drive that alignment on, Hey, this is kind of a good stand and keep building. As you say, Chris, more sort of visibility awareness in the.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Wonderful. So it's even when it comes to government influence, it's still, still going back to money, cuz it's like, where, where is the government gonna spend its money? But I think that will evolve to something hopefully a bit closer to policy regulation. And I would also say that, you know, Google, the Google SEO example, that was a Google policy.

It was a decision that they made not, I dunno, we probably had some, I don't know the background of that decision, so I'm just guessing, but it was this decision that they made, which drove a lot of action from a lot of organizations. And that's why these things are such great levers to, to pull because it's a small change can have a big impact as we're kind of reaching to the end of the, of the, of the panel.

We might have gone over a little bit. But I just wanted to ask each of you, you know, what advice do you have for someone looking to start having conversations regarding green software in inner roles, or even just in their communities? Let's start with you, Chris. Lloyd-Jones. Do you have any advice for people?

Chris Lloyd-Jones: me. It be about identifying that business case to support green software, but also understanding your culture. I mean, focusing again, gonna repeat it on that management example. I do think you need to know what your organization's motivated by and be quite honest about that. If you are a pragmatic organization cost or one of the other drivers, Chris mentioned will be important for some organizations, it being the right thing to do will be enough to start these conversations.

We need that organizational support to have that driver support adoption. You also need a sponsor. Cause without that, buy-in, it will be difficult to encourage teams to actually adopt these new practices. Go out for training. Like, like Anne was saying, if you're taking away from developer productivity, there has to be a really strong reason for that.

So that's the top down. I think the other thing I would say to start having conversations would be grassroots advocacy, meet the like-minded individuals. Those would be my two main.

Anne Currie: Great piece of advice, Chris Anne, what's your thoughts? Well, my thought would be, remember you have consumer power, almost everyone in the tech industry has consumer power to make change. Yes. So when you are buying, when you are buying stuff or. When you're thinking about buying staff, talk to your suppliers and say, I care about this, and this will, this is something that will make the difference between whether I buy from you or I buy from somebody else, because if you can then get them to go and change their products either immediately, or just because it's the feedback they're getting from their customers that will have outside impacts without you having to do anything at all, or get any internal sign off.

Just, just ask for it.

Asim Hussain: Right. Absolutely. Use your wallet, Chris Adams. What's your thoughts?

Chris Adams: I'm actually gonna agree with a lot of what Andrew said. There's a whole phenomena called the values perception gap. That's common in psychology, where everyone basically assumes that everyone. Doesn't care about anything until they ask them and realize that they do care about things. And like, until you do that and are explicit about that, or explicitly give a team permission to do this, or explicitly talk to someone, they'll basically assume that you do not care.

And if you don't do that, then. Well, we are kind of here because everyone is assuming that no one else cares and no one is prepared to ask, like, can you please do to our provider or Hey team, do you reckon people might wanna join us? If like we were, what some, we look more like the good guys, rather than the bad guys, there's all this stuff that we could be doing.

And I feel like a lot of time is basically be very explicit about this, about what you're after and what your values actually are lead with your values in many cases. But back 'em up with some numbers that you can come up to justify when someone is asking when someone is challenging, you, you later.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. And I will, I will just add to the, I do work for one of those large cloud providers and I will, I will. That the sales org, they do. It is flagged. It is put in a database when a customer reaches out and complains about anything. But like specifically there's a there's, you know, if, if the request or suggestion is around sustainability, it is flagged then is go.

It does go in a database, which is brought up in discussions, at least with you, like, what are your, what's your, what's your guidance?

Elise Zelechowski: Yeah, I, I would say all, all great points and all part of the kind of systems thinking that needs to be applied here of sort of activating right. Sort of different stakeholders and levers within an organization. You know, I can speak, you know, you know, specifically to, to ThoughtWorks, you know, one of the things that I have found, you know, we are a very decentralized culture, wherever agile culture, and it's.

So important for us to find champions in different parts of the business and then do the education and training and bring them along. And, and we've learned a lot from our participation already in the, in the foundation, but just getting enough people who are starting to spread the word, you know, sort of in a frankly, in a grassroots, right.

Sort of like pollinating different parts of the business. So you have. Suddenly you have this sort of like, oh, I'm hearing about this over here. Oh. And I'm hearing about this over there. And then as you're sort of building that business case that Chris is talking about, you know, and putting this together, you've already sort of primed the organization culturally and kind of gotten enough momentum building that, that it, I feel like you can just move then more quickly and get gain more momentum.

But definitely I, I feel like that grass. Piece has been very important at ThoughtWorks, even though we're a very purpose led company, it's just the, the way our organization works. You need to kind of do that pollination.

Asim Hussain: I would, I would absolutely agree with you. I think that we, one of the things people don't realize about Microsoft is it has one of the largest kind of green teams of any organization in the world. I think we're almost 6,000 people now in the organization kind of actively sit and participate and talk and, and, and make it very, very clear that sustainability is a value to them.

And. I think that's a strong signal to everybody else in an organization. So the middle management and the CIOs CTOs and the CIOs that, you know, they to make a decision around sustainability would be, it would be supported. So, um, yeah, absolutely. I agree with all of you, all of your opinions. Thank you.

Thank you. All of you. Thank you all for being part of this panel and thank you for being part of the foundation, your guidance and support. And your knowledge is instrumental in us achieving our mission and our goals. Thank you. Wonderful. Thanks so much. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please do leave a rating and review. If you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show. And of course we want more listeners to find out more about the Green Software Foundation.

Please visit greensoftware.foundation. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.