Back in October I penned a missive about substituting virtual meetings for live (meatspace) ones. I challenged myself and others to avoid the convention of boarding a plane for remote face-to-face meetings and use network collaboration tools like conference calls, video conferencing, and virtual worlds as an alternative.
I was able to successfully use these virtual substitutes for the last calendar quarter of 2007 with only one exception, and have a 50%-less-travel goal in 2008, using virtual meetings instead.
One very nice side effect of this effort was that I was contacted by the excellent people at the Nature Conservancy, who asked me to write up a brief summary of my efforts for Nature.org, which they were kind enough to publish here, which was also picked up by the Digg community here. I appreciate the support and outreach I have received from the community, which has been extensive in the short period since the article was published.
As a result, I'd like to encourage those would also like to adopt virtual interactions as a more environmentally-friendly substitute for air-travel to share their best practices and guidance in the blog comments, which I pledge to aggregate into a user-editable Wiki for the community to share. I will be bringing up a Wiki in the next 24-48 hours and will publish a link here as soon as I have it.
Very impressive to take on all those virtual subsititues, if more people did this it would certainly cut down on our carbon footprint. I do a fair amount of video conferencing myself and have found it very convenient. For the small to medium shops out there and even people looking to use it for personal use I suggest ooVoo since it is free and allows up to six people to video conference at once.
Its a great way to reduce your carbon footbring by taking on virtual subsitutes, it'll also save quiet a bit of money as well.
Posted by: Pat | January 31, 2008 at 05:50 PM
Hi Christian !
Thanks for opening this new way :-)
on our side, we are working on a solution called "Immersive Training Center", that will work both in Second life and another Virtual World (to set up a server inside our clients' networks, mainly for security reasons).
Our main investor (a bank) will be the first to test it for real and we are targetting toavoid 30% of the business trips dedicated to training sessions. Only for the pilot project, that means some 100KEuros saved, but also, of course, many tons of carbon at the same time.
We will provide this solution to our clients (mainly Fortune500) soon. Can you imagine how much carbon could be saved ? ;-)
Posted by: Pierre-Olivier | February 08, 2008 at 08:00 AM