Luis Suarez reminded Dennis, who re-reminded me, that yesterday was Blog Action Day. Luis works at IBM. He is a social software maven, an all round good guy, and an obsessive twitterer. But he also has a life-its always great to hear him planning a weekend of first life activities-he really loves Fridays. Really loves them.
Luis says:
“So, while I have been thinking what I could blog about on the subject for Blog Action Day!, I mean, trying to establish the relationship between the environment and Knowledge Management along with Social Computing, it just hit me big time! And here I am. Putting together a few thoughts on how I think both KM and Social Computing could help out bring forward the conversation on how to preserve what’s been given to us so that we can pass it on to later generations in best of conditions.
They say that both KM and Social Computing are all about having an impact. An impact in the way you share knowledge, you collaborate, you connect and innovate with others. An impact that, if anything, has always been notorious for taking action, your *own* action, into wanting to change things and make things happen the right way.”
Blammo, as Cote might say. Luis is talking to exactly why I started Greenmonk-that is, green from the grassroots up, where open source and social software modes and methods lead to better environmental outcomes. One good thing about blogs and such-no paper! Back to Dennis.
“Professionals have a long history of attempting to reach the Nirvana of the paperless office. VersionOne recently won a gong for its paperless office product. I hope this might inspire firms to consider how new technologies might help in the fight to reduce our carbon footprint. It doesn’t stop there. If you use data centres or data services (don’t we all?) then it’s worth asking just how green the supplier really is.”
Now this is a conversation i am more than happy to be involved in.
Good point. I can see how it would be tougher to tie the environment to certain blogs’ topics – it looks like he found a good way to do it.
I’m sure you are right that there’s a distinct role for “social networking”/Web 2.0 in supporting environmental activism, and I salute you for starting Greenmonk Associates – which just goes to prove the point!
Beyond greening the data centre, I posted (for my blog action day contribution) on how we need Enterprise Applications to get green (end-to-end) if we want companies to be end-to-end green as well. [ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-action-day-enterprise-30-only-one.html ]
Not sure if you concur, but if you do this is certainly an angle I’d love to see Red/GreenMonks take up in your conversations with the Enterprise Application vendors!
Hey Susanna. Obviously I concur.
Paul- I am increasingly talking about exactly these issues with enterprise software vendors. I don’t exactly how redmonk and greenmonk will integrate going forward – but for now its small things, loosely joined