Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

If you don't hang around developers, you may not know that any acronym that starts with YA usually means "Yet Another". In this case, YASC is Yet Another Sustainability Conference.

If anyone profited off of environmental concerns in 2007 it was the conference industry, where a rash of new energy efficiency, sustainability, environmental and green themed conferences hit the market. I found many of them useful, especially earlier in the year when the information was still fresh, but by the end of the year I found myself showing up, doing my part, and heading out. Too many corporate advertisements, too many canned speeches, and not enough real information exchange.

But with so many companies having to work their way up the same learning curve, and with so much innovation starting to happen, I think there's still a need for people to be able to get together and share ideas and experiences. Since our business at isn't conferences, we're free to try something a little different. Based on our experience with "unconference" style get-togethers for developers, we think there's real potential for that format of meeting in the sustainability space. And to see if we're right, we're going to hold on.

So if you're around San Fran in early January (Jan. 10 to be exact), consider stopping by the first OpenEco Energy Camp. We've got over 200 folks signed up, including some big names and thought leaders from a number of area companies. In addition to lots of discussion time there will be book signings, videos and some food. It's an experiment, but as its shaped up I'm more and more convinced that this type of get together has an important role to play.

Hope to see you there!

Yesterday Dell announced that they were going to join the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration. I happened to have been talking with Paul Dickinson about this at the GeSI board meeting last week, and I think that this a good idea.

As we have been saying in the past, alignment among the key players in the electronics supply chain is going to be critical for making deep progress. In particular, I'd like to see EICC (the group formerly known as Electronics Industry Code of Conduct) adopt this (or some variant) and standardize the specific info that will be requested of the electronics supply chain. (Note: this is my opinion, and may or may not reflect Sun's official position within the EICC).

But this idea also highlights the need for OpenEco. If all of the thousands of organizations in Dell's supply chain need to teach themselves about GHG emissions, or go hire expensive consultants, or buy a proprietary software package, this is going to be a costly endeavor. There's nothing magic to reporting carbon emissions, and we need to all work together to make it as easy as possible. Hopefully OpenEco will help some companies get started (US now, other geos coming soon). The easier this gets, the more data will be surfaced, and the faster we'll collectively figure out how to improve.