Environmental Impacts of Internet Technology (eimpact)

The E-Impact Program is a venue for discussing environmental impacts and sustainability of Internet technology. Within this scope, the program looks at trends, issues, improvement opportunities, ideas, best practices, and subsequent direction of work related to Internet technology, architecture, and operations, including visibility and efficiency on energy and other environmentally-impacting attributes. In particular, the group focuses on Internet architecture's role in these topics.

The program targets topics not yet progressed into concrete standards or research efforts in the IETF or IRTF while also being a coordination point for work across multiple WGs/RGs, and a venue to highlight ongoing work in the IETF/IRTF as well as external SDOs. The program will use the existing E-Impact mailing list [2] as the venue for discussions.

The program's progress and the quality of discussion may point to the need to organize additional workshop(s) to continue the 2022 IAB workshop on the Environmental Impact of Internet Applications and Systems [1].

The program may work on documents that analyze areas where Internet technology faces challenges related to the program's topics or provide architectural guidance. Potential examples of such documents include ones that describe sustainable network architectures, and those that document tradeoffs between environmental impacts and other characteristics such as performance and availability. Publishing any document as an RFC will be at the discretion of the IAB.

The program intends to have regular virtual meetings along with periodic hybrid meetings that are co-located with in-person IETF meetings. The program is open to all interested participants, and its meetings will be publicly announced.

References:

• [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/eimpactws/about/
• [2] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/e-impact