The audience consisted of students from the computer science program at VU, but also from other universities in the Netherlands were present in great numbers. Apart from students, the room was filled with practitioners and academics. In total, about 150 people attended the event.
Patricia Lago, the director of DiSC, gave an overview of all the people and projects affiliated with this new center for digital sustainability at VU on 18th of January 2023. The strength of this center is the strong ties between industry, different faculties, and organization in the field that are also committed to make the inevitable digitalization of today’s world more sustainable.
After this introduction, Rick Kazman from the University of Hawaii explained how both sustainable digitalization and digitalization for sustainability are important. As an example of sustainable digitalization, Rick mentioned outdated IT systems, like the Belastingdienst in the Netherlands, use a lot of energy by inefficient storage of data, inefficient code. Additionally, these outdated systems come with many bugs that need to be solved, over an over again. A better code architecture could solve these issues. Digitalization for sustainability is more about how digitalization might influence behavior changes, by showing people how they can reduce their energy use by using devices more efficiently. This can be stimulated by developing smart digital solution, like showing what you use of energy in your house. Another example is Vandebron that implemented an IT system which can tell you when green energy is available in the network, so you can try to use energy around these times.
Rick made everyone think about the impact of digitalization, and the way how people who engineered the digitalization could reduce the energy needed. Specifically, flaws in architecture uses up energy by more bugs, and more time needed to retrieve certain information from the system. The audience asked about the new trend in IT, working from an agile environment. Rick answered that agile environments do not necessarily solve the issues as to remove flaws in architecture are not a fundamental part of working agile.
Second, Jeroen van der Tang from NL digital gave an inspiring talk how he thought of making the digitalization in the Netherlands more sustainable by collecting laptops that are no longer used by organizations. Since 2022, AllemaalDigitaal collected 15.000 devices which are, after a thorough check and clean-up, handed out as refurbished laptops to marginalized groups in the Netherlands who cannot afford to buy these devices. The government will donate 150.000 laptops the coming 3 years. Additionally, he pointed out the climate monitor that reports about the energy usage and CO2 of the IT sector. The data shows that the IT sector actually performs very good in terms of energy efficiency, and achieved many efficiency targets. Jeroen explains that this is not due to the cooling system in data centers which became much more efficient. The software and hardware determine the workload and the energy use. The largest reduction in energy use can be obtained in greening of ICT (increase sustainable energy in NL, enabling efficiency and smart energy system, and use the waste heat from data centers). After that, these initiatives could result in greening by ICT: providing smart solutions to various industry sectors: energy, logistics, manufacturing, buildings and agriculture.
Afterwards, an interesting discussion was brought forward by the panel. The ultimate question was whether we need the government to implement rules to reduce energy use by the ICT sector, or to stimulate consumers to ask for more sustainable devices. The audience wondered about the newer ML methods being used so rapidly by so many, like ChatGPT which requires a huge amount of energy.