How Green is your Web?

Last night's meeting of the London Social Media Club* threw up a number of threads, but a recurring one was around how can social media assist "green" projects (global warming and so on and so forth)

But why stop at social media - the question surely is what can the 'Net do about Green issues overall?

Quite a lot, methinks. But it isn't doing much now. Take commuting for example - generates huge amounts of carbon and heat, forces infrastructure to be designed at many times greater than its average load, and wastes a huge amount of time.

Many years ago (about 15 - before email even took hold en masse) I co-wrote an article in Management Today, hypothesizing that as electronic connections got better, people would start to commute electronically rather than physically, given all the time / cost / etc benefits.

Boy, were we wrong !

Car and plane journeys have rocketed in that time, despite email, IM, VoIP, Webcams, mobile and broadband and all the rest enabling a level of comms we could barely conceptualise even in 1990. Yes, there is more homeworking now, but it seems to have had very little impact on the commuting classes.

Why is this?

Is it that people just love to commute - I don't think so. Is it that companies are still insisting on "face time"? Or is it that most of the recent broadband Net Benefits - aka "Web 2.0" - are totally consumer focused and haven't allowed real benefits to be gained by those chained to a desktop.

Also, it seems the social web hasn't really allowed all those home web workers to congregate socially around their electronic cafe's - you've all no doubt seen the Sad Picture of rows of lonely latte lovers in coffee shops all looking at their PC's and not talking to each other.

Perhaps its just that culture changes far more slowly then technology - or is it that going Bedouin doesn't work, and you actually do need real world company infrastructure. (We've been a virtual company by design for two years now, and we don't think so - but maybe a small knowledge worker business is not the best example)

At this point I have no real answers - but it seems like a good project for the London Social Media Club to work on!

(It would also be good if the social web could act as a rallying point to inform / educate people about Going Green, and help stop all these Green Scams (some windfarm projects really take the biscuit) that are more about making profits on a wave of Green Guilt rather than doing much helpful stuff).

We also had a very good discussion about "peer to peer privacy" - two strands to this really, one is about privacy and trust, the other about harnessing peer to peer networks as tools for social media users rather than tools to slurp pirate content. Lots of interesting thoughts, especially about the interplay of the "onion theory" (layers of intimacy) vs the "set theory" (different groupings of intimacy parameters depending on person). Common thread though was for real trust, the data should be owned by you, not The Man.

* tres amusant - The Economist (disclosure - I am a subscriber and think its a wonderful mag ) seems to have put together a blue sky team, and about 6 of them trooped into the meeting and a half an hour later they all left again for their team building dinner - clearly N people x 1/2 hour each is better at hoovering up the memes - and the beers!! - on the table than 1 person staying for an evening . All good stuff anyway, we've worked on a few of these sort of projects with companies in the past, be interesting to see what this team comes up with.......