Linked articles

Common calls: from energy efficiency to digital twins, a new lever for public policies?

Support for the emergence and development of digital commons is making its way into public policy.In 2021, the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME) has proposed a new way for the public player to participate in financing the development and maintenance of commons: the Appel à communs.The call for commons procedure aims to support the creation of commons, i.e. resources (data, software, hardware) shared and fed by a community that develops governance and rules (notably licensing) to manage and protect them.This type of intervention differs from traditional calls for projects in that its primary aim is not to generate new projects, but rather to maximize the networking effect between existing projects.The Commons Day, held on July 4, 2024, provided an opportunity to take stock of the "Territorial Sobriety and Resilience" call for commons launched in 2023.The IGN, Cerema and Inria have in turn launched a call for joint projects to design a "digital twin" of France and its territories. The 2021 and 2023 "Sobriety and resilience of territories" joint calls for proposalsIn March 2021, ADEME launched an unprecedented Call for Commons, the aim of which was to bring together willing players to strengthen the resilience of territories by producing open resources. Eligible projects had to meet four criteria:they are developed under open licenses;they integrate communities of users and contributors;they are documented on a wiki;they meet at least one of the challenges of the call for proposals.The call for communes in 2021 resulted in the selection of 20 communes, which shared 1 million euros in funding. This experimental mode of intervention has been the subject offeedback.IGN and ANCT have joined ADEME in 2023 for the second wave of the "Sobriety and Resilience" call for commons.Of the 83 commons projects submitted, 29 have been selected. Six of them will be supported by IGN.Six projects supported by IGNIGN will oversee the monitoring of the following six projects via its Fabrique des Géocommuns:Participatory mapping of climate refuges This project, led by the Tribu consultancy firm in partnership with Toulouse Métropole and the LISST and LMCD research laboratories, aims to develop a methodological kit for the construction of a long-term participatory mapping tool for climate refuge areas in cities, for use by local authorities and residents. The aim is also to identify, characterize and evaluate these public spaces, both indoors and outdoors, by and for residents; and to trace the paths of coolness that can guide people's journeys to climatic refuges in periods of high heat.Common Core The aim of this project is to produce, collectively, a set of new forest management methods and bodies that will enable the diversity of stakeholders to be involved in a more systemic way: local communities, associations and militant collectives, local governments and public players, private owners... Designed, tested, documented and enriched with new feedback and ideas, these systems will be available on an online platform. Several circles of players will make up the project's immediate and wider community, and will be mobilized to contribute to, enrich or share its lessons.AequilibraE AequilibraE: this tool is used to estimate travel patterns in a given area, based on current or projected situations described using socio-economic data and taking into account the various transport infrastructures. This common tool could be used in the future Digital Twin of the region.Analysis and simulation of mobility at the individual level EQASIM: This project is based on two Open Source software packages: EQASIM, a software package for detailed estimation of individual travel (mobility needs), and STARLING, a software package for simulation of mobility behavior and shared mobility services.Priority facilities for intermediate vehicles To help identify priority facilities, the project aims to develop a methodology and a web mapping tool to characterize, or at least highlight, priority development areas, based on existing data, either in Open Data or available within the technical departments of each local authority, and on the mobilization of the OpenStreetMap community to produce new data.The atlas of economic spaces for transition The "transition economic spaces atlas" is a digital atlas that maps the "transition economic spaces", the real estate stock dedicated to players of ecological and societal interest that our association seeks to promote and develop. Through quantitative surveys carried out among transition players and via databases, the atlas is aimed at local authorities, public and private real estate decision-makers, and the general public, to give visibility to these spaces and steer their massification. IGN, Cerema and Inria call for joint projects to create France's digital twin"This ambitious project presupposes the federating of local and thematic initiatives already undertaken by public and private players alike. The call for joint initiatives that opens today is aimed at local authorities, administrations, research laboratories, associations and companies wishing to join the project, in order to scale up their solutions to the national level or integrate their needs. By listing the players in the ecosystem, it will help to better structure collective action around this initiative.Local authorities are invited to propose a use case or present feedback on their local digital twin.The future digital twin of France and its territories focuses on several themes:Monitor and anticipate the effects of climate change on the region, using simulation and forecasting models;Simplify decision-making, by offering a systemic analysis tool that integrates environmental, economic and regulatory factors;Facilitate the co-construction of development projects, by enabling all stakeholders, from central administrations to the general public, to "speak the same language";Contribute to the structuring and development of the digital twins ecosystem in France and Europe, at all levels, from both a community and economic perspective.A set of tools and data :Data, in particular a 3D model to which business data can be connected;Visualization (including immersive navigation) and query services, data enrichment and cross-referencing services;Simulators for a thematic and systemic approach;A science park to stimulate the research ecosystem.The needs expressed by pilot users will be given priority, and they will benefit from the services offered by the twin from the test phases onwards.

• Data

• Innovation

• Commons

• Environment

Published on 17/10/24



Digital decarbonation: new professions, but what kind of training?

The Observatoire des métiers du numérique, de l'ingénierie, du conseil et de l'évènement (OPIIEC) has set out to identify the skills, employment and training needs of companies in the digital sector, in light of their obligations to reduce their environmental footprint.Companies in the digital and engineering sectors see the ambitions and obligation to reduce their environmental footprint " as simply another technological evolution on top of those they have already overcome... The sector is also used to constant innovation, and therefore considers itself perfectly capable of integrating this new paradigm"."The environmental criterion is already gaining ground in recruitment, both on the employer's side and the candidate's, particularly among young graduates ", notes OPIEEC. "To date, the training on offer lacks maturity and clarity: it is not yet equipped to meet the challenges of tomorrow, despite the real abundance of solutions available to companies".New professions ..."While the ecological transition has not revolutionized core businesses, new areas of expertise seem to be developing in response to the challenges of digital sobriety".A number of "new" professions are emerging within larger organizations.Responsible Digital Manager: he/she provides expertise and acts as an interface between the IT Department, the CSR Department and the General Management. He/she creates value through the responsible design of digital products and services.Sustainable Development Director: he/she oversees an organization's sustainable development impacts, activities and aspirations. " The job is becoming increasingly important to companies as they steer strategies linked to sustainable development and sobriety issues in general. These people supervise project managers, heads of responsible departments and work full-time on these issues".Carbon auditor: he/she takes "exhaustive photographs" of all the GHG emissions of a particular organization, event or project. He/she facilitates decision-making in terms of actions to be taken to reduce carbon impact.Responsible Digital Trainer: provides expertise and support to Green IT managers. He/she is responsible for raising awareness and training internal teams."These new professions tend to be reserved for larger companies," says OPIEEC. " In smaller companies, these functions are often integrated into general management, or even technical management".... and new skills for core businessesWhile business function mapping is only slightly affected, "all business functions will have to comply with the requirements to reduce the impact of digital technology: management, sales and marketing functions, technical/product departments, but also all types of other support functions".The study identifies a series of key skills directly linked to reducing the environmental footprint of digital technology.In terms of hardware, this means knowing how to use input peripherals (mouse, trackpad, tablet, microphone, Ethernet cable, etc.), mastering processing peripherals (processor, microprocessor, CPU, motherboard, etc.), storage peripherals, understanding output peripherals (screens, network output devices, different ports, etc.), understanding how to power devices, and mastering man-machine interactions.When it comes to software, it's important to master software eco-design via various tools, the user interface (UX Design), automation and the continuous integration environment.Finally, when it comes to network and cloud computing, this means mastering architecture in all its forms (functional, solution, application, data, software, integration, technical), mastering cloud computing architectures (private, hybrid, public) and virtualization.A training offer that is insufficient in number, unclear and, according to the majority of players, ill-adapted."Some engineering schools and universities offer modules on the subject ", such as ESAIP in Angers and the University of La Rochelle. " But the subject is unfortunately only touched on in the majority of training courses".This brief initial training offer does not cover the entire spectrum of the theme.In particular, OPIEEC points to" The absence of a training course totally dedicated to the theme"."Training that skims the surface of eco-design (Life Cycle Assessment - LCA) and doesn't go into digital optimization in depth"."Business and engineering schools insufficiently involved"."Students are sometimes forced to self-train on their own initiative to acquire a base of knowledge".As far as continuing education is concerned, OPIEEC observes " a profusion of offerings", and even " a Far West effect ", as it is " so difficult to find one's way around". This is due to the multiplicity of players positioning themselves to offer training on this theme: digital service companies (ESN), consultancies, training organizations and associations. Complementary training modules are often " too generic".An action plan?The OPIIEC study concludes with an action plan:Define and clarify the concept of the digital environmental footprint;Raise awareness among all players in the ecosystem;Densify and increase the reliability of technical training;Adapt the mapping of professions.

• Environment

Published on 23/04/24



[Feature] What data for ecological planning?

In December 2023, the General Secretariat for Ecological Planning (SGPE) published a proposed roadmap entitled "Digital and data for ecological planning".Drawn up with the help of more than 300 national and local public-sector employees, this roadmap suggests ways, sector by sector, to make better use of available data and ensure that it is shared for the purposes of steering and analyzing public policies.This dense document (259 pages) identifies and details a total of 147 actions. " Digital technology must help change the current system, not optimize it even further".In an introduction in the form of a manifesto, the authors of the roadmap address, at length, the raison d'être (the "why?") of this roadmap: " Faced with the major, systemic challenge represented by the ecological transition, and given the urgency with which we must act, digital technology is an indispensable tool for targeting the most effective actions, managing complexity, reducing delays, modeling, anticipating crises, networking and mobilizing (...) Digital technology must help change the current system, not optimize it even further".They go on to explain the method (the "how") of implementing the roadmap: "For a digital project to be a success, it is often necessary for a large number of players to do their part in a coordinated fashion (developing the necessary standards, making the data available, creating the interface, deploying the tool, training users...) ".As part of the "public platform" approach that underpins the roadmap, " the public authorities lay down the basic rules governing the ethics, security and interoperability of digital tools. It also builds the basic infrastructures. These are identity or business databases, which are distributed in open data or shared with a given circle of players via ad hoc infrastructures. These foundations must be robust and pragmatic. Without them, everything else is built on sand".This public platform approach "allows roles to be shared between the public and private sectors. (...) This collaboration takes the form of shared digital bricks, monopolized by the public sector in the relevant geographical area, to which digital services are connected, often in the private, competitive sector". Eight themes mappedThe work was structured around the eight themes of France Nation Verte's ecological planning. These are: "better mobility", "better housing", "better resource conservation", "better biodiversity conservation", "better production", "better nutrition", "better consumption" and "transversal".To visually represent the roadmap's objectives and projects, the authors used the metaphors of buildings and "bricks" to map each of the eight themes. Each theme (building) is thus associated with several types of "digital bricks": foundations (rules and infrastructure), "walls" (digital services), roof (observatories). "Each brick rests on those below. Dysfunctions observed on the tip of the iceberg, such as the lack of interoperability of digital services (building walls) or the lack of consistency in observatory data (building roof), are very often due to dysfunctions or the absence of robust foundations". Each of the 147 areas identified as priorities is the subject of a numbered "action". Each action is documented: business challenges, current situation, sub-actions to be undertaken, initiators (central administrations, operators, territories), a main initiator and an indicative timetable. And use cases for each themeIn addition, each of the eight themes is associated with use cases that the roadmap is designed to address as a priority:Getting around: "Analyzing and planning mobilityBetter housing: "Energy consumption in housing", "Improving the citizen's approach to renovation".Better preserve resources: "Forecasting water resources and managing crises", "Managing coastline recession".Better preservation of biodiversity: "Taking biodiversity into account in urban planning decisions".Better production: "Efficient deployment of renewable energies".Better nutrition: "Enhancing soil qualityBetter consumption: "Making environmental cost measurement more reliable and harmonized".Cross-functional use cases: "Tooling citizens", "Tooling territories".Each use case explains the business challenges and the current state of digital tools and associated data, as well as the impact indicators."This work on use cases makes it possible to define the priority actions for the theme. Conversely, cartographic work enables us to know everything that exists (...) and to think about the urbanization of bricks in a systemic way: who relies on what? who needs to be interoperable with what?". Identify missing bricks or bricks to be consolidatedThe main contribution of this roadmap is that it reveals "these underground bricks to initiate, unblock, secure or accelerate their development and integration into all the higher bricks". In this way, it tackles "several sea snakes whose smooth operation is essential if we are to professionalize, industrialize and rapidly scale up to meet the ecological emergency".Key identifiers (such as premises and building identifiers, or agricultural parcel identifiers), business databases (such as real-time public transport information, soil quality, environmental impacts of real food products, or data on the reparability, durability and environmental impact of real products) are among the bricks that are missing or need to be reinforced. "Move the governance of the digital commons towards more public models, or create them where they don't exist"."All the themes highlighted the need to share data between a restricted circle of private and public players in order to implement their ecological planning policies. The roadmap highlights the importance of data dissemination infrastructures, which enable open data to be distributed securely and within a legal framework, and to be shared or made accessible to a restricted circle of players, when they are not intended to be open."Historically, to meet this need, it has often been external private or associative players who have built the necessary sharing infrastructures. However, the associated governance poses problems of continuity, sovereignty and neutrality. To enable the deployment of these infrastructures and the industrialization of the associated public policies, it is therefore essential to move their governance towards more public models, or to set them up where they do not exist. Private digital players can contribute to building these infrastructures, but as service providers, not on their behalf, without which the criteria (continuity, sovereignty) cannot be guaranteed. Rationalizing observatories to monitor and steer ecological planning"The proliferation of public and private observatories makes it difficult to monitor and assess the impact of actions taken". This proliferation of observatories corresponds to the proliferation of objectives and national plans contributing to the ecological transition (transversal or sectoral strategies, roadmaps, multi-year programs, etc.).While the roadmap announces the creation of new observatories (such as the hedge observatory, the industry decarbonization observatory, and the freight transport and logistics observatory), it also provides for the rationalization of existing observatories and their alignment with the ecological planning dashboard, which accompanies the Green Nation Plan. Anticipating data for adaptation and crisis managementThe roadmap is also an opportunity to reinforce a systemic approach to the use of data to anticipate and manage environmental crises. An interministerial working group has identified around ten major types of crisis linked to climate change and the collapse of biodiversity: floods, landslides, underground cavities and coastline erosion, atmospheric meteorological events, forest fires, drought, heatwaves, deterioration in air quality, health risks, epizootics and vector-borne epidemics, "prospective" crises, and so on.In some cases, data is not available for the entire territory (e.g., all the areas likely to be impacted by the detachment of a glacier), or is not updated as frequently as required. In the case of monitoring the appearance of new invasive exotic species or pests, for example, "current systems require highly advanced qualification of data, which is certainly necessary for their scientific reuse, but often leads to long exposure times, incompatible with close monitoring of the subject"."Generally speaking, sources of information are widely dispersed and rarely fluidly accessible. This leads to the construction of sometimes complex feedback channels, conceived on a case-by-case basis rather than in a systemic logic ", add the authors of the Roadmap. "It is therefore necessary to identify all data sources and to exploit them satisfactorily (...). It is also essential to set up a feedback system that takes into account the cross-referencing between crises, in order to deal with these particularly complex cases".The creation of new systems during a crisis is always a delicate matter: the Centre national de commandement stratégique is therefore working on the design of a national data-based crisis management tool, sized and adapted to all types of crisis. A "Digital Data Strategy Committee" and thematic committeesTo meet the need for decompartmentalization and political support, a France Nation Verte "Digital and Data Strategic Committee" will be set up. Co-chaired by the SGPE and DINUM, it will regularly bring together the stakeholders in the scheme to allocate funds, coordinate and secure the program as a whole.The structuring of the new financial resources allocated to the site will be consistent with this governance. These resources will not be allocated player by player, but action by action, in order to decompartmentalize projects and therefore data. As with the global financing of ecological planning, these resources will be allocated on a multi-year basis. 120 posts (FTE) will be allocated to the central administrations involved.Because of the scope and scale of the roadmap, structured thematic committees will be set up around the Green France Nation themes. Towards a territorialization of the "digital and data" roadmapFrance Nation Verte's "digital and data" project involved government departments and representatives of local authorities in the early stages of developing a common roadmap. "Nevertheless, the maps produced are limited to a generic description of regional bricks. They do not take into account the specific characteristics of each region, in order to maintain a certain degree of legibility". Given the complexity of the subject and the number of players involved, a working method was tested with the Breton region in May and June 2023.IGN, Cerema, ADEME, OFB, ANCT and CDC will be making digital and data engineering services available to local authorities. Next steps This frieze shows the main actions of the 147 actions in the roadmap.The timetable is indicative: it may change as work progresses in-house.

• Data

• Innovation

• Commons

• Environment

Published on 03/10/24



How can we design more energy-efficient data centers?

At a time when the volume of digital data is growing at a dizzying pace, a team of researchers in Montpellier is exploring new ways of reducing its energy impact with the Genesis project.The amount of digital data being created or replicated around the world is constantly increasing. This increase has repercussions on energy consumption: digital services account for between 6% and 10% of the world's electricity consumption. In France, this figure is estimated at 10%.It is therefore pertinent to examine the place of data centers at the heart of this digital economy. " These data centers, equipped with servers, switches, storage and cooling systems, provide storage and computing services, usually for companies or organizations (...) Centralizing data in these places makes it possible to provide reliable access to this data at lower cost for the entities accessing it", explains Abdoulaye Gamatié, Research Director at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics (Lirmm): a joint research unit of Montpellier University and CNRS."On average, datacenters are only used 30% of the time, whereas they are constantly powered up," observes Abdoulaye Gamatié. "We need to ensure quality of service while maximizing utilization. This can be tricky, given fluctuating demand. An e-commerce site is more in demand in December than in August, for example. To respond to peaks, it must therefore agree to allocate a higher-than-average number of resources," says Gilles Sassatelli, Research Director at Lirmm.This steady rise can also be explained by the emergence of new services. First and foremost, video-on-demand. The proliferation of connected objects also plays a role.Reduce energy losses while using renewable energiesGiven that an increase in the number of services will automatically lead to an increase in traffic, what levers are available?"Current trends are pushing towards the deployment of service closer to usage (edge computing), which reduces data traffic on the global infrastructure".Another lever is the use of renewable energies. Integrated into datacenter plans for several years now, "this is often done with an accounting approach, by creating a photovoltaic park on an arbitrary site supposed to offset the datacenters' annual consumption".There's also the technological lever: "We can design computing architectures and memory technologies that are not exclusively silicon-based, which will consume less energy while offering increased computing performance. Other levers being studied include controlling server operating frequency, intelligent allocation of tasks to servers according to their nature, and virtualization.Observing data center practices, the Lirmm team found that "a significant proportion of infrastructure consumption was accounted for by components peripheral to IT functions. This led us to think about how we could drastically reduce energy losses while using renewable energies".The Genesis projectTo meet this challenge, the Lirmm team in Montpellier is proposing " a real paradigm shift: local computing units, themselves locally powered, and interconnected in a network so as to share data processing and storage, but also energy sources".Lirmm has developed several generations of prototypes, with the support of the Occitanie Region."The Genesis scientific approach aims to integrate energy into a distributed system; as a finite resource and managed in the same way as storage or computing capacity. In this scheme, energy is allocated and routed between units, like data. This concept has required research at the interface of computer science, embedded systems and power electronics to create software and hardware objects with these capabilities".First resultsThe Genesis project is based on a system of photovoltaic panels coupled to small data centers. Currently being evaluated on a small scale, Genesis is already achieving very encouraging results. " Thanks to calibrated modeling, using an experimental prototype installed at Polytech Montpellier, we have noticed that the ability to migrate both energy and data between computing units reduces energy from the power grid by 22% to 27% ".One of the scenarios developed by the scientists targets a Nantes district with 2,600 residents. Taking into account architectural constraints, it would be possible to cover 30% of the roofs with solar panels that directly power small data centers, thus partially meeting the energy consumption of local digital activity. Another scenario, in a Montpellier district, envisages covering up to 50% of roofs, which would fully meet local demand.The Lirmm team must now move on to a larger-scale prototype.

• Innovation

• Environment

Published on 20/11/23