Digital Sufficiency
In the French community the term Digital Sobriety is used instead.
There are several publications on digital sufficiency, mainly by scientists from German-speaking countries. The concept of digital sufficiency was developed as part of the German research project "Digitalisierung & Nachhaltigkeit" (2016-2022): https://www.nachhaltige-digitalisierung.de/
The following publication also originates from the project:
Santarius, T. et al. (2022) ‘Digital sufficiency: conceptual considerations for ICTs on a finite planet’. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-022-00914-x
Definition:
we define “digital sufficiency” as any strategy aimed at directly or indirectly decreasing the absolute level of resource and energy demand from the production or application of ICT
A distinction is made between 4 dimensions:
- hardware sufficiency
- software sufficiency
- user sufficiency
- economic sufficiency
Software sufficiency:
Increasing software efficiency would aim at reducing the demand for electricity and hardware utilization per unit of computing power or data transmission.1 In contrast, software sufficiency aims at software being developed so that data traffic and hardware utilization during application are as low as possible in absolute terms. Hence, software sufficiency includes strategies that actually reduce data volume and traffic and demand for computing power and that increase the service life of ICT hardware.
3 parameters are relevant for achieving software sufficiency:
- software needs to be designed for minimizing electricity and resource demand in the use phase
- the amount of data collected and transmitted must be minimized. Software products should avoid data transfer that is not necessary for a service to provide its intended functionality.
- required hardware capacities should be adapted according to the current demand, allowing software products to manage and control the hardware capacities they occupy, e.g., by setting parts of the network infrastructure into sleep mode at low utilization rates. In data centers, IT management software can foster minimal energy and resource demand by improving overall processes (Enterprise Resource Planning) and energy consumption (energy analytics) and by implementing the principle of neuromorphic computation.
Digital Reset
In addition to the well-known German scientists, The Shift Project and others were also involved in the European science project “Digitalization for Sustainability: Science in Dialogue” (2020-2022).
Website: https://digitalization-for-sustainability.com](https://digitalization-for-sustainability.com
This resulted in the “Digital Reset” report:
Digitalization for Sustainability (D4S), 2023: Digital Reset. Redirecting Technologies for the Deep Sustainability Transformation. https://digitalization-for-sustainability.com/digital-reset/
Sufficiency is one of 7 principles, which are described as follows (in German):
Die vorherrschende Strategie des Einsatzes digitaler Technologien zur Steigerung der Effizienz muss von einer übergreifenden Strategie der Suffizienz geleitet sein, die darauf abzielt, Bedürfnisbefriedigung (‚ein Genug‘) anstelle einer laufenden Steigerung (ein ‚mehr‘) zu erzielen.