SCI for Open Telemetry

The SCI formula exists. The language to express it in observability tooling does not.

The Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification is an ISO standard that defines how to measure the carbon emissions rate of a software system. It covers operational emissions, embodied carbon, energy consumption, carbon intensity, and the functional unit that ties them together. Unlike the GHG Protocol, which was designed for organisational reporting, SCI is built specifically for software: it measures emissions as a rate rather than a total, it accounts for the hardware a system runs on, and it gives engineers actionable signal — lower numbers mean the software itself is getting greener, not just that someone bought an offset. What it does not define is how those concepts should be named, typed, and structured within the telemetry systems that practitioners already use.

OpenTelemetry is the dominant open standard for software observability. Its semantic conventions registry defines the shared vocabulary for telemetry signals — metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and more — across tools, languages, and backends. Without SCI concepts in that registry, every team that wants to track carbon emissions invents their own attribute names, their own metric keys, and their own data models. The result is fragmentation: tools cannot interoperate, backends cannot build standard dashboards, and the SCI score remains invisible to the engineers and operators best placed to reduce it.

This assembly will draft a proposed set of SCI Semantic Conventions for submission to the OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions SIG. Working from the SCI specification, participants will agree on the attribute registry, metric definitions, and event conventions needed to represent SCI formula components within OTel's framework. The output is a complete set of semantic conventions, ready for submission to the OTel Semantic Conventions SIG. It will be taken directly into the OTel community for validation and refinement, with the goal of formal adoption into the semantic conventions registry.

Instrumentation that uses these conventions — such as OTel collector-level tooling — is a natural next step, open to the OTel community and tool vendors once the conventions are agreed.

What you'll produce

• A proposed attribute registry covering the core SCI formula components: O (operational emissions), M (embodied carbon), E (energy consumption), I (carbon intensity), and R (functional unit)
• Agreed metric definitions with correct OTel instrument types, units, and requirement levels
• An event convention for recording complete SCI calculations, including baseline comparisons
• A set of design decision rationale notes suitable for the OTel SIG GitHub issue
• A submission-ready draft proposal formatted for the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions repository

Who we're looking for

• Software engineers and SREs with hands-on experience instrumenting applications with OpenTelemetry
• Contributors familiar with OTel semantic conventions authoring, the semconv repository, or the Semantic Conventions SIG process
• Green software practitioners with working knowledge of the SCI specification and its formula components
• Engineers with experience in energy monitoring tooling such as Kepler, RAPL, or hardware telemetry
• Sustainability leads or architects at organisations that measure or report software carbon emissions
• Representatives from OTel backend vendors or observability platforms interested in native SCI support

This assembly runs asynchronously via email using Harmony, GSF's AI-assisted consensus engine — expect to respond to one or two structured rounds per week, around 10-15 minutes each.