Science and technology have created the possibility of renewable, closed loop systems that bring health and energy to people and the economy with absolutely no waste. Making it a mainstream reality is essential for the economy's long term survival, not to mention human life.
Over a beer last night with friend and supporter juzmcmuz from Made By Many (who brought 18 people from London), we talked about our overall impressions of SXSW Interactive this year. It was his first time attending, and it was my first since 2005, when Interactive was still relatively small compared to the thousands from startups, agencies, major and emerging brands, and independent bloggers and artists who blew up Austin this year. Here are a few highlights and recommendations for an even better 2011.
1. Fully Embrace Geo Experimentation
In some ways, Interactive has never been about talking, but rather about testing and iterating real tangible services, and SXSW's eager early adopters are able to demo great emerging services better than any. With Twitter and this year's rising stars FourSquare and Gowalla, the fun was in the participation. To keep in touch with friends and digerati alike during the conference, especially at night, FourSquare was best way to find people whose party you wanted to join. (Mashable even reported Foursquare has had 100,000 new users in the last 10 days.) I felt a bit lame that there isn't yet a FourSquare app for my Nokia N900, so was left back in time to 2009 browsing Twitter and Facebook for the latest info.
Other event driven startup services like Hot Potato and SitBy.Us tried to introduce their services through the conference. Unfortunately, they both would have needed a stronger initial base and some promotion by the organizers to be used by a critical mass. It would be great if the festival leveraged these event based start ups more intentionally into some kind of festival long user competition.
This is particularly important when realizing that most of the panel audiences were only about 50% present while tweet heckling or passing links during the talks. For those addicted to ever flowing Twitter hose of new tech and social innovation information, it's tough to find something truly new and innovative at the conference. But testing digital services with a bunch of other people in the same city for a week, now that's something you don't get every day. With additional support from the conference (like they did with special Foursquare badges for SXSW this year), we could pioneer and demonstrate what's possible with the amazing location based services of 2011.
2. Make Interactive Sustainability Leadership a Reality
A highlight for me was hearing Valerie Casey's keynote of the Designers Accord call out the Interactive community for being largely absent from our culture's drive toward a sustainable economy. While I'm unsure how much her presentation made an impact on the thousands of people in the room, I was so happy to see such a prominent venue for what I've been arguing are the best opportunities for people and agencies that build interactive experiences to demonstrate digital sustainability leadership.
The overall SXSW festival organizers have made a decent sustainability effort, having reduced shwag significantly, highlighting some innovate green design, and installing garbage cans with easy to understand icons for waste, recycling, and composting (the whole city of Austin needs them!). But the breakthrough behavior change, as with the rest of society, just hasn't really happened.
I would love to be happily surprised at SXSW Interactive 2011 when the next big competing social platforms are mashups of FourSquare and Mint.com that drive social behavior change toward #zerowaste and #transparency. For all the work that government, non-profits and businesses are already doing around sustainability, until there is a world class Nike+ style service that successfully incentivizes mainstream sustainable behavior, then interactive leadership has not yet stepped up to the plate.
3. HackDays for Great Music & Social Innovation
While the panel format will inevitably continue to unfortunately dominate conferences, SXSW Interactive should continue to innovate on the platform to generate more results out of our time together.
A good example of a session designed for more than talking was CauseLab's full day session dedicated to Ending Hunger. I only attended the tale end, but the group sessions generated 9 tangible ideas that could create breakthroughs toward solving hunger. Hoping for strong follow up as well.
The next level for SXSW Interactive 2011 would be if we were to do something similar to Music Hackday (see image from Music Hackday Boston) for innovating on APIs to either create great music apps or solve social and environmental problems. Especially given that the conference is a full 5 days long, it would be amazing if there could be a thread similar to the Seed Accelerator program, but focused on hacking existing APIs for social and environmental impact data to develop innovative solutions.
While I know that designing and coding for 12 hours at SXSW is not the most fun way of enjoying our time in Austin together, it is getting easier and easier to prototype ideas, and how cool would it be if we could connect talent like @infoharmoni and R/GA with social problem solvers like @seeclickfix and @expertlabs, to create actual tangible output on big screens and big attention of SXSW Interactive 2011?
Now that would actually be worthy of Valerie Casey's call for sustainability leadership from the SXSW Interactive crowd. What do you think?
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As people and brands begin their long term journey towards becoming truly sustainable, what are appropriate and effective ways to use digital to share data and engage stakeholders? Overall, even award winning brands are still over-spending efforts on static sustainability reports that are relatively useless to the digital generation. Below are some opportunities for agencies and brands willing to lead.
Last June, I attended the 2009 Sustainable Brands conference on behalf of a client. The experience talking with brands, sustainability consultancies and agencies confirmed two things:
These lessons got me interested why agencies weren't more aggressively exploring these opportunities. So after completing a major project with Nokia and Rihanna in November, I chose to leave my job as an Account Director at R/GA in London, spend the month of January in India, and move to the Bay Area to further explore opportunities to apply lessons of digital marketing to sustainability.
Social media's influence on sustainable brands is already well documented by sources such as the Gort Cloud, and I won't spend time here discussing that in depth. Instead, I will focus attention here on opportunities for digital agencies and brands to drastically improve the way they create digital experiences for their customers, shareholders and employees.
From Sustainability Reporting to Data Storytelling
Due to the nature of sustainability, most major brands have rightfully focused their energy on evaluating the social and environmental impact of their products and services. Particularly for manufacturers and distributors of physical goods, the vast majority of the improvements they can make are in the physical life cycles of their products. Therefore, the question from a digital perspective is: How can digital media engage stakeholders to share progress more dynamically, and also accelerate the momentum of those improvements for the company and its stakeholders?
As part of the 2009 Ceres/ACCA Sustainability Reporting Awards, which highlight best practices in reporting on sustainability issues by North American organizations, the General Electric pdf report won top prize for how it communicated the strategic alignment between their sustainability and overall business strategies. And Seventh Generation received a special award for making their report a flash based e-book with links and videos.
However, comparing these prize winning reports to even basic digital user experience expectations in 2010, the reality is that sustainability reporting is still extremely poor on interactivity and utility. In a joint research project by the Global Reporting Initiative and Radley Yeldar evaluating trends in online sustainability reporting, they were similarly unimpressed:
"Few companies are taking advantage of the more innovative uses of technology. No company in our survey used XBRL to tag data; none used Web 2.0 technologies to create engagement and dialogue with users of their primary report; and even where other online functionalities are being used, these tend to focus on 'design' rather than functionality."
There is a major opportunity for brands and leading digital agencies to make a step change that goes from simply reporting to long term dynamic storytelling. Instead of static pdfs and e-books with lots of photos and text designed to impress advocacy groups and shareholders, imagine amazing data visualizations of historical, current, and future projected social and environmental impact based on tangible, implicit data. Some early explorations of life cycle storytelling at the product level are Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles, and so many creative opportunities are yet to be explored. Also see TED International speaker and friend Manuel Lima's post on the subject of data visualization and sustainability.
The Need for a Strong Sustainability API
Beyond being product and brand specific, useful sustainability data eventually also needs to be intelligently shared through APIs that enable stakeholders to visualize, compare, and innovate on the data. In order to gain wisdom across products, companies and sectors, brands will need to become comfortable opening up their data, some of it proprietary, for customers and even competitors to build on and mash up effectively.
One of the most forward looking projects has been the GreenXchange project with Nike, Creative Commons and other partners, which opened up some of Nike's patents for innnovators to build on. I am curious to see what results are created out of the open innovation, but the long term strategy is spot on.
Similarly, some smart technologists have been working on open standards on environmental impact data to enable the kind of innovation we've seen in web 2.0 in the green economy. Walmart's efforts to create a Sustainability Index have major potential, and it would be great to see the UK retailers like Marks & Spencer build on their already strong leadership to formalize standard data sharing through an API.
According to Programmable Web's API Directory, for example, there are some noteworthy independent APIs such as the Carbon data measurement standards AMEE, Open Eco, and Carma. Of the three, the UK based AMEE, which stands for Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine, seems the most aware of its potential role in driving innovative mashups for sustainable choices.
While independent organizations may be in a better position to gather and process data, sustainable brands and the agencies that serve then have an opportunity to be pro-active about leading or participating in these platforms, and will improve their brand reputation strongly by doing so.
In the second part of this series on Digital Opportunities for Sustainability Leadership, I will evaluate some of the best digital sustainability experiences that brands and agencies have produced to help people and communities to improve their life and buying choices, and live more sustainable lives.
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I woke up this morning at 6am to the sound of my Nokia N900 alarm, still searching for a sim card in this new old American land. While we were spending the last month in India between our most recent life in London and our new life in the Bay Area, we spent a week in a small coastal spot in the state of Kernataka called Gokarna.
While the rest of our month was filled with Mumbai chaotic excitement, motorcycles through Hampi boulders and temples, and family time in Kerala, our week in Gokarna was kind of like an extended New Years Day of resolutions and visions for 2010. We also spent time over four days practicing a morning ritual that will become a key part of our 2010 back in the United States.
When I reflected on the last few phases of my adult life since college, I saw that while I have been someone with strong vision and ideas for the future, my 7 years in Brooklyn and 3 years in London haven't seen much actual progress on putting finishing polish on any of ideas or creative work.
Especially during in my time at R/GA in London, I gave most of my waking energy to work and projects with clients and colleagues on the global Nokia Account. I don't regret the time I dedicated toward promoting the online & mobile launch event Rihanna Live for example, but at times it felt like I misplaced part of my soul at home.
There are words, music and images that I have been gathering on my journey over the last 10 years, stories that I feel compelled to share, applications that I want to create. And instead of pretending that I will work on these projects when I get home at night, with my head full of the inevitably chaotic day, I have decided that I will be keeping the clearest part of the day for myself and my priorities. I will be "choosing the morning."
So good morning to a great 2010 here in the Bay Area. Good afternoon to folks in London and good evening to those out in Mumbai and Singapore. I look forward to sharing some of these words and images and stories in the coming days and weeks and months. Now onto sit ups and push ups before breakfast.
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My song Destination Non-Specific has spread on Youtube mostly because users are forced to strip the copyrighted music from their videos (using YouTube's audioswap function), and are offered Creative Commons music like mine to replace it.
The first ones were pretty random, like the first, Thunder Bay Flyover.
Then, a few months ago, I got a pretty interesting one where user comments were upset cause the song was used on top of a popular video from one of their favorite artists. The users of course weren't that happy, but it was interesting to see some of the comments were positive about the song.
Then today I realized did a search and realized that the song had been used a lot, so did a search on youtube for "Destination Non-Specific" and it came up about 50 results on Youtube.
When I was browsing, I noticed a user named annamaisa had even made an actual music video for the song, and it's actually pretty beautiful (and viewed over 10,000 times). See here.
Overall, people continue to validate my belief that many of us are living in the emerging gift economy. While I still have not leveraged any my life long social capital for actual tangible cash capital, I think that day might be coming soon.
Thanks all for the collaboration. Let's keep building the new economy. Check out "350 Make a Choice" from MuskokaDreamscape, which uses an alionsonny remix of my CCmixter track Everyday Choices to promote 350.org's climate action campaign.
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For a potential project I am exploring, I searched online to try to find out where the garbage that I throw out in city garbage/rubbish bins goes. The best information I could find was article in the Guardian called "Following the rubbish trail," but it was from 2004. I wrote an email to the author Leo Hickman, but so far, no response (I'm sure he busy on new articles).
So I asked my housemate, a proper Londoner where she would look, and she pointed me to the city councils. After a quick google search, I found the newly organized London Waste & Recycling Board, and sent the following letter to the contact person listed. I'll let you know how it goes.
--
Hi,
Thanks for the work you do for the city of London. I used to live in
New York City, and London is definitely a much cleaner city. As
someone interested in environmental issues, I have become interested in
finding out more about the impact (positive and negative) that I make
with my daily life and choices.
One specific piece of information I haven't been able to find online is
where the rubbish is taken that I put into the public bins around the
city. Do you know where I would be able to find out? While I'm
intersted to know where it all goes, the buroughs I am more interested
in are my home burough of Hackney, as well as Islington, Camden and
City of London.
Any information or contact information for the right person to contact would be very much appreciated.
Cheers,
Colin
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