greenforge

Yeah. Gotta get busy with the Forge. I been on the inter-galactic highway too long, and now I am back and I want to hook me up with some righteous hyper-linkers. You got knowledge of Green APIs? Well bring em on. You seen ‘em on your pretty little world? Tell us where to find them. The Forge is kind of resource constrained right now - eco-terrorism don’t pay the bills too easy, and that last core bomb really hurt. So we’re looking for help. Contribute your Green API links on Ma.gnolia over at our Green Forge group. By working together we can punch upwards of our weight jus like with my Tae-Jitsu. And I am already one. heavy. duty. dude. Peace out (unless you a pollutahscum).

Its April 19th and 20th April 2008 in SF. Go sign up

There’s a problem here on Earth that could spell serious heat for all who dwell. Your governors and governance is wrong. The players don’t get it. They are holding the levers and pulling them all about but they ain’t connected like they were.

That’s probably ‘cos you all live on this tiny little planet in a single dimension and are about 50 billion light years behind the rest of the galaxy….which leaves you believing that it’s possible to command your ways out of trouble.

But for a star-roaming, dimension-busting, criminal gangster like me, it’s all about stellar networks and they only work one way - from the roots up. It’s the Empire vs the Republic all over…

But you have leaders who understand and it’s these people that need to be plugged into the networks, communities and marketplaces that players are now building to show real progress. Like your main player Yvon Chouinard who mixes slow business, eco-respect and but also offers style with his words, such as his tome - Let My People Go Surfing - which gets the full GF seal. And feel his full story here.

And more so the man can collaborate which as I say, ain’t exactly a human strong point. The player’s idea of the One Per Cent For The Planet where companies give up one per cent of their sales to the cause is real.

The dude is SO right, he’s kind of unhuman. Word.

Me and my man Buck arrived on your little planet a little while back and we been out there discussing the status. And it ain’t so good. You humans got short memory banks.

This little planet you call your crib is sick and we seen it all. Back on Naboo, humans also wrecked a world. Like Earth, Naboo was a fine venue holding clear oceans, green forests like nothing and grassy plains of beauty. Now I ain’t no fool. More the stone cold criminal gangster that ripped a a gazillion credits out of the player Clode Rhoden while Buck got real with Madam R. But I enjoy beauty and it ain’t so frequent in this universe that you get to see real peace.

For the longest time the Gungans ran Naboo with respect. Players like Binks were real and connected. Then that major bad ass Kwilaan come over and the humans started to arrive for leisure pursuits which were all about shooting stuff up. Now I get real deep pleasure from the use of extreme violence and engaging with major weaponry but only for significance. Like when I stopped Rhoden and took all his shit. You humans are twisted - taking hype shooting dumb creatures that have no-thing.

Then you showed in major battalions and used that sick nature till you were running tings. And when those Gungan rolled over - you started shooting up each other! That’s where the peace on Naboo ended and the end of that story was clones and swamp gas.

And now Buck-Moegantz have spent valuable GreenForge time assessing the reality on Earth I see you doing it all over! But I don’t see no positive action. I see a lot of humanoids moving their lips but there ain’t no meaning in their rhymes. When you going to realise that carbon ain’t the problem? It’s the shit in your human brains which makes your triggers keep on flicking. You ain’t got trust. And that reality is making your planet sick.

So me and Buck are kicking back with players like Messina, Musser, Starks, Bell, Hoffman, Duncan Davidson, DiBono. Rich synapse-rich mo-fo’s who see the reality. And we going to take action using tools like these APIs that you came down on about 50,000 eras after the rest of the galaxy. And we going to get to work building new truths….

So look out. GreenForge is creating. We got the medicine and we’re dangerous.

But stay aware. If any of your synapse-light brothers try to stop this realness Buck’s gonna be there showing moves to your madams and Moegantz still has core-bombs and evilness plenty to bring down on fools….

Steal This Brand talks about the Open Source Planet.

While the industry has very low direct environmental impact, its indirect impact is immense. As CSR practitioners, we all have an interest in helping to hold SAP, IBM, Oracle and the rest to account. These companies constitute our Global Resource Management infrastructure. Their systems can unlock transparency and sustainability through open source systems and networked accountability, or they can bury us in waste, secrecy and bureaucracy.

The call to action? Go over and contribute to James Farrar’s open thread - “What should technology companies do to fulfil their social responsibility?”

I wrote about Governance, Risk and Compliance as the new ERP here.

disclosure: James may become a client at some point.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I rampaged intergalatically with the GreenForge firm wreaking acts of eco-terrorism. I destroyed people who weren’t loving our homeland of Naboo - players with mines and refineries. And do you know what my motivation was? Kicks. And cash.

Yep, that’s the thing about eco-terrorism - it’s a good way to make coin and get a rep, but reality-wise it gets you nowhere. And also, you can end up looking like a bit of a sandal-wearing fool, which is a style that I swerve by dressing my 450kilo figure with much ghetto-tastic, real-mans bling. Having a head the shape of a rock and yellow eyes that make people shiver also helps. Even my man Buck managed to avoid a tree-hugging, lentil-bugging tag by loving the ladies and knowing a lot of moves. But deep down that dude ain’t no eco-terrorist - more like a jiggy-jihadist.

And you know what? I’ve seen eco-terrorists fail all over. Just look at that Swampy fool you had here on planet Earth. The brother tried to stop that highway network by living in a hole. I mean people liked him and took the point but he failed and no one wanted to be him. He had no-thing and he smelt bad. Take a view!

GreenForge don’t have those issues - although I may have to test Buck on his choice of cologne occasionally. In every galaxy and on every star, players wants to be with GF and join forces with Moegantz and Buck. Cos’ they know we get respect and pick up action.

Now Buck and I have brought GreenForge way into your world, ditched the violence and core-bombs and decided to update by reaching out to the world of technical dudes and dudesses. It’s still the GreenForge and we still going to bring hell upon those folk who are trying to wreck this wonderful, tiny, green planetoid you guys call home. Just in a remixed, modern way using networks, communities and marketplaces that people dig and want to be part of.

Personally, I am and still going to be looking for fun, rep and wealth. And I know Buck is really just here to mix it with your foxy humainoids. And hell, if we fail and your planet boils, we’ll move the GreenForge over a few galaxies and start up.

So where do we go from here? Maybe with this API foolery that you all just found….

It may not be an API but the locallygrown.net web site is certainly interesting, in helping local farmers to find local customers for their goods. What comes after globalisation? Why localisation of course… a great GreenForge opportunity.

“We believe that small, diverse, family-owned farms contribute to society’s overall health, so we’ve made LocallyGrown.net to be the most convenient method to get food from field to plate.”

Unfortunately the service is currently is US only. I wonder if there is a UK equivalent? Maybe Chris Dalby should build one. The transactional business model is interesting- the site takes 3% of profits. With tight margins that might be hard to swallow.

One final Greenmonk angle to the story. I heard about locallygrown.net through @MikeG1 on twitter, who pointed out it was built by @ewagoner, “One of the few farmer slash software developers out there.” Its refreshing to read tweets written in pure pork rather than pure dork…

“My hog’s going to the butcher tomorrow. I shall soon get more practice with charcuterie. Might make prosciutto.“

picture courtesy of Garrulus

The AMEE API is about as green as it gets. A tremendously interesting UK project, a “Web 2.0 service for climate campaigning”, AMEE is designed to:

1. Enable any climate campaign to use a common standard for Carbon Footprint Profiling and Measurement
2. Open up the data, making it easy to access (using an “API“). This enables each campaign to create their own branded front-end to their campaigns, but rely on the same standard data.
3. Open up methodologies, part of our approach is like a “wikipedia for data” with tight peer-review - everyone can see exactly where the data came from, and why. We recognise and accommodate the fact that different organisations have different opinions on the underlying assumptions and data - we want to encourage open-ness and debate in this area to increase engagement with the issues
4. Provide a common platform for profiling. Any campaign can use our anonymised profiling engine to store and track individual’s personal CO2 footprint. We can’t identify people individually - campaigns can identify only their users - but it does enable us to create broad anonymised reports across campaigns. We hope this approach will help campaigns work together to accelerate change.

AMEE is open data, with no front end. That is its the Intel Inside, but shared. Its cool the UK government sees the benefit in sharing data here…

All code is GPL.

All other data is CreativeCommons attribution share and share alike licensed.

AMEE is cool because it isn’t competing with other more front end focused services such as Make me Sustainable. The idea is just to make the data better and better, through sharing.

For dorkier readers its worth noting the AMEE API is RESTful and supports JSON. Here is some API documentation.

AMEE is perfect for correlation - so for example a service such as dopplr (a social network for frequent travellers) could use AMEE data to convert their miles tracking into carbon footprint tracking. It is already being used in the UK public sector, both local and central government - early adopters include Defra, The Climate Group, The RSA, Herefordshire Council, and Global Cool.

If anything deserves credit from GreenForge its AMEE. Scary name? Probably harsh but fair.

If you know any other Green APIs please let us know.

photo of the eagle on ice courtesy of swanksalot over at B12Solipsism.

Check out Ed’s blog.

We’re starting to think how we can get going with some Green APIs: logging, tracking and thinking about. Problem is we don’t even know what they are yet. So it was good to see this post from Genuine VC David Beisel where he lays out some ways of thinking about greening. (I ain’t so sure about a “web” having four “branches”… Buck).

1. Providing an aggregated trusted source of useful information. Startup sites like TreeHugger (which also has a site called Hugg, a Digg for environmental news) offer news, culture, and instructive information. Big media companies are also jumping on board – MSNBC has an Environment channel online and Discovery acquired the aforementioned TreeHugger company just last week). Large non-media branding-based corporations, like Starbucks, in an attempt to enhance their eco-friendly image are also sharing information via the web.

2. Connecting people to other people and useful services. For example, there’s now a Facebook Carpool app which “makes sharing a ride safer and easier by using Facebook to find people going in the same direction.” Boston-based GoLoco is pursuing the same ends with a stand-alone web service. Both are perfect examples of leveraging the web to connect people towards a greater environmental good. In addition, the web can act as the perfect vehicle to connect people to specific services, like purchasing carbon offsets in an effort for individuals to live carbon-neutral (ZeroFootPrint, TerraPass, and NativeEnergy are just a few companies doing this).

3. Becoming an integral component of a service. In some cases, the web actually is a fundamental component in a green service. As illustrations, Greendimes allows consumers to reduce their unwanted junk mail and Earth Class Mail (fka Remote Control Mail) allows users to read their mail online, reducing paper handling costs and recycling in a central facility. Without the web, these services would hardly exist or would look dramatically different.

4. Replacing functions that are otherwise less eco-friendly. It’s interesting to consider virtual meetings in Second Life and other virtual worlds as replacement for flying people to meet in person. Though some question this approach given the amount of servers/electricity in creating these spaces, examples like Cisco using virtual worlds for a number of events and interactions are surely notable.

In all of these cases, different shades of the Green Web take a step in the direction towards better planet – and do so in a potentially profitable way, making it a win-win situation. What other innovative green technology-enabled services will the web help facilitate?

GreenForge will be doing some of the first three… all contributing to the just cause of pan-Galactic eco-terrorism. I wonder if we can find a Jatropha-powered API?  What say you, Programmable Web? Keep up the good work Mr Beisel.

What  makes an API more green than another?  Is it green by virtue of pointing to green -related info, or by turning the server off at night? Is it green because the API provider is investing heavily in indigenous tree replanting programs, or because they have their own wind-turbines? Is it green because the clover is oh so fine? Apparently Citibank is building green data centers now - what are the API or web service implications?

More snowball momentum required, so once again we’re calling for “geeks, hackheads, bloggers, SW fans and all other earth-dwellers very welcome.” Maybe 21st CenturyCitizen can help with the call to arms, even though that was aeons ago.  We’re all concerned now, right?