This week a group of six of us from Headshift Centrale took a trip to Geneva for the LIFT08 conference. Tom Taylor was presenting about some of the climate change-related projects that we've worked on (you can see his awesome presentation online here), so rather than jump on a cheap flight we decided that we'd practice what we've been helping others preach and travel by the far more carbon-efficient mean of Eurostar and TGV.
The downside is that this takes rather longer - 2.5 hours from London to Paris, and then 4 hours from Paris to Geneva. And taking six people out of the office for four days is a big chunk of the team, so to use the time productively we decided to try an experiment in building a web application from scratch. Starting from an idea and a blank text editor, the intention was to create a visualisation tool for the del.icio.us tags that we collect in our Headshift account.
I'll save a description of the tool itself for a later post, but the process was almost as interesting as the outputs. Here's a few things that we discovered.
We started on the Eurostar from London to Geneva. Power in transit is always going to be a challenge, so we'd booked first-class tickets so we could take advantage of the sockets that are provided up at the expensive end of the train. That wasn't quite what we expected - there's only one socket per pair of seats which makes for complications when there's six laptops in use. And the TGV from Paris to Geneva doesn't have power at seats at all, so that meant that work came to an end about half-way into the journey across France.
The other major hurdle to be overcome was networking. Being well-behaved geeks we wanted to do this properly with a Subversion server to manage the source code, so getting networking up and running was a priority. Eurostar and SNCF don't provide on-board wifi, so we rolled our own - or rather we tried. Peer-to-peer sort-of worked, but six laptops in close proximity in a tin tube causes all kinds of interference and cross talk problems. Colin travelled well-equipped with an Airport base station which performed better, but the wobbly power supply on Eurostar trains doesn't make for stable wifi.
Having said that, developing on the move with Macbooks, Rails and SubEthaEdit rocks. We were able to write the spec in SubEthaEdit collaboratively, run separate instances of Ruby on Rails on our Macbooks and manage the source code in Subversion. I don't think we'd have been anywhere as productive with Windows laptops.
Lunch gets in the way, too - it's all very nicely presented on trays with napkins and glasses and cutlery, but there's not really enough space for food AND code simultaneously.
One aspect we didn't investigate in detail was the effect on our fellow passengers. Quite what they made of a bunch of six geeks with Macbooks in the midst of Blackberries and Dells we didn't get to find out - but if you were travelling to Paris last Tuesday and we disturbed you, we humbly apologise ;-)
And the application? It didn't get completely finished - lack of power saw to that - but with some additional work afterwards it's looking good - and we'll be integrating it into the website here in the next few days.
how fabulously climate-change aware and green you all are - your business is certainly an inspiration to me. i suppose that is why you have spent the last year or so working on a "social networking" site for BP (www.motoraddicts.com) which is aimed at flogging a high-performance motor oil and encouraging people to show off their 'modded' cars which are of course far less fuel efficient and which is an unabashed celebration of car culture? i guess their money is still green, eh? i think i smell bullshit 2.0.
Hi Idris,
You have raised an issue that we have thought about a lot, as it happens. We are not a climate change charity, nor an agency for green issues. We are a company that helps other companies use social software and social networking for practical purposes.
The fact that we work for Green Thing and also for companies such as BP and other large corporates is not "bullshit 2.0" but rather plain old "reality 1.0". It is also not a secret - we are open about it.
We are comfortable working with BP because of all the energy companies in their sector we feel they are the most committed to change. Also, we have a set of ethical standards for new clients and they are well within them. On the other hand, we do not work for companies involved in the arms or the "defence" sector in the UK or USA, nor tobacco companies and some other sub-sectors that do not stand up to our ethnical standards.
Regarding Motoraddicts specifically, what we love about this project is the community-based, open approach to communicating with the 'passionates' in a customer group. These people drive cars (so do I) and they are geeky about 'modding' cars in the same way that I am about computers.
Just as I sometimes feel guilty about the massive environmental impact of large data centres that run my Google and other online services, so I also sometimes feel guilty about driving my car. All of us need to face up to these issues honestly and openly and try to solve them together. What I like about Green Thing is its focus on making behaviour change easy and habitual, rather than hoping that guilt alone will work (it won't!).
Are car geeks somehow less worthy users of online social networking? Of course not. Should they be taking action to reduce their environmental impact? Yes, I personally believe they should. Is that best achieved by patronising top-down guilt tripping from large companies that sell them products, or by allowing them the opportunity to connect and discuss issues on their own terms and in their own way? You tell me...