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Microsoft: Green From The Roots Up?

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I am really liking this announcement from Microsoft and The Clinton Foundation. Rather than trying to push top down initiatives, its designed to support local government organisations that want to reduce carbon emissions. Its a very greenmonky story at first glance –

“The Clinton Foundation and Microsoft Corp. today announced a long-term partnership to develop a suite of technology tools that will enable cities to accurately monitor, compare and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The technology will include both software and services.”

My complaint – why is this initiative only aimed at the world’s 40 largest cities? Sure they account for the lion’s share of world pollution, but its a core roots up concept that every little helps, and small contributions can add up to big macro effects. It is nice to see a tech vendor not just making a green datacenter play though.

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An open perspective on global development

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Anyone trying to make sense of the opportunity to apply the principles of open source to opportunities wider than just software needs to listen to the recent series of Reith Lectures, broadcast by BBC Radio 4.

The Beeb’s curious podcast policy means that the archives are only accessible via its radio player, but right now you can grab a proper mp3 download of the final lecture, ‘global politics in a complex age’.

Here’s a taste:

“Once the problems are recognized, and the deep science is understood, it is far easier to come up with solutions, which typically require the application of new technologies at a scale to address the challenge. Those technologies exist, or can be developed. Public policies will be needed to get them into place.

Fortunately, governments will not need to do all of the heavy lifting. Individual champions of solutions can make great headway in demonstrating what needs to be done. New technologies for specific problems can be proved at a small scale and then taken to global scale. Social entrepreneurs from every sector can step forward with proposed solutions. The main role of government is stand prepared, with checkbook at hand and policy brief ready, to take working solutions to the needed scale.”

If you have time to listen to just one lecture, I’d go for lecture 3. If you’re interested in making sense of how open principles can be applied to speed up action on sustainability, or to transform the pace at which the world tackles the challenges of development, you’ll find inspiration here.

I’d also recommend dipping into Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm. It’s a bit academic (read heavy work) but the insights are worth it…

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Designing from the bottom up?

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It seems we’re going through a purple patch of the ‘greening’ of design right now – from Bill McDonough’s now well know ‘Cradel to Cradel ‘ design ideology (watch the great video from TED here for a 20 minute insight) through to GM’s plug-in Chevy Volt – a car designed around its ‘green’ powertrain. The sign that sustainability has really ‘arrived’ on the designer agenda is best summed up by this month’s issue of Wallpaper* Magazine – the uber-trendy lifestyle magazine, beloved of architects and designers the world over. The May issue is crammed full of sustainability-friendly content, with editor Jeremy Langmead devoting his leader column to explaining how the online eco-edit design exhibition lead to a total re-evalutation of currating an exhibition – cutting carbon footprints and bringing things together on-line, rather than flying lots of people and things around the world.

So design is green a-g0-g0 – great – but here’s the rub: designers, who are generally billed as ‘problem solvers’, have actually created many of the problems in the world that we’re now rather belatedly looking to fix. The key question we as designers (in the wider sense) need to be asking is can we continue to ‘design’ our way out of the problem by simply making more stuff? I implore you to read Allan Chochinov’s brilliant “1000 words : A manifesto for Sustainability in Design” over at Core77 for more on this.

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“the first open source project dedicated to ecology”

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via worldchanging comes news of openecosource.org

“Our mission is to create a web base tool, which will help speed up the distribution of available knowledge and connect efforts that aim to create a sustainable environment.”

How cool is that – someone else focusing on Green From The Roots Up. Greenmonk is also about applying open source methods to greening issues, so we’ll definitely be tracking this resource, and almost certainly contributing in some form or other.

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On The Web, Green Change, Architectures of Participation and Rain-making

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One of the reason we chose the name Greenmonk Associates is that this blog is about the associated community. With no community there will be no Greenmonk. Community drives serendipity.

Example1: This morning I got into the office and found an interesting link on my Monkchips blog – as part of a comment on a completely different topic. I followed it and came to Thomas Bjelkeman, one of the leaders behind GreenOcean, a “non-profit organisation which provides education and information about sustainable energy, food and water production based around our oceans.” First post I see there refers to Mark Charmer, one of my Greenmonk partners in crime, and his great post Why Open Source marketing changes everything. The post mentions the Netherlands Water Partnership and the Unesco-IHE Institute for Water Education. These are the organisations we’re working with on the SMART Water project for India. Then the penny finally drops. Thomas is the guy Mark profiled yesterday.

A Swedish entrepreneur and technology visionary, he has worked doggedly to build a series of ventures that tackle the world’s most important problem – access to water.

While studying environmental sciences at Stockholm University, he cut his teeth helping Brit Charlie Paton build the profile of Seawater Greenhouses. The ingenious desalination system, which allows you to grow commercial-scale crops (or power air conditioning) in arid coastal regions using just sunshine and seawater, has bagged lots of awards and now just needs some enlightened punters to get on and build some big commercial projects.”

Which is where Mark comes in, with funding to try and help Thomas build a networked, rather than top down systems, opportunity. They are going to coalesce opportunities, becoming rainmakers for clean water funding.

“The problem, of course, is that many of the ‘systems’ people might build could easily, like a decade of corporate intranets before them, lie unused and unwanted. The point of an open development process is that a concept will constantly adapt to the needs and opportunities of its market – of the communities that use them. There are several communities that will matter for this and other open source projects. Crucially, how do you create something relevant and empowering for the communities themselves? Second is the ability to galvanise the NGO / development community – read hierarchy. And how do you build a base of support among the stakeholders, including NGOs, corporations and national, regional and local governments? Also how do you involve software experts who can make sure the system evolves as it needs to”

Mark and I will both be in SF next week and hopefully make some progress.

Example 2. This morning CleverClogs contacted me via instant message. After we talked about a couple of things I showed her Greenmonk. She immediately suggested some resource and people to reach out to:

Information World Review is looking into Cleantech.

Meanwhile Al Tepper compiled these resources.

Photograph of a waterdrop courtesy of Kevin Pelletier who prefers me to link here.

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What is Greenmonk Associates? Why Modbury Rocks

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Like Cote I am already somewhat bored by the green data center frenzy but I do think the broad structural changes and new methods and approaches we’re finding in the software and Internet industries are extremely relevant to the environmental problems facing us all. Open source really does change everything. So does powerful cheap social software. In some cases those things come together, such as on the WordPress blogging platform, used by this site. It seems to me that there is no way that top solutions are going to work when we face such huge challenges. Greenmonk Associates will be designed to foster and support and amplify bottom up change agency. We want to create some stars of alternative thinking. We want to track interesting initiatives.

For those of you that don’t know me I am James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, the first open source industry analyst firm. We have taken methods and approaches from open source and applied them to the market research and advisory business. I like to think we’ve been pretty successful. The skills and hopefully some of the contacts I have made over the years will hopefully get involved. Greenmonk is supposed to be a collaborative effort. Its not my baby, its our baby. My first partners are the guys over at The Movement Design Bureau. Mark and Joseph are both really smart, and are scarily obsessive about the future of movement (wait til you hear Mark start talking about walking machines and so on). Obviously transportation, mobility and environmental impacts are extremely closely linked, but the guys also do some work in related spaces. Some of that work will find its way here.<p>What is an example of a classic Greenmonk story? The town of Modbury in Dorset that just banned plastic bags outright. The supermarkets won’t do it (although they will kick in some lip service). The government won’t do it (the good old mantra of “choice”). In other words Modbury is a poster child for a grassroots revolution. Modbury rocks.

modbury

I was pleased to see Shai Agassi post today about where do big ideas come from, because it struck a chord about bottom-up change and innovation. That said, Shai is taking a pretty corporate view. Greenmonk is somewhat more interested in broader cultural changes. Its not that Big Companies won’t be a huge part of working out our environmental problems, rather that I think responsibility will be pushed to the end points.<p>People are braver than companies or governments. People are far more willing to make sacrifices than companies or governments. It is people that will come up with the ideas that are necessary to change our behaviours. And that is why GreenMonk Associates is going to be all about people.

And that’s about it for now, from an intro standpoint. If you want to readup about the Open Source water initiative, before I point to it tomorrow, then go here.