Was it Winston Churchill or Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben who said “With great power comes great responsibility”?  In October of last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s body for assessing science related to climate change, issued their Special Report “Global Warming of 1.5° C”, detailing the impacts of a 1.5° C rise in global mean temperature. It’s not pretty. Yes, our sector will be impacted, but so will most of the earth’s living systems and human populations, either directly or indirectly, and some catastrophically.  As well as being affected, we also contribute to the problem, and to the solution. The Climate Group’s widely cited 2008 “SMART 2020 Report” estimated that while our sector is responsible for about 2% of global man-made carbon emissions, the application of smarter products enabled by digital infrastructure has the potential to reduce global man-made carbon emissions by 15% by 2020. Great power, indeed!

Call for Participation in iMasons Sustainability Committee

At the iMasons meeting in London in November, 2018, iMasons announced that the board had chartered a new Sustainability Committee, chaired by Patrik Ohlund, CEO of NodePole, based in Sweden.  We are now ready to call for iMasons member volunteers interested in participating. Our plan is to create a small, focused “Sustainability Steering Committee” of 6-8 dedicated souls to meet regularly and formulate and guide the work, and to create ad hoc project teams to get specific things done. If you are interested in contributing in either capacity, please click the link below to put your name on the list to be contacted when opportunities arise.

As well as getting the committee formed and launched, planned projects for 2019 include:

• Formulating the criteria and processes for launching and maintaining an iMasons Sustainability Champion Award, to be first awarded at DataCloud Monaco in June, 2019
• Formulating the iMasons rank/level requirements for a 4^th degree, recognizing the member’s contribution to sustainability.

SustComm’s First Project – Review GEC’s “Cloud Services Purchasers Guide”

The Green Electronics Council (GEC) is best known for managing EPEAT, the world’s premiere green-rating system for electronic products, used by the U.S. Federal Government, 5 other national governments, hundreds of states and provinces and other public purchasers, and thousands of enterprise purchasers of electronics. EPEAT gives these purchasers assurance that the products they buy meet their organization’s green purchasing goals.

Working with stakeholders in our sector, GEC has developed a draft “Cloud Services Purchasers Guide”, giving large-scale purchasers of cloud services 13 questions to ask their prospective providers to help them evaluate the sustainability of the provider’s cloud service. They have reached out to iMasons to ask if we could review the draft report and provide them feedback. If you are interested in seeing and commenting on the 16-page report, join the Sustainability Committee by clicking the link, above.

We’d love to get 6-10 reviewers from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives.  GEC is most interested in our technical feedback: feasibility, measure-ability, etc. We are planning to identify the reviewers as a group for overall credibility, but not attribute specific comments or input to individuals. They want the feedback by the end of the month, if possible.  Perhaps this is that big opportunity to get involved you’ve been waiting for!