Earth Day Roundup

Links to some interesting reading this Earth Day: Green IT. A couple months ago I posted about "Green IT" and the growing awareness that information technology demands fuel and creates emissions like all other energy consuming activities. But this article in the BBC took me by surprise... email SPAM is a major contributor to IT energy consumption, utilizing 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power more than 2.4m home, and in the process contributing 17 million tons of carbon dioxide to our greenhouse gas burden. Green Education. A bit of good news for all the non-profits making efforts to educate their constituency about green issues: it makes a difference. The EPA reports that there is a measurable improvement in air quality associated with environmental education. Nearly half of the surveyed institutions hosting education programs reported an improvement in air quality at their facilities due to actions taken by students, including doing service-learning projects and fostering community partnerships. Examples include decreased levels of carbon monoxide and mold, and enactment of a policy that decreased car or bus idling. Green Markets? Free-marketeers have been extolling the value of "Cap and Trade" solutions to control emissions... but there is mounting evidence that it is not so simple. An article in the British New Scientist reviews the results of the ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) currently in place in the EU. The approach works when the price of permits is high. But if the value falls, the incentive to improve emissions falls right with it: As heavy industries mothball factories, energy use drops and demand for permits goes down. At the same time businesses try to raise cash by selling their unused permits, flooding the market and further depressing prices. French energy company EDF recently complained that carbon markets were failing just like the market for subprime mortgages. As a result, all kinds of green energy schemes are grinding to a halt.

Daily News, Daily Blues

In the last few months, it seems that at every social gathering I attend, the conversation gets around to "Newspapers - what's going to happen to them?" The closing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's print operations a few weeks back, coupled with Hearst Corporation's announcement that may close the venerable San Francisco Chronicle as well, has brought the plight of print journalism into focus. And I've been finding that my friends get really worked up about it -- it's clear the newspaper as it exists today has real meaning in people's lives. It's not a problem that suddenly snuck up on us. Back in the summer of '06, The Economist was already talking about the decline of print, and predicting that the future would see the closing of most local papers, and a new mix that consisted of "an elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists..." The problem of course is the collapse of the traditional business model of the newspaper. In that model advertisers pay publishers enough to support the news-gathering operation because advertising in a newspaper with decent reporting was the best way to get their copy in front of readers. As essay by new-media guru Clay Shirky points out, this is no longer the case, because "...the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem." The Internet has disrupted the old economic realities of information distribution. Because of that, advertisers have migrated to the net in droves. In the past, classified advertising was the most lucrative source of advertising revenue for the publisher - Rupert Murdoch referred to it as "a river of gold" - but that river is now reduced to a trickle, leading the Economist to say that Craigslist has done more than anything to destroy the newspaper. And publishers' reponse to that loss of revenue has been to cut expenses by shrinking the paper and reducing the news staff - in other words, by making their product less desirable. Shirky says, "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism." But the newspapers have provided a concentration of resources for serious journalism that the new media alternatives, such as The Huffington Post, let alone individual bloggers, have not yet demonstrated an ability to replace. Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time and former CEO of CNN, assumes that the print edition is dead but the institution need not perish with it. He proposes that the solution is for the major pappers to begin charging for their websites. Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it. This is not a business model that makes sense. Isaacson envisions both a subscription basis (as the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal currently have) as well as a micropayments model where individual articles have a small fee (five or ten cents each) for non-subscribers. Conventional wisdom is that people will not pay to read the newspaper online, but Isaacson is convined that it can be done. After all, he points out, people pay to text. Some resources: "Who Killed the Newspaper", The Economist, August 24, 2006. Eric Alterman, "The News Business: Out of Print," The New Yorker, March 31, 2008 Clay Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable",March 13th, 2009 Walter Isaacson, "How to Save your Newspaper", Time, Feb 5th, 2009 Scott Adams, "The Future of Newspapers", Oct 1, 2007

What is Green IT?

For a couple of years now we've been seeing talk of Green IT, and as early as 2007 management consulting giants Gartner and McKinsey were addressing Green issues as a major issue facing IT managers. The McKinsey report offers a concise statement of the issue: The rapidly growing carbon footprint associated with information and communications technologies, including laptops and PCs, data centers and computing networks, mobile phones, and telecommunications networks, could make them among the biggest greenhouse gas emitters by 2020. However, our research also suggests that there are opportunities to use these technologies to make the world economy more energy and carbon efficient So Green IT is really two issues: making information technology itself more energy efficient, and going beyond that to using IT to reduce the carbon footprint of other operations. Today's EnergyWise announcement by Cisco underscores the growing concern managers have in both these areas. The EDS blog The Next Big thing devoted eight posts last autumn to an in-depth look at the idea of Green IT and lays out a path that considers both of these issues in detail, focusing on the green data center. Many of these ideas seem more appropriate for a Google or Microsoft than for a medium-sized non-profit or association. Techsoup offers some suggestions for Greening the smaller workplace. These include virtualizing your servers to use fewer boxes, and using your technology to minimze travel. Has your organization grappled with these issues? Have your solutions saved you money, added complexity, or both?

Three common security pitfalls

Security is a growing concern in the non-profits community. The requirements may be legally mandated, as in the case of HIPAA and client health care information. The issue may be competitive -- you do not want to hand out your grant applications to the other orgs in your building before you've even sent them off to funders. And everyone has finally woken up to the need to secure supporters' credit card information and comply with PCI standards. Organizations are putting increasing pressure on vendors of applications and networks to assure security through the use of encryption, https, and user specific access to data fields and tables. But we see three simple security flaws over and over again in the smaller non-profits. Inadequate physical security of the servers. Is your database server sitting in the unlocked phone closet? Is your web server in a room shared by three programmers? I know one group with real privacy concerns who keep the server on a counter in the break room. It doesn't really matter how much you lock your network down with the latest firewall technology and encryption techniques if the servers can be waltzed out of the building without causing a stir. Inadequate password security. I see this everywhere I go - users know each others passwords. It may even become part of standard operating procedure: "to do this, I log in as Eileen." Let your OS help you with this: require users to change their passwords frequently. Require complex passwords. Beat up on people who tell others what their password is. And if you have legally mandated privacy concerns, consider adding biometrics to your user authentication procedure - USB thumb scanners are widely available these days. Improper Disposal of Computers. When the time comes to dispose of a pc, what do you do with it? All your security efforts were for naught if you just sit the machine in the trash. Wipe that drive! Reformatting the drive does not do it - it just clears the directory structure. Any snoop can still read your data after a reformat. There are numerous software packages on the market for just this purpose - a number of government agencies have standardized on cyberCide. You can destroy the drive with a few well-placed drill holes - but the software approach is easier - and then you can still donate the old. Thanks to Sean Henriques for a tweeting a link that made me start thinking about this!

The Summertime Blues

You'll love those lazy hazy crazy days of summer - those days of hot dogs and pretzels and beer... remember that old tune? I can remember listening to it on the radio as we drove to the Catskills in my Dad's old Dodge. But vacations are different now - everywhere I'm reading articles about how we Americans don't really get away from our work anymore when we go on holiday. We go loaded with smartphone and laptop and a plan to get six weeks of special projects done during six days on the beach. I know that's how I made my last trip miserable. But I don't think we should get too new-agey about this one. For the techie in the non-profit or association space, taking a guilt- and anxiety-free vacation is not about state of mind, but about preparation. It's about making sure your organization, your clients, your users, really will be OK during your absence. Its a sort of preparation you need to be thinking about in one way or another before any absence - whether its a day off to paint your kitchen or a month-long trip through India. Prepare your users. Your users depend on you on a daily basis for solutions, for advice, for troubleshooting. The longer your absence is going to be, the earlier you need to let people know about it. Make sure all your key users understand when and for how long you will be out, and give them a good understanding of the limits on your availability during your vacation. Encourage them to think now about needs that might emerge during your time off. Make sure they factor your absence into their timeframes for special projects! And let them know where to turn for help while you are gone. Prepare your backup. The folks who are going to be filling in for you during your vacation need to know exactly where your major projects are at, how to find the information they might need, and who they can turn to for further help. Make sure they know exactly how and when they can contact you, and when you be unavailable. What should you prepare them for? Look through your last years log of issues you've had to resolve. And be careful: documenting your network is useless if you have not made sure the right people know where to find that document. Don't have a backup person? - no wonder you and your coworkers are anxious! Take care of this first. If its not someone on your staff, make arrangements with a consultant. Prepare yourself. Your work pattern needs to change as you get ready to leave. We did a project several years ago for Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. Frequently our partner Jochen would fly there for meetings. Pressed by the users to make enhancements to the application on a short time frame, he'd crank out code in his hotel room in the evening and install it the next day. Then he'd get on a plane to come back to D.C. Inevitably the user would have some huge issue with what he had done while he was on his seven-hour flight home. None of us back in the office had a clue what the requirements were or what the discussion had been. We've identified this as the Friday Install problem. Now we know to wait until we are in a position to support before we change. When your absence is going to be longer than seven hours, this issue becomes much more sensitive. Make sure you are not adding to the support burden in the days before you leave. And send me a postcard!