Ask a Question. Get the Industry's Answer.
Getting consensus at scale, across organisations, time zones, and languages, is one of the hardest problems in standards-making. An Assembly brings the right people together around your question and uses AI-assisted consensus to produce a validated, citable answer everyone stands behind. No six-month committee. Typically 6 weeks.
Upcoming assemblies
Join an assembly to help shape the next generation of green software standards.
AI and Water White Paper
Bringing clarity to the discussion around AI's water footprint by distinguishing direct on-site water from embodied off-site water
Green AI Committee
AI Infrastructure Energy Disclosure
Exploring what energy data regulators should require AI infrastructure providers to disclose
Software Standards Working Group
Cloud Tenant Carbon Allocation
Building consensus on how cloud and colocation providers attribute Scope 3 carbon emissions to individual tenants
Data Centre Hardware-Software Interoperability
Exploring whether a standardised data layer between data centre hardware telemetry and software optimisation tools could unlock cross-silo sustainability improvements
Harmony: AI-assisted consensus built on human accountability
At the centre of every Assembly is Harmony, GSF's AI-assisted consensus engine. Think of it as an intelligent facilitator that never sleeps, never forgets, and can hold the perspectives of hundreds of people simultaneously. The decisions it helps reach are provably fair.
Human-in-the-loop at every stage
AI reads, synthesises, and surfaces patterns. Humans rate candidates, validate outputs, and cast every vote. The AI is a lens, not a judge: it cannot make decisions, cast votes, or determine outcomes.
Cryptographic inclusion proofs
Every response is hashed into a Merkle tree. After synthesis, you can receive a mathematical proof that your exact response was included. If it had been altered or excluded, the proof would not validate.
Full auditability
The chain from individual submission to published output is transparent and logged. Every action (responses received, syntheses generated, votes cast) is timestamped and auditable.
A structured process for getting a hard question answered together
An Assembly is a time-boxed process for getting a group of experts to answer a hard question together. The question could be technical, strategic, or exploratory. The output is flexible: a consensus statement, white paper, set of recommendations, or foundation for a new standard. What stays consistent is the process.
At the centre of every Assembly is Harmony, GSF's AI-assisted consensus engine, designed and built by Joseph Cook, GSF Head of Research. Harmony synthesises every contribution, surfaces patterns of agreement and disagreement, and asks participants to verify its work. AI handles synthesis; humans make every decision.
Three types of Assembly
The type determines who participates and what the output feeds into.
Private
GSF members only. Produces the baseline for a specification or guideline. Feeds directly into Working Group development. How the SCI specification went from concept to ISO certification (ISO/IEC 21031:2024) in under 3 years.
Public
Open to non-GSF members by invitation from a convening member. Exploratory. Produces a white paper or consensus statement. Goes to the GSF Steering Committee to assess whether further investment is warranted.
Open
Available by agreement with the GSF Steering Committee to established government bodies, regulatory authorities, and recognised policy institutions where open participation serves a clear public interest. Not open to all by default.
Get in touch →THE PROCESS
From question to validated answer
Define the question
Before anything starts: scope, rubric, and the core questions the group needs to answer are agreed. What exactly are we asking? What's in bounds, what's out? How will we know if the output is good?
Bring the right people together
The convening member invites participants: other members, non-members, academics, policymakers, or NGOs, whoever can best answer the question. The assembly is as broad or as focused as the question demands.
DISCOVER: What does everyone think?
Participants reply by email with their honest views. No meetings, no travel, no turn-taking. Harmony reads every response and produces an anonymous synthesis: themes, areas of agreement, areas of disagreement. Roughly 10 minutes every few days.
DELIBERATE: Which approach works best?
Harmony generates candidate positions, one optimised for the least-satisfied participant (minimax), one for mean satisfaction. Participants rate each 0–10. A position isn't viable until even the lowest rating reaches at least 5/10. Rounds continue until a viable candidate emerges.
DECIDE: All aboard?
The strongest candidate goes to a final vote: ENDORSE (active support), CONSENT (can live with it), or OBJECT (blocks consensus). A single OBJECT halts the process until the objection is resolved. This is not majority rule: one person's concern can stop the whole process.
Output is published
The validated document (consensus statement, white paper, design document) is published and attributed to participating organisations, available for reference, citation, and action.
Why consensus at scale breaks down
The traditional multi-stakeholder meeting isn't broken by accident. It's structurally biased against the quiet, the remote, and the outvoted.
Competing organisations, competing interests
Competitors around the same table don't freely share. The loudest voice dominates. Minority views get drowned out, and conformity pressure shapes what people say before they even speak.
Time zones and language barriers
Synchronous meetings always disadvantage someone. Real-time discussions reward fluency over insight. Participants who aren't native speakers of the meeting language are structurally sidelined.
Slow by design
Traditional multi-stakeholder processes can take years. By the time you reach consensus, the world has moved on. The process optimises for procedure, not outcomes.
Who can participate and convene
GSF Members
Can participate in all Assemblies and, critically, can convene their own. Define the question, invite whoever you need, and commission a validated output the industry trusts.
Government bodies & NGOs
Select public-interest bodies are offered access to Harmony and Public Assemblies on a case-by-case basis. The outputs shaping sustainable technology should be informed by public-interest voices.
Non-members
Can be invited to participate in Public Assemblies by the convening member. Participation is by invitation only. Public Assembly outputs are published openly.
Internal specification Assemblies
Assemblies that feed directly into GSF specification development are exclusively available to Steering and General members. The hard alignment work is done before formal Working Group development begins.
Completed assemblies
Every assembly started with a problem. Here's what they produced.
Software Standards Working Group
SCI for Web
Extending the SCI to the Web, addressing the challenges of measuring website emissions
Workload Dynamic Power and Cooling (WDPC)
Project Mycelium
Breaking hardware and software silos for end-to-end sustainability
Software Standards Working Group
SCI for AI
Extending the SCI to AI, addressing the challenges of measuring AI carbon emissions
Green AI Committee
GAIC Kick-off
Shaping the Green Software Foundation's strategy on AI and sustainability
Software Standards Working Group
TOSS Decision Trees
Refining the decision-making framework for sustainable technology operations
Green Software Patterns
Patterns 2.0 - Strategy Formation
Defining the next chapter for Green Software Patterns
Frequently asked questions
Does Harmony make decisions?
No. Harmony synthesises: it produces a summary of what the group said, identifies themes, and drafts candidate positions. It does not make decisions, cast votes, or determine outcomes. Every substantive decision is made by human participants.
Doesn't AI remove the human connection?
Harmony replaces the logistics of deliberation (scheduling, minute-taking, circulating summaries), not the deliberation itself. Research on group dynamics shows that in-person discussions amplify dominance effects, conformity pressure, and status bias: the most articulate speaker wins, not the best idea. An asynchronous, anonymised process neutralises these. Every participant gets equal space. Nothing prevents running Harmony alongside in-person sessions if social connection is also a goal.
How do I know my view was accurately represented?
Every response is cryptographically hashed and committed to a Merkle tree. After synthesis, you can receive an inclusion proof, a short piece of data that mathematically proves your exact response was included. If it had been altered or excluded, the proof would not validate. You can inspect the plaintext submitted to the model and verify it through a public web app.
What if the AI misrepresents my view?
The DECIDE phase gives every participant a veto. A single OBJECT vote blocks consensus entirely and forces the group to address your specific concern before the process can move forward. Additionally, the minimax metric means a synthesis that ignored someone's concerns would produce a candidate that person rates poorly, flagging it as non-viable regardless of what the AI did.
How does the consensus model work?
GSF uses a three-tier model: ENDORSE (full agreement), CONSENT (agreement with possible reservations, also the default if you don't respond), and OBJECT (formal veto that halts the process until the objection is resolved). Any participant can object regardless of their organisation's size or seniority.
What's the difference between an Assembly and a Working Group?
An Assembly is fast, time-boxed, and question-driven: it produces a defined output in weeks. A Working Group is the ongoing governance structure that, if appropriate, takes an Assembly's output and develops it into a formal specification through the full standards lifecycle. Not every Assembly leads to a Working Group. Many produce standalone research, recommendations, or policy positions.
How long does an Assembly take?
A standard asynchronous Assembly runs approximately 6 weeks. Compressed formats can run in 2 days when participants are co-located. Internal specification Assemblies typically take 8–12 weeks.
Can non-members participate?
Yes. The convening member defines the participant list. Public Assemblies are specifically designed to bring in external subject matter experts, academics, policymakers, and practitioners from non-member organisations.
What about energy use and carbon?
LLM inference for a complete assembly uses roughly 0.01–0.1 kWh. A single 1-hour video call with 10 participants uses ~0.3–1.5 kWh. Harmony also displaces travel. Token usage is tracked per assembly and available as a JSON report at conclusion, so you can calculate actual emissions rather than estimates.
Can my organisation propose an Assembly?
Yes, if you're a GSF member. The first step is defining the question and whether it's suited to a Public Assembly (broad input, published output) or a Private Assembly (members-only, specification-track). Get in touch to start the conversation.