Introducing GSF Labs

Over the last twenty years, technological innovation has accelerated at an unprecedented pace, shrinking the time between research breakthroughs and mainstream deployment from decades to months. While new applications and engineering practices continue to emerge, standards needed to measure their environmental impacts have traditionally taken months or even years to progress.

To support more efficient development of credible green software solutions for emerging areas, we’ve created GSF Labs—a dedicated space for new projects across the sustainable technology landscape. 

Open to the wider community to share feedback and build on, Labs is designed to host initiatives that may mature into working groups, specifications, reference implementations, tooling, or agent-ready skills, enabling organizations and practitioners to explore and build innovative technologies sustainably and responsibly.  

#What GSF Labs Means For Green Software 

Labs gives practitioners a way to experiment and develop solutions across emerging impact dimensions and architectural layers. Through interacting with and contributing to projects, they can test and exchange ideas while helping shape future guidance informing green software standards and tools. 

A project in Labs is an active piece of work. The space supports: 

• Prototyping ideas and learning how to apply them in practice.
• Developing tooling, reference patterns, or agent-ready skills that demonstrate actionable green software approaches.
• Testing methodologies against real workloads. 

We aim for the projects to mature independently: some will graduate into working groups or specifications, while others will become open source tools, reference implementations, or educational assets that practitioners can use and apply in their work. By introducing ideas in the early stages of development, Labs helps green software advance alongside rapidly changing technologies. 

“Green software must evolve at the speed of technology. Labs gives the green software community an open space to collaborate and prototype—turning early ideas into standards and concrete solutions.”— Navveen Balani, Executive Director, Green Software Foundation

#The First Labs Projects

Two projects are currently available in Labs: 

Agentic AI Software Calculator. As agentic AI workloads move into production, the questions about how to measure their environmental impact have become harder to address. A single user request can fan out into many model calls, tool invocations, and intermediate steps. Building on the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) for AI specification, this project explores how to understand and manage the carbon, energy, and resource footprint of agentic workloads.  

Visit the GitHub repository: agentic-ai-impact-explorer or try it in your browser.

Green Agent Skills. Agents are increasingly used by engineers in their day-to-day work. This project develops agent-ready skills that surface green software considerations inside agentic workflows, making sustainability part of the engineering loop. The Skills draw on GSF patterns, specifications, and projects, and are designed to run in broadly used agent environments and developer tooling. 

Visit the GitHub repository: green-code-skill.

#Building on our Work  

Our strategic direction, From Silicon to Screen, expands the Foundation’s focus beyond carbon to four impact dimensions—carbon, energy, water, and waste—across six architecture layers, from hardware and devices through to governance and observability.

To deliver on this vision, we focus on three core areas: standards, policy, and practical implementations—delivered through Labs. 

Labs is home to many implementations that build on GSF specifications, including SCI (ISO/IEC 21031:2024) and the SCI for AI specification. Through the Reference Implementations repository, we demonstrate what applying these standards looks like in practice. 

“Everything we do at the GSF—standards, education, practitioner enablement, and policy—starts with understanding what practitioners need to put sustainable IT into practice. GSF Labs closes the gap between idea and adoption, letting our community experiment with emerging tools and methodologies before bringing proven approaches into their own organisations.”—Gadhu Sundaram, Chair, Green Software Foundation

#Next Steps 

The first two Labs projects are now available for the community to explore and provide feedback on. Over time, Labs will expand to new opportunities across the impact dimensions and architecture layers identified through the Foundation’s strategic direction.

Labs projects are designed to create practical value—whether through tools practitioners can use directly, such as calculators or agent skills, or through emerging methodologies that may inform future standards. When a project demonstrates the potential for broader adoption, it can progress through the working group process for consideration by the Steering Committee.

#Get Involved 

Labs projects in the Reference Implementations repository are open for everyone to engage with, contribute to, and learn from. A project can mature into a working group if a GSF member organization decides to take ownership of it.  

Try Labs projects. The Agentic AI Software Calculator runs in the browser with no setup, and the Green Agent Skills can be installed into commonly used agent environments. Working through a workload or a code review is the fastest way to see how these concepts apply and where they need to evolve. 

Extend existing projects to your context. The projects ship with editable assumptions, documented methodology, and clear scope boundaries. By applying them to their own systems, practitioners can bring workload-specific patterns, real measurements, and integrations with the tooling they already use.

Share your inputs. We invite you to share your feedback on direction, methodology, and relevance to practitioners’ needs via the discussion space in the Reference Implementations repository. Your input can shape how the projects evolve and inform the working group and specification work that follows.

Contribute your implementation. The collection is designed to grow as it’s adopted and used; by submitting alternative implementations, new tool guides, additional patterns, and case studies, you can help create a shared space where practitioners shape the future of green software. Submit your implementation to the community folder.

GSF Labs is an experimentation space of the Green Software Foundation. Outputs are educational and illustrative, intended to inform later standards, tooling, and reference implementations, and to invite collaboration from the community. They are not production-ready. The Foundation’s ratified specifications and standards continue to be developed through its working group process.