Background

Group B discussion facilitated by Adrian Stevenson.

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.

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?

Discussion notes:

• Power usage, scale and scope is questionable. Larger providers have a greater energy use
• Working from home over the internet stops you travelling and reducing your footprint
• Edgehill virtualisation of servers: fewer actual PCs so reduce power - also smaller steps like screensaver shorter timeout, go to standby rather than screensaver
• Landfill of old servers and desktops, look at upgrading to Vista which means a huge hardware turnover. Upgrade servers for upgrade's sake - contracts.
• Is Windows Vista processing-intensive in order to deliberately shift more hardware? Universities are always getting new students and they bring the latest hardware with them, so it has to be supported, so we need to have it inside the University.
• One Laptop Per child (OLPC), green, human-powered by footpump
• Apple's use of toxic elements in component usage recent controversy with Friends of the Earth
• WEEE electronic disposal of all sorts. Computers are hazardous waste.
• Disposal is a problem. Shipping to China can be economical because we get stuff here and ship it back in the same boxes, but then how do they dispose of it?
• People move things to the web because they think it should be better and new, but it's not always, let alone practical. Printing stuff is a huge waste, there's no smart printing so you get a lot of stuff that you don't necessarily want.
• Getting new servers without FPUs are more energy-efficient.
• Cultural issues about using thin clients - although this would reduce the environmental impact of desktop PCs - they have a much longer lifecycle, something like 8 years or so opposed to the three year desktop upgrade.
• Departmental control of servers could be reduced by centralisation but it's a hard political problem.
• Estates pay or the electricity, so depts. have no motivation to switch to power saving machines.
• Heating from machine rooms into the buldings, problems with extractions? Got to be an efficent re-use of heat power. Bath turned this off.
• Community - do we provide another tools to work from home? What about all departments? Seems to be OK for IT workers. Is the green thing a red herring? Your own home has its electricity and lights etc. which would otherwise be shared at the office.
• Pervasive computer use means a 24/7 computer power. All tech devices need chargers, etc. and a lot of people just leave them plugged in and turned on all the time.
• Internet can't possibly be a green technology - there's no true offsetting - it's only the power generation that we can really save on so how can we improve there?.
• Eco-friendly hosting services.
• Are we buying more stuff because it's online, but then you're not travelling in to town go actual shopping.
• Tesco delivery -
• Supermarkets have started experimenting to use electric powered-trucks, converting all old milk float factories to produce them.
• Video conferencing rather than travelling? Still not very popular, especially for larger events - still not really very good.
• What would we be doing if the internet wasn't here? It's an enabler for things that wouldn't exist without it, so is it worth it anyway?
• Does the long-tail enabling of the internet means that there's more demand and consumption or has it been displaced from somewhere else?
• eBay is an enabler of extra sales so re-use on that scale is great.
• Digital music purchases mean fewer CDs thrown away but does this offset the purchase of digital devices?
• Can institutions influence the 24/7 expectations/gg use by having nightly downtime which makes people expect it and start doing it themselves?
• Measurement is the problem. AMEE is aproject to help measure this and is installable inside institutions.

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.

Discussion Notes:

*

• 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