Background

Not much time is available for the discussion groups, so please try and focuss on the activities.

Please ensure that a note-keeper is available for your group. The note-keeper will ideally keep notes on this wiki.

Discussion Group Session 1

Exercise 1: Green Issues

Your discussion group should begin by listing what you see as the main green issues relating to the Internet. You might want to list these under the following headings and consider some of the following ideas:

• Carbon Footprint (a generic term used to determine the environmental impact of an activity) e.g. Pollution, energy usage, daily working/office and home environment, travel, using raw materials in manufacturing and maintaining equipment.
• Sustainability (preserving what we have without loss of lifestyle) e.g. progress and development, economics, expansion, disposable or reusable, recycling, lower expectations, change of lifestyle, or just change of daily habits, efficiency, etc.
• Community/Cultural issues (people with shared interests getting opportunity to network, share ideas and solve common problems) e.g. finding out about and acting upon opportunities, tools for sharing ideas/concepts, language problems/issues? – communication, jargon busting, global vs local issues, motivation, documents on the Web, preservation issues, green fascism vs user requirements, education, etc.

* how do we know the green credentials of web organisations whose services we use?
* Barrier : people save paper but they're wary if
* Uncontious archiving - people keeping things because they feel they "ought to" - should organisations take responsibility for curtailing use? Tape storage is a solution.
* DRM could be green - self deleting files?
* Curations & Information management needs to be better.
* CO2 emissions in UK from IT same as from airlines.

Exercise 2: Barriers

Consider what are the main barriers to solving these issues.

• Is the Internet a green technology? Does it create more problems than it solves?
• What tools can help us solve these issues?
• What technology/s could be used to help make the expansion of the Web more sustainable?
• With respect to the web, what cultural issues could be addressed to improve morale in the workplace, and in your community, does it need improving?
• What are the barriers that need to be overcome in your area of work in order to reduce your environmental impact and save money?

* Getting green information out of service providers.
* Organisations like large amounts of stored data because they can use if for profiling, marketing etc.
* Universities don't provide individual accounts for electricity etc - this would help provide some incentive
* Both organisational and personal responsibility & education needed.
* Self re-redgulating nature of internet is actually a barrier as easy for service providers to avoid it.
* We as eduction providers have an opportunity to help with this - educate incoming students about green credentials of providers, invite speakers to talk about green credentials.
* opportunities for linking cost saving and green-ness going begging - link often not highlighted.

Discussion Group Session 2

Building on day 1

In your group revisit the issues that you identified on day 1. Seek to identify solutions to these challenges. What is holding us back from creating a greener Web? Can you put together a simple Web services environmental policy? Please provide your feedback on the wiki. Add your notes here.

* Jeff Barr - offering apparently limitless server capacity, an example of what we're talking about.
* One thing that we could do is encourage people - on a voluntary basis - to continually encourage people to sort out their storage.
* Name-and-shame, league tables etc, public measure of who's doing best in green inititatives.
* Could use IWMW community as a basis of pushing through some sort of policy, target etc which would effectively be national.
* Get everyone to submit an audit to a central resource to plunder for ideas on green initiatives.
* Difficult to measure actual power consumption because we get everything through university but can measure other things - paper, machines buying rates, extensive latent capcity etc.
* Go back to Universities and ask higher authorities to crack down on wasteful project-based spending on useless new machines (when there are good old ones around).
* Students (and some staff!) often want to use machines/bandwidth for frivolous purposes - why not offer them separate (cheaper) server/network for this and thereby we can cut back on our (often expensive and wasteful) "serious" service capacity - one step back, two steps forward. University of Kent.
* Another measure - switching off lights, machines etc etc. Desktop lamps for people who like light rather than switching on office lights.
* Talk to people in student union about educating students on green issues in IT - they seem aware of green issues in transport etc, but not CO2 from IT services and impact of "endless" storage and 24/7 services.
* Finding out some of the facts we wanted at the start of the session - green credentials of service providers, power consumption of IT equipment etc etc - and sharing it through IWMW community.
* Asking commercial people who come to IWMW conferences to provide the green information we wanted.
Further notes from Shirley Keane - and apologies for any repetition:
* JISC guidelines - see if there are any - a possible starting point
* university policies - enhance existing green policies, or start a discussion to get the ball rolling
* audit once, make changes, audit again to measure results
* influence young people while at university into a new mindset
* outsource server use, if appropriate
* more videoconferencing
* more efficient code, which leads to fewer servers being required
* deleting unnecessary web pages
* use print style sheets for better use of paper