GreenerMeet: Assessing Energy Usage & Carbon Emissions in Zoom Conferences

Prize category

Best Content

Overview

The project aims to leverage the Impact Framework and its plugins to quantify the energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with Zoom meetings, providing valuable insights into the environmental impact of remote communication technologies.

The project will collect data on various aspects of Zoom meetings, including duration, TDP of 30 most commonly used CPUs, and CPU utilization. Energy consumption will be estimated based on TDP of CPUs, real-time CPU utilization, and the duration of meetings. Carbon emissions will be calculated by considering the energy sources used for electricity generation in different regions by calling the watttime plugin.

The report of energy and carbon emissions will be automatically displayed through a webpage.

Questions to be answered

No response

Have you got a project team yet?

Yes and we aren't recruiting

Project team

@anthonyli633 @Olivesz @elieppr

Terms of Participation

[X] I agree to the hackathon Rules & Terms and Code of Conduct

Project submission

Summary

Our project uses the Impact Framework and its plugins to quantify the energy consumption and carbon emissions of users running Zoom meetings. It notifies users when their carbon emission exceeds a threshold, and automatically displays a webpage that reveals the analytics of the meeting. The webpage includes graphs about energy and carbon emissions, total carbon emissions, and a representation of emissions in the form of easily understood measurements such as distance traveled in a car. Our goal is to spread awareness of the impact of everyday applications and provide valuable insights into the environmental impact of remote communication technologies.

Problems

Since 2020, the amount of Zoom participants has grown by over 2900% and now averages 300 million daily active users. Zoom has had an enormous impact, facilitating over 3.3 trillion meeting minutes since its inception. However, with this much usage, there is limited research on this area, along with limited awareness of the impact of Zoom on carbon emissions. In a Zoom meeting, there is no direct way for a user to determine or even estimate the energy used or carbon emissions of their meeting, resulting in the consumer either being unaware of the impact of their meetings, or being unable to get insight into their specific Zoom meeting.

Application

Our application targets not just developers making products and applications, but also the consumers who decide which products they want to use. The application is accessible as it runs the entire process automatically after calling the Python files, with both the notifications and the webpage automatically being displayed. The notifications show the user what actions on Zoom pass the threshold that they set, allowing them to consciously avoid doing strenuous tasks. On the webpage, the energy graph allows the user to directly visualize the usage of different features on Zoom, such as sharing screen, blurred background, etc. Information about the user's device increases awareness of how their system might be impacting their carbon emissions. The final carbon emissions of the meeting are paired with conversions to common activities such as distance traveled in a car, phones charged, and carbonated drinks opened, to compare the carbon emissions given to a more familiar concept.

Prize category

Best Content

Judging Criteria

Overall Impact

We provide users with a tangible understanding of their carbon emissions from Zoom, allowing individuals can make informed decisions regarding their digital communication practices. This heightened awareness can lead to a collective shift towards more sustainable behaviors, such as reducing unnecessary call durations or opting for energy-efficient settings like audio-only meetings. Our project demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of integrating environmental considerations into software development processes. By showcasing how the Impact Framework can be easily applied to digital platforms, our project can help pave the way for other developers and tech companies to prioritize sustainability in their projects, thus fostering a culture of innovation that aligns with ecological stewardship. For the potential impact of our content to be realized, user engagement and adoption are crucial. The change has to occur on the user end, so raising awareness about the significance of digital carbon footprints and integrating insights into decision-making processes is essential. Further innovation and updates on measuring the carbon impact of digital applications will be vital for actualizing the change, and with enough usage of products such as our application, change within the user’s evaluation of carbon impact in applications is likely.

Clarity

Our team effectively displays complex concepts by presenting them in accessible formats. We provide conversions of the carbon emissions to increase clarity of what exactly 1 gram of CO2 emitted might mean. We aimed to automate as many processes as possible so that all users, especially those with less experience can use and understand our application. Our graphs are simple and easy to understand, both showing energy or carbon emissions in relation to time, with their corresponding timestamps, so that people can easily match the energy or carbon emission graphs to their own Zoom meeting. In this way of reaching a wider audience, this program should be able to spread awareness and create some change in the way people look at their applications such as Zoom.

Innovation

Our innovation stems from novel ideas and creative solutions, evident in our adept combination of diverse code libraries and languages to create a robust program that seamlessly computes users' carbon profiles from start to finish. We initially wanted to get CPU utilization straight from the Zoom account using its user dashboard, but that feature is only available on high membership-level accounts. Thus, we found another way to get it by calling the “psutil” library. This not only allows everyone regardless of paid membership to get their CPU utilization information but also allows the code to be easily repurposed to get the CPU utilization of other applications. Another unique feature is our notification system. While the final outputs of the graphs and statistics occur after Zoom has finished running, the notification system lets the user know the moment when their carbon intensity exceeds the set threshold in real-time, enabling our program to have an active role in influencing user decisions that reduce their carbon emissions.

Process

Our process started with understanding Zoom behavior and what information we could get from the Zoom application, along with how this can be used via the plugins to calculate carbon emissions. After pinpointing our use of CPU, we needed to find a method to get the CPU utilization, as well as the TDP of the user's advice. After getting the inputs along with timestamps for the CPU, we used the TeadsCurve Plugin and the WattTime Plugin to calculate energy and carbon emissions. Finally, we needed to display this information back to the user, so we decided to create a webpage for final results along with notifications that could give instant feedback on emissions.

Inspiration

While brainstorming ideas as a group, we wanted to find commonly used applications that people use so much that they don't realize it's impact, some applications that could spread awareness beyond developers and could be shown to a wider audience of people. As we were discussing in a Zoom meeting, we noticed that our computers were quickly heating up, and we realized that the very application we were using was a perfect case of this phenomenon. With increasing numbers of work-at-home jobs and online classes, Zoom’s downloads have shot up to over one billion downloads from users from all over the world, we realized that it is an application so commonly used that we forget its impact—especially on the environment.

Challenges

We faced challenges regarding technical, content, and group work aspects. As high school students, during much of setting up the Impact Framework and developing our own software, we encountered many new tools and concepts that we had little prior knowledge of. There were also some difficulties with getting our application to work on both Mac OS and Windows. Another challenge was determining what information should be given to the user, along with how the information can be demonstrated which would lead to the greatest increase in awareness of carbon emissions, and be the most understandable for users who are not necessarily familiar with the data we present to them. To overcome these barriers given the limited three weeks of time, we had to work together and coordinate even with our different schedules and schoolwork, and how to split the work so that we could be the most efficient.

Accomplishments

Our biggest accomplishment is that as high schoolers with less experience, we were still able to participate, contribute, and complete a project using the Impact Framework. We are incredibly appreciative that as high schoolers we were still able to be included and experience this hackathon. As users of Zoom ourselves, this experience has led us to gain valuable insights and are much more aware about how everyday tasks and applications all have an impact on the environment and need to be emphasized. Through our experience working with the Impact Framework, we have entered a world of clean energy that will have a tremendous impact on us and the future.

Learnings

We realized the power of innovation and collaboration driven by a shared passion for sustainability. While working on our application, while we learned a ton about the different components and tools in IF, we more importantly learned how even in this short amount of time we are able to make a product, turning our passions into a real world process. We learned that we have the capabilities to contribute and work for a greener future, and that just because we are younger and less experiences, doesn't mean that we cannot help make change. Through this hackathon, we also were able to explore amazing accomplishments that the Green Software Foundation has already done in addition to the Impact Framework.

What's Next?

Our next steps involve integrating our program with Impact Framework (possibly even through a plugin) to further its reach and capabilities, serving as a foundation in which others can build upon for their own use. In addition, we may seek to incorporate memory and network usage to enhance its accuracy and capabilities while growing our outreach by making this program more accessible to run by users. Furthermore, we will seemlessly merge the notifications and webpage aspects together to increase the functionality and perhaps incorporate it into task manager by adding an additional column to reach out to more users. Because the only thing specific to Zoom is the CPU utilization data, our solution could be easily modified to calculate the energy usage and carbon emissions of other digital communication technologies, comparing and contrasting them to see which is most sustainable. In the future, we would like to conduct more extensive testing to solidify results on the impact of specific Zoom functions such as recording, AI summary, etc. It would also be fantastic if we can make it an app on Zoom, demonstrating the diverse applications the IF has and motivating others to do the same with their areas of interest.

Green-Software-Foundation / hack