Greening Events at the Institutional Web Management Workshop

11:14 am in general, remote, technologies by guest

The JISC Greening Events  Project

Greening Events is a small exploratory project funded under the JISC Greening ICT programme . It is investigating how to minimise the negative sustainability impacts of academically related events (such as conferences and seminars, training, administrative and project meetings, etc.) whilst gaining the maximum benefit from them. The two main objectives of the project are:

  1. To develop a prototype ‘systemic’ impact analysis methodology. By systemic we mean not only the direct impacts of an event but the knock on and incidental impacts (both positive and negative). Factors would include more concrete impacts such as energy, carbon, water and waste footprints and finances but also and the less tangible but no less important social, personal and organisational costs and benefits of people attending the events, thus enabling a more rounded exploration of the balance between costs and benefits.
  2. To explore the use of a variety of technologies to help minimise the sustainability impact of events. To do this the project builds on two earlier JISC-funded software development projects and will lead to prototype software that will allow the event organisers to effectively plan their events and attendees to get connected and/or get information (including via mobile devices) towards “greener events”. Damien Steer, who is speaking at the event, will include a reference to how we are using Mobile Campus Assistant in the Greening Events project in his presentation.

The project is using real academic events as case studies and will be interviewing three virtual delegates from this year’s IWMW event as well as, if access if possible, study the Web logs of the video and Twitter feeds to see how virtual delegates are making use of these tools.

Finding Out More

If you would like more information about the project or would like to get involved in one of the interviews please contact the project analyst Paul Shabajee (paul.shabajee@bristol.ac.uk) or the project manager Debra Hiom (d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk).