I gave a seminar yesterday about my ideas of how internet could be more sustainable, both from an environmental perspective, both also from a personal / society perspective.
Here is the presentation:

Information and communications technologies and sustainability are two areas that seems quite unrelated. But it is not so and there is a growing interest in their interplay. As a very interdisciplinary and new area there is still not a consensus on a research field definition nor very defined boundaries between different parts of the research area. I was going to write a longer scientific papers on this, but I found more appropiate to publish it as a short scientific blog post hoping to get more interactive response.

I will present my view on the subject, dividing the current research into three areas, one of them (ICT4D) that is quite established, while the other two are a bit more blurred together. As presented in the graphic below I do believe that there are common ground between these three.

ICT4Development

ICT4D refers to the application of information and communication tools for social and economic development, usually focusing on developing countries. [1]
Some of the topics ICT4D works with:
•    Providing ICT infrastructure in low income countries.
•    Developing digital literacy and closing the digital divide (technological access gap).
•    E-learning, e-health, e-government, e-commerce for developing countries.
•    Increase awareness in social and ethical issues.
ICT4D can be seen as the study of the positive second grade impact of ICT in social and economical sustainability [2].
Interesting literature can be found in: [1, 3, 4]

Green IT
Green IT (or green computing) refers to the quantification and reduction of the ICT equipment environmental impact. It can be defined as the study of reducing the negative first grade impact of ICT in environmental sustainability [2]. Some of the topics included in Green IT are:
•    Virtualization of equipment
•    Materials recycling
•    Design for disassembly
•    Energy management
Interesting literature can be found in: [5 ,6]

ICT For Sustainability

With Information and Communication Technologies for Environmental Sustainability I refer to the research that studies the use of ICT in solving the environmental challenges of sustainability. It focuses on the possibilities, on the positive indirect impacts of ICT in environmental sustainability and the positive structural and behavioral effects [2]. It looks at ecological problems that undermine sustainability such as climate change, eutrophication, biodiversity loss, acidification, water scarcity, air and water pollution.

•  Optimization and savings using computers
•  System changes due to use ICT that reduce energy and material uses
•  Society and behavioral changes due to ICT use

Interesting literature can be found in: [2, 7,8,9,10]

Conclusions

I find it is important to clarify the vocabulary and have a common ground when speaking about a research area. The terms green IT and the work studying the use of ICT for reducing ecological challenges as global warming are usually mixed. Conferences and reports get ambiguous titles, and the different terms are usually part of the discussions. I would like to put my  small contribution and point out my views in the differences between those areas. The focus of green IT in reducing the impact of ICT hardware is in my opinion a needed condition if we are to use ICT as tools for sustainable change. But it is just a part in the broader study of the complex relationship between information technology and sustainability.

References

[1]    United Nations. 2007. GAID Series 1: Foundations of the Global Alliance for ICT and Development. Edited by Aliye P. Celik. New York.

[2]    Berkhout, F. Hertin J. 2004. De-materialising and re-materialising: digital technologies and the environment. On Futures 36 (2004) 903-920.

[3]    Development divides and digital bridges: why ICT is key for achieving the MDGs (Shoji Nishimoto and Radhika Lal, Commonwealth Finance Ministers Reference Report, 2005.)

[4]    The Case for Technology for Developing Regions. Eric Brewer, Michael Demmer, Bowei Du, Kevin Fall, Melissa Ho, Matthew Kam, Sergiu Nedevschi, Joyojeet Pal, Rabin Patra, and Sonesh Surana. IEEE Computer. Volume 38, Number 6, pp. 25-38, June 2005.

[5]    Haris, J. 2008. Green Computing and Green IT Best Practices on Regulations and Industry Initiatives, Virtualization, Power Management, Materials Recycling and Telecommuting.

[6]    Kuehr, R. Williams, E. (2004). Computers and the Environment – Understanding and Managing their Impacts. Kluwer Academic Publishers & United Nations University. Dordrecht/Boston/London.

[7]    Global e-Sustainability Initiative. (2002). Industry as a partner for sustainable development: Information and communications technology. United Kingdom 2002. ISBN: 92-807-2186-0

[8]    Hilty, L. Arnfalk, P. Erdmann, L. Goodman, J. (2004). The future impact of ICT on environmental sustainability. EU-US Seminar: New technology foresight, forecasting and assessment methods. Seville 13-14 May 2004.

[9]    Fuchs, C. (2006) The implications of new information and communication technologies for sustainability. Springer Science.

[10]    Alekson V. Et al. (2004) Making the net work: Sustainable Development in a Digital Society. Xeris,  ISBN: 9780954621605

I’m back at work and getting update with what have happened during the last month I’ve been offline. I’ve found some pretty interesting new projects.

First, two environmental applications of google maps (google maps API must be the single most important generator of web applications with environmental purpose). One comes from a collaboration between google and UNFCC, showing climate change emissions data in a neat way.

Sad to see Sweden and Spain in that awful purple meaning they have increased their emissions instead of reducing.

You can play with the map and the different data sets here.

Via Treehugger  

The second, TapIt, comes from New York, and it is a list of places where it’s possible to refill your bottle with tap water instead of jumping into the closest 7eleven and buying one yet more plastic bottle. (Of course they have an iphone app too!)

Via Treehugger

Then I watch a quite unexpected video from UK’s prime minister Gordon Brown in TED, advocating for the use of ICT as a tool for change. Worth watching (as usually in TED)

Finally, via treehugger too, I found a report from Vodafone about the use of mobile technology with sustainability purposes that I should have to have a deeper look into. And an article about the sustainability potential of cloud computing, that is one of the things we have started to think about too.

Lot’s of things going on, lot’s of energy to start the semester, lot’s of ideas for new research.

I’ve been at Berkeley today, and I’m now sitting at a Café, drinking a capuccino and working with my laptop, surrounded with students doing the same as it’s pouring outside. Nice atmosphere. I’ll make a short resume of the meetings:

I met first with Tapan Parikh from the School of Information, when we discussed around ICT and sustainable development and I got to know more about the work they are doing around ICT for Development. I also participated in the seminar about ICTD when a the plans about researching the impact of mobile phones in Rwanda in prices, wages and in mitigating economical shocks and crisis  was presented, interesting work going on there! I’m seriously thinking that we need to change focus to developing countries, or at least have some more work on it.

Then I met with Eric Hallstein (Energy and Resources Group), Graham Bullock, and Avery Cohn (Department of Environmental Science, Policies, and Management), that are working at the Infolab, researching the use of technologies to create and provide environmental and health information to the consumers, how that impacts their behavior and developing tools to do it in the best way. One of the projects that they were part of is Good Guide, which now  they are using as data source. We had a lot of research areas / questions in common, and it was giving to discuss with them around different ideas. It would be good to have more contact with them.

The picture is actually from the Muir Woods, I couldn’t take pictures of the nice campus here as it’s raining heavily, but they had a creek and some impresing redwoods too here.

In my research I am looking at how internet, mobiles, and new ICTs can be used for making a sustainable society. Social media is one of the key technologies that I see can have (is having) a deep impact. Social media tools are allowing new ways of organizing, of creating content, develop ideas, create change… in a grassroots way, horizontally, but in a huge new scale that was not possible before. A change in scales:

• geographically (allowing global interactions)
• temporal (changes and ideas develop much faster)
• in size (a change from the concept of participation from the greek agora, limited by the size of the public space, to a global participation, only limited by technological access , and remember that 60% of the world already owns a mobile phone)

Kiva.org is one of the key examples I always mention. It uses technology to link entrepreneurs in needs of small amounts of money in developing countries with people all over the world that can loan it. It takes the microfinance movement to a new scale, allowing a more personal interaction between entrepreneurs and lenders, and allowing millions of users worldwide to help towards reducing poverty and contributing to a more socialy sustainable society.

Interesting concepts from kiva:

• Peer to peer financial systems in a global scale.
• Promoting entrepreneurship, reducing poverty.
• Making it personal: linking individual entrepreneurs with individual lenders.
• Creating community: groups of lenders, local groups…

I just loaned to this group in Peru.

I was interviewed for the student newspaper Femte Statsmakten (2009/01, page 39) about sustainability and the media.
Some ideas about e-paper, dematerialization, behavioral change, new media, digital divide…

In PDF (Swedish)

I’m the kind of person (mac user, usually early adopter) that should have got an iphone. I should probably have gotten one of the first generation for more than one year ago. But all the hype, the apple locks and limitations, that you almost have to “sell your soul” to the operator to get one, that it didn’t have any special new technical functionality that my p1 didn’t already have, I didn’t like the input mode (I like hand written recognition)…

Now we have got one for the persuasive services project to develop some applications. And after one week I was sold. It is just too good, I understood the hype. The app store and the amount of creative things people have made for it just rocks. And with the interface and easiness to use typical of apple.

So what happened with my first 2009 challenge:

>To go completely mobile for all my work & leisure activities. From sending emails, blogging (I’m writing this from my mobile), editing papers…Why mobile? I have the opinion that mobiles are key for sustainability. Not only  they have a small carbon footprint (around 25kg per subscriber and year), but they are the most widely lCT product in the world, ever, 60% of the world population owns one.

Iphone solved all that in one week:

• Email + safari + contacts + calendar. All basic functions works perfectly, in sync with my macbook, they make my life much easier.
• Outpost. Having control over my basecamp account in my mobile was what I was waiting for. Killer app.
• Flickr works beautifully on it.
• Fring for having Skype.
• Tweetie for microblogging.
• WordPress for blogging.
• TouchTerm for having SSH terminal access to my servers and fixing technical things on the go.
• And more, from reading ebooks, to writing notes, to planning routes… And if it’s not there yet probably it will soon.

But there are some questions arising:

1.  Convergence of devices. Iphone is as powerful as many computers, and with telephone capabilities as good as any phone. There is few things I will need a computer to (if I didn’t need to program and such things). Will be follow japan’s lead and abandon computers towards personal mobile devices?

2. What interesting green applications can you do with this toy? I’ll post a list of some applications I have been testing.

3. Hardware sustainability. I feel bad about having still another electronic device. What is the impact of changing electronics so often? What is the real impact to the environment? and for climate change? Is there any possibility to reverse this trend and reduce the impact? how? I’ll try to develop my ideas about this in a following article.

I’m using Twitter for research related microblogging. I have connected my twitter account with this blog so you can read the latest twitts in the sidebar.

For personal matters I use Jaiku.

Is it really a mobile world? and can it be green?

This year I have planned two research related challenges, just to test personally some of my research questions.

The first one is to be able to go completely mobile for all my work & leisure activities. From sending emails, blogging (I’m writing this from my mobile), editing papers…Why mobile? I have the opinion that mobiles are key for sustainability. Not only  they have a small carbon footprint (around 25kg per subscriber and year), but they are the most widely lCT product in the world, ever, 60% of the world population owns one.

My second challenge for this year is to be able to track my exact carbon footprint using ICT tools. Here I’m talking about real accuracy, not your typical web calculator, a number that can give me feedback about my behavioral changes.  One example of this is my Dopplr carbon profile whit the greenhouse gases emissions of all my travelling. Then I have to find out good ways to monitor emissions from the apartment, office, commuting, food, consumption. Let’s see, it’s gonna be scary.

During this year I’ll blog here about my experiences and results around this two personal challenges and the application to my research.

In my opinion we will live paperless. And sooner than later.

When I state this, I’m always met by skeptik looks, and it’s normal. We live in a society (specially we in academia) surrounded by paper. Myself I’ve grown up in a house full of books, and I love reading, buying, searhing for books. Why then do I think this?

1. E-ink technology

One important thing to mention is that until recently reading digital material was much less comfortable than paper. Reading a novel in a screen is just painful, the concentration span is shorter, a headache probable. This is the argument most people have against electronic books.

I use this e-ink device above, the sony reader 505. It uses a reflective display without light, works wonderfully under direct sunlight (actually work best under direct sunlight). I have used it for reading many books under the last year, and after the first pages you just forget that it’s not a normal book.

This devices as the new sony reader 700, the amazon kindle, the different readers from iRex, and more to come are the first towards making the act of reading in a screen as comfortable or more than a book.

2. Everything that can be dematerialized, it will be dematerialized.

Going digital is full of advantages, no weight, no need of physical space, easy to search and index, easy and cheap to produce, easy to scale up and provide to millions of users at the same time. Just in the tiny memory card of my reader with its couple of gigabytes there are space for probably more books than I could ever read in my life, everything packed in a thing that is smaller than a pocket book.

A fast calculation: A book the size of any Harry Potter is around 400kb (in the sony e-reader format .lrb), if I read 100 books per year during 100 years (I hope for improved longevity..), the total size of those books is around 4.000.000kb ≈ 4gb. I can buy that for my reader for less than 25€ in a memory card that is just 5 × 12.5 × 1.2 mm, the size of a fingernail.

Yes, that size, that price, compare that with 10.000 books the size of Harry Potter. (Not even talking about the environmental gains).

Let’s see other examples of things that can be dematerialized and that have already been:

Music.I think that editorials should be aware not to follow the discography example, following a business model based on the scarcity of a physical objects when those objects have been dematerialized. The change in music consumption just talks for itself, the change from collecting cds, to downloading mp3s and using ipods, to just listening to Last.fm or Spottify. Unavoidable.

Other example, when I was working as a DJ I collected vynils, I loved the feeling of the turntables. Until Final Scratch arrived, connecting the turntables to a laptop, same feeling with virtual music, that was probably the last time I bought a vynil.  Once a technology has that unquantificable thing that I call “feeling”, plus the benefits of being digital, it’s over for the analogic equivalent.

Pictures. The change from film cameras to digital ones and the explosion in photography amateurism. I still use a SLR film camera, I love its analog feeling, but I develop only to digital copies and upload them to my Flickr.

Movies. Movie theater to DVD to DivX to streaming. Same pattern, same results.

3. Pattern recognition:

We have seen that it happened before, are books really that special? Well, yes. Books are a wonderful technology. A great way of transmitting content, and more advantages in its selfcontinement than a vynil or a DVD. But seeing the pattern followed by music, films, pictures, and some trends as the rise of new e-ink readers, traditional book companies as penguin starting to sell their titles electronically, amazon putting so much energy in ther kindle and people loving it, the success of mobile novels in japan, the increase in traditional books bought online, the boom of blogs as a source of news, the new generations of digital natives, the use of laptops as the OLPC (with its high-contrast reading mode) creating some million of new digital natives… All those trends point somewhere towards a change in the way we create, distribute and consume text information.

Of course point out that there are some trends against this hypothesis, as the rise of publish on demand and cheap online publishing as blurb.com and lulu.com

4. Linking the nodes

Ok, we have seen how dematerialization has work in other areas and different trends in electronic reading. From this and from my personal experience, my conclusion is that when the new digital technologies with all their benefits reach the feeling of their analogue predecesor, in this case e-ink displays making reading as comfortable as a normal book, the days for the analogic technology are counted. E-ink and new display technologies are the turning point, and paper will decline. I do not know if we will use specialized devices or if mobiles and tablet pcs will get screens that are as good for reading as the current e-ink or better (just see the olpc2 concept). The paper as we know it will dissapear, it will take a while, but in my opinion it’s unavoidable.