On Sustainable Cities & Towns

Tags: Dunkerque, Exido, Green IT strategies, ICLEI, Sustainable Cities and Towns, Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign

Dunkerque Grand Littoral, France,  co-organised  with ICLEI Local Government on Sustainability and with Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign, had the honour of hosting the 6th European Sustainable Cities and Towns conference. For three days, over 1800 mayors. elected officials, techical experts and representatives of EU institutions, national governments, business and NGO´s were present to debate, exchange and challenge ideas and experiences about the sustainable city of the 21 st century. This excellently performed conference, with high service and information contents,  marked an additional step in the concrete mobilisation of local governments and their significant role in the field of sustainable development. Local government have a distinct political will and a territorial commitment that place them in a prime position for a true change of practice. 

TCO Development contributed to the conference by a presentation of a study of how local governments can work with greening their IT, under the title ” Green IT strategies in Swedish local authorities can save up to 700 million Euro per year”. The presentation was based on a recent study of 35 out of 280 Swedish local authorities, performed by Exido, Sweden.

Read more about this interesting conference on www.dunkerque.org
Read about ICLEI on http://iclei.org/;
about Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign on http://www.sustainable-cities.eu/
Read more about Exido`s work on greening IT in Local Authorities on  http://www.exido.se/GronIT/

Ashes as environmental test

Tags: greenhouse gas, infrastructure, video meetings, volcano

The consequences of the islandic volcanic eruptions will be enormous for a long time and we are horribly reminded of the fragility of our infrastructure, so will built up and so abrubtly crashed. Within a few hours the Island volcano has managed to do what neither governments, climat activists nor anybody else has done so far – to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases caused by the human being.

According to facts the volcano does not emit any bigger amounts of CO2 itself. Probably it will even chill down the so far too high global temperature. Though how  will the damage from toxic emissions effect on humans and nature? Positive reactions are seen on the usage of video meetings instead of flying to each other on physical meetings.

Other tecnical innovations will prosper. So even if volcano eruptions are not typical examples, this one has clearly started product and service development towards virtual meetings.

Earth Hour Every Day

Tags: Eath Hour, energy saving function, switch off computer

Reminder!

Earth Hour will soon occur, on Saturday 27 of March from 8.30 pm, we are all recommended to shut down our lighting for one hour. A good recommendation is to practice an Earth Hour every day, during lunch or other convenient time. And do not forget also to switch off your computer.
Read how to activiate energy saving function on your computer.

Good ideas in the shower

Tags: breaks, communication, continous partial attention, email apnea, Linda Stone, long-term memory, media, Twitter

Do you have problems keeping up with your Twitter flow?
Well one of the reasons is that more than 50 million Twitters are messaged a day!  According to Kevin Weil, head analyst at Twitter, the use of the Twitter service has exploded. Extra services like “Manage Twitter” has started, as a device to clearing  the users you are following.

What do you do while reading this text? Or looking up from the newspaper, watching the TV in the background?  Or reading with one eye a text message, just arrived in your cell phone? Or updating your Facebook status? Thinking quickly about an email you should have answered yesterday? Yes, you probably take  your time with a lot of little things as you are trying to focus on reading an article.

This is how our media and communications processes often look today. This form of “wandering attention”, that comes from the way we always are available, is called “continuous partial attention”,  by the American scientist and technology thinker Linda Stone. She is a writer and consultant who coined this phrase in 1998.  Stone also coined “email apnea” in 2008, showing that people tend to keep their breath while e-mailing, starting biochemical processes in the body, in the long run resulting in stress related illnesses.

But even if  the ever shared attention is stressful for us Linda Stone and other researchers have found that there are advantages in being  distracted or taking small breaks when we are focused on a task. Short breaks from job may give new energy and new ideas about how to solved tasks.  According to study results from researcher Michael Kane, University of North Carolina, our focus moves from what we are doing about one third of the time. It indicates that this behavior probably plays an important part  in our brains. Other studies also show that when we are daydreaming,  or allowing the mind to fly freely for a while,  brain regions associated with savings in long-term memory are activated, helping the brain to save information better. When the mind flaps away in non mental demanding breaks it activates the  parts of the brain that helps us to solve problems. So when we look out of the window thinking of nothing special or standing in the shower, where we are not connected, our brain  keeps doing advanced creative work. This is something completely different from continious partial attention!

 So think about  how you breathe when unopened e-mails fill the screen. And begin to see Facebook and looking out of the windows not as time wasters or signs of poor work ethic but as important parts of your job performance. For even though most of us cannot take a three-hour walk in the woods during working hours, maybe a bit wandering surfing through the  images from your friend’s bachelor party can make you a little more creative and efficient.

 I quote Linda  from her web: “Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with phamaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.”

Read more at www.lindastone.net

Filling the search field

Tags: Google earth, journal Room, keyboard, search engins, search field, skyskrapers, streets, the cloud

In the Architect journal Room I read Sam Sundberg´s chronicle about something I found utmost thoughtful. Sam is author and outdoor journalist and he has reflected over the symbol for the 2000 century. This is his conclusion:

If a picture is to conclude the 2000 century it will neither be the crasched twin towers, nor the forests of bragging skyscrapers in Shanghai or Dubai. No, the symbol is the empty search field. We meet it daily in Google, Wikipedia, Spotify, Eniro, the Pirate Bay and everywhere on the web where we are looking for something: the persistently pocking marker. “What do you search for” it asks. “What do you do here?” “What do you want“?

Instead of moving about in the city, chasing along streets and buildings with our eyes, we are seated at our keyboard, staring at the search field. Instead of groping about in countless stores chasing for a good laptop we search for it on the web, cross referring among search engines and sites for price comparisions.

Smart architects have realized that the city space is changing in its margins and thus design and build houses in two dimensions, on our web browsers!  Zaha Hadid has reached the most advanced solutions in his Google Earth-architecture – the buildings look better from above than in street level.

Whith a huge investment on smart phones they create a constant presence in the streets. The building The Cloud,  proposed at the Olympic arena in 2012, is an internet time observation platform. It takes the observer on a strange sky trip which is full of information noise. This is the empty search field in a physical shape.  Because, when climbing up its twisted, windling  stairs, blinking and lost, we ask ourself:  why are we not at home watching the olympic games in our web browser?

Good habits

Tags: earth hour, energy consumption, WWF, you and the planet

Earth Hour for 2010 will take place on Saturday 27 March at 8.30 pm to 9.30 pm. Closing down most of your energy consumtion for one hour every year is supposed to contribute to a clear and measurable global energy saving. This will be one of the good initiatives taken and will be a continued call to action. It will, I think, also be an eye opener to more good habits, by you, for you and the planet. 

Welcome also to Earth Hour 2010 Conference, organized by WWF, World Wide Found for Nature, on 23 March at 1.00 pm – 5.30 pm, in the Golden Hall, Stockholm City Hall. The conference will present a series of pioneering examples of how business, politics and public sectors together can solve the global climate challenge.

If you can read Swedish,  more on WWF site

For more information check also the official website for Earth Hour

Green Guide in your Iphone

Tags: Green Guide, Iphone, Swedish Society for Nature Conservation

Many people want to act environmentally smart today, but they do not know how to choose the right product when standing in the store. Now they can get quick and educational information directly into the phone at the time of purchase.

Green guide, intitiated by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, is now avaliable  for IPhone users. You can choose between green products and in this way make your life a bit greener.

read more: http://www.naturskyddsforeningen.se/gron-guide/gron-guide-i-mobilen/

Green All in One Usability

Tags: All in One PC, Lenovo, single unit, space conserving, TCO Certified

All in One PCs – a computer and display in a single unit – are a great way to get the performance of a desktop PC without the cable clutter of a separate CPU and monitor. The compact design of an AIO also enables the user to conserve space on the desktop.  Ideal where space is limited or when the user wants to maintain a clean look on the work surface or having a free space under the work surface.

TCO Certified is your assurance that your AIO delivers all the visual performance you expect from a freestanding monitor – outstanding color, luminance and resolution. It fulfills some of the toughest environmental criteria around – from strict limits on hazardous substances and energy consumption, to designed for recycling. It fulfils a brand commitment to socially responsible manufacturing practices. Add to this the criteria for safety, usability and low emissions and you can be sure that every product bearing the TCO Certified label is among the very best.
AIO is the latest addition to the family of TCO Certified for PCs. First out to certify AIO is Lenovo, hereby congratulated.

Read more: http://www.tcodevelopment.com/

Green Software Development

Tags: collaboration, environmental impact, local suppliers, locally developed software, slow consulting, SMC, Software, software costs, software outsourcing, software waste

Today we have the honor to welcome our guest bloggers, Mr Måns Sandström and Mr Joakim Holm, Adaptiv Sthlm AB.  Read their interesting blog about how to green Software and make IT more usable.

Re-interpreting Green IT for Software Development

When reading about Green IT you may get the impression that itʼs only about IT hardware products or, possibly, manufacturing services related to hardware. We submit that this is not true. There is  also a large quantity of services surrounding the software running on those IT products.

One such example is own domain: Software development, the design and development of tailor-made or off-the- shelf software. It seems obvious to us that the process you employ when designing the software as well as the actual design of the software has a major environmental impact. Therefore, it saddens us to report that as software practitioners and craftsmen we see IT resources (people, computers, energy) employed in a wasteful manner every day.

#1 Waste: Creating Unwanted Solutions

One great waste in software development is all the energy spent creating functions and products that nobody uses. One study from the Standish Group [JJ] showed that on an average 19% of the features in a given system was used rarely – 45% never. That is approximately 2/3 of the total number of functions. The number of software developers in the U.S. alone (2008) was estimated to 1.3 million. Hence, we may estimate the total number of developers globally to 5-10 million (and growing rapidly). Can you imagine 2/3 of them are wasting time, money, and energy creating ”stuff” nobody really wanted? The need for improved collaboration between clients and suppliers is acute.

In recent years, outsourcing software development to low-wage countries has become popular with larger companies. What these companies fail to understand is that outsourcing software development not only makes the communication slower, but also worse. The possibility of achieving that vital collaboration between customers, users and developers is severely hampered. Consequently, outsourcing works as a catalyst for the problem of creating unwanted solutions. This may be illustrated by a simple thought experiment: What if the situation was reversed? Imagine that you are a Swedish software developer given the task of developing a ticket system for an Indian travel company. What difficulties would you encounter?

#2 Waste: Creating Unwanted Problems

Another major waste today is that we almost always develop systems of poor quality. Keep in mind that software quality is not only what the user perceives, the external quality, but also the internal quality, how defect-free it is and how easy it is for future developers to understand and maintain the product. This latter part is what drives the rapid increase in cost of software maintenance.

Back in school, we were taught that there are no error-free programs. Since then we have learned that it is indeed possible to write programs that behave correctly. Contrary to what people often intuitively believe, it is both cheaper and faster to develop high-quality software. This is sometimes called the General Principle of Software Quality [SMC]. You see, the time spent on fixing bugs is always greater than the time spent on avoiding them. Quite unnecessarily, suppliers deliver low-quality software in a haste, thinking that they are saving money, when in fact the opposite is true.

“Slow Consulting”

We believe that Green IT should be given a higher priority in procurement in general, including procurement of IT services like software development. There are huge, hidden costs of outsourcing development – not to mention the effects on our environment. Outsourced software development is riddled with long lead times, misunderstood needs, and failure to change direction as we learn. This is of course in addition to more wellknown costs like increased documentation needs, coordination, meetings and travels. How many companies take the effect on the environment into account when they plan their outsourcing? We think they should.

Furthermore, we believe that priority should be given to selecting local suppliers for software development. On the surface this may seem more expensive, but when taking the hidden costs mentioned above into account, the ROI calculation for outsourcing looks less attractive.

“Slow Food” is a movement focusing on using local produce, craft skills and health thinking in cooking. We can use the same thinking in software development. We thought about calling our ideas “Slow Consulting”, but we would probably run the risk of a less flattering interpretation. However, it is evident to us that certain goods and services may work well from a distance while others, like developing businesses or software, do not. We are convinced that a locally developed software product is both right for the environment and yield the best results.

Måns Sandström & Joakim Holm Adaptiv Sthlm AB

PS If you are interested in reading our proposals on how to deal with these challenges, read here  (in Swedish). References: [JJ]” Johnson, J. (2002), Keynote speech, XP 2002, Sardinia, Italy [SMC]” McConnell, S. (2004), Code Complete, 2nd ed, pp. 474-475

Universal charge of your mobile phone and the planet

Tags: carbon dioxide emissions, charger, energy saving, Mobile phones, usability

According to an agreement with GSMA, an operator association within TU, International Telecommunication Union, there is now a great chance for all mobile phone manufacturers to equip their phones with a charge function through micro- USB, according to an agreement called UCS, Universal Changing Solution.

This is great!!  The goal with UCS is to decrease the manufacturing of chargers by 50% per year and be far more energy efficient.  This will  decrease the carbon dioxide emissions.  This will also in the future eliminate all specific chargers as you will be able to charge your phone directly through your computer.  And our Usability habits will surely change in a positive direction.

read more www.gsmworld.com/our-work/mobile_planet/universal_charging_solution.htm