It is customary with the launch of something new, to offer a “Hello World” and so I will borrow my colleague Stephen O’Grady‘s tried and trusted Q&A format for the purpose.
Q: What is GreenMonk?
A: GreenMonk Associates aims to bring grassroots, open source and social media thinking to the emerging green and clean technology sectors. At this point its a blog and a loose affiliation of like minds, with associated projects.
Q: Who is GreenMonk?
A: The point man is James Governor, one of the founders of RedMonk, a boutique industry analyst firm founded in 2002 specialising in infrastructure software, which makes extensive use of open source and social software in its business. Redmonk generally focuses on practitioners, people that do stuff -developers, engineers, architects and sysadmins – in analysing the market, rather than trying to compete with Gartner for C-level attention, which gives us a fairly unique perspective.
Q: Who else is involved?
A: GreenMonk began life as a joint venture with the Movement Design Bureau, a thinktank looking at the future of movement in all its forms. One of the Bureau’s first projects is to help foster AKVO, a resource for clean water initiatives in emerging nations (“The Open Source For Water”)- India in the first instance. Mark Charmer and Joseph Simpson are behind MDB – and as you can see from the Bollywood-style poster they are not afraid of imaginative messaging. I am also working with James Cherkoff of Collaborate Marketing on some related projects.
Q: Why aren’t other RedMonk analysts like Stephen and Cote‘ involved?
A: Redmonk is our business, while Greenmonk is a separate initiative. It is not a RedMonk business unit at this point. Of course Stephen and Cote can contribute if they want to- but they have lives and day jobs.
Q: Why bother with green issues?
A: My son is nearly two, which is one reason. To be honest I have always been a bit of a tree hugger, but now the mainstream is waking up it makes sense to make some public noise in this regard. Its about being a 21st century citizen.
Q: How do you think you can make a difference?
A: You’re reading this, aren’t you? I have to believe technical solutions are going to help at least mitigate the effects of climate change, but what are we going to do about over-fishing, pollution and so on? Without changing behaviours we’re not going to fix any core problems. Small pieces, loosely joined, can add up to major impacts (just look at Google’s Adwords revenues). We need a combination of both top down and bottom up approaches to achieve anything- think CFCs and dolphin friendly tuna (now we just need to work out how to catch tuna friendly tuna.)
Q: There is a lot of money in green data centers and technology, isn’t there?
A: There will be – investment is pouring in. That is not the reason for being GreenMonk though – on the contrary projects so far have been voluntary. Ask Mark from MDB if contributions have helped him so far. GreenMonk will also shortly begin working with another non-profit organisation to help it make better use of the web to drive attention and build community. More on that later.
Q: But are you getting paid?
A: Yes. Computerworld offered a paid syndication deal for GreenMonk Associates content. GreenMonk’s focus is likely to follow the money somewhat… (Computerworld will be expecting more green data center coverage than I ever intended, for example). I am hoping the real drivers of the agenda though will be you.