During 18th of January 2012, many sites on internet, including wikipedia, shutdown in protest against the SOPA and PIPA legislations (+ info). Internet as we know it, looks as it does because many of the founding technologies were created by idealistic people sharing a hacker ethic, that believed that information should be free. Internet and the web is built on open technologies and transparency and that’s one of the reasons why it has allowed the innovation and changes that it has brought. This hacker ethic at the root of internet is challenged by governments with legislations as SOPA, PIPA or FRA in Sweden, trying to curtail freedom and privacy in the name of security, and by companies trying to own and profit from the technology by creating closed systems and taking your data. I believe that a sustainable internet is an internet that is true to the “hacker” values that created it, that values openness, freedom of speech, privacy. Closing Wikipedia for a day showed how we now depend on the tools that these values helped creating. We should help keeping them alive.

I organized together with Hannes the Greenhackathon that took place 21-22 October 2011 at the former reactor hall R1 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. It was financed thanks to EIT ICT Labs. The idea of a hackathon is to get together groups of programmers and work for an extended period of time (in this case 24 hours straight) making things (in this case things related to sustainability). It is part competition, part of social event. The time limit seem short, but it actually provide a time of intense focus that usual office schedules don’t allow. The limit also helps focusing in getting things done and delivering a working prototype (think Tim Ferris  & Parkinson’s law). The event was a success, with around thirty participants coming from a variety of backgrounds and places. The quality of the results was great:

The two winner contributions were James Smith from England, who found an fun way of displaying carbon emissions in Minecraft, and Petri Kola and Mikko Heikkinen from Finland, who built a Chrome extension automatically ”injecting” CO2 data into websites. With their tool Remember Carbon, browsing last-minute-flights will not just be about the price but also about the climate impact.

My own contribution was the site Should I buy this? a “decision making tool” for consumers. I also worked with Sourcequest and did the graphic design and illustrations.

You can see the rest of the results here.

The location in the R1 reactor hall made a big difference. With a bare, post-industrial feeling, underground so not even mobile signals reached there, it was the perfect place for “hacking”. Also representative to make a event about sustainability in a refurbished nuclear reactor. From nuclear to sustainability, from heavy to virtual solutions.

In my opinion this event shows how the hacker ethic (understood in a general way as defined by Himanen) can contribute to sustainability, bringing the concepts of:

• Sharing, community and collaboration: sustainability is not going to be solve by anyone alone, share the results, work together. People work in teams, and a lot of cross-pollination happened between different teams and participants.
• Openness: information should be free. Most of the applications are based on open data and released as open source. Openness triggers innovation.
• Hands-On Imperative: doing things are necessary to understand and change things, move beyond just words. The teams created something functional in a limited amount of time.
• World Improvement: the main motivation of doing things is to improve the world, not commercial ones (but you can still make money “by accident”). The teams were motivated for creating a positive contribution.

A main problem, as my colleague Pargman wrote about, it’s a paradox to have a “green” event where people fly to participate. This is the same problem we have with sustainable conferences, research meetings and so on, and it’s a wicked one. You want to do things to change, but almost everything you do in our industrial society will have an impact in energy and resources. This is a discussion that I would like to develop later on. In any case, the 6.6 tons of CO2 are something not to ignore, and not something that anything that was created could offset. Some solutions may be to just organize local events, so developers can attend in their city, or virtual events to just participate globally. In any of the cases, there is loss of the social part and new connections made.

Now we are working towards replicating the event in other cities, starting with London and Helsinki, and thinking about the organization of the next one in Stockholm next year. If you are interested, follow us or post us a message!

Footprinted is the project I’ve been working on lately, this is the press release that Bernhard at CESC wrote:

Environmental impact information is difficult to access, thus missing much of its potential influence on sustainability decisions. It is time to apply the concept of open data to environmental information.

Sustainability decisions need to rely on the results of quantitative environmental research. Commonly, these results are found in closed, often expensive databases based on proprietary software. Alternatively, environmental information is presented in text documents (pdf-files) which cannot be processed.

- Environmental impact information should be accessible and easy to use. That’s why we have developed Footprinted.org, says Jorge Zapico from the KTH Centre for Sustainable Communication (CESC).

Footprinted is a web-based service applying the concept of open linked data to environmental impact information. In Footprinted, environmental research results are available free of charge. Data is stored in a format that can easily be processed to develop new services on top of the data. Everybody can create, present, share and reuse the environmental impact information. Different sources of research are presented in a transparent way. Unlike closed databases Footprinted does not apply a unique answer approach.

- It is a bazaar of environmental impact information, rather than a cathedral, explains Jorge Zapico.

In its current version, Footprinted provides a repository of life cycle assessments of different materials, products and processes. The next step in Footprinted’s development is to include the footprints of individual consumer products.

Footprinted is the result of a design research process within the project Data Driven Sustainability and is currently available in beta version at www.footprinted.org. Footprinted is a collaboration between the KTH Centre for Sustainable Communications, Sourcemap Inc and MIT Media Lab. Footprinted is to be presented on 6 October 2011 at the EnviroInfo Conference in Ispra/Italy.

For the next months I am a visiting PhD at MIT Media Lab. I’m working as a part of the Sourcemap team, developing Open Sustainability Info. We have been developing this project together for some time, and while I’m here we will work intensively to release a stable version. I’m very excited to be working with this team, I will post more information about Sourcemap and what we are doing.

See my personal page at http://media.mit.edu/~zapico

Greenalytics.org is a web services I developed under my research project.  The idea was to use existing data from Google Analytics such as how many visitors the web had, how much traffic, from which countries… to make an estimate of its energy use and carbon footprint.Details about the calculation can be found here. The first prototype was released more or less one year ago in 2010 and the more advance current version was released in December 2010. You’re welcome to test the application, right now is by invitation, just write “greenmywebsite” as invitation code The code is also available as open source if you want to have a look.

The aims of this intervention are:

• The obvious one is to make visible the impact of websites. Creating content on internet seems to not have any impact on the environment, it’s just virtual! It’s true that the impact of a website compared with other type of activities is small. But the combined impact of all the servers, the network infrastructure and the users’ computers using electricity is quite considerable, and that not including the energy and environmental impact from the production and disposal of the hardware. More information about the energy impact of internet can be found at this report from my colleagues at CESC. Greenalytics calculations, even if they are an approximation, they are a reminder that all those small actions sum up, that website do have an environmental footprint. Making the problem visible doesn’t solve it, but it’s a first step.
• The second aim, and the most important from my research perspective, is to be a proof of concept for data driven sustainability, for how new technologies can make working with environmental data more dynamic, real-time and participatory. It shows how using existing information sources new data can be created dynamically. This mash-up approach is a base for the development of the web in the last years, but it has been slow to reach other type of information such as sustainability data. When I talked about a mashup approach for sustainability data, it sounded abstract and difficult to understand. Being able to show a real life application, that show in praxis what I discuss in my theory, makes things much more easily.

These duality is central in my action research approach. I create applications, both as a tool for research, but also for having (trying to) a real world impact.

What now? Well, apart from some technical problems inherent to a prototype, the application is working, the main problems / possibilities:

• It just point out the problem, it doesn’t provide any solution or possible action. Providing tips and actions such as carbon offseting can be a possibility.
• The calculation is based in many assumptions. Calculating the environmental impact of websites is a complicated matter, specially without having access to the servers, using only web statistics. The calculation is the best possible we could do, but it can be improved. Letting the users to change parameters is one of the options that need to be implemented, for instance the servers efficiency or if they are using renewable sources for the electricity.

I will release a second version during this year. Help and ideas are always welcome!

I have owned an ereader (a sony 505) for more than three years, I was an early adopter (specially for here in Europe) and defender of the technology, promoting its paperless and it’s implications for a dematerialization of knowledge and culture. After three years, thinks have changed quite a lot, ereaders are more mainstream, and there is a general feeling that the future of publishing will follow that direction. So what have I experienced during these three years?

• First, that the environmental gain of going paperless is not as straightforward as one may think. As my collegues at CESC have studied, you need to read more than 33 book until the impact per book is lesser than a paper version. I have read more than 33 books on it, but I’m quite a extreme reader, reading up to 50 books (not counting academic reading) per year.
• The sony reader, as the kindle, is made for books (meaning literature). Using it for reading academic papers or other documents has not worked for me. The iPad on the other hand works great for articles (while it does not work for books).
• It is not as subjected to obsolescence as other technologies. The e-ink screens are still the same and the reading function doesn’t change. It could have wifi and touchscreen or color as new models, but reading is reading, and the actual e-ink models perform good on it. The battery on the other hand is not in as good shape as before, that will probably end the lifespan of my device in some years.
• The final observation is typical for any technology. There is an accumulation, not a substitution. It’s like the TV not substituting the radio. I keep buying paper books, just a few less than before, but there hasn’t been a substitution. I always liked books, I always did, they are perfectly self-contained artifacts, I don’t see them disappearing any time soon.

In the end,  the content is what matter most, so I usually go for the easiest, most accessible solution: sometimes is going to the bookstore (having a bookstore in the same building so I can go in slippers helps..), sometimes downloading an ebook. If equally  convenient and same price, the balance usually tips towards a physical book (as they are nice to have, and feel more worth than an immaterial good). Probably the balance will keep moving towards ebooks as accessibility improves and prices drop. Let’s see how it keeps developing.

Earlier posts on ereading.

I wrote this review in June 2010 as request from the Journal of Industrial Ecology. In the end it wasn’t published, so I thought it will be relevant to publish it as an online review:

Greening through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability. Bill Tomlinson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010, 210 pp, ISBN 978-0-262-01393-2

The use of information technologies as tools for solving environmental issues is a growing area. Bill Tomlinson’s book can be seen as the first comprehensive effort in this area being published for the broader audience. This is a welcome publication and it will help in consolidating this growing interdisciplinary research.

The book starts with an overview describing the research area. The author chose to use the term Green IT as an umbrella term for all the interactions between IT and environmental issues, and with focus on the proactive use of IT for helping in environmental issues. This choice of terminology is not an obvious one as Green IT usually refers just to the greening of IT itself. The subtitle “information technology for environmental sustainability” is less catchy than Green IT and it is not used throughout the text, but in my opinion it describes better the research area.

The book’s central discourse is introduced in this first chapter. The author argues that environmental problems are caused because there is a gap in the time, space and complexity scales. Environmental problems are broad, big and slow while we humans have a narrow, fast and small scale for them. IT is presented as the opportunity of bridging this gap, as it compresses time space and complexity. This argument will be used as a core idea trough the whole text.

The next three chapters are an introduction to the problem area from three different perspectives: Environmental, Human and Technological. Starting from a standard but necessary introduction to today’s most important environmental themes, Tomlinson discusses the role of humans and technology in these problems. The author takes a social constructivist position, arguing the position that technology is value free and it is just a multiplier of human intent, while  it is also pointed  out that technologies are designed, providing affordances to the users.

Next, the author proceeds to analyze the impact of IT on the environment. The first order negative effects are presented: GHG emissions, e-waste, resource depletion, toxic substances, and the multiplier effects in other emissions. This analysis lacks a bit of depth and it’s weak in references. The positive effects are then argued, followed by a comprehensive survey on existing examples, going through most of the existing discussion and projects on the use of IT in agriculture food, energy, manufacturing, transportation, buildings and IT itself.

The next three chapters deal with specific areas and are developed around the author’s own projects. The first explored opportunity is education, and focus on the informal acquiring of environmental skills. The example presented is Ecoraff, a simulation tool for learning about restoration ecology in a rainforest environment. The author presents the point that simulation broadens the horizons of the users in time and space, letting the users experiment without consequences. The second area is personal change, where the possibilities for changing behavior are explored. The author presents the project Trackulous, a tool for tracking personal behavior. Having accountability is argued as the first step for behavioral change. It encourages the users to live a “well informed life” basing their decisions on quantitative information. The third area is collective action. It develops the idea of using IT for helping people to get together to reduce their impact. The project presented is GreenScanner, a community driven database of sustainability ratings accessible through the mobile phone. The book is then wrapped up by bringing together all the presented ideas using the concept of horizons and expanding the ideas from the first chapter.

In conclusion this book provides a good introduction to the emerging field of IT for environmental sustainability. The main criticism is its lack of a broader selection of references. Most cited projects and texts are coming from computer science, human computer interaction and other technical fields, and the text misses references to much of the interesting work coming from fields such as sustainability studies, environmental analysis or ecological economics. In any case the text that Tomlinson have put together is comprehensive, and it has the potential of becoming a reference book for this research area. I would say is a recommended reading for everyone interested on the possibilities of IT in sustainability.

I have a 2004 Powerbook (G4 Aluminum, 15″) that my parents are using. It’s a beautiful machine, the aluminum body doesn’t show wear and the minimalist design is timeless. The only hardware problem is the battery that died some years ago, but as it is used mostly as a stationary it does not matter.

The problems begun when I had to reinstall the operative system. I hadn’t touched the system and it was still running OS X Panther (10.3). I reinstalled with the original disks. And then the problems started.

• There weren’t any programs available for OS X 10.3, no skype, no firefox, no flash, nothing. In the end I could find some legacy installers from external websites, but I couldn’t restore it to the original state. The firefox available for Panther is so outdated that many websites complain or don’t show correctly.
• I thought about installing a new OS, but the new Snow Leopard is just for intel macs, not available for old PPCs. What about buying Leopard or Tiger that could install in PPC? Apple don’t sell them anymore.
• Alright, trying Open Source. I installed Ubuntu for PPC. But most applications wouldn’t install on it.

So, suddenly I have a perfectly functional computer that it cannot really be used just because Apple decided to not support their own technology anymore. Software obsolescence.

I would still try to fix the computer, find some copy of Tiger that I can still, but that would be just delaying its death one year, as PPC or dual applications are not being supported anymore. My first thought and probably the response that any user would get from support is: buy a new one. Laptops mean life is around 3 years, with 6 years this one has have a long life.

But if we take in account that most of the environmental impact of the computer is connected to hardware production, shortening its lifespan and promoting buying new equipment is not the most sustainable strategy. This is quite connected to the Make It Green guideline: Support legacy systems, don’t design software just for the latest technologies and keep pushing the users towards buying new stuff.

* CC Photo from Redjar

I presented two full papers at Enviroinfo2010 in Bonn (International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection).

1. Carbon.to: Improving the understanding of carbon dioxide information

About carbon.to

2. Greenalytics: A tool for mashup life cycle assessment of websites.

Presenting Greenalytics.org

A preview version of my short article “Environmental metrics: the main opportunity of ICT for Industrial Ecology” has been published at the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

The main point explored is that making environmental flows (such as energy use, resource consumption, waste streams…) visible as the main basic opportunity for ICT for environmental sustainability. Once the flows are visible, they can be accounted, they can be optimized, changes can be monitored, feedback can be provided to the users, results can be communicated.

See the abstract. If you are interested and can’t download it, send me a mail.