Financial organisations lead the way

A recent article in computing magazine reported on the initiatives undertaken by the likes of HSBC, Lloyds TSB and Nationwide to be more energy efficient. HSBC is piloting virtual boardrooms across the world from June 2007 in a bid reduce both the cost and the environmental impact of air travel – a flight to New York is equivalent to 1.2 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. Amongst other initiatives is the drive by both Nationwide and HSBC to encourage customers to stop paper statements and complete all banking online. As an avid online banker I find the convenience of paying all my bills and transferring money part of my everyday life and would be severely inconvenienced without it.

However, I am still guilty of receiving my paper statement every month and will continue to do so as there is some part of me that thinks this big IT system containing all of our information will one day fail and I will have to rely on my trusty paper statement to remind me who and what I pay every month. This leaves me asking myself the question, “am I a laggard” for not wholly embracing e-banking? The argument becomes more compelling when I realise that I didn’t know what blogs, mash ups, and flickr were until January 2007. Moore’s admittance in Crossing the Chasm that he too falls into this category when adopting personal technology offers me slight solace (that and the fact that when I read on in the article, the take up of online statements is less than 18%)!

Having diverted slightly, I want to finish my blog by telling you all that the article also taught me something I will think about as I leave the office every night – switching off the lights will provide enough energy to make 1000 cups of tea. Maybe I will educate my colleagues by advertising this at the door, on recycled paper of course!

Will Mechanical Turks Save the World?

For those who have never heard this term, a recent article in the Independent Newspaper outlines how you can earn money from the internet by doing such bizarrely different tasks such as language translation to answering off-beam questions. Before you all rush to earn your fortune, the hourly rate on offer is usually way below minimum wage, but it is interesting how the wisdom of the crowd is now being used to complete tasks which were either expensive or impossible before. What is more interesting is that the Mturk-ers providing their services for next to peanuts are actually doing it - this can only be explained by the social computing phenomenon that has lead to MySpace, YouTube and the rest.

But is this relevant for sustainability? Well, this shrinking virtual world surely omeans that searching for services becomes easier and hence less of the world's resources will be consumed in the hunt for a provider. In the old old days, if you wanted to translate something, you probably invited suppliers for interview, set up a contract and posted the information backwards and forwards. In the future, no search or contracts will be necessary as the market will provide the lowest cost (and CO2) solution.

So will Mturks save the world? Well, not quite, but maybe this ultimate market solution will start to chip away at some of our assumptions of where work resides and thus gives an opportunity for consumption reduction.