“The truth is we think of it as a responsibility to equip designers and engineering professionals with the right information so they can understand the social and environmental impact of their designs before they actually build them.” Lynelle Cameron, director of sustainability at Autodesk. SF Business Times, September 28, 2008
Author Archives: Ruth Ann Barrett
Press Release for EarthSayers.tv
Today, a press release ran on http://www.world-wire.com/
Worldwire runs press releases “from environmentally relevant organizations and corporations that keep you up to the minute on this fast-changing field.”
Global 100 Most Sustainable Firms that are U.S. companies are major candidates for sponsoring EarthSayers.tv, the voices of sustainability. We are seeking help from our network of friends and colleagues to identify the sustainability initiative, green, and/or Corporate Social Responsibility contacts within these companies. The seventeen U.S. Firms on the 100 Best list are:
Advanced Micro Devices
Agilent Technologies Inc
Alcoa Inc
American International Group Inc
Baxter International Inc
Coca Cola Company
Eastman Kodak Company
FPL Group Inc
General Electric Company
Genzyme Corp.
Hewlett-Packard Company
Intel Corp.
Nike Inc
Pinnacle West Capital Corp.
State Street Corp.
United Technologies Corp.
Walt Disney Company
Official Launch of EarthSayers.tv
Today EarthSayers.tv enters the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) awareness stream by publishing our first press release through the CSRwire. Go take a look at http://www.csrwire.com/
The Day after the Sustainability Workshop
As luck would have it I bent down to pick up a sock yesterday morning and could hardly straighten up. My knees buckled and I had the feeling I was dealing with something very painful. Getting to the the Sustainable Brands workshop was tough. I was a good hour late and had to stand through much of it, but I did get to meet some interesting folks and had the opportunity to introduce myself to Brian Gruber, President and CEO of Fora.tv here in San Francisco. I have been wanting to talk to him about EarthSayers.tv and possible points of collaboration: a word, by the way, referenced more than a few times at the workshop. I also introduced myself to Jurriaan Kamp, the President and Editor in Chief of Ode magazine. Both Fora.tv and Ode were co-sponsors of the workshop.
Much of the content was a repeat of the speakers at the Sustainable Brands conference in Monterey last June, but the audience was pretty much new to the sustainability movement. There was considerable discussion of folks inside organizations that are sustainability evangelists and have to prove the ROI for programs and lack the tools to do so. No one talked about pushing for the ROI of unsustainable practices, like events, but then the world out there is fairly unbalanced at the moment.
I am going to try and get EarthSayers.tv mentioned at the upcoming workshops in New York City and Austin, Texas. There is a lack of information on the subject of sustainability and EarthSayers.tv, even at the prototype stage, offers an opportunity to be much better informed and, yes, inspired.
As to the back, it’s getting better, but I am not doing much moving around. Getting in and out of a car is painful!
Branding for Sustainability Conference, SF, September 17th
I will be attending a half-day workshop this week (9/17) on “Branding for Sustainability.” Will update the blog with how the workshop goes as I hope to meet some people interested in sponsoring EarthSayers.tv. I have written a whitepaper on Branding Sustainability that is available on this blog – see right column. My point was to suggest with brand awareness so low for the term, sustainability, attention needs to be paid to building awareness for sustainability directly, as, for example, is done with product categories like milk. More later.
There are two more 1/2 day workshops scheduled for Austin 9/22 and New York on October 20th.
“Our goal is to spotlight the ideas, practices and possibilities for building and scaling sustainable brands,” said Jurriaan Kamp, founder and editor-in-chief of Ode magazine, who will moderate the workshops. “We are creating an interactive forum for business executives to share experiences, insights and opportunities about sustainability and brand value.”
For more information including more detailed agenda go to:
http://www.brandingforsustainability.com/sf.html
On Becoming An Advocate
In the process of building EarthSayers.tv I have become an advocate of sustainability. An advocate is “a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular cause or policy. Early on in my career I was hired by the National Association for Community Development in Washington, D.C. We were advocates for community action and community action agencies across the country. It amazes me how long it took me to come full circle, back to advocacy – over thirty years. It wasn’t even part of a plan. It just happened.
Sunday Morning
Meeting this morning with the visual artist, Torben Torp-Smith, to review his portfolio and look at how we might collaborate on future projects. Torben does mostly theater design and sculpture so a morning with Torben is always visually stimulating and leaves me with asking him the question, How did you make THAT? This photo is from Torben’s MFA thesis presentation for the opera, Billy Budd. It is a cross-section of an armed Man-of-War navigating in the two fluid media of wind and waves. It is a metaphor for deck levels of class identity rigidly regulated by an unmoving and inflexible matrix of law and custom. Wow! For more inspiration visit, www.torpsmith.com.
It’s the 30% that count!
When we started to query the Blinkx database on the term, sustainability, we were not sure how many we would have for review. We hoped for 2,500 to work with by the time the prototype would be ready (May) and expected 25% of that number to be of relevancy and quality. We did set an objective to include at least 250 programs in the prototype.
Over 300 (31%) are now in the database and we have more to review than expected.
Here is how we got to the 300.
We are now working with a pool of 3,200 programs and have reviewed for the prototype 1,052 (32%). Of that number, nearly 70% were rejected primarily because of duplication, no connection, or they were not appropriate (sustainability used in a different context): a full one third because they were duplicates. One reason for duplication is because Blinkx is aggregating from over 250 channels and many videos are posted to multiple channels, not always with the same title and description.
Finding the Voices of Sustainability
Since relevancy and quality are crucial to keeping people using the Web to explore and learn, rather than just be entertained, it is very worrisome that the U.S. is #8 in search volume on the term sustainability.
Today if you do a Google search on the term sustainability you get over 33 million results, up from 15M just a few months ago. If you want to hear what people are saying (video and audio) about the subject go to Blinkx and you’ll find 54,000 videos selected, up from 20,000 four months ago. If you do a Google search on a subcategory of sustainability, climate change for example, you get over 72M results. We are drowning in a sea of results.
This is why we created the EarthSayers Website as a “front door” to the voices of sustainability. We aggregated videos by hooking up to the Blinkx database and did a very narrow query on the term, sustainability. Then we began our review process to determine relevancy and quality of content – our value add. For the prototype we have reviewed over a 1,000 videos, out of 3,200. Over half of the 1,000 were duplicates another 17% did not connect to a page. We guessed at the start that about 20% of the content would be enough to form a major sustainability video collection, catching the eye of those who have recognized a need, are curious, and beginning to search.
We now feel confident in the 20 to 25% number to quell concerns that user generated content is all that’s out there. Weeding is definitely necessary, but the 20% left each of us on this project motivated and inspired to make a commitment to change our lifestyles – at home, work, and community levels.
We now know the site will yield a rich content of over a 1,000 programs to start, more than enough to be a compendium of voices (audio and video) and a running mate to Wikipedia (now the number one listing in organic search on the term) as the premier destination for increasing sustainability awareness and education.
We need sponsors to help drive traffic and build out an EarthSayers Community .