Blue Angel for Okular

[Cornelius Schumacher]

Dear Okular developers,

you might have heard about the Blue Angel[1]. It's an ecolabel which is 
awarded by the German government for environmentally friendly design. It 
covers a broad range of different products, from recycled paper to 
eco-friendly ship design. Last year a category for resource and energy 
efficient software products was added[2].

The award criteria for this new category include energy-efficiency as 
well as other factors such as influence on hardware obsolescence and 
user autonomy. They match quite well with values we have in the KDE 
community and how we develop our software.

Up to now there is no product yet which has been awarded with the label 
in the new software category. We can change that. Okular is an ideal 
candidate as it is a popular application and matches the criteria quite 
well.

I have put together a first draft for an application[3]. It includes the 
documentation for all the criteria and how Okular matches them, as well 
as measurements, which have been executed by students from the 
Umwelt-Campus Birkenfeld[4]. The goal is to submit it for certification 
as soon as the data is complete. KDE e.V. will act as official applicant.

While Okular itself already matches the criteria from my point of view, 
there are a few things which are asked in terms of documentation, which 
could be made more transparent on the Okular web site. I will submit a 
merge request with suggestions for corresponding changes shortly.

This is an exciting project to give KDE more visibility in what it is 
doing for sustainable computing. If you are interested to learn more or 
to join, please feel free to get in touch with me.

We also have a mailing list to talk about energy efficiency and topics 
around that [5]. Feel free to join there as well if you are interested 
and ask any questions you might have.

Kind Regards,
Cornelius

[1]: https://www.blauer-engel.de/en
[2]: 
https://www.blauer-engel.de/en/products/electric-devices/resources-and-energy-efficient-software-products
[3]: 
https://invent.kde.org/cschumac/blue-angel-application/-/tree/master/applications/okular
[4]: https://www.umwelt-campus.de/en/
[5]: https://mail.kde.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/energy-efficiency

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>