Making Prezi Carbon Neutral

TEDGlobal reminded me of something I had forgotten: I used to care about the environment; a lot. A showing of Home and many of the talks increased sense of urgency to act. Coming back to Budapest everyone agreed: Prezi should do its share to stop global warming.




But there is little consensus on how to do this well… The carbon market is a hot topic. I found this helpful though.



As soon as we’ve made up our mind on what model to use, we’ll need to install a processes that ensure minimal carbon output and compensation for the carbon that we produce.



Let us know if you have ideas on how to do this best!

Comments

[Jerry Sheehan]

I applaud your efforts to look at how Prezi can do its part to decrease anthropomorphic climate change.

Here are a few ideas:

1) Show Your Current Carbon Footprint: I believe Prezi is hosted by Rackspace which has nine data centers worldwide. My guess is that your biggest site with them is in Dallas. Work with them to get "real data" on the energy consumption of the Prezi application on their virtualized hardware. Once you have this, and know the location (needed to know type of energy fueling their servers) you can do a carbon footprint calculation. Once you have this number publicize it on the Prezi web site. In addition, make sure you use the calculators (EPA has one) which shows how this equates to things people understand, i.e. cars on road equivalent, etc.

2) Decide if You Want to Be Carbon Neutral or Reduce Your Footprint: Being carbon neutral is tough, it means having no GHG impact which would require you to offset all of your emissions. While this is the "brass ring" of emissions reduction I don't know of too many businesses (especially information communication technology) which can afford to do this today. Instead, it might be more practical to focus on reducing your emissions. Choose some of the targets being used internationally and make Prezi better then these.

3) Buy Offsets: If you want to go towards neutrality or perhaps adopt a reduce/offset strategy you can buy carbon offsets once you know your footprint. If you are going to go to the trouble of buying offsets make sure that you purchase "verified" offsets as opposed to those you can get on some of the voluntary marketplaces.

4) Alternative Energy Data Center: Ask Rackspace what their plans on to create alternative energy data centers. There are a number of these centers being deployed globally, and in the US including Canada, which are focused on using energy source like hydro, wind, solar to power their data farms. If Prezi was inside this type of virtualized environment you would be minimizing your footprint and also encouraging greener data practices.

5) Prezi Carbon Free Partnership: Identify some of the leading not for profit organizations (like the Climate Group) and encourage them to use Prezi for their presentation needs. Give these not for profits free accounts in exchange for climate education information which can be showcased on the Prezi site.

6) Prezi Green Like Me Competition: Your greatest resource are your users, create a Prezi Green Like Me Competition and ask your users to create Prezitations focused on explaining climate change, minimizing their environmental impact, creating a more sustainable future.

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[Greg Ruth]

Well, currently Prezi has no way of printing a summary page of the presentation. While that is something many audiences are used to having in their hands from PowerPoint presentations, maybe continuing to exclude paper printouts is a good indirect approach to carbon reduction.

[Bjorn Utgard]

As I work for an int'l e-NGO on climate change issues and have been using Prezi for my presentations for the last year, this topic is right down my alley! =)

Some comments:

1) make sure your servers are efficient and if possible buy only renewable energy for them. How the latter point can be done depends on where your servers are, but it is now possible in many countries to buy renewable energy "certificates"

2) make your own form of "offsets" by supporting NGOs promoting policies to reduce emissions. For example, providing Prezi for free to them will enable to use their scarce funding on more activism instead of buying licenses from you. It will not be possible to quantify exactly what amount of emissions this offsets, but it could well be that this has a larger effect than buying other forms of offsets. (This would of course have a good marketing effect for Prezi as well - personally I give about a 100 presentations about the future of environmental technology etc for about 2-4000 ppl all over the world a year)

3) cloud computing in its self already has a significant reduction of data that needs to be stored, as the number of duplicates is minimized. Generally speaking, data storage requires energy, and the less data that needs to be stored, the less energy is used. Include this perspective in the further development of Prezi by for example making it possible to use the same pictures and information elements from one presentation in another presentation without duplicating the information on the server.

4) "carbon-neutral" is really soo 2007 - "carbon negative" is the future! - check http://www.bellona.org/ccs/Artikler/carbon_negative

Get in touch with me at bjorn (a) bellona.org if you wanna discuss any of these points with me personally.

Cheers from Oslo, Norway!

Bjørn

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