Features, sustainability, technology - by roningirl - December 10, 2009 - 01:39 Europe/Berlin - Be first to Comment!
The following article, featuring yours truly and my newest initiative with Vin Sumner — Greenshift Europe — is included in a Copenhagen Climate Change Conference publication for New Europe magazine this week. Your feedback welcome!
Greenshift Europe
“Greenshift Europe is a movement promoting ICTs to fight climate change,” says Vin Sumner, CEO of UK-based Clicks & Links, and an expert in applying information and communication technologies to address climate challenges. Sumner and Cheryl Miller, founder of ZenDigital.be, have recently joined forces behind Greenshift Europe to promote ICTs for building “smart,” sustainable communities across Europe.
“First and foremost, we aim to lower the footprint of ICT itself,” says Sumner about the principles behind Greenshift Europe. “Then, we look at how ICTs can make the way we do things today, like powering our homes and public buildings, smarter and more energy efficient. And finally,” he adds, “we plan and build ICT infrastructures in our communities, like free, public broadband networks, which help transform our behavior in a direction that will have less impact on the environment.” The last of these, according to Sumner, represents the ultimate, digitally-driven, green “shift.”
Announced this week by EUROCITIES, a Greenshift Europe and City of Manchester-led initiative called the “EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter,” [download pdf here] builds on the Greenshift principles, and calls on European cities to publicly commit to deploying ICT projects to fight climate change. Emphasizing the role cities can play as important catalysts for achieving climate goals, signatories of the Charter pledge to undertake specific actions using digital technologies “to increase energy efficiency, facilitate emissions reductions and forestall climate change.”
“The EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter might be seen as a kind of ICT ‘component’ of the Covenant of Mayors,” says Cheryl Miller, a veteran ICT consultant who has partnered with Sumner to promote Greenshift Europe. “Covenant of Mayors signatories have committed to surpassing the European climate goals for 2020,” says Miller. “And both the European Commission and EUROCITIES acknowledge the important role ICTs can play in enabling cities to achieve their climate objectives,” she adds. The European Commission DG Energy launched the Covenant of Mayors in February of 2009, and today it has almost one thousand signatories.
At the launch of the EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter last week, Leader of the Manchester City Council, Sir Richard Leese, explained that while signing the Charter is good for the environment, it is also potentially good for a city’s economy. “One of the greatest means for innovation lies in exploiting ICTs to contribute to a greener digital world,” said Sir Richard.
With fourteen major European cities signing up to the EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter in the days leading up to the Copenhagen talks — including Manchester, Reykjavik, Stockholm, Vienna, The Hague, Birmingham, Ghent, Nantes, Genoa, Zaragoza, Murcia, Lisbon, Bristol and Tallinn — the Charter would seem to represent a kind of green “shift” in Europe which many welcome.
Entertainment, Features, Reviews, Social Commentary, Videos - by roningirl - November 3, 2009 - 15:02 Europe/Berlin - 1 Comment
I wrote the below in response to a very interesting post by Walter De Brouwer, an organizer of the TEDxBrussels event, and EU responsible for One Laptop per Child. The post is featured here on the TEDxBrussels Ning site, and quoted in part below.
This is what I gather happened. Hendrix was a black American Rock Artist and that did not exist in the States at the time. It was a white thing, and very much a British thing. This was the time of Pete Townsend and the Who. They came first to the Monterey Pop Festival. At the end of their act, as the audience expected, they destroyed their instruments. Hard to beat that. You cannot follow this act and do the same. Jimi Hendrix started by saying that he would “sacrifice something I really love.” That was not destruction, this was sacrifice, sharing. And he started playing The Troggs “Wild Thing”. Suddenly he kissed the guitar, laid it down and sprayed lighter fluid all over it. He lit a match and set it on fire. He seemed to start making love to his guitar and distributed flaming pieces of it ritually to the crowd. It was magical. I have watched this scene over and over again. And no doubt, it contributed immensely to the spirit of the Summer of Love. Not because of the instrument destruction. That had been done before by Pete Townsend, Keith Moon, Jerry Lee Lewis, Kurt Cobain and even Tré Cool. It was about something else. In fact Jimi produced the financial world crisis of today because he unleashed the notion of “sharing”. I wrote about it in “Free The Love Generation” (Ariadne Capital Magazine) in 2005:
Every civilization is allowed to build the kind of heaven it deserves. Ours is most certainly a global bazaar where everyone continually chases the best deal and the best deal is undoubtedly that which costs nothing. The web 2.0 business models that are successful are free of charge, on the house, at no cost, gratis! It seems that our world is trying to play more and more complex non-zero sum games and we seem to get better at it, because more than ever before successful experiments emerge as phenomena.
All this, by simply burning a guitar.
Free love=right on! But, we always pay for what we get — don’t we?
After eventually deciphering the text from your Ariadne Capital article, Walter, I wondered if you were not being ironic. Your description of “our” heaven is hell to me. Why measure ultimate “value” with a pricetag — or lack of one? And, frankly, I for one can’t stomach a connection between Jimi Hendrix and the financial meltdown! If it were up to Jimi, I suppose there’d never have been such a thing as “finance,” and only continuous, macro-personal metaphysical meltdown…
Doesn’t making the search of the “best deal” belittle the objects we are valuing? And since when is the price of something a true reflection of what the thing is actually worth — or even what it truly “costs”…? Attributing value is a personal thing reflected in the subtle, highly-nuanced multiplicity of options our language gives us for doing this: We can value something as “pricey” or “priceless”; “valuable” or “invaluable”… This naming may just be a (the only) real “complex non-zero sum game”!
And the “items” that fall into the “priceless” and “invaluable” categories, well, don’t they add up to something that is far more (and much better) than simply “free”?????
The question is not, in fact, about something being “free” or “20 dollars”, though — but more about how valuable a given object/service/experience is to ME (potentially). AND, in order to have that object/service/experience, what I am going to have to pay — in blood, sweat & tears, burning guitars, and maybe even — but not necessarily, and not even importantly — money…
All this to say: As terrific as it sounds, “non-zero sum games” don’t exist. “Free love” doesn’t exist and “free software” doesn’t exist either — even when it’s “brought to you by Web 2.0″. Jimi Hendrix (and all those musicians you mention) pay/paid for our blissful, enduring enjoyment with their genius and their lives. Come to think of it, we all pay for life with our lives. 
Jimi claimed he made a pact with the Devil. We got “Wild Thing” and the burning guitar, but he paid with his soul.
More boring: After adding in all the hours of development, delivery, maintenance and support (plus personal frustration, agony, tirades and angst), I suppose it would be hard for anyone to say that the Ubuntu shareware running on all those OLPC laptops is truly “free,” after all, too…? But right. My point: It’s all relative. AND, it’s all highly-personal. But, it’s NEVER “free.” And to call *some* things “free,” imho, manages to reduce them to simple bean-counter thinking, which, to me, they don’t deserve. At least, equating Jimi Hendrix with McAfee Virus-scan Plus, for example, is simply unforgivable.
Free love, free music, free software. For all these “non-zero sum” games, isn’t it actually more like the Japanese say, at the end of the day? Not only are “free” things not real — e.g. “free love” is not love. Only love is love. “Free things are the MOST expensive.”
Entertainment, Features, sustainability, technology - by roningirl - October 8, 2009 - 02:57 Europe/Berlin - Be first to Comment!
The pie I’ve most recently stuck my thumb into is TEDxBrussels — a TED-licensed member-driven event taking place at the European Parliament on 23 November 2009!
Burn this Box!
Although I am not certain about the calligraphy (I would have preferred something a little more Art Nouveau), it looks pretty cool on the event T-shirt, I must say. Wonder if it comes in a babydoll model…?
Burn, baby, burn!
For the moment, I’m trying to keep on top of the TEDxBrussels LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter and FaceBook sites. It’s a lot of work — so PLEASE feel free to help — but LOADS of fun! And… it’s for a terrific cause, in many ways.
The TEDxBrussels event itself is cheap, and places are filling up, so be sure to pre-register to get your place right away!!!
Reviews, sustainability - by roningirl - September 30, 2009 - 12:07 Europe/Berlin - 2 Comments
Yesterday, I commented on an Ethical Corporation article about the “Cost-Benefit Analysis of Beer” — which sounded like a worthy topic of discussion, as many of us remember from our MBA Case Study days. Turns out it was just disappointing PR hot air from Miller Brewing.
Other Ethical Corporation readers, to their credit, seem to have thought the same thing. 
Reviews, Social Media, new media - by roningirl - September 24, 2009 - 10:04 Europe/Berlin - Be first to Comment!
Excited to post the link for the new eBook I edited and helped copywrite here!
The book has been online for a couple weeks now, and yesterday the following came in the mail — a review from Lon Safko, author of The Social Media Bible:
What a great job you did on “Your on-Line Journey Starts Here”! I loved it! The design is great!
You address questions we all face with good solid common sense answers… With a global perspective.
I like the concept of “HyperThinking”… It ties together all of the Internet concepts with a 21st century call to action.
The book is fun, but has a lot of terrific take-aways!
I am really glad to see you part of our team! Welcome!
Lon S. Safko,
Corporate Consultant & Social Media Strategist
Top 100 Best Selling Books In America Since Its Release at Position #20!
Second Best Selling Business Book On Amazon!
Gee, if that isn’t a glowing review, I don’t know what is! So GO DOWNLOAD, READ IT and SHARE IT with your friends NOW!!!
…And now I’m glowing too! O:-)
