Along with other edglings, I’m a huge fan of Web 2.0 technologies and especially the frequently borked Twitter. Most folk I know are addicted to Twitter so that despite its many failings, we keep hanging on in the hope that one day, the management will hire a team of engineers that actually knows what it’s doing. That won’t wash in enterprisey land where buyers expect services to be at least fit for purpose and not suffering continuous outages and glitches. This morning for instance, the only way you can reliably see @ replies is to use Summize and enter @username as a search term.

Anyhoo - some enterprising people are thinking of building an enterprise class Twitter clone - well not a clone exactly, an enhanced version that works for enterprise. What makes this project interesting is that it arose almost spontaneously as a result of this Plurk conversation that spilled into Twitter. I found out about it because a person I was searching upon in Twitter mentioned it.

It turns out that a number of the players are people I know through my involvement with SAP’s community network as an un-remunerated mentor. (Disclosure: I do some paid work for SAP’s business process expert community.)  One of them requested I join the project as they needed some business use case scenarios as a guide to the kind of functional requirements the design team will need. I’m no nerd (though I can code a bit of PHP and a fair bit of CSS) but I do understand how business processes work so I signed up for what is now known as ESME.

Serendipitously, around the same time, I was scheduled to talk with Aaron Williams who manages some of the advanced technologies being worked upon at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. We were due to discuss Collaboration Workspaces, a Jive Clearspace based platform that I have used in the past and which is being enhanced by Williams’ team for internal use.

As part of the discussion,Williams mentioned the magic ‘w’ word - widgets, saying that CW will include an Adobe Connect widget at some stage in the next couple of months or so. That’s cool in its own right because it means CS members can schedule and hodl conference calls with all the shared desktop features that Connect offers. I casually mentioned that a team is in the design phase for ESME and asked whether Williams is up for ideas like that which can be incorporated into his initiative. ‘Why yes, even if they’re really crazy ideas,’ came back the reply. W00t! How often can you say that about a behomoth like SAP?

Why should this matter? CW and ESME are firmly in the Web 2.0 camp, offering facilities that enable collaboration and which can be used as part of informal networks designed to solve specific problems.  But; context without process is a waste of time. When problem solving, you still need to be able to have those contextual thoughts expressed through business process - in other words you need to be able to act upon the outcomes. The way I’m looking at this is as an environment that allows business people, business process experts, who may also be technical analysts and developers to come together in a way that collapses time to value for customers. Adding in ESME allowscommunication to takeon an extra dimension that might prove useful in cases where near immediate answers and actions are required. An example might be clarification around policy documents.

ESME is a fascinating idea which is currently considered a ‘thought experiment.’ Its fascination comes from the fact I’ve heard plenty of talk about such projects among Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle (MISO)_ people, but not seen anything get under way. ESME will be entered for consideration as a potential short listed solution for TechEd DemoJam. If successful, it will be interesting to discover how just how far such a service can go and whether it will be possible to get a widget into CW. That only leaves the BPX’ers to get enthusiastic about the project to amplify use cases so they are more ‘real’ than the ones we have at the moment. It will be an interesting ride.

The other day, I wrote a post about Carbon Accounting as articulated by BT for the SAP Community Network:

I am dismayed. While I appreciate the efforts being made by companies like BT to promote the notion of solving sustainability issues, imposition of what are arbitrary standards and methods is not the way to go about it. In looking at BT’s approach I note they are attempting to apply a model that can be summarized from this reporting in Computing:

Developed by BT director of sustainable development Dr Chris Tuppen, the Climate Stabilisation Intensity (CSI) model links data on a firm’s carbon emissions and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation), to global emission reduction goals recommended by the UN, to work out an appropriate emission reduction target for the firm.

The nub of the problem lays in the fact that it is almost impossible to arbitrate across industries on standards of this kind without an understanding of the different inputs and outputs that constitute a particular carbon footprint. At the same time, what matters to one company may not matter to another when it comes to discussing carbon emission reduction effectiveness. For example, if the cost of adding solar power requires a payback that’s outside the company’s usual rate of investment return do you do it for the sake of going green? The answer to that is clearly ‘no.’

It might instead be more effective to lobby local politicians to pressure solar companies into finding ways to reduce their costs so that you can justify the investment.As I say plenty and often, carbon emission reduction may be a top C-level item in boardroom discussions, but it has to take place within the context of an economic environment.

I have an upcoming trip to the UK which involves going to both Bangor and Leeds. There are two of us on the trip. Trying to figure out the most cost effective way to manage the trip is hard enough but then I also need to factor in the carbon emissions element. Here’s how it goes:

• Booking with RyanAir from Granada to Liverpool comes in at €219
• Flying with Jet2.com from Malaga to Leeds-Bradford costs €470
• The train from Liverpool to Leeds costs £37.80 (single) while Bangor to Leeds is £44.00. I’ve not factored in Liverpool to Bangor because it is possible we can get a ride for that part of the journey, assuming we fly into Liverpool and go to Bangor first. I could hire a car at Liverpool which would come in at around £100 plus fuel for the time we will be in the UK.
• If we travel from Granada then long stay parking works out at €40 but is free in Malaga but the journey to Malaga is an extra 130km in both directions which will cost roughly €28 and involve an extra hour’s driving each way. If we fly to Liverpool then on the return we either book a hotel for possibly 4 hours sleep at a cost of £65 or hang out in the airport and conserve some cash. Any thought of getting sleep on a RyanAir flight is wishful thinking. Returning from Leeds means a cab ride costing aorund £13-15 as there is no reasonable public transport option that allows us to reach the airport for check-in.

It seems to me that which ever way we organize the trip, we’ll end up with roughly the same cost because the savings in flight fares in going to Liverpool will be swallowed up by additional costs elsewhere. I’m not sure we gain anything from flying to Leeds because we still have the problem of making the Bangor journey. I’m not convinced there is any real difference in carbon emissions cost as the flight times are virtually identical and the train journey times are not so far apart as to make a demonstrable difference. I’m prepared to be flexible if I could only work out the best combination of travel methods.

What I really want is a service where I can input those parameters and have it spit out the optimal combination of cost, time and carbon emissions load so I can then assess the best way to make the journey. Unfortunately, I can’t find a site that does this. Surely if we’re going to get serious about traveling in a cost effective yet least harmful manner, then a service of this kind makes sense? Today, we have discrete aggregator services like Kayak, that focus on flights or Travelocity that only factor flights, hotels and car hire. And yes, I also want SMS notification in case there are any likely delays. Some might argue that is good enough but I’m far from convinced. I’m reasonably certain I’m not an edge case on this one so if anyone does know a service that provides the information I’m trying to find then I’d love to hear about it.

Two entirely unrelated posts caught my attention today. Tom Raftery asks whether SaaS saves greenhouse gases. Quick as a flash, Chris Yeh from PBWiki does some back of fag packet calculations and comes up with the startling conclusion:

That means PBwiki could be saving the world up to 585,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, or the equivalent of driving an SUV around the world 50,000 times!

Tom is sceptical of the assertion, qualifying it to say:

Now, obviously not all 500,000 hosted PBWiki’s are replacing an individual server but say 100 PBWikis replaces one server, or 1,000. That’s still somewhere between 600 and 6,000 tons of CO2 PBWiki are saving the planet per annum.

That’s still pretty impressive but like Tom, I’d like to see harder numbers. Elsewhere, Simon Wardley, whose thinking is generally both out of the box yet spot on talks about finding new ways to shed extra pounds.

Anyway for reasons of vanity I’ve decided to do something about my additional mass. Having caused environmental damage gaining it, I’d rather minimise the environmental cost of removing it. Whilst one obvious option is to spend time down the gym, I was wondering whether anyone has done a study of how much additional co2 such pointless exercise causes. I say pointless because there are usually no additional benefits to gym exercise other than the exercise itself.

What I’m looking for is exercise with some form of point, such as an allotment or forestry work or volunteer gardening. However, I’d still be interested to know what each kilo of my additional mass means in unnecessary and unsociable environmental damage caused.

That seems like an eminently good way to look at the problem of exercise that yields a net-net positive outcome. Until I read Simon’s post, I was thinking about investing in a WiiFit. But then I’d also have to calculate the amount of energy I’d be consuming by running the Wii. Ugh!

It seems that sometimes, you just can’t win. Unless of course you’re prepared to consider Simon’s option.