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What if all of our social media activity could be aggregated and quantified to determine our carbon footprint in real time? A FriendFeed for our footprint.
Originally from Green Monk by Tom Rafferty:
“I come from a Social Media background. I use blogs, Social Networks, Microblogs, Photo Sharing sites, Video Sharing sites, Livecasting apps, Social bookmarking sites etc. everyday. I generate a constant stream of updates about things happening in my life which can be followed via RSS or on my Friendfeed page (a feed aggregator) or on the individual sites.
Carbon accounting is rapidly coming down the line. Already we are seeing companies like BT and Verizon requiring lower carbon footprints from their suppliers. This is because carbon accounting will take supply chains into account.
Carbon accounting will be incredibly granular and will attempt to take everything into account in the life-cycle of goods and services. This will include electrical power usage, road mileage and air miles alongside expenses and financial returns.
To get buy-in from staff, reporting total power and energy usage will have to be made as simple as possible so that it doesn’t interfere with the natural flow of people’s work.
This is where lifestreaming applications come in. Encourage the people in your organization to use applications like blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, et al. Then you can capture that output and route it through the carbon accounting software and…ta da!…carbon usage information accounted for.
Obviously it won’t be as easy as that, but if your employees are using Twitter, say, set up your company’s carbon account software with a Twitter account.
Then instruct staff on how to message the software with what you are doing at any point in time i.e. “@bt-carbon-accounts – putting on the kettle for a cup of coffee” or “@ibm-carbon-accounts – hot today, setting the aircon to 19C”. This would also be especially useful for capturing the carbon footprint of people working from home.
IBM’s master inventor Andy Stanford-Clark has already done some work in this area. His house has a Twitter account and regularly sends updates automatically.
Will carbon accounting software and its requirement for constant inputs from all levels of business bring lifestreaming applications into the Enterprise 2.0 fold?”
See Part II of this post, which focuses on Dopplr.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 bbm // Jun 18, 2008 at 12:26 am
or even, dog forbid, “@company-footprint: hot today, opening the frigging window!”
2 Simon Harris // Jun 18, 2008 at 8:28 am
Measuring and benchmarking carbon emissions resulting from Occupational Driving / Employees Driving at Work has always been a challenge. NEMOSYNE reports on actual Business Miles and carbon emissions automatically. A data logger (the size of a match box) is placed on the dash board of the car and then uploaded regularly via USB to a web based application that provides the user with an automated mileage claim and management with a report suite that allows measurement and management of mileage, CO2 emissions, traveling time etc
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