Green thing - you make my heart sing!
October 15, 2007 :: by Lee 1 responses
Today, on Blog Action Day for the environment, I want to tell you about a wonderful project we are part of called Greenthing.
Greenthing is an ambitious labour of love, initiated by Andy Hobsbawm and Naresh Ramchandani but supported by an amazing cast around the world, with the aim of making it easier and more fun for people to begin reducing their carbon footprint.
The blog is well worth a read (RSS here) and you can also upload photos, videos or audio recordings of your greenthing stories and observations. If you are more geeky green and what to get into the evidence for the project, then pop along to the wiki , where you can sign up and contribute alongside many of the project's environmental experts.
The site suggests an action every month and rewards people with videos, walkcasts and other goodies for doing the greenthing. This month's action is simple: walk once. Go on - its quite easy ... and you get badges! The first greenthing creature was designed by top monster man Pete Fowler and he's yours to keep if you do the walking thing.
Over time, we hope people will use the site to keep track of their carbon-reducing behaviour, hang out, meet people and have some fun in the process. We are in beta launch now and as soon as we are on top of the inevitable bugs and launch issues, we have plans for some delightful new features that we hope will make the site more useful.
Headshift contributed some much needed disorganisation and flapping around, plus we built the site and added in some of the social features that we hope will continue to be an important part of the greenthing experience going forward.
The most interesting aspect of the project has been the challenge of finding the right balance between curated and commissioned 'content' on the one hand and opportunities for community ownership and contribution on the other. Andy (European chairman of Agency.com and UK internet industry pioneer) and Naresh (award-winning creative genius from the advertising world) have been remarkably open to our ideas about the role of object-based social networking in the project.
This has been an amazing learning experience, and if there was a prize for being super-nice, open-minded and tolerant of (our) ambiguity then Andy, Naresh, James and the team would win its hands down. No questions asked. They have worked incredibly hard to get this off the ground, and deserve great credit for doing so.
So, please take a look, give us your thoughts and if you feel so inclined, get more involved - we are planning to crowdsource development beyond the initial launch phase, and will be opening up our task list for this soon.
Great job, great design, great initiative !