The Greening.it eBook was released during International Green IT Awareness Week 2010 and is a collaboration between a group Green IT experts across the globe. This book started out as two people’s commitment to save the planet, and one guy crazy enough to suggest that a book was the way to do it. All three of us can now call ourselves the editors of this exciting, internationally collaborative, and nonprofit (Creative Commons licensed) project. Allow us to introduce ourselves: Irene & Adrian Sobotta and John Gøtze.
Personally committed to contribute to solving human’s impact on global warming, Irene and Adrian wanted to apply their professional fields of Environmental Politics and Information Technology to increase awareness of Green IT solutions. Using John’s knowledge and experience in collaborative bookwriting, the Greening IT project was born.
Our common underlying assumption is that there is something wrong with the world today! We perceive Climate Change and Global Warming as the effects of unsustainable consumption patterns in an industrialised world. In an effort to contribute to solving the problem, we look into the great potential of Information Technology (IT). The overall goal is to communicate to a large audience how IT can be leveraged to transform today’s society into one characterised by low emissions of greenhouse gases.
Although we strongly believe that IT is part of the solution, we must emphasise that we also do not believe in silver bullets and technical fixes. As such, the problem and indeed the solution, is at the end of the day a question about human, social, cultural and political commitment.
From the outset, the project was dependent on contributions from other committed souls around the globe. Thus, the book has been written as an internationally collaborative effort resulting in a compendium of works with a loose common thread, being Green IT. This approach allowed us to bring in expertise in various fields of Green IT and the environment thus allowing for different approaches and perspectives on the potential of Green IT.
The contributors are situated in Denmark, United Kingdom, Germany, USA, Netherlands, Japan and Australia – a truly diverse team which despite their geographical dispersion and cultural diversity, has communicated a unified message.
That message being that IT is a strong and significant enabler to transform our societies into those characterised by low-carbon footprints.
The aim of the book is to look into how Information Technology can support society in reducing CO2 emissions, saving energy and optimising resource utilisation - thus becoming greener and developing towards a low-carbon society. The book seeks to cover the general potential of Green IT, as well as the potential of a number of specific technologies, such as Smart Grid and Cloud Computing.
This preliminary version of the book is published online in December 2009 for the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen. Work on the book will continue, taking in feedback from commenters and reviewers, as well as a number of new contributions. In spring 2010 the final book will be published in print, and be available through Amazon and other channels.
Naturally, we will offset the emissions required for the printing of the book - in order to keep the book a ‘Green Initiative’.
May the book fulfill its intentions and help leading us to the Low-Carbon Society.
Enjoy!
Adrian, Irene and John
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