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An Ending and a Beginning

Michael — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:33:44 +0000

This month, Bruce Sterling posted the last Viridian Note, and seeing as the gist of this blog was born in the Viridian Movement, I wanted give props. (It’s worth your time to enjoy this Note, either way, but if you haven’t yet been exposed to Viridian, it would be perhaps be just as edifying and entertaining to read the very first note, or the manifesto. Yeah, every movement has to have a manifesto!)

Recent events have clearly established that the character of the times has changed. The Viridian Design Movement was founded in distant 1999. After the years transpiring – various disasters, wars, financial collapses and a major change in political tone – the world has become a different place.

It remains only to close the Viridian episode gracefully, and to conclude with a few meditative suggestions.

If you read it all the way through, I would be curious to hear your thoughts.

After Nov. 4, Worldchanging, Viridian Movement’s most visible offshoot on the web, launched Inaugurate Change, a call for the incoming administration to set the nation on a course to carbon neutrality by 2030. It’s a call to the Viridian ideal:

The things we must create to fight climate change are also the things we need to generate a strong economic recovery: livable cities, clean energy, green jobs, new technologies, better transportation, healthy forests and thriving family farms.

And if you are still at all skeptical that the times have changed, it is worth considering this humble little form on a new web site called change.gov.

The government coming into power now has an active videoblog, and it wants to hear from you.

Energy & Environment Form on change.gov

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World Usability Day and the Global Transport Challenge

Michael — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:48:37 +0000

Today is World Usability Day 2008, and this year’s theme is transportation. As part of the day’s events, the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) has announced the Global Transport Challenge, which includes a little web-based carbon calculator.

It’s an easy way for you to understand how you use transportation everyday and the impact it has on our environment.

You will be able to:

MEASURE your everyday transportation usage

MONITOR your personal carbon travel footprint and compare yourself to othersaround the world

MINIMIZE your energy usage through alternative transportation choices, carbon offsets, and simple travel changes thereby maximizing the impact on our world.

Today there are World Usability Day events in over 40 countries, many will be webcast, and some will take place online only. World Usability Day is a UPA initiative to

provide a single worldwide day of events around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen and governmental groups for our common objective: to ensure that technology helps people live to their full potential and helps create a better world for all citizens everywhere. [Link]

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Green Social Goal-setting on Edenbee

Michael — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:43:30 +0000

Edenbee is a social network working to tackle climate change through better personal choices (with a little encouragement from like-minded souls). It went into an invitational beta* earlier this month. It has all of the essentials of a social network — ways to build a network with friends, and groups and discussions — but on Edenbee, personal profiles get a unique spin with “Lifestyle Profiling” and “Carbon Logbooks,” and a framework for setting goals against the two.

After signing up, you’re asked to work through some questions about your lifestyle, to gauge where you are now, and where you can make an impact. This creates your Edenbee “Lifestyle Profile.” Edenbee immediately recommends some goals (”Take your next holiday close to home,” or “Use public transit whenever you can”) and then invites you to find more that match the changes you’re hoping to make.

This social goal-setting system is particularly interesting because it encourages discussions that are purpose-driven and relate directly to the environmental impact of “Lifestyle” and “Logbook”. People can tell stories and ask questions about any goal; for example, on the “I’ll compost all my food waste” page, people might trade tips on best practices in backyard composting. One can imagine even finding potential compadres who are working on making some of the same changes (And of course, groups provide a tried-and-true avenue to finding others). Like 43 Things, a pioneer in social goal-setting, Edenbee encourages not only information-sharing, but a way for people to cheer each other on.

It will be interesting to see how Edenbee puts the carbon calculator & log integrated with the site to new uses. When you combine a social network with familiar tools you can get some pretty neat things. From the synthesis we might see emergent behaviors, like a little friendly competition: the footprints of group members are averaged to create group footprints, and with a little flourish those can turn into teams, and tournaments. Throw in some collective goal-setting, and carbon footprinting’s a whole new ballgame.

If you’d like to try it out, comment here and I’ll send you an invite. Or, if you’re signed up already, let’s be friends.

*or as they like to say, “Beeta”.

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