layoutElementContent.uuid: ff80808121c032da0121d39f6f8d6a0d
layoutElementContent.uuid: ff80808121c032da0121d39f6f796a0c Document Name COM_SUSTAINABILITY_TELLUS Document UUID ff80808121c032da0121d39f6f796a0b

Welcome to the Sustainability Community

This space is focused on developing concepts for tools and/or services that can help individuals and communities understand their impact on the environment, and to take action to lessen that impact.

The sustainability community is part of the Sustainability Concept Development project promoted by the Vodafone User Experience team with collaboration from Vodafone R&D.

layoutElementContent.uuid: ff80808121c032da0121d39f6f786a0a
RSS Feed

Sustainability blog

 
Jan 19th, 2010

EcoMo09 links-in-progress

We’ve got lots of material coming out of the event. Here are the links so far. Feel free to send updates to ecomo09-at-vodafone.com or add them as a comment.

Photos

Projects

Video

Blog posts

  • The Future is Flat, post by James Goodman, Head of Futures at Forum for the Future, and part of our EcoMo09 judge panel, writing about EcoMo09 and the potential of open innovation
  • Moving Waves, smarter mobility blog by industry analyst Jeremy Green, writing about EcoMo09 and the "ingenuity and the enthusiasm" of the developers who were part of it
  • David Wood's write up of the Mobile Monday London session on Mobile Phones and Sustainability
tags:
posted by Tory Dunn  |  View comments (0)  |  Add comment
Dec 17th, 2009

EcoMo09 Project: AMEE-Google Mashup Greasemonkey script



AMEE – Google Carbon Mashup

Group members: James Smith

Q. What is it?
A. A Greasemonkey script that adds in AMEE data for the CO2 footprint of travel routes generated by Google Maps’ directions feature. The carbon data is displayed along with the distance and time required by a given route.

Q, What are the benefits?
A. It helps users understand the environmental impact of a given journey, and because it shows the CO2 for all the route options displayed, it allows people to choice the lowest carbon option for a given journey, quantifying the carbon saving in making that choice.

Links
James' post about the project and further AMEE links
Project code
AMEE for data sources
Project video from EcoMo09
tags:
posted by Tory Dunn  |  View comments (0)  |  Add comment
Nov 14th, 2009

World Usability Day on Design for Sustainability

World Usability Day was this week.

Lots of great discussion at the UK UPA World Usability Day event held at LBi, focused on how (user-centred) design can help foster the kinds of social, behavioural and technological changes that will address the sustainability issues we face.

The presenters for the UPA programme were:

Meriel Lenfestey, founder of Flow-Interactive. Meriel talked about her product-sharing network service, Ecomodo, launching soon, aimed at allowing people to share use of products they only need occasionally (you know - like that power drill you use twice a year). She discussed the development of the service, the inspiration and user research behind it, how she has tackled issues of trust and the logistics of business models and requirements.

Debra Lilley presented the initial research going into a three-year project at Loughborough University which will explore the impact of design on sustainable behaviour, specifically in relation to home energy use. She is part of the Sustainable Design Research Group at Loughborough.

Franco and I presented EcoMo09 and Carbon Tippy Toes, which were received with great interest and discussion on how technology and design can help create tools and services to tackle these issues. This included looking at how an individual activity focus relates to the potential of initiatives at an infrastructure and governmental level, similar to some of the discussions we had in our initial co-design workshops. The discussion at the UPA event concluded with a general agreement that the urgency of our world situation requires action on multiple levels.


tags:
posted by Tory Dunn  |  View comments (0)  |  Add comment
Nov 4th, 2009

EcoMo09 Project: A Virtualised Greenmap with Mobile Clients



A Virtualised Greenmap with Mobile Clients

Group members: Mamading Ceesay, Kevin McDonagh (cloud implementation); Mohammad Haque, Carl-Gustaf Harroch (Android implementation); Eric Donavan, Kieran Gutteridge, David Zverina (iPhone implementation)

Q. What is it?
A. Green Map builds on the work done by the Glasgow Green Map project, which gives users a just-in-time map of local green resources. The development done at EcoMo09 ported the Glasgow model to a cloud-based generic resource that capable of generating a map for any locality for which data exists, and displaying it in a Android or iPhone app.

Q, What are the benefits?
A. The map itself allows individuals to discover green resources, such as recycling centres and sustainability-centric businesses, in their area, and quickly find green features and offerings when visiting somewhere new.

The platform, which offers tools for generating a customisable map. allows sustainability activists to create a professional presentation of local resources, without needing their own programming expertise.


Links
Project video from EcoMo09
tags:
posted by Tory Dunn  |  View comments (0)  |  Add comment
Oct 11th, 2009

EcoMo09 Project: carbon.to



carbon.to

Team members: Henrik Berggren, David Kjelkerud, Jorge Zapico

Q: What is it?
A: Carbon.to is a carbon calculator that helps people visualise the CO2 impact of an activity, e.g. travel or energy use, in terms that make more sense in their daily lives. For example, a user can translate the carbon impact of heating their flat for a year into the equivalent impact represented as loaves of bread or cups of tea or travel on the underground. The project also has an API to output equivalent figures.

Q: What is the purpose?
A: Our project started with the idea that in our everyday life we are increasingly exposed to carbon dioxide information for our everyday life. From the grams CO2 that the burger we ordered produced to the tons our travel created.

The skill to understand this kind of information is developing and for many people it is quite difficult to interpret, understand and relate to numeric carbon dioxide information. How much is 1kg of CO2? Is it a lot? Is it little?

Our idea was to create a simple tool to transform carbon information between different units, trying to help understanding these numbers better, trying to improve our carbon literacy.
The result is carbon.to, a web application that allows you to:

  • Transform carbon dioxide information to other units for example km of train.
  • Compare different footprints, for instance, how many apples' footprints would it take to equal the footprint of a single 4-hour flight
  • Use as an API to transform CO2 information from your own service and show the equivalent units for another use.


Q: What is the technology?
A: The technology includes HTML, CSS, Ruby on Rails and Ajax.


Links
  • Carbon.to
  • Project code
  • Article on the project and EcoMo09 on Centre for Sustainable Communications site
  • Team pictures on Flickr
  • Video from EcoMo09
    • tags:
    posted by Tory Dunn  |  View comments (0)  |  Add comment
    layoutElementContent.uuid: ff80808121c032da0121d39f6f8d6a0e

    Recent blog comments

    EcoMo09 done... looking forward ...

    Tory Dunn, Sep 16th, 2009


    You're welcome, Dan. Thanks for being part of it. The meals were from Ruby, a cafe over on Charlotte Road, and I have to confirm this with BASH, but I think the late night sandwiches were from Organic Buffet.

    more...

    EcoMo09 done... looking forward ...

    iamdanw, Sep 16th, 2009


    Thanks for a lovely event. That was the most productive atmosphere I've seen at a hackday. The food was real tasty too, where did you get it from?

    more...

    Looking for people for form a team?

    palfrey, Aug 27th, 2009


    I'm looking for a team. Primary skills: Python, Linux embedded systems, Gtk/Gnome development, C, PHP, etc, etc. Most everything else I can probably pick up darn fast, so anyone care to suggest an interesting project? Mail it to ecomo09@tevp.net

    more...

    EcoMo09: registration now open!

    Tory Dunn, Jul 8th, 2009


    Hi Alistair, thanks for your encouragement! Sorry for being slow in seeing your comment.

    more...

    EcoMo09: registration now open!

    alistair_uk, Jun 22nd, 2009


    I am very glad that the event is being moved, and I appreciate the effort involved in you doing this. To aid with selecting a new date you may find http://www.wheresthegeeks.co.uk/ that is being rolled out by Dom Hodgson useful. If I can be of any assistance then please get in touch http://www.agm.me.uk/contact .

    more...

    EcoMo09: registration now open!

    Tory Dunn, Jun 18th, 2009


    Thanks everyone for pointing out the potential event conflict with Music HackDay. As you'll see from the most recent post, we are going to postpone, to allow people to do both, if they want. Please stay in touch for updates as we revise our plans. Cheers.

    more...

    EcoMo09: registration now open!

    Tory Dunn, Jun 18th, 2009


    Hi Alistair, thanks for the feedback. In all honesty, as a project it is a new way for us to go about things, and we are learning as we go. Maybe I should say a bit more about the "briefs", which are really starter ideas and stimulus for the event. We are trying to connect up the thinking/ideas of activists - which is the basis for the ideas, with environmentally-concerned developers. Our thinking, in terms of preparing that stimulus ahead of time, was that 24 hours is a challenging time period even if you have an idea of the kind of thing you want to prototype. But as Franco mentioned to Dan, the kinds of things we are using as starter ideas are quite broad, and we hope that people will stretch it. We want to release the actual briefs on the day, so that everyone has the same amount of time to work on them, but they really will be quite open. However, it sounds like it might be useful to publish more information in advance, so we'll look at doing that.

    more...
    layoutElementContent.uuid: ff8080812254f25f0122605303f879cf Document Name COM_SUSTAINABILIITY_NEWS Document UUID ff8080812254f25f0122605303f679ce

    News

    EcoMo09 logo

    Code your way to a greener future at EcoMo09 Dev Camp.

     

    EcoMo09 took place on 11 - 12th of September at BASH Studios. A good time was had by all (we hope), and some great projects resulted. We are in the process of blogging the projects and relevant links here on Betavine.

     

    In addition, you can check Flickr for images tagged EcoMo09, and watch the videos on Vimeo under Carbon Tippy Toes.

    layoutElementContent.uuid: ff8080812254f25f01226053048879d1 Document Name COM_SUSTAINABILITY_RESOURCES Document UUID ff8080812254f25f01226053048879d0

    Resources

    Sustainability project overview
    Quick link to past posts on Sustainability Community blog
    twitter.com/ecomo09