Three questions for Teresa Zeck
Teresa works at the German Informatics Society and is project coordinator at ECO:DIGIT.
What is the role of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) in ECO:DIGIT, and what responsibilities are associated with it?
In ECO:DIGIT, the GI assumes the role of consortium leader – meaning we coordinate the overall project and ensure that all partners work together efficiently and with clear focus. This includes, among other things, organizing regular coordination meetings with project partners and facilitating communication with the project sponsor as well as the accompanying research teams. Another key part of our work is the dissemination of results: We publish in scientific journals, present at conferences, and actively contribute our findings to national, European, and international standardization processes – with the goal of ensuring that the research results are adopted and used in practice in the long term.
Why is it important to incorporate research findings into standardization efforts?
Integrating research findings into standardization processes is essential – it lays the foundation for new technologies and methods to not only be developed but also widely and sustainably applied. New standards promote the development and application of advanced technologies because they provide a stable basis upon which innovation can thrive. Especially in the field of sustainable software development, recognized standards are crucial: they ensure interoperability and make systems comparable. Without standardized procedures and metrics, the environmental impact of digital applications can hardly be measured objectively – let alone systematically improved.
That’s why the results from ECO:DIGIT actively flow into national, European, and international standardization processes. This ensures that the methods developed are not only scientifically sound but also practically implementable – and actually adopted by industry. Standardization thus provides a transparent and reliable foundation for assessing the resource efficiency and ecological impact of software solutions.
Why do you consider the ECO:DIGIT project to be significant, and what can it achieve?
In my view, ECO:DIGIT is an exceptionally important project – because, for the first time, it systematically captures the complete life cycle assessment of distributed digital systems. While many other initiatives tend to focus on individual components or specific scenarios, ECO:DIGIT goes significantly further: the project offers a comprehensive analysis of a wide range of deployment scenarios – from cloud and edge to mobile devices and mobile networks – and examines them in an automated way.
The goal is to make the energy and resource consumption of these systems measurable and, most importantly, comparable. This creates greater transparency and provides a solid foundation for understanding where digital technologies currently stand in terms of sustainability. This is tremendously important, because only with reliable data can well-informed decisions be made – for instance, about how digital systems can be designed to be more resource-efficient and sustainable in the future. ECO:DIGIT thus makes a vital contribution to sustainable software development by, for the first time, providing concrete data that allows for the targeted analysis and reduction of the environmental impact of digital applications.
