How a Hackathon Is Slowly Changing The World

Behind many corporate sustainability announcements is a grassroots story of a few employees who were convinced of the opportunity to make a positive impact on both the climate and their business. What started out as a hackathon project three years ago to demonstrate the potential of carbon aware computing has now culminated in an industry-leading whitepaper, a carbon-aware application, an open-source toolkit, and a partnership between some of the largest companies in the world . This open-source technology now has demonstrated potential to avoid megatons of carbon emissions by enabling software to be run when and where the carbon intensity of the grid results in lower carbon emissions. Our hope is to empower any person or organization to decarbonize the software running their compute demands.

“Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.”?~ Margaret Mead?

Grassroots sustainability efforts have brought us to a watershed moment for carbon-aware technology: what happens next is determined by corporate leadership, shareholders, and regulators. Technology is not the limitation: we lack not only the political will to align climate rhetoric with bold action, but also the innovative business thinking to tie climate reduction opportunities to enterprise value. This retrospective will “peel back the curtain” and outline two strategies on how we can truly accelerate sustainability progress.?

• Bottom-up: Seven insights on grassroots coalition-building that employees can leverage to collectively drive impact.
• Top-down: Four opportunities for executives to bridge the implementation gap between sustainability pledges and real-world progress.

To say “it takes a village” would be an understatement: this launch is a culmination of ongoing collective efforts from hundreds of individuals across the software industry who have contributed to the foundational and technical development, provided inspiration and guidance, or sponsored crucial activities. I will start by extending heartfelt gratitude to all involved at all steps in the journey that led to this whitepaper and OSS launch, especially those that wrote the code.?

Bottom-up: Building Coalitions?

#1: Hackathons build community

In 2020, I joined Microsoft with the intention of using technology to accelerate sustainability progress. Immediately, I joined Microsoft’s sustainability employee group, the Sustainability Connected Community (now over 9,000 strong!) and found a cross-company hackathon [1] with the goal of building carbon-aware software. Applying the Green Software Engineering principles , we demonstrated massive carbon savings potential; because of this, many of us have been pushing this forward over the past several years. This hackathon created the foundation for a vibrant professional community.?

One of my mentors from the hackathon, Asim Hussain , launched the Green Software Foundation (GSF) in May 2021, which became our banner cry.?

#2: Sustainability innovation seed funding is crucial

Later in 2020, I applied for an internal Microsoft sustainability grant around “GreenAI,” a nascent field dedicated to measuring and reducing the rising carbon cost of Machine Learning. This seed funding was my first management opportunity; I was fortunate to draw from the University of Washington’s Global Innovation Exchange ( #GIX ) talent pool to hire a temporary team for the project. Partnering with collaborators such as Remi Tachet des Combes from Microsoft Research, our small team [2] shipped AzureML energy consumption resource metrics , an industry-first of any cloud ML platform.?

The source of this seed funding was provided from Microsoft’s internal carbon tax . Companies that implement carbon taxes should implement mechanisms that recirculate those funds back into individual business group accountabilities in a way that empowers employees to take effective action.

#3: University partnerships represent untapped potential?

In mid-2020, I met Greg Hay from the University of Washington’s Information School , and we kicked off a 2+ year partnership with his 100+ graduate students. The teams [3] performed a wide range of GreenAI case studies (1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ) that proved a strong correlation between financial, energy, and cost savings techniques.?

A year later, I used the remainder of my sustainability grant to hire an exemplary team lead, Taylor Prewitt , on a contract basis. I challenged him to programmatically implement the principles of carbon awareness that came out of our hackathon. Under minimal supervision, Taylor’s talented team developed a “Carbon-Aware API” Proof of Concept (PoC,) which was leveraged by several teams across Microsoft (Microsoft Research, Windows, Xbox, Microsoft 365, and others.) These talented grad students deserve recognition for bootstrapping this launch!??

As budgets tighten, companies have opportunities to align business innovation needs with academic partnerships through capstone projects such as with the University of Washington’s Global Innovation Exchange masters program. Any academic/industry partnerships should create robust talent pipelines to ensure that they do not miss out on much-needed sustainability talent to address the sustainability skills gap.?

#4: Open-source tooling consolidates efforts

Carbon Awareness across Microsoft was gaining traction with employees: numerous teams were either leveraging our PoC or implementing their own versions (N.B. reinventing the wheel is an expensive endeavor). It was time to consolidate efforts, however, grant funding was depleted.?

Through the GSF, I connected with a colleague Vaughan Knight , a principal software engineering manager, and we began strategizing how we could consolidate efforts into an open-source carbon-aware toolkit that would democratize access to carbon intensity data and decision logic. A few months later, Vaughan launched the “Carbon Aware Software Development Kit (SDK)” which became our north star: we deprecated the PoC.?

#5: Research partnership & publications build momentum

Around this time, I created a partnership with preeminent researchers from institutions who coined the term “GreenAI ”[4] (Allen Institute for AI, HuggingFace, Hebrew University, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Washington). With the carbon-aware PoC and the GSF’s Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification in hand, we began applying carbon-aware principles to a wide variety of Machine Learning use-cases.

In June 2022, we published our findings in an Association of Computational Machinery (ACM) paper - my first academic publication! This paper provided a reference for applying carbon awareness to any industry, and was invaluable in building momentum and credibility, both internally and with customers. Our work was covered by prominent outlets like Nature , MIT Technology Review , and IEEE Spectrum .

#6: Empowering others is the only way to scale without formal authority

l spent a full year lobbying for funding across Microsoft, which turned out to be an incredible networking opportunity. Inadvertently, this process turned me into a thought leader and subject matter expert at Microsoft. A colleague affectionately dubbed me a “cheerleader” for carbon awareness, and I wear this moniker with pride.?

I am now working across diverse Microsoft groups to consolidate scenarios, establish governance, facilitate access to data, improve methodology quality, and establish industry leadership.???

Some of my strongest partners emerged from the sustainability grant: Jason Oppler managed the sustainability grant, Alex Bitiukov PM'ed the original hackathon, and Chandrika Jain has been my partner in execution. One of my original collaborators, Scott Chamberlin , laid the groundwork for Windows to become the first carbon-aware operating system . Most recently, some colleagues from Xbox launched the first carbon-aware gaming console .?

Our collective efforts resonate across the software industry, allowing us to scale beyond any individual or product contributions. This is a true cross-Microsoft collaboration [5]: the momentum is staggering! Knowing the pipeline, I can’t wait to see what comes out next.?

#7: Customers create unstoppable momentum

In September 2020, I showcased our carbon-aware research to Microsoft's Sustainability Connected Community. Through this, I connected with Nithin MATHEWS , who was managing a relationship and working on a variety of digital transformation & sustainability initiatives with United Bank of Switzerland (UBS), one of the largest banks in the world. Nithin invited me to share my work with his partner at UBS, Kin C. , and explore collaboration paths. Over the next few months, the three of us created the necessary organizational alignment and defined the success criteria for an MVP carbon-aware application.?

I was given the opportunity to pitch my work in GreenAI and Carbon Awareness to executive members of the UBS Technology & Sustainability Guild. The project was greenlit! UBS joined the GSF as the vehicle for the collaboration. At this time, the Carbon Aware SDK was not materially in existence: this partnership presented a co-development opportunity to bridge funding gaps.

We secured engineering talent from Microsoft's Commercial Software Engineering division [6]: Bill DeRusha and Christian Binder ensured a smooth onboarding for all teams. Over the past year, we matured these ideas and technology in close collaboration with UBS, the GSF, and WattTime. Our work was a core part of a landmark expansion of the cloud partnership between UBS and Microsoft , and represented ~? of the press release.?

All of this culminated in the official announcement: we delivered not only an industry-leading whitepaper, but also the open-source release of these capabilities through the Green Software Foundation.?

It’s truly humbling to see our work announced by business leaders like Paul McEwen (UBS Global Head of Technology Services) | Elisabeth Brinton (Microsoft CVP, Sustainability ) | Bill Borden (Microsoft CVP, Financial Services Industry) | Catrin Hinkel (Microsoft GM, Switzerland) ?

Top-down: Opportunities

Now that we have proven the power of grassroots employee efforts, executives can lead the way to establish an environment that empowers their employees to succeed. This can be addressed structurally:?

#1: Revise standards & reporting practices around real-world emissions

A fundamental problem we face is that many Green Software mitigations are not yet recognized under current reporting practices and standards. Therefore, a carbon-aware action such as choosing a time or location with a lower carbon intensity will have a real-world impact, but will not yet accrue towards a company’s sustainability target.?

This is because tradeoffs in attribution methods and oversimplified mental models lead to gaps (some say divorced from physical reality ) in reporting practices and missed decarbonization opportunities. Until reporting practices and standards evolve, there will continue to be limited incentive for an organization to lower the grid-based emissions of their IT.

Business leaders need to advocate for improved electric-sector accounting that focuses on additionality and real-world impact. The GreenHouse Gas Protocol has issued a survey for feedback (due March 14th, 2023), but updating the protocol will likely take years.?

#2: Make commitments to Green Software?

Corporate leaders should take action immediately, and true progress does not happen without commitments. To my knowledge, no organization has yet made a public commitment to Green Software Engineering, despite the fact that the IT sector is expected to account for 14% of the world’s carbon footprint. Net Zero commitments are great, but to get there, the world needs commitments targeted toward real-world emission reductions of software.?

The foundations for a commitment now exist: through our whitepaper , customers and cloud providers can leverage the Carbon Aware SDK and Software Carbon Intensity specification to take swift action and reduce their grid-based carbon emissions.?

#3: Create accountability at all levels

If an employee can’t trace their sustainability work up through the chain of command, an implementation gap will exist between a (top-down) sustainability commitment and a grassroots (bottom-up) employee coalition’s “lived experience.” Organizational change management theory suggests that middle management can play a crucial role in bridging the gap.?

According to recent research , success will be more likely when executives empower sustainability organizations to engage proactively and strategically hold them responsible for creating measurable impact. To address this, three best practices of sustainability performance management should be targeted towards middle management:

1. Develop sustainability-specific performance metrics and targets (both financial and nonfinancial) attributed to individual lines of business (e.g. AI).?
2. Establishing incentives: at Alcoa, for example , twenty percent of executive compensation is based on progress toward specific sustainability goals.
3. Establishing regular performance reviews of sustainability KPIs or scorecards.??

I propose a simple litmus test for any corporate sustainability leader: survey a distributed sample of employees at different levels, and ask them if they are aware of their business group sustainability OKRs, if they feel recognized/incentivized to work in sustainability, and how they see that they can contribute to their corporate sustainability goals through their day-to-day responsibilities.

#4: Empower employees to contribute to goals

To address the sustainability skills gap , business leaders can engage in concerted cultivation of the significant sustainability talent within an organization. However, the reality is that most employees simply lack sufficient incentive structure and organizational support to make an impact on their broader organizational goals. This disjoint has been observed to be felt acutely within large, publicly held companies.?

Studies affirm the clear correlation between sustainability employee engagement and improvements to the bottom line (including income, shareholder return, cost reduction, retention, and productivity). However, there remains a gap in linking employee sustainability efforts with a company’s operations.?

For a company to establish a sustainable competitive advantage as an?industry leader and be equipped to meet an onslaught of customer demand, sustainability must be an embedded requirement for every job. In the same way Microsoft established a pillar in evaluations around Diversity & Inclusion and fundamentally improved the business, mechanisms should be put in place to ensure that sustainability work does not come with an opportunity cost in career development. ?

Microsoft’s 100% volunteer-led Sustainability Connected Community leadership [9] has mobilized over 9,000 employees, and is relying on the generosity and goodwill of dozens of volunteers to make sustainability a part of everybody’s day job. But there are limits to what volunteer labor can accomplish without the necessary business environment to set them up for success.?

Many other tactics are outlined in Stanford Innovation Review’s roadmap to sustainability employee engagement .?

Acknowledgements?

I am extending heartfelt gratitude to all involved at all steps in the journey that led to this whitepaper and OSS launch.?

I am thrilled to now be under the leadership of Mehrnoosh Sameki , Steve Sweetman and Daniel Moth with a 50% charter to embed sustainability within AzureML’s Responsible AI offering. Responsible development and application of AI systems must account for hidden costs, and I am looking forward to integrating the principles of carbon awareness into AzureML.??

Editors/Contributors: Holly Alpine (née Beale) , Olivier Corradi , Julia L. , Urs Villiger , Tammy Adkins McClellan , Remi Tachet des Combes , Barbara Toorens (MBus) ?

[1] Hackathon peers: Alex Bitiukov , Bill Johnson , Conor Kelly , Scott Chamberlin , Asim Hussain , Barbara Toorens (MBus) , Sebastián Rivera González , Cooper Cole , Rebecca 'Bink' Naughton , Karine Ip , Ali Mahmoudzadeh , Joerg Hambruckers, Kavitha Perla , Daniel Coelho de Castro . Alicia Lu, Mikkel M?rk Hegnh?j , Abdelwadood Daoud , Sushmitha V , Ethan Arrowood , Ehsan Nasr , Eric Tierling , Giulia Gallo, Ph.D. Hemant Bharadwaj , Avinash Agarwal, Muskan Goel , Jo?o Pedro Martins , Gustavo de Rosa, Nikhitha Musthyala, Srikanth Dakshinamoorthy, Vedang Gaonkar, Divyank Shukla , Alex Mang, Saket Saurabh, Mohamadou Ly, Mradul Karmodiya, Michael Hoffmann, Mahidhar Mullapudi, Felix Sie, Niraj Nirmal, Lisa Wolffhugel

[2] Grant team:

• Sustainability grant: Tamara ("TJ") D. for creating the carbon tax, and Jason Oppler for managing the sustainability grant program and giving me the seed funding opportunity to make a change.
• Teammates: Srilatha (Bobbie) M. , Esha Choukse ,
• Contractors: Ka Ho (Steven) Guh , Louis Quicksell , yedukondalu Sondala , Shiraj Kashani, Shailendra Saxena?
• AzureML engineering guidance from Andrew Schonhoffer , Anthony Karloff , and William Baumann

[3a] UW iSchool faculty: Greg Hay John Raiti, Ph.D. Linda Wagner

[3b] UW Students: Taylor Prewitt , Daniel Chen , Ji Kang , @Abhinav Agarwal, Nicholas Marangi , Drew Forman , Amiya R. , Victor Suciu , Donghee Lee, Anna Craig , Ruihan(Bonnie) Bao , Emma Cozart Vidhaat Dunna , Yu Lin, Corey Cherrington , Harry McNinson , Durga Prasad Tavva , Thao Phan , Peter Carlson , Gavin Murphy , Leo Moley , David Wang , Nathan Limono

[4] GreenAI coauthors: Remi Tachet des Combes , Erika Odmark , Jesse Dodge , Emma Strubell , Roy Schwartz , Dr. Sasha Luccioni , Taylor Prewitt

[5] Microsoft collaborators and mentors: Chandrika Jain , Kari Lio , Rob Drollinger , Leonardo Alfredo Mérida Mejía , Devin Roberts, Daniel Jacobs , Malav Shah , Josh Sayler, Abdelwadood Daoud , Senthil Bala , Jonty S. , Yassine EL GHALI , Brian Sifton , Ryan Meinke , Tammy Adkins McClellan , Abhishek Gupta , Natalie Hollier , Michelle Lancaster , Dan Taylor , Nabila Babar , Sharon Gillett , Chris Lauren , Vaidyaraman Sambasivam , Jordan Edwards , McKenzie Huneke , Ian Robinson, Matthew Sekol , Milan Patel

[6] UBS / Microsoft team: Nithin MATHEWS , Bill DeRusha , Christian Binder , Vaughan Knight , George Lara-Matthews, Dan Balma , Robert May , Chris Holguin, Jennifer Lara (Madiedo) , Juan Carlos Zuluaga , Madeleine Hughes, Kanshik Tantia, Akshara Ramakrishnan ,? Priti Pathak

[7] executive sponsors:

• Microsoft: Erez Barak , Elisabeth Brinton
• UBS: Paul McEwen , Mike Dargan , Zoe Evans

[8] Whitepaper Co-authors:

• UBS: Kin Chiu , John Foxon , Daniel Cooke
• Microsoft: Nithin MATHEWS , Avi Allison , Bill DeRusha , Sangeeta Iyer , Elizabeth Graham , Christian Binder
• WattTime: Laura Corso , Henry Richardson
• GSF: Vaughan Knight , Asim Hussain

[9] Sustainability Connected Community leadership: Holly Alpine (née Beale) , Drew Wilkinson , Matt Hellman , Cooper Cole