Posts Tagged ‘sustainable IT’

BASG: Peer Pressure The Gate To Way Social Change

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011 by jreilly

Last Wednesday,  the G2 Team rolled up as usual to get everything set up, for this month’s BASG (Boston Area Sustainability Group).  For those of you who aren’t familiar, BASG is G2’s way to help promote sustainable business choices in the community. We get a speaker to come and share sustainable business practices; and it’s free; there’s networking; and it’s at the House of Blues.

Anywho, this BASG we got to hear from  Susan Hunt Stevens. Stevens is the Founder/CEO of Practically Green, an online service that motivates people to make healthy green changes in their lives using the power of social networks and gaming techniques to drive real-life behavior change.

Steven business model brings up a great point. Social media has created a massive platform for peer pressure.  Stevens talked about sharing individual habits via social media and how internet has expanded the reach of our communication and the impact of our choices.   Where “liking” others habits on facebook is really building communities and updating your status is creating social norms.  So the kicker here is, if everyone is tweeting about their sustainable habits, aren’t you going to feel guilty that when you realize you’re the only one who’s not integrating sustainable lifestyle choices? Or the only one on facebook that doesn’t like Bostons new Green Labs? Or when you’re the only one not tagged in the photos from the last Green Drinks?

Just saying, thanks to technology, peer pressure is changing one guilty non-recycler at a time.



Datacenter Powered by Bull****

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 by Jeff

I came across this article and thought it was funny as well as intriguing that a datacenter could be powered by…crap. HP is studying this issue although they say they are not currently exploring where to put this technology to work. Cullen Bash, a member of HP’s Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab team says, “It can be done today.” I initially thought that the majority of US dairy farms are located in the Midwest but after doing some quick research I found that California is where the large farms (2,000+ cows) dominate and is the Nation’s largest milk producing state. I thought that is a perfect situation as most of the tech giants, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Intel and HP are headquartered in the Golden State so proximity wouldn’t be an issue. Although these dairy farms aren’t located in the Silicon Valley they wouldn’t be relatively too far away either. I also thought it would be a great application to use for underdeveloped countries because generally speaking their economies are agriculturally based so it would be great synergy helping to diversify and grow an economy using none other than the power of BS. http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/05/18/hp-envisions-cow-powered-data-centers?page=0%2C0