Flash I love you...but we only have 14 hours to save the earth
Posted by Bill Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:00:00 GMT
“SAAS [Software as a Service] as a greener alternative” on the Techcrunch IT blog explains how one company saved money, reduced CO2 emissions and increased revenue by using a web-based collaboration tool.
Now our primary aim with Swirrl is to support effective collaboration and better information sharing in any business, even if everyone is based in one building or even one room. But if the people who need to collaborate are in different places then some kind of online tool becomes essential – and can support successful working with less need for travel. Also as the Techcrunch article points out: for a lot of companies, visits to their clients are a major expense in terms of both money and time. If you can visit less often while maintaining good communications, then it makes financial as well as environmental sense.
Recently I’ve been reading “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” by David MacKay, a Physics professor from Cambridge University. It investigates the options for meeting our energy needs while making the kind of drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that are likely to be needed to tackle climate change. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand this subject better. (It’s available for download in draft form at www.withouthotair.com). It slices through some of the woolly rhetoric on the topic with the twin swords of back-of-the-envelope estimates and basic arithmetic.
Anyway, to get to the point: roughly speaking around a third of the average person’s carbon use arises from transport, so to cut down on CO2 emissions, travelling less is one good place to start.
Now I’m not saying that a web collaboration tool offers a complete alternative to face to face meetings: to really get to know the people you are working with you have to spend some time with them. But it can certainly make a few meetings go a long way.
We have some first hand experience of this at Swirrl: Ric and I both work from home and our homes are around 4 hours drive apart: so we only get together once every few weeks. We use Swirrl (of course!) plus IM, e-mail and an occasional voice chat to keep in touch the rest of the time.
Certainly our face to face days are very productive. We review, plan, brainstorm, make important decisions – but then we go home and get on with it. Being in the same place every day wouldn’t add a lot – and every morning as I make coffee and start work, I feel a warm tingle of schadenfreude at the radio traffic reports and give thanks that I don’t have to waste my time commuting.
So, save the universe, give Swirrl a try :-)
