Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

We haven't made a ton of noise about openeco.org in the last couple of quarters, but that was probably a mistake.

One of the most frequent questions I get as Sun's Chief Sustainability Officer is how other organizations can get started on GHG reductions. The first step is to calculate your current emissions, and to get a feel for what parts of your activities (business or otherwise) are causing those emissions. This leads to one of two follow-on questions: 1) how hard can that be? or 2) that sounds really hard - I bet I need to hire a high-priced consultant.

The combined answer is that it is not trivial, but for most organizations you don't need a consultant. The math involved is not hard, but finding the right equations and coefficients isn't easy. Also, to track and measure over time you need to keep lots of data around, which can get cumbersome.

This is why we created openeco.org. It is a free, online tool that lets organizations calculate and track their emissions over time. We needed a tool for ourselves, but found that our solution was applicable to schools, churches, companies and other organizations. It knows about different locations and sources of emissions, and follows the standard, accepted protocols for doing the GHG calculations. It also lets you set goals and track your progress against them.

As you can see above, it has a good user base, with over 700 participating organizations. Whether you're working as part of a big company, small company, town government, private residence, church, or school, openeco.org can get you on the right track quickly and (very!) cheaply.

For a quick demo and tour, check out the videos below.

Kudos to Lori Duvall, who has been the main driver behind this from the beginning, to the team at CodeMagi, who have been Java programmers extraordinaire on the project, and to the Sun Eco marketing team, who has been involved since the earliest concepts.

Under the leadership of Marcy Lynn, Sun's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports have always broken new ground. We've pushed the envelope in publishing on the web, what type of data is reported, and how data is reported. Last year we changed how stakeholders interact with that data by allowing comments. And this year we've pushed the envelope again.

Yesterday we announced the release of Sun's 2009 CSR report. With the pending acquisition of Sun by Oracle, the focus this year turned to reporting on the key metrics we were tracking for our fiscal 2009. We also focused on how to cut the production cost of the report, and to continue to minimize the impact of printed copies.

So you'll see that this year's report is a fairly radical departure. The first half aims to present the data in a way that gets the key points across quickly and easily. The back half fills in the key details and boilerplate to adequately document the summary.

You'll notice a big drop in the narrative flow and commentary. This was one of the biggest changes: we stopped trying to write it as a coherent document. I believe people will find the data that they're interested in much more quickly, and will find they don't miss the color commentary, but we'll see!

Finally, I'd like to recognize the groups and folks who contributed to this (this is always dangerous - I apologize ahead of time for anyone I missed). First, in addition to Marcy, other key partners in this project were Terri Bedel, Jim Mize, and Anna Eyre from the Corp Marketing team, and the gang at Celery Designs, who've worked with us for the past few years.

Second, we got strong support from groups across the company this year, including: WE (including the JLL team), HR, EH&S, Business Conduct Office, Investor Relations, Global Communities, WWOPs, Legal, Education, Employee Volunteer and Gift Matching program, Privacy office, Product takeback team, Software team, Sustainability team, and Brand marketing. Thanks to everyone who helped out this year, it was another great team effort.

This week our book, Citizen Engineer, made it out the online bookstores and is supposed to hit the bricks-and-mortar stores next week. The book was written by myself and Sun's CTO Greg Papadopoulos, with tons of help from John Boutelle. Of course its also important to recognize our publisher, Greg Doench, at Prentice Hall.

The website for the book is citizenengineer.org, and there are links there for buying the book at Amazon (paper or Kindle), from the publisher, and other book sellers. PDF's of the book are also available there under a Creative Commons license.

We also plan to use the website to publish further content, publicize events related to the book, and provide forums for discussion of the book's topics (some of this is there today, and the rest will be very soon).

So why did we write this book?

After the turn of the century, Greg and I began to notice some recurring themes in our work with the engineers at Sun Microsystems and elsewhere.

First, an increasing number of engineers, especially those right out of school, were expressing a desire to "make a difference". Some had a hobby or activity they were already invested in outside of the office, while others were searching for something that would make them more fulfilled. Many were also bringing that sense into the office, and trying to see how they could use their job to make a difference beyond the bottom line of Sun.

Second, the world at large was asking more of engineers. Public knowledge about topics like recycling, copyright, privacy, and climate change translated into new demands on manufacturers of products and services, which, in turn, required new ways of thinking in engineering.

Generally this was good news: we have engineers who want to make a difference, and a public which has rising expectations of them. In 2006 Greg wrote the first blog post about this entitled Charting a Course from Recent Grad to “Citizen Engineer”, which launched a more focused discussion of Citizen Engineers and their role in the coming years.

However, as we began to discuss this more, it quickly became clear that engineers, including ourselves, had missed out on some important topics during our educations. In particular, engineers were being asked to make increasingly complex decisions about environmental impact and intellectual property, but had never had any formal training in either area.

So we set out to write Citizen Engineer with a couple of goals in mind. First, we wanted to promote the idea that engineers could, and should, take a more visible role in shaping our future world. Second, we wanted to fill in some of the basic knowledge gaps that we found to be widespread through the engineering community. Finally, we had a point of view about the role of engineering and how to approach these complex issues which we wanted to get across.

While we feel like the book does a great job of meeting these goals, engineers are in a rapidly changing environment. We hope to use the website, along with updates to the book, to try to move the discussion along and keep it current.