Green IO

In this episode, we went to Paris and met Elisabeth Mouchy. In 2013, Elisabeth co-founded Delighted, the Spotify for art in San Francisco. Now, she is now Product Director at Meetic, the multi-awarded dating service. She is super open to provide feedback and insights on Digital Sustainability, a topic she has helped ramp-up at Meetic. We will see how to make sustainable the move toward greener product management. And the way Meetic has tackled painpoints ranging from "Where do I start" to "How to avoid the end-of-the-world versus end-of-the-month dilemna?".❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect: Elisabeth's LinkedInGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Acknowledgement This episode has benefited from the support of a dozen of digital product experts across Europe. A warm thank you to them.  Acknowledgement are in this LinkedIn post. Elisabeth's links and other references mentioned in this episode Elisabeth’s article in Medium about the Meetic team achievements at the API Days Sustainable Digital Challenge Elisabeth’s talk about Daylighted Meetic websiteAPI Days 2021 Sustainable Digital ChallengeClimate Action TechHubblo/ScaphandreJoin Maestro masterclass on Sustainable Product (in Paris and in FR) ISO 14001David Attenborough's a Life on our planet (available on Netflix) Cyril Dion's book Petit manuel de résistance moderne (FR) TranscriptGaël Hello, everyone. Welcome to green IO, the podcast for doers, making our digital word greener one byte at a time. Whether you work in tech, product, data, design, marketing, you name it. You will find inspiration with us for your next actions in digital sustainability. And IT. In this third episode, we went to Paris where we had the pleasure to meet Elizabeth Mouchy. And before we start, I would like to thank all the product experts across Europe who have kindly answered my survey, helping me to prepare for this great interview with Elizabeth. Because Elizabeth has had so many lives and such a track record in digital sustainability that I needed a Joe Cocker's moment: a little help for my friends. So let's start! Elizabeth! Elizabeth owns a master degree in IT engineering with a specialization in electronics, and a management degree in international business. In 2013, she co-founded Daylighted, the Spotify for art in San Francisco. And the Dayglighted technology has enabled viewers and artists to interact on more than 100,000 artworks. Now, she is one of the top product leaders at Meetic the multi-awarded dating service. She is super open to provide feedback and insights on digital sustainability. Like she recently did in a Join Maestro Masterclass for instance, and she is dedicated to this. I must tell you that she blew my mind with the amount of preparation work she did for this interview. Welcome Elizabeth. Thanks a lot for joining Green I/O today. ElisabethThanks Gaël. So happy to be here. GaëlThanks! First of all, what did I forget to mention about you? ElisabethNothing at all. Perfect. Thank you so much. One thing that I'd like to highlight is maybe that I'm very interested in the digital sustainability subject and overall the social sustainability in general, but I want to say that, and I know that it's gonna make you laugh, but I'm not an activist. I'm just another normal person who want to do a part in this fight against climate change. So trying to do it with a very hands on approach in my company Meetic. GaëlWow, that's great because we interview both activists and just people wanting to be great doers. [laugh] This is a tagline of the podcast indeed. ElisabethNothing against activists. Of course. GaëlNo, but you need both, both profiles for people to get a connection with the hosts. The guests - sorry. but okay, so you're not an activist, but how did you become interested in the sustainability in the first place and the sustainability of our digital sector in that case? ElisabethYes, of course. So it's obvious to me that we all have to do a part in this fight against climate change and for sustainability. And so everybody usually like me starts small with recycling or eating local organic foods, trying to avoid eating meats, you know, things like this in your personal life. But I think like everybody come at a point where they would wonder “how can I have a bigger impact”?. And for me, as I got more and more interested in the topic I learned that digital is actually a pretty dirty field. [laugh] I know, you know this, but it's typical to present between three and 4% of all greenhouse gas emission in the world. And just a quick data, but and again, I know that most of you listening might know this, but it's already more than a travel industry and it's about to go over road transportation soon as well. And it's growing an incredible speed. So if you're a bit sensitive to sustainability and you work in digital and you know that you have to do something about it, right? GaëlYeah, absolutely. [laugh] Sounds very familiar to me [laugh] ElisabethSo that's it, that's basically how I came to it, very interested and “what can I do around me to make it bigger?” GaëlBut that's interesting because you say, okay, I want to do something. And which is great is that green IO is about sharing hands on experience on how we start ; how to make digital services and Tech more sustainable. And I know that you're part of the productmanagement at meeting. So could you tell us a bit more about the journey that Meetic started toward a lighter environmental footprint? How did it all start? ElisabethYes, of course. So for Meetic, it's very interesting. Also a few employees were already involved in separate sustainable actions. It really started a few years back when our new CEO Mathieu Jacquier took his office in 2019. Since his first day it made it really clear that we – Meetic - as a whole, as a company could have a bigger impact on sustainability if we put all our effort together. So not only did he stated clear business objective toward a better Meetic, better that's greener, but also a clear message that Meetic is going to try to be sustainable from now on, and not only carbon neutral, but also carbon free. GaëlWow. That, that was a pretty big objective, but how does it all start? ElisabethYeah, so you have to start somewhere. The best to start is to start with studies to know where you are right now. And for Meetic, the question was “what really was Meetic carbon footprint”? And that was the first thing that we got after our first audit. We were spending 750 tons of equivalent CO2 as a whole company. And while we were measuring that in the meantime, there were also a lot of practical initiative come up, such as incentive to recycle list of restaurants, where you can bring your own boxes. Of course, reminder to turn off the light or the screen if it was not done automatically. So that was really the tip of the iceberg, because it's really like the classical things you see about sustainability. But because Meetic wanted to have an impact, of course it was not only what … we didn't want to stop there! It was really the tip of the iceberg. GaëlYeah, because it was mostly scope ... I mean, it was a scope one audited obviously. Just a side note for the listeners, not yet familiar with the three scopes in a carbon footprint assessment. Scope one is a greenhouse gas emission that a company emits directly while operating. The scope two is the indirect GSG emitted related to the purchasing of electricity and heat or steam. And scope three relates to pretty much everything else must notably all the indirect green house gaz emissions made along the supply chain. And what is important here is that for tech companies, scope three usually accounts for more than 80, if not 90% of the total emissions. And you can easily optimize from scope one to scope three. And for instance, a company can shift from direct car ownership to leasing the car and “poof”, that's magic, suddenly the cars are not in scope one anymore. In IT, of course you can not use your own servers, but the ones of a public cloud provider like AWS. And this leads to another very interesting discussion on how to assess the carbon footprint of your cloud provider. And I'll stop here not to spoil you because we will have a fully dedicated episode on this topic very, very soon. So 750 tons is an interesting figure, which tools and frameworks were used to assess Meetic carbon footprint for the scope one and maybe more later [laugh]. ElisabethYeah, exactly. So for this audit - specific audit - it was done internally with whatever we can find to create it. But then in 2020 we hired an external company called Inside App to help us measure the impact of our services so together - And it's a kind of a process, you know, because it's pretty new - So together we decided on three interesting user flows to be measure on different steps. So for example, the download of the apps or the pages, the usage generated by each scenario and for each one, we then created the carbon footprint impact of data center usage, the user terminals and the network. And so that made up a total of 1,300 tons of equivalent CO2. So about twice what we calculated for office and company alone. So of course you have to realize that this is just a number and this was all quite new, kind of, at the time and really experimental. So when you do that, you have to take a lot of hypothesis and everything in the calculation is of course questionable. But the idea is really to arrive at a numberh so you can improve things from there. GaëlYeah. But I think that's really the idea the life cycle and analysis is still an it's infant phase, but it's way more efficient than just measuring the electricity consumption and that's it and as you said measuring is the first step to improve things. So how did you start improving things? ElisabethSo, yes. So in the meantime, during those audits I was actually contacted by the team behind APIdays. I was a speaker at APIdays in the end of 2019, I think, no 2020 sorry. And they asked me if Meetic wanted to participate in their yearly digital sustainable challenge. And as I knew that this was a challenge, very interesting challenge, and it was a great objective for Meetic together. So I've contacted collaborators inside Meetic to try to put together a team for the challenge. So we succeeded in that, we were six persons participating to the challenge. It was really interesting focusing on IT sustainability and really a good level of expertise in the field. We learn tons of good practices and what's interesting too, is to actually talk and meet with like-minded people that want also to have an impact in their company and for the company and also production partners of course. So that was a challenge. And at the end of the challenge you have to put together a pitch to communicate about what you have done during the challenge and what you plan to do after that for your company and to improve sustainability. And so for our pitch, we had practical recommendation around optimizing our apps and website because of course it was not really done before. Also, it was not terrible. The performances were good, but you can always do better, especially when you start to measure, but we'll come back on this point later. We had recommendation around optimizing our data centers. That's also an easy one, and I know you talk about this, so I won't spoil the next podcast. But one thing that was very specific to what we wanted to do, was to evangelize the subject internally, because if everybody at Meetic, knew, or kind of knew how to correctly recycle, the knowledge on sustainable product development and good practices was close to zero also, it seemed and so that was something that we really wanted to do, like the evangelization of good practices to develop according to sustainable best practice. And so the challenge jury really liked our 360 recommendation. And so we were really happy to win the silver medal but we didn't stop there of course. GaëlOh, congratulations for the award. ElisabethThank you. GaëlOkay. So after this silver medal, what happened? Like was everybody at Meetic already fully evangelized through the participation to APIdays, or it was not the case yet? ElisabethIt was a start. But we knew that something else had to be done to improve internal knowledge about this. So at Meetic, we generally organize yearly hackathons and employees always love to participate. So the idea suddently popped up, like to have both together, why not organize a hackathon on IT sustainability with the challenge of making Meetic apps greener. And so that's what we did. And it had a great participation. About 45 people participated from all departments in Meetic with a total of eight presented projects ranging from optimizing our customer care answer flows and to integrating new cache tools or optimizing caching protocols, et cetera. And the winning project was a project to make an homemade tool to measure different sustainable indicators called green tool. GaëlYou're gonna have to tell us something about this green tool, but first, just a quick question. So 45 people that seems a lot, but how many people are working in Tech in the Meetic company? ElisabethI think it's about 150, something like that around this. GaëlSo you're telling me that almost one third of all the product and tech teams wanted to participate to this hackathon. ElisabethYeah, exactly. And also, also we are joined also by other teams. They're always like marketing which participate GaëlYes Marketing. ElisabethBut yeah, it was a really like a high attendency. GaëlWell, yeah, pretty impressive. Congratulations that's say something about the interest of the sustainably topic in industry I believe. Could you tell us a bit more about this green tool? Sounds very interesting. ElisabethYeah. So green tool is an internal dashboard used to evaluate the performance and impact of our features. We've developed it for different parts of our services, apps, and web apps but also emails, for example that we send like customer management. The idea is that when a developer puts a new feature live, they can check many indicators about it and see if it had an impact. And we have indicated such as data transferred, page weight, loading speed, download speed, but also just straight equivalent CO2 calculated from the usage, actually it's from a scenario usage. That's important because for example, they took different scenario, but one of the sample scenario is a user recently arrived on meeting and visited 50 profiles. And so if you, if you took this sample scenario and through automatic test, they can simulate the impact on the scenario, get the data on the performances, and then you can see what was entitled the scenario before and after the feature. That's very interesting. And so one of the, of green tool impact for example, is that after an update, they realize that with the same scenario of visiting 50 people that on the mobile web app, the weight of the overall flow would increase and would be 66 megabytes. And the story was quite big. And the notice that the image size was the same than the desktop web up, meaning way too large, you didn't need like the same size on mobile app, than desktop app. So they optimize it and now the overall weight of this scenario is just eight megabytes. So that's an amount of 90%. GaëlWow ElisabethYeah that's pretty good. Pretty amazing actually. And when you start to measure the data around sustainability and around performance, and you start to measure like frequently, there's lots of hanging fruits to get, you know. Another example that we had is that … Sorry, I'm talking a lot, let me know if you want to [laugh] GaëlI think the audience wants to hear you, not me. So please [laugh], you're the one having very concrete hands-on feedback to provide, so go for it. ElisabethAnother examples that I found interesting is that we had this assumption that photos are the first thing to optimize because you know, like it's visual, you know, it's heavy and when we launched green tool, we saw that we look into it, you know, like we look into the different categories that are loaded on the page, and we were expecting photos to be like super big. Right. And but what you look at the number from green tool you notice is that it's nothing, nothing, compared to the Javascript code which was actually way bigger, way much bigger. And so that thing like this, that you get surprised because you actually don't know until you look into it. And so green tool was really like a really useful tool for us. Today it's mostly monitored by QA manager and it's included in the auto generated test process, but the idea is that it's so easy to use and so user friendly. - that's why we made it - that it could be used by any engineering managers and product owners as part of their monitoring routine. For example, after whole launch. One thing that's important to realize with those measures and tool to measure is that, you know, we talk about an audit at the beginning and that's also good to really know where you are. But then, with Meetic, you know, we deploy updates almost every day on our apps. So there is no way that this audit is true tomorrow. So the nice thing with green tool is that we have the autonomy to check every time we update something on our app, that it's correct, that the performance are the same, and that it's always at the top level and we can always try to improve. GaëlIs it fully automated? Like you don't have manual interventions to update the data? ElisabethIt's fully automated it's based on auto-generated tests that run automatically every, I would say something stupid, so maybe every five minutes or 15 minutes or half an hour I dunno. But it runs automatically. And then you check the data if you want to see the graph, but you also receive alerts if something's wrong, something had changed. GaëlWow. That's a very powerful tool. And that's a super insightful feedback. You give us about all this Meetic journey towards sustainability. Thanks a lot. And you know, in the survey I mentioned earlier, the top four challenges listed by participants where “top level involvement”, “company-wide awareness”, “how to start measuring, doing things, et cetera” and “prioritization in making sustainable the commitment towards sustainability”. And if you don't mind, I'd like to start with this last point: “how to organize?” To avoid the “end of the word versus end of the month” dilemma. How did you entrench the sustainability criteria in your day to day product operation? Beyond the use of green tool, which is obviously a very massive first step. ElisabethYes. all of those are very interesting questions. To answer this specific question about how to avoid end of the world vs end of the month dilemma. It had to track back of where we started to put the sustainability in our day to day operation. But one thing that I mentioned is when, like Meetic this is a companywide objective and on top of it that socially engage the company, initiative can come from many places and it all come together at some point to create a big impact. So it's hard to notice where it really started. But if I answer your question a bit more precisely, from my point of view, once the topic is really pushed forward by top executives, it has to quickly move down to the employees so they get familiar with it. That's why the hackathon was a superb opportunity to help employees learn more about the sustainable practices, what can be done and join in with their own expertise, try things, show that we can do things and create a sort of emulation so that everybody wants to do it too, and wants to do their part GaëlSo once the ball has started rolling, everything gets smoother. If I understand you. Right. ElisabethExactly. Yeah. GaëlWhat advice would you give to someone willing to kick starts? Because as I said, something like 90% of the respondents in my little survey, not a scientific one [laugh] but have no action planned except for starting to measure and almost all asked for “what are the first steps?” ElisabethYeah. So the, the measurement is really the first step because when you start to measure, you'll see where you have to start, you know what I mean? It really linked one to another. So, if you really want to be hands-on, there are many tools out there that can help you measure your apps, your site performance, such as lighthouse or Hublot's open source tool which is called scaphandre but some tools even provide guidance into what to improve to be sustainable. And at higher level, there also a few consultancy companies that can run a carbon emission audit for you. You should really start there, you know, like it looks like it's easy, but actually it's not. Even if a consultancy company helps you, it's not easy. You really had to go through it and make lot of hypothesis. And it's really a process and you'll improve it every year. But this is really the first step that you have to take. I'm sorry, it's maybe an obvious answer but... GaëlNo, no, it's not. And this feedback is super important. I think the example you provided regarding the image size is a very interesting one. Of course, if you are a developer with the right level of awareness, when it comes to a digital sustainability, as the good craftmanship, you will pay attention to the size of the images, but you might miss this Javascript. ElisabethThere's another thing that said like “you can change what you can measure”. Something like this. [laugh] GaëlExactly. Yeah, exactly. [laugh] but it has been used some time to postpone change. Like “start measuring, come back two years later and we will see you can do”. And I think what is very interesting with what you shared with us is that you start measuring and you knew that it was not the right measure, but it's still the right things to do. Start measuring, start testing, correcting it. And this is ... it's obvious that in 10 years time, I mean, we will have international standards in digital sustainability, in IT, everything will be way smoother. I bet pretty much that we will have carbon accounting assessor as we have today for financial accounting. And that, you know, actually that will be a huge pressure from pretty much everyone to be sustainable. But do we really have 10 years to wait that everything is set up? No. So starting to measure and knowing that maybe it's between one, two, threefold [laugh] the size doesn't really matter because the direction is way more important than the absolute number. ElisabethYeah. Absolutely. It's about having the right direction. Yeah. GaëlGoing back to, to another pain point that was raised, what about company-wide awareness? I mean, you choose a hackathon at Meetic, but would you give other advice on how to turn goodwill into action within teams? ElisabethYeah, very interesting question. And very applicable to Meetic because we have a lot of initiatives implying our teams. So at Meetic, it also started a few years back with brown bag lunch meetings, BBL. And during those BBL, we used to discuss everything from our product to the obvious administrative subject that I mentioned before, recycling, et cetera. Also we have a slack channel about sustainability where we share from time to time what is done around the world and also what we do in our personal life. So everybody can advance also in their personal life if they want. But I think the first step here, and this is what I mentioned just now is really to create a strong community of people. We really want to push a topic forward. And for example, also around green tool use, we have set up performance committees attended by most tech leads and engineering managers. This is a meeting that happens monthly and it is used to prioritize a backlog of ideas to improve the overall performances of services. And during each committee, they go over the best ideas and try to think of ways to measure them - again the measure - and to prioritize them depending on the impact and the effort, et cetera. And green tool is really key again in that - sorry, I'm talking lot of green tool - because as it's an homemade tool, we can make it evolve at the same time that indicators we need to measure the new ideas that we have. It's really like a good circle in like a positive circle of evolution. GaëlAnd what about top level involvement? Obviously the sponsorship of your CEO is super strong, but was he the only one? In your opinion, is it the best sponsor? The only one possible? ElisabethTwo things on the subject. One thing, I think the top level involvement worked at Meetic because it was really genuine, meaning it's never been about external communication or green washing, you know. We were doing things only internally, so it was not for external communication at all but really a better impact on society and on the world. And I think that's why it's taken off in Meetic. Because it was really a... it was really driven by genuine will of changing the world. And second thing is that even before the hackathon, the executive wanted to make this objective a long term objective for Meetic. So let's say that tomorrow, all the executives from the executive committee change. So CEO, CFO, everybody leave whatever. They wanted to make sure that the objective will stay within Meetic. And so that's why they decided to apply for a European standard norm, the norm ISO 14001 that set up an objective of improving every year your process of making the company more sustainable. And we set up high objectives of improving the impact that Meetic has by 10% every year. And so we know that we are in a long run with this. We're not gonna stop tomorrow. GaëlWow. That's very interesting to connect with the overall objectives. 10% is quite ambitious and, actually, it connects super well with another question which is highly related, which is kind of my challenging question: “Beyond beautiful low carbon scope 3, what about the impact on business?” And let me clarify. Several people in the survey clearly stated that sustainability and profit were tradeoff in their company. Thus, nobody at the top level takes it seriously beyond greenwashing. And is it for you a misconception? How come it was different at Meetic, which is certainly not a nonprofit NGO. How was the ROI calculated? Because you mentioned greenwashing earlier and obviously you were not afraid of greenwashing labeling because you didn't communicate that much about what you were doing. So do you think it's a misconception? ElisabethIt's a topic that come back often around sustainability and digital sustainability. It's an interesting thing at Meetic because on top of the CEO - and of course the CTO who also run the subject, you know, for tools extra and for development optimization - it is now the CFO who's responsible for running the sustainability topic. GaëlInteresting. Elisabeth[laugh] yeah. So I know it's always a concern in the field that you have to choose between profit and sustainability, but actually sustainability is often improving your performances. If you take IT sustainability for example - but it works also with recycling or anything - by optimizing your websites or apps for low carbon impact, you often notice that your apps will also be quicker to load, lighter for your users and even often simpler in the product flow, because if you want to improve also the product sustainability, you have to optimize the product flow, maybe remove some features, something like this. And so it's really a win-win for everybody. But at Meetic we don't capture any direct ROI. We know we have to do this and I believe that everybody will do it at some point anyway, so better be the first one. Gaël[laugh] Being pionners once again. ElisabethExactly. GaëlI think you answered beautifully the top four challenges that my former colleagues and other experts shared with me. So I'd like to end up now with two more general question. First one being what makes you optimistic about our path toward a greener digital word? Elisabeth[laugh] interesting. So to be honest, I'm not really optimistic. You know this, I know this the stats are worse every year and every year scientists, researchers, people who know things give new objectives to limit greenhouse gas emission, and the overall temperature raise but year after year, it's higher and we're further away. So it's pretty pessimistic, sorry. But as there is no way out we don't have a choice, I guess. So we still have to try our best, to do our part and try to optimize and be the cleaner we can, I think, personally and professionally of course. But what we can be optimistic about - because there always something we can be optimistic - is that even if it's still not a main topic in the political world, which it should be of course, there's more and more people, especially in IT sustainability who are interesting in this. And that's of course a good thing because more people means more effort and more impact. So that's what I'm optimistic about. GaëlYeah. The ratio of almost one third of tech and product people wanting to participate to the hackathon at Meetic is clearly a very positive signal as well. And one last question that I asked to every guest, what would be your recommendations to learn more about digital sustainability and green IT, some thought leaders you could recommend to follow, some books, et cetera, et cetera. ElisabethIt's a really hard question because it's not a main topic yet. I guess I would recommend warmly APIdays sustainable challenge. But also following the mentor there, because it's really like you ask for where to start. And I think it's a good place to start actually for people who can participate. Otherwise I mostly get information from my peer network, you know. IT sustainability is not yet a major subject. There is no major leader in the field that you have to follow absolutely. So like there's not John Cuttler in the product management field of Paul Graham for entrepreneurship. You know. There is nobody like this for IT sustainability yet. And so I see it as an emerging, almost underground topic. And so my main advice would be to build your peer network to get updating for about it and to know what's being done in the world. GaëlThat's a good advice. This is where I started when I joined the - not that underground – Climate Action Tech community. But you are right. It is still quite under the radar at the moment. ElisabethYes, exactly. GaëlWell, Elizabeth, that was awesome. Super, super hands on [laugh] . Thanks a lot for being with us today. ElisabethThank you GaëlReally. Your insights and feedback, they were just great. Especially on how you run a sustainable product management on a daily basis and all the concrete actions you took. So I'm sure many of our listeners will find inspiration in it to kickstart or ramp up their journey to greener digital services. So thanks again. And next month we will go to Berlin … by train! And meet onsite - it will be my first recording onsite - Chris Adams the green web foundation director and a pillar of the climate action tech community I mentioned earlier. We will talk about green hosting cloud sustainability, and how to reduce carbon emissions associated with digital services in general. I must admit I'm looking forward to meeting such a giant in the sustainability field and that's it for this month … or not yet :) Just a few words about your beloved podcast. In two months time with zero marketing budget, green I/O already has hundreds of listeners. It's a great news. It means that you are not alone trying to build and run Greener digital services and Tech stack. Now my dear listener, I need you to boost it further. Just after you're done listening to this episode, please rate it five stars on Spotify, apple podcast, or any other podcast platform you use. On some of them a nice review would also help. It will make a huge difference in the search results. And together we will reach new people eager to make our digital world greener one by at a time. 

For the second episode of Green I/O, I met Sandra Sydow. She is a natural-born European: borned French, having studied in Sweden, worked in Germany where she married and now living in the UK for almost 10 years.Sandra has an impeccable track record at PHD as a Managing Partner where she thrived making complicated things easy to understand in digital marketing and working for global brands like Airbus, HP or Expedia. 2 years ago, she decided to dedicate her communication and pedagogical skills to fight climate change. She co-founded the climate pitch and became a Board member at the Digital Collage.In this  episode, we did not deep dive into a specific area like Green Hosting or Green AI but we focused on the most important asset in any Digital Tech company: humans! And the challenges we face when it comes to raising awareness about the increasing ecological footprint of our digital world. And transform it into concrete actions.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect:  Sandra's LinkedIn Gaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Sandra's links and other references mentioned in this episode The Digital CollageThe Climate Pitch Institute for Sustainable IT (INR in French) MOOC on Sustainable IT The Decathlon's use case presented by Julien Gontier Jane McGonigal's wikipedia page and her initiative Urgent Optimists Christiana Figueres's book "The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimists' Guide to the Climate Crisis" and the initiative she co-founded Global Optimism Corentin de Chatelperron's TED talk on "Nomade des mers" and the Low Tech Lab he co-founded  Solitaire Townsend's TED Talk on the creative industry destroying the climate  Ollie Burch's CAT Talk on how to communicate about sustainability  Timothy Morton's book "Being ecological" on how to communicate about ecology TranscriptGaëlHello everyone. Welcome to Green I O, the podcast for doers making our Digital World greener one byte at a time. Whether you work in Tech, Product, Data, Design, Marketing, you name it, you will find inspiration with us for your next actions in Digital Sustainability and Green IT. In the second episode, we will not deep dive into a specific area like Green Hosting or Green AI, but focus on the most important asset in any Digital Tech company: humans! From Ops to Design, from SEO to Data science, from UX Research to Webdev, we are all facing the same challenges when it comes to raising awareness on the increasing ecological footprint of our digital words and transforming it into concrete actions. And to get meaningful insights, we went to London and met Sandra Sydow. She is a natural born European, I would say. Born French, having studied in Sweden, worked in Germany where she married and now living in the UK for almost ten years. And yes, my British friends - disregarding any political agenda - you are still European to my heart. Sandra has an impeccable track record at PhD as a managing partner where she thrived making complicated things easy to understand in digital marketing and working for global brands like Airbus, HP or Expedia. Two years ago she decided to dedicate her communication and pedagogical skills to fight climate change. She co-founded the Climate Pitch and became a board member at the Digital Collage. Welcome Sandra. Thanks a lot for joining Green I/O today. SandraThank you again. I'm really pleased to be here. GaëlThanks. And first of all, what did I forget to mention about you? SandraI would say maybe you have forgotten to mention that I'm doing musical Theater too, in my leisure time. And I just want to specify this because this is something I changed in my life when I decided to quit my old life to my new life. And it's about the importance of getting creative and reminding ourselves that we are creative every day in a world that is highly automatized. And I think it's super important to reconnect with our true values. GaëlThat's amazing. How did you become interested in the sustainability and especially the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place? SandraWell, it's a bit of a story here again and I'm okay to share it with you. It's a bit of a personal one. But five years ago I was really thinking heavily of what I should do. Is my carrier the right one? Should I continue? And I had a little bit of an increasing dissonance with what I was doing, the aim of what I was doing. I was in advertising to remind, so pushing for consumption. And then at the same time, my son, who was teenager back then, was asking himself a lot of questions about his own future. And he asked us as well a lot of questions. And one day at dinner time, he looked at me in the eyes and said, Mom, I don't understand what you're doing. This job, I never do it. And that was the first lap in the face I had. The second was when I went with him to the Greta Thunberg demonstrations. And I swore to myself that day that I would be the one wearing, carrying those posters and not him in the future. So that was a big point in my life where I decided I need to change something. I need to put my skills to the benefit of positive missions. And this is when I decided to quit my job, my comfortable seat, and then dedicate all my time to positive missions. So at that point I was still completely lost and it was a complete blank sheet of paper. And I decided then to go back to study and understand better the sustainability world, which I did. And then step by step, you explore and you explore and touch what you maybe you want to do and you're good at. And then I discovered that it could be awareness, it could be communicating. I mean, I was 20 years in communication, so it's not a surprise. And then I always dedicated, I was always passionate about digital. And on my way, I had the luck to meet wonderful people working on the digital sector sustainability. I discovered their tool we talked about after and I thought, it's brilliant, I can do that. I can be an ambassador of this. I'm pushing for more questionable and more frugal ways of doing digital. GaëlThat's a very impressive story. The wake up call coming from the children. Not the first time I heard it. I think it's quite interesting in our generation that it's our children pushing us to our limits and making us realize that we might have some stuff to change for the second half of our professional career. But you also became an entrepreneur? SandraYes, Totally. You know you would have told me five years ago, you will become an entrepreneur one day I would say no. I would laugh at their face and say, no, I'm not an entrepreneur. And then I realized during that whole change of life that you need to explore and you need to be open to everything. And I realized that actually stone after stone, I met brilliant people, really inspiring people. And I discovered that I could also create things myself. And in the awareness space, I thought, there is so much to do because we are facing a world where scientists have tried to tell us that it's urgent, that the world is burning, that we need to do something but without having a real impact. So how do you do that? And I thought, there is a big space here also with scientific matters to simplify it and to make it so accessible to the people that they actually recognize has a space, especially a space within the business environment. And this is when I met someone great, Frederic. And we created a tool we were absolutely convinced of, because it was missing for businesses to address climate change. So we developed a conference format, and this is where it all started. And I said, okay, now I need to build my company and set up my own company then. Yeah. GaëlIt's very interesting because I remember Ollie Burch giving a lecture at the climate action tech community and enlisted the three main issues when you talk about sustainability and the very first one was like humans are super good at solving simple problem and they're super bad at solving big complex problem and they need to split it into smaller pieces to make them actionable. So I guess when you face something as big as okay climate change, how you split it into smaller pieces of chunk, how you make it understandable without SandraBeing two scientist. Yeah. Well, we developed we have few ingredients in our format or conference format, and one is the visual storytelling. So visualization, first of all, we work together with a creative director who's highly involved into sustainability topics. He lives actually in Vancouver, he's brilliant and he's doing a lot already in this. And we love the way he drew. So it's a big drawing that we've got. And then we use storytelling to go through this drawing. This big drawing with our audience and the other ingredients is about interactivity. It can't be anymore a descending lecture to get people close to the knowledge and also let them recognize that they actually know already something and be part of this learning path together. So the format we've developed is actually interactive, so interactive that people can't really relax and they always need to be with us and respond to questions. So they are simulated every two to three minutes roughly. GaëlWhoo SandraAnd it's very important. And also the subject is very serious. So it's very important to tackle the right tonality. We don't want them to have a slap in their face. We want them to have a click and then to enclench an action, to have a motivation to go after that. The main aim of the conference is that they go out and they're totally and fully motivated. So we include our client in this and we say, okay, once we have described what is the context, what is exactly the problem or the challenge we've got with climate change, then the client can expose where they are at in their strategy of transformation, in their low carbon strategy, to their employees in a very macro level. But still explaining, we're en marche, we may be not there and we're maybe not perfect and that's important to say, but we are en marche and you can be part of this. So we are action this during the conference. So at the end, people feel empower. They feel allowed actually to be part of this story and of this fantastic transformation ahead of them. So that's the aim. GaëlBecoming actors. SandraBecoming actors yes. GaëlYou know, Green I/O is about sharing hands on experience and how to make our digital world more sustainable. And of course, for this to happen, we need teams to be aware of our ecological footprint and then ready to take actions which lead me to this very simple and hard questions. Which means do you use to achieve this outcome, how do you concretely tackle raising awareness regarding the footprint of our digital your word? SandraWell, coming to digital in particular, I think, first of all, it's important to know the macro picture. So it's important to understand the problem around climate change. That's the first thing. And we say to our participants, but then go into the sector, in the digital sector. And what I say always is the first step to change his awareness. We are here at the very first funnel of a path and we also encounter lots of people who think they know about the matter because we hear so much about it around us. But we never grasp exactly the details of it, the interconnectivities, the overall big topics that are running in the background. And there is a reason as well why we're talking about a digital rucksack, for example, it's because we usually like to see the top of the iceberg, but we don't see what's behind, what's in the water. And I think it's very important. So awareness is the very first step. And get to know what's the problem makes you understand why and how you can act. That's the very first step. GaëlCould you maybe explain to the audience what is the rucksack of a digital device? SandraYes, of course. So we tend to think about digital as the solution. We tend to think about digital that it's great, it's cool, and it will give us a lot of possibilities in the future. And that's true. As I said, I'm a passionate of digital. I was part of digital transformation. I helped clients to set up whole bunch of teams around digital and help them being more efficient. However, there is a lack of understanding of what is the reverse side of it if we're not questioning what we're doing. So the rucksack is also there to represent that. It might be positive, but actually the negative impacts might overweight, outweigh, the positive impacts. And that's what the people are not aware of. And therefore in the workshop we're proposing - this Digital Collage workshop, - is really to understand it themselves and discover that oh yes, I love digital, but actually, if I don't question what I'm doing, we're going to the wall. I mean, it's just you talk about exponential growth. Well, it's great and always being faster. And this is the fastest growing sector as we know. However, if you narrow this to the emissions, carbon emissions, then this is exactly the same and it goes exactly on the same trend. We are not in a decelerating trend here in this sector. We're accelerating and this is where we need to question what we're doing, how we're doing things, and how we're using digital. GaëlYou mentioned the Digital Collage workshop. Is it one of the tools you use the most? SandraYes. So I use the Digital Collage a lot for specific requests. When people want to know more about the digital impact on the environment. Digital Collage is part of an organization. This organization is between a social enterprise and a charity. I think there isn't a real word in English, it's a French organization. And the mission of this organization is to raise awareness around the digital impact of their environment as quickly as possible. And this is based on a very interesting system actually because as I said, descending lecture is over and now it's really about tackling this with a more fun way and collaborative way. So it's based this workshop on collaboration first and on collective intelligence. This is very interesting because people realize during the workshop that they know something and when they put all this knowledge together as a team, they can actually crack the clues of what we're giving them as a game. So it's a set of cards they need to put in a certain order and they discover themselves then the knowledge. And that's really helpful. So yes, in this context it can be team building. It can be perfect as well for IT Departments looking to set up a green IT strategy and they don't know where to start. That could be the first step, for example, to understand all the different bits of digital impacts on the environment. What does it mean when people are coming to us? They are a bit lost and confused because you hear a lot about different things. You can hear about the mental health elements of digital, but you can hear also about the emissions and then you hear less about the materiality of the digital impact. And this is where it hurts actually. This is this materiality that hurts our planet right now. GaëlThanks a lot. And full disclosure for my audience, I am also a Digital Collage facilitator, but I was not part almost from day one of this beautiful adventure like Santra was with Aurelianiva. So that's why I'm very happy that she will explain all of this in detail. And I was wondering, how do we avoid the information dump as a coin by Timothy Morton in “Being Ecological” that we tend to push a lot of scientific facts, mostly anxiogenic and with a short lifespan into people's minds, then we push for technical remediations. But there are not that many true aspirational triggers like I have to do it to solve a problem rather than I have to do it because that will make my life better or life of everyone better. How do you see the digital collage working on this issue? SandraWell, what's great, I think in the Digital Collage developed by Aurélien Déragne and Yvain Mouneu and that they have dedicated a whole part on actions. So the first part of the workshop is about understanding by playing. So that's the set of cards where you discover those eventually disturbing big key facts. But they are needed. They are needed for a wake up call. They are needed as well to understand - because there are a lot of myths that we need to break during a digital workshop. There are a lot of false thoughts around data centers, for example, or the impact of the Cloud. And there are things that are not really known about recycling and the low level of recycling in this sector or the resource intensive part. So you really need to make that clear so that at the end, when you come into the action part, at the end you have 20 or so cards that have been detailed to give you ideas on how does that connect to what you've just seen and how simple it can be sometimes? You know, there are some actions, it just tells you to keep your devices longer, try to take care of it. You know, it's not the world, what we're asking. The actions are very pragmatic and very close to the people and very easy to implement and it might make your life better. That's what we call the co-benefits of having a more frugal way of running digital GaëlIt's not asking for life changing decisions, but more a step by step approach into being more eco-conscious. SandraExactly. GaëlAnd you also mentioned that the digital collage can be used to embark people when you start a green It strategy or sustainability strategy. What are the specificities in that case? Because some people might have to join the workshop rather than volunteering to join the workshop. How do you deal with that? SandraYes. Well, you just have to be warned that when people are coming to a workshop on a mandatory basis, it's a very different situation in spirit and that's why you're asking the question. So they're not necessarily from their own wish there and they're very reluctant from the beginning. So you see, they're not necessarily very open, but then that's a workshop which is based on collaboration and they need to work out with their team, the set of cards and the interconnections. We as facilitators, we are there to help them understand the game, but we're not the one really or necessarily giving a lecture because we're not there to give lessons and it would be a wrong signal too. We're not the one knowing everything by heart either, or the absolute most expert. And it allows therefore the team to understand that here we are all together in this and we are not lecturing anyone. You are actually discovering something that exists and then you take it with you and you express it as you want. So there is a lot of freedom on how to discover this knowledge. And because of the dynamic of the group, we talk about groups of six to eight people per team and you can have multiple teams in a room (it's better to do it in person), you see that evolves and where people with their body language are outside of the table. So we put the chair out so nobody can sit really, and they really need to be active around the table with the cards and really exchang together. So we as a facilitator, we're not part of their discussion. We are coming back in each set, but we're not involved completely. They have to crack it themselves and they have a certain amount of time. And during the development of this first phase, you see that through set by set, arrives set three of cards, people are much more involved and engaged and they realize they understand the game, how it’s played. There are only bits of knowledge written on each of the cards that they can discover. It's not overwhelming, but then in the discussion with their colleagues, it makes the whole much more interesting because they all have their own opinion on their own part of the knowledge. And at the end of that understanding part, you see that people are much more open and then, at the end, they're really engaged and they really want to action and they really want to take action themselves. GaëlBecause it's a peer to peer communication process rather than a top down. SandraYes. Yes, absolutely. GaëlSo tomorrow let's say I'm product manager, tech leader, head of design, and I want to start a discussion within my team or with my hierarchy. I'm aware of the situation, but I'm also aware that my colleagues or my hierarchy are not that much aware beyond the usual let's green the data center. What advice would you give to her or him? SandraYes. I think what's really important is what is the level of understanding of the problem altogether around you, how the people are interacting with topics like climate change, for example. How are they interacting with sustainability, what are the levels of knowledge and that's the very first audit I would do around me. Another thing is that to find your allies within your company. If it's a company. Find people that are like minded things like you and want to push further that topic. The third advice I would say is that you need to embark as soon as possible your leadership. The best results we've seen so far is when leadership is on board, they understand the matter. When I say on board, then at least they are addressing as well. When the workshop is proposed to the employees to frame it, to introduce why do they do this and put credibility on this step that is important to their company, to them and to their company, and to the transformation and the future of their company. So if I have advice to give, it's really those ones: don't be on your own, find the allies internally, it's much easier then try to embark your leadership. There is also another thing. Digital workshop is great and the digital impact on the environment is one part of the big picture. And if you don't understand the big picture first, then you might have some problems to grasp also the part of digital in there. So always my first recommendation would be, well, let's understand first, what do we talk about here and it's climate change. And then why is digital taking such a big part in this? Because it's part of the whole. So that's another thing. I hope it answers your question. GaëlYeah, that's super interesting. And that leads me to two other questions. The first one being we tend to see the ecological impact as equal to carbon emission and of course climate change it creates. But we also are facing other planet boundaries today, especially the biodiversity crisis, the resources exhaustion. So in your mind, would you say that we should have workshops about, of course, first and foremost, climate change, but also biodiversity crises and maybe some other crisis before starting any awareness program specifically dedicated to digital? Or is there any shortcut? Sandra Well, it would be “crème de la crème” to be able to acknowledge the people around the climate change crisis so that they really understand what it is about. Biodiversity can be addressed within the climate change topic too. So we are addressing it in our climate pitch, in our conferences, because it's equally urgent and important to understand now. It's the ideal picture. If you don't have the time, you can of course go short and do the Digital Collage workshop. That's absolutely fine. And then during the workshop there is a possibility to discover also the link to climate change and how is actually digital part of the climate change. So that's fine too. GaëlThanks. And my second question was, so, how do you pitch your boss? SandraHow do you pitch your boss? Well, as I said before, I think first you need to know from what you're talking about. So you have to have a certain level of understanding even if you know about the urgency. And it's great. I think it always helps to be backed up of things that you've done or you know already. So that's one thing. Don't be on your own with that. I think it's always great to go not on your own and not addressing this on your own, but already know and point people around that think like you; have lots of key facts and boss rely on facts and what your advancing needs to be backed up. And also I think, and this is from my 20 years working in business, you need to make the math in terms of what does this mean for the company? What does this mean in terms of finance and actually digital and applying a green IT strategy might help financially, will help financially because you will make some savings. So maybe go that door and show that actually if you reduce your IT park and you use longer every device, for example, then you will not have to renew every other year your devices. It will make a huge benefit or saving to the company. And if you think like this and if you draw actually all the benefits that are connected to this type of step, then it's much easier. GaëlAbsolutely. There are huge savings to be made. And I think another point might also be that especially for pure players like digital, pure players having the first mover advantage. SandraAbsolutely. GaëlWe know that at some point some regulations will come. We know that at some point some awareness will happen to very critical segments within the entire customer. And that also might be a trigger, don't you think? SandraYes. So we talked about the risk/opportunities because it can be a risk, but you can change it to an opportunity as a company. And this is where we talk about talents for example. If you have the right … - You know the new generation is looking for purpose and they're looking for missions where they understand that the values of the company are what they embrace and are within our planetary limitations. So there is a challenge as well here to retain and to attract talent. And this is one part of the risk/opportunity you can have. The other part is your client, your client base. Clients are more and more now aware of what's happening and they want and are looking more and more for sustainable solutions. If you're able as a company to make it credible and to embrace this transformation towards your clients, then you will win. So it's what you said as well, having this competitive advantage, if it's about competitive advantage here and it's the same when you want to work with great suppliers, for example, that are thinking alike. And then you enter a kind of ecosystem, which is the good type of ecosystem that pushes you into the right direction GaëlA virtuous loop rather than a vicious cycle... SandraExactly. GaëlGoing back to my product manager or tech leader or anyone working in the digital industry. What will be your recommendations? To learn more about digital sustainability and all that is really. SandraI think the most difficult thing to grasp at the moment is that this rucksack, this digital rucksack ,is not really known. And also it's bits and bobs. So you will read something about mining and extraction, you will read something about recycling, you will read something about the cloud, the data centers. But there isn't a proper source where it encompasses everything. And this is what the French have done so far. And after working now almost two years on the Digital Collage workshop and also contributing to the international expansion and looking for sources outside of France, it has been a challenge. So it means that really talking and understanding the span of green IT, sustainable IT is hard or you have to read different things. So what I can actually suggest to the people here on this podcast, if you have 30 minutes to spend, then there is a great mooc which has been done by the Institute of Sustainable IT, INR in France. And we're lucky it has been translated in English and it goes over all the key topics that you need to know when you start your journey on digital sustainability. And if you have more time, then you can dedicate 4 hours to it. There is the longer program on this and you can go back to it whenever you want because it's a mooc so it's available to everyone and it gives you a really good idea on all the topics that are linked to this responsible practices to apply in digital from every single aspect. So I think that could be a good start to it if I may. And then this is about more looking into diverse projects. I have a great case studies. I can advise you to our audience. Decathlon has done this. Decathlon I follow closely as well. I think they're really smart in the way they approach the sustainability topic. And when it comes to digital, they have actually applied the green IT strategy. And I can give you the link, but there was an article written by the head of IT back then to explain the six steps all companies should follow to decrease their digital impact. And also at the end you discover that they have developed their own measurement tool on their carbon footprint and they opened source it so everyone can have access to it. And this is really the end here. So reading case studies also helps, I think. GaëlAnd just for my dear listeners. As you know, all the links, all the reference to everything we spoke about will be put in the landing page. So don't worry. Thanks a lot for these two very valuable pieces of information. Would you advise some influencers, some leaders, to be followed? Because that's how the game is also played today. So if you got two or three names, SandraDefinitely. I think there is a young engineer called Corentin de Chatelperron. I'm not sure you heard of him. “Nomade des mers”. He created this “Nomade des mers” initiative. He went on to a trip to Bangladesh and he decided to sail there and he did his sailing with minimalistic entrepreneurship. He had the ambition to be on his own and to be completely autonomous. And then he decided to build the “low tech lab”. And the low tech lab is great because it's a mission to share solutions in the spirit of low tech with as many people as possible. And the last one I could advise as well. And actually this is a Lady I've met in my earlier life, Jane McGonigal. Jane McGonigal was actually a fan of gamification, so she actually researched gamification as a positive way to develop projects. And actually she showed by research that it can help tremendously to solve complex problems. In the medical research, for example, they have been able to develop new vaccines within only a couple of weeks instead of ten years, for example. And you go on. And this lady has now published a new book and has also initiated a new movement called Urgent Optimist. I love this idea of optimism because we really need optimism to go on. The gloom of the situation doesn't help every day. But what helps me is this type of organization. There is another one from Christiana Figueres called a Stubborn Optimist, or she's called a stubborn optimist. And she has created the global optimism movement as well. And it helps because sometimes it's daunting to be faced every day with this picture of the world and you still need to carry on. GaëlThat's so true and that's great sources to share because I didn't know about Jane McGonigal so I think I'm going to jump on her books. That was awesome. Thanks a lot Sandra for being with us today. SandraI was very pleased to be invited. Thank you very much, Gael, for inviting me. Gaël You're more than welcome. Your insights and feedback were just great, especially on the Digital Collage but also on how to pitch your boss and your colleagues. SandraOur main motto should be never give up right now. And you're not on your own so be in community really. I think you had this in your first podcast, but the Climate Action Tech group is really great for that, too. GaëlAbsolutely. So thanks again. And next month we will go either to Seattle, to Berlin or to Paris depending on the agenda of my three next guests. I'm so sorry to tease you. It was not intended but great doers tend to be busy people so subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss the next episode and that's it for this month. Thank you all for listening to Green I/O. As you surely have noticed in this episode, Green I/O is a nonprofit podcast so we rely on you to share it and rate it five stars on your favorite platform. My dear listeners, you are our true communication power and you are our scouts as well, so feel free to share with me your ideas for new guests who want to make our digital world greener one buy at a time. 

For the first episode of Green I/O, I interviewed Fershad Irani a web performance expert and restless advocate for a low carbon web in his newsletter "Optimized".He helps environmentally conscious companies ensure their websites are fast, optimised for performance, and have a low carbon impact. Based in Taipei after graduating in Sydney, Fershad also contributes to open-source projects like OpenSpaceData and is an active member of the climateaction.tech community, where I discovered his work. He has recently launched 'Are my third parties green?' a much-needed tool to give some visibility to the sustainability of third-party requests on the web.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect: Fershad' s twitterFershad' s LinkedInFershad's websiteGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.    Fershad's links and other references mentioned in this episode Fershad's newsletter Optimized on "Are My Third Parties Green?" Fershad's news initiative Are my third parties green? ClimateAction.tech and especially their tutorial videos on YoutubeThe Green Web FoundationWebsite carbon calculatorHTTP Archive: Web Almanac 2021 EditionMy Climate Journey podcast Gerry McGovern's book World Wide Waste Bjarne Oldrup's article Is MP3, AAC or Opus best for speech? Michelle Barker's article Reducing The Web’s Carbon Footprint: Optimizing Social Media Embeds The Branch Magazine website and the article explaining their Sustainable Interaction Design Principles Organic Basics low impact websiteOpen Space DataTranscriptGaëlHello everyone. Welcome to Green I/O, a podcast for doers making our digital word greener one bite at a time. Whether you work in Tech, Product, Data, Design, Marketing, you name it :), you will find inspiration with us for your next actions in Web Sustainability and Green IT. In this first episode, I had the pleasure to speak with Fershad Irani, the web performance expert who audited the Cop 26 website. He is a restless advocate for low carbon web in his newsletter Optimized. He helps environmentally conscious companies ensure their websites are fast and have a low carbon impact. Based in Taipei after graduating in Sydney, Fershad also contributes to open source projects like Open Space Data, and he is an active member of the ClimateAction.tech community where I discovered his work. Welcome Fershad, thanks a lot for joining Green I/O today. FershadHi Gaël. Thanks for the intro, mate. GaëlFirst of all, talking about the intro, what did I forget to mention about you? FershadYou covered most of it I think. On the personal side of things, I enjoy rugby, so you'll probably find me on the weekends and nights watching a bit of rugby League or rugby Union on a live stream. I also play touch football so I represented Taiwan at the Touch World Cup a couple of years ago and I helped organize a bit of touch football over here. And just a recent thing that I've been getting into more and more, kind of work side project, has been looking at the environmental impact of third parties as well. So I recently launched a project around that which has been quite interesting. Learn quite a bit in that process as well. GaëlAre you talking about "Are my third parties Green"? FershadYeah, I'm talking about that one, mate. GaëlOkay, great. I think we will come back to this later. First, how did you become interested in the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place? FershadI think like a lot of people, a lot of people that have picked up, especially in the last few years, it kind of goes back to Jerry McGovern and his book Worldwide Waste. I can't remember, time is a blur now these last few years…. I can't remember where I became aware of that book and I don't know how it ended up on my radar, but I started reading it and just going through it chapter by chapter. He starts with the topic and you find yourself thinking, yeah, I kind of understand. I kind of know a bit about whatever. And then by the end of the chapter you find that your mind has just been completely blown by the environmental impact of whatever it's been talking about. And so definitely it started there. You knew about it but you didn't realize it. And then suddenly you're like, you've got this kind of wow effect. GaëlI think pretty much everyone who read it had it. FershadYeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people would share that feeling about this book. And for me personally, as someone that works in the web, I kind of found myself for a little while afterwards thinking like, okay, he's talked a lot about the impact of the internet and the impact of video and media and different parts of the ecosystem, but what can I do? And I was wrestling with that for a short while after that. And then I think I heard something from Tom Greenwood when he was talking about how Wholegrain Digital approaches projects with clients and how they kind of just build websites. And those websites that they build just happen to be green. Some of their clients don't even come to them asking for green websites, but they just built them that way. And that kind of clicked with me that I enjoy web performance and I enjoy making websites fast. And then a lot of the stuff that we do to make websites faster would also make websites greener just by default. So that was kind of the whole starting process for me down this journey. And it's one where you're always learning. Web performance on its own is like a field that's just constantly developing. There's so much to learn in that area just alone, and then web sustainability on top of that. It's a young area of study, and new research is coming out every month about it. So there's always a lot to learn there as well. GaëlAbsolutely. That makes it absolutely fascinating I guess. Talking about performance and web sustainability Green I/O is about sharing hands-on experiences on how to make the Web and Tech more sustainable. And you mentioned your mission at Readle, and the founder himself seemed very happy about the outcome. Could you tell us a bit more about it? FershadYeah, sure. So just before we dive into a full disclosure, the founder and myself, Christian and I, we worked together in a previous company, so we have some history going back. It wasn't like a fresh project that someone I don't know just came to me with. But yeah, he was working on Readle, which is a language learning app for folks that want to learn German. The approach with the app is a bit different from other language apps, where it's very story focused, and you get a story to read, which is in German, and you also get the audio for that story, which you can then listen along as you're reading. So that helps you kind of with a bit of the learning there. When Christian first approached me for some performance work on Readle, it was based around a desire to be faster as an app in some key markets that they were targeting. There was no real talk of sustainability in the initial project scope, and so we just set about doing what we needed to do to make the app faster in the areas where they wanted it to be. A few of the things we did. Again, this goes back to how we do in web performance. Kind of flows through to making the web more sustainable. As a result, a lot of the stuff we did was just reducing data that was being requested when the app was launched. So we managed to save around 200 KB off the initial app launch. So when you look at that from a sustainability perspective, if you want it's slightly under or around, sorry, 0.1 gram of CO2 at scale, the more users that are launching the app, obviously that impact becomes larger. But from a pure performance point of view, we were able to get back around 1.5 seconds off the app load time, which was fantastic considering that we didn't actually do anything overly complicated. It's just a bit more critical about what data we're sending over the wire. And then from there, that was like a combination of removing some json requests or trimming down a few json requests and also image optimization. And again, this is like all stuff that if you start poking around with, how can I optimize my website? You'll find all that type of stuff coming up as well. And in doing that, we were able to kind of get the app to where they were happy with it in the regions that they needed it to be performing well in. And then subsequently, as it happens with businesses and stuff, they had other priorities which they had to focus on. But we've been in touch during that period. And I think later this year we do have plans to do a bit of work around their website and other online assets and hopefully we can touch on the app again as well. And I think that's the evolution for a lot of businesses or that will be the evolution for a lot of businesses in that, Unfortunately, I don't have people coming to me knocking down my door saying, please, we want our website to be greener. I got people coming to me saying I want my website to be faster, but I just want it to be green no. But I think once we show the performance results and once we start a conversation around, hey, by the way, did you know that we've also just reduced CO2 emissions by this much or we've had this positive impact on the environmental performance of the app? Once we start those conversations, it kind of triggers a curiosity in people and they can start to see results from it. So the next load of work that we plan to do around Readle that does have a sustainability aspect to it, and they have actually asked for that, which is positive. GaëlThat's now an expected benefit from your second mission, which was absolutely not the case for the first one. FershadAbsolutely. And to see that from the customer side, rather than being like, hey, by the way, did you know we did this to hear the customer coming saying, I want my web assets to be faster, but I also want them to look at what I can do to make them greener. That's fantastic. And I think a lot of businesses will have that two step kind of evolution as they look at how they can green their digital assets. GaëlAnd during this first mission, how did you manage the human side of the project? Because I guess not everyone was fully aligned on the need for more performance, et cetera. You sometimes get some tension regarding the arbitrage. You mentioned JavaScript and image size, and they are, I would say, pretty emotional topics for designers and developers. So what did you do to bring all these people together and did it work? FershadI think it did work. As I mentioned, Christian and I, we've known each other prior to the project, so he knows how I am and I know how he is. But then he did have a developer who I was meeting for the first time on that project, and it was not just around kind of educating, like not saying hey, this is wrong, this is garbage, whatever, like not being dogmatic about things but just educating that if we can make these reductions in the amount of data being transferred when the app loads, we will see performance gains regardless, and then just taking it out a step further and using a CDN for cashing some resources or optimizing some resources even that'll give us an even bigger gain. And in terms of communicating with Christian, I think it's just at a human level communicating the value of having a greener product, having a greener app and app that is more low carbon and as a result is faster as well. GaëlWhat tools did you use to achieve those results? FershadI'll mention one thing that we didn't implement in that project, but I think we might look to implement coming up this year, which is around the audio improvements. So I was recently made aware of a post from Bjarne Oldrup and he wrote a post about reducing I think it was reducing the bit rate of audio files and seeing the same quality audio, but at a much smaller file size. And that's something that we didn't really look at in the first project. But now that I'm aware of that, I think it's something that I will bring up with those guys for future work because not only will it help with audio playback time, so that's a big part of the app is the user engaging with the audio to learn words and stuff, but also it will help them in terms of their operating costs. I think where smaller file sizes mean reduced cost of storage, reduced cost of accessing the data and downloading it, I think there's overall benefits that can be gained by that. And I think it's a long winded way of saying the community is the resource, like Bjarne someone that I have never met in my life, but I connected with him on Twitter and LinkedIn, I think, around the COP26 article that you mentioned in the intro. And I've learned so much from just his post. I've learned so much from other people in the community. And then you can take those things and apply them to your own use cases in their own projects that you're working on. And that's where I get a lot of my information and learning from, because it is really impossible to keep up with everything that's going on just by yourself. GaëlYeah, that's the very purpose of this podcast as well, which is why we will put in the description, all the links to these very valuable resources. Thanks a lot. Now you mention it. Yes, of course, another use case made some noise last year when you decided to audit the Cop 26 website. Why did you do that? FershadI don't know. I was bored. Just a crazy idea on Saturday night. I was just bored and curious, I think, and I get myself into a bit of trouble like that sometimes. It was just like I had to start with COP was coming up and it was everywhere like “COP26 this”, “COP26 that” on the news, on Twitter and everything. And I just thought, what does their website look like? Because that's what I do. I'm not a climate scientist, I'm not an engineer. I don't have a SaaS product around solving climate change, but I do stuff on the web. So I wondered what does their website look like in terms of its sustainability and its environmental footprint? And digging through that, I learnt a lot personally about the web and I think sharing that with the broader community also kind of just gave visibility at a time when it was a hot topic. It gave visibility to digital sustainability and web sustainability as well. And it was really good to see through the reaction from the Gov.uk folks when the article was published. It did take a while because governments and bureaucracy and which team owns what. But we did get there in the end in terms of reducing the size of at least the biggest culprit at the time of my audit, that was a large image in the photo. It was almost like a three megabyte graphic in the footer and we managed to get the size of that down quite considerably and they managed to push that change I think in the first week of COP. Since then they did have like a lot of social media embeds and stuff on their site as well. And since then there's been an article by Michelle Barker on Smashing Magazine's website about that and reducing the impact of social media embeds because it's something I noticed when I looked at their site. But COP’s Twitter feed and everything wasn't as active as it was. It wasn't as active as it was later on in the event so it was still not that big of a contributor. But once you start having videos coming in from social media and stuff, you can really blow out the size of your website. So when I did the audit, I think it was a week before COP26 that I had to look at it. I'm kind of wishing I did it earlier because some of those things that I highlighted in that article could have been fixed, but they needed a redesign of the overall site. Like the social media element of it could have been addressed, but they would have needed to redesign how the home page looks. GaëlVery valuable insights and links and documents being shared here. What advice would you give to someone willing to do the same kind of audit as you did for a pro bono or a professional mission? FershadThis is not just for audits. I think this is just in general with how we talk about digital sustainability, performance and all those types of things where you're looking at someone's work and giving a bit of a critique. Don't be dogmatic about it, saying in black and white, this is right, this is wrong. That's a surefire way to turn someone off and not get your message across. There's a lot of Gray, there's a lot of edge cases, there's a lot of situations which you might not be aware of that people are dealing with when they're making websites, when they're making apps, especially time pressure is probably the biggest of them. So rather than going at it with a black and white, this is right, this is wrong. What you've done here is so bad, it's heinous. It's a crime against the environment. Go at it with a bit of empathy, go at it with an open mind, and don't be afraid to ask the question of like “why did you do this”? GaëlAnd is measuring helpful as well? I’m thinking about page speed insight, for instance, from Google or other solutions as well. Does put hard numbers on the table, actually helps or scares people? FershadI think it can help, but there can sometimes be too many numbers. And I say this is someone who's really started looking at performance, like in the last couple of years. There are so many acronyms and even in the sustainability space, there's just so much you need to be aware of and you need to understand in order to be able to digest the numbers you're looking at. So I think measuring does help. And something like Website Carbon does this really nicely. The way they present the results, it's not overpowering. It's almost playful. Even when your site is very polluting, it's almost playful the way that they present that to you. GaëlAnd it's just a call for action rather than a judgment. FershadYes, and I think that's helpful. Like presenting a whole bunch of numbers to a group of marketing executives. You're probably not going to get too much buying from that. But if you're able to pick out selective metrics and measure them against their business impacts, that's where you start to really reaching and be able to communicate better with non-technical folks in companies. It's a bit harder in the sustainability space, though, because the greener website doesn't equate to anything other than if your company is tracking maybe scope three emissions and you're tracking your website as part of that, then okay, it does kind of correlate. But if you can tie performance to sustainability, you can then take that back a step and go, well, for every 100 milliseconds, we improve our performance. We are reducing our carbon footprint by this much. We're also increasing our revenue by this much. I think being able to communicate things in that manner is very impactful and helps you communicate the importance of these things more easily with folks in other business departments. GaëlWhich brings me maybe to the challenging question, I would say. Which is beyond the beautiful scope three world, what about the why? My point is, did you find yourself in situations where making tech greener was not enough? Where you had to question the purpose of some digital services, if not entire companies? FershadI've never found myself in that situation in the work that I've done, but just in everyday life. I mean, you have companies like Facebook, Meta, that have a positive social impact. They've also got quite a substantial negative social impact. And you start to wonder, is digital really being put to its best use in these cases? I find myself a lot of the time more ever increasingly, I find myself feeling like digital is not the only solution. There are times when digital is one of the options, but that sometimes people view it as “we need to digitize this and it's only going to be available 100% through an app”, whereas actually to make it more accessible for everyone, elderly people that don't have a phone, people that have limited access to data or whatever. To make that more accessible, you need to consider other options besides just digital. So I think it's looking at digital as one of the options, one of the solutions for any given problem, but not discounting others, even more traditional ones like a pencil or a paper. Just a recent example here in Taiwan, when Covid was picking up and the government really jumped into the QR code, check in. So when you go to a restaurant or a shop, you check in with your phone, scan a QR code, and your details are captured. But what that did - and beyond that they also made vaccine bookings and everything like that accessible through an online system, and you would get notifications by SMS and whatnot - that excluded a large chunk of the elderly population who then had to rely on relatives or local community members to kind of help them. GaëlAnd they were the more concerned about the epidemic… FershadYeah. And just like something like that thinking, okay, we got to digitize this. It's going to be more efficient if we do. But let's not forget that we need to keep this as something that should be accessible to everyone. GaëlAnd going back to something you mentioned, one of your most recent nonprofit work, you started to investigate how green are third parties. Could you elaborate a bit more? FershadYeah. Again, this is one of those kind of I was bored and I was curious kind of situations. So I don't know if your listeners would be familiar with the Web Almanac. It's a set of articles that's put out every year. So it's a part of the http archive and it's been going for three years. It's kind of tracking how the Web is evolving and changing over time. And one of those chapters in that Almanac is about third parties. And I was just as you do on a week night, I was giving that a read and I came across a couple of stats that were mentioned in that, which just blew my mind. Somewhere in the vicinity of 94% of websites load at least one third party script. And third party requests account for 45% of website traffic. So when I read that, my mind straight away went to “I wonder how much of this is actually coming from green service?”. Like, what's the impact? Here are these third party scripts, all of them hosted on green web host, in which case that would be fantastic. GaëlIt would be. FershadSo I tried to figure out how I would be able to understand that a bit better. And that's where “Are my third parties green” was born. So I also kind of wanted to play with some technology, so I wanted to try out StealthKick, which is a framework for building web apps and websites. So I got to do that also scratching my curiosity as well. GaëlYeah. Killing two birds with one stone, which is a terrible expression in regard of the biodiversity crisis that we are in. And today, this third party's audit website, is it focusing only on energy or did you manage to go beyond? Study potentially the Scop three? Do they advertise their carbon footprint, and beyond scope one and scope two? FershadNo, not really. Right now, it's still very much a side project that I'm slowly updating with different things that people have kind of requested when I can. The main focus is around green hosting. So I'm looking to see other third party requests hosted on green web hosts. I use the Green Web Foundation API as the source of truth for that. And I do put in a carbon score just as like a rough estimate of the first time this request is made, what would be the carbon impact of it? Because some of them - it's hard with third parties, some of them are really well cached and they have a long life on the browser; others the cache expires within a minute. So if a user comes back to your site two minutes later, they will have to download the fresh one again. So it makes it a bit trickier to give a real accurate carbon estimate. But I do have another project in my head about that, but I'll leave that for another day. So I do have a couple of plans to make some of this data more accessible and visible to people that might be deciding to use third parties on their website. I've got a branch and the code at the moment to create a directory, at least of the known third party. So if you're looking for an advertising provider, you could kind of look through that list and see which ones are hosted on green web hosts. And what would be the CO2 emissions related to that request? It just makes it an easier way for people to kind of compare because at the end of the day, for us to make a difference as individuals, we can speak through our actions. And the more of us that go to third party providers that are hosted on green web hosts, and the more of us that make that known, that was part of our decision. The more we'll see these providers shifting to more sustainable web hosting, optimizing their scripts so that they're lighter and better cached and all that stuff. So, yeah, I do have plans to add to the website with the directory, maybe with a bit of a comparison even inside of the test results. So, yeah, it's definitely a work in progress, but I'm not sure about getting into something more complicated like scope three, scope two emissions. GaëlThat's a hell of a job to start auditing and just collecting the information when it is made available, which is pretty rare these days. FershadYeah. If any of the listeners do want to help with that, they can go over to aremythirdpartiesgreen.com and run their website through the tool to see how their website looks. And I've got some ideas about how I might be able to use this data to also contribute back to some of the data sources that I'm using. So I use a library called Third Party Web, which kind of categorizes the third party request. I would love to use data from this tool to then feedback into that library to help make it more complete so that the other people that use that tool as well can benefit from that. GaëlTwo last questions. The more general question I would say: “Today, what makes you optimistic about a path toward a greener digital world?” Fershad… blank …GaëlLaughing Spontaneously, not that much. A bit scary. FershadLaughing No, I was just thinking. I think my answer is not just for digital. My answer goes for our path towards a greener, more sustainable world as a whole. The thing that makes me the most positive is just a number of incredibly smart people that are working on the science behind changes that we need, that are working on the engineering, that are working on products to help us get there, that are lobbying for changes to be made at the government level. Just a number of people that are out there helping us move in the right direction. That's what gives me a great sense of optimism. I mean, going beyond the digital space. Another podcast I listen to is called “My Climate Journey” by Jason Jacobs. And he interviews people from all kinds of different industries and like some of them you wouldn't even think of, but you can just see that the scope of not only what's required, but the spaces in which people are operating across a gamut of industries. And that's what we need in the end to move things on a sustainable path. And that trickles down to digital mate. I mean, there are people out there way smarter than I am. Tackling the problem of sustainability across the digital sector and knowing that they're working on it and knowing that they're open to assistance from the community, that kind of gives me hope. Gaël Yeah, me too. It's pretty crazy when you start to investigate the level of knowledge. But still - that will be my last question - we still have a lot of newbies when it comes to Web Sustainability. People with great aspiration, willingness to change, but not that much knowledge yet. What would be your recommendations to learn more about Web Sustainability and Web Performance to this audience? Fershad I think just read or consume as much as you can. You know, there's a lot of content out there on YouTube. ClimateAction.tgech has got their YouTube channel, which is a lot of videos across a lot of different aspects of technology. So maybe you're not a web developer, but you work in machine learning. They've definitely got videos up there about machine learning, AI, cloud computing, data centers. So just consume. There's so much information out there. There's so much knowledge. Obviously subscribe to this podcast because it's going to be a good one. Gaël Thanks. Fershad Also, I think getting involved in the community is quite important. Like the amount that I've learned since being a member of the ClimateAction.tech community online. Like the people you meet, the things they share, that helps you kind of stay aware of what's going on as well. Because things do change pretty quickly. And having a community around you to kind of help you keep an eye on things that you might not be able to otherwise. That helps you ensure that you're always learning something. Gaël Yeah you definitely need those. I remember when I joined the Slack workspace, it can be pretty intimidating. That's just so much information. But at the same time, suddenly you don't feel alone. Like, you feel ten times stronger than you were just a second before because you realized, as you said, that so many great people are contributing. I really do love ClimateAction.tech; not the least because this is where I met you. But thanks a lot for all these very valuable insights. That was awesome. So thanks a lot Fershad for being with us today. Your insights and feedback were just great. I'm sure many of our listeners will find inspiration in it to help green the web and IT. So thanks again and next month we will go to London and meet Sandra Sydow, the founder of “Why Not Now?” and cofounder of the “Climate Pitch”. She is also an active member of the Digital Collage association and she will tell us everything about this great tool to raise awareness about the ecological footprint of the digital sector and … that's it! Thank you all for listening to Green I/O. As you surely have noticed in this episode, Green I/O is a nonprofit podcast so we rely on you to share it and to rate it five stars on your favorite platform. My dear listener, you are our true communication power and you are our scout as well! So feel free to contact me either via LinkedIn or via my website gaelduez.com if you have an interesting story to share or if you know someone who should in order to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time.