Teblog

Frighten the kids, or encourage the grown-ups?

Have you seen the Act On CO2 'bedtime stories' advertisement that our dear government has spent £6M on? Although it's a cartoon, the words are real enough. Fundamentally, it tells children that they're victims of grown-ups' actions and, if the grown-ups change their ways, they may (note: only 'may') be saved. According to the advertisement, over forty percent of the emissions of CO2 are caused by 'ordinary things' that grown-ups do, like warming homes and driving cars.

The Advertising Standards Authority has received hundreds of complaints which it plans to investigate. Good luck to it. According to a BBC report, "An ASA spokeswoman said the watchdog would be investigating whether the claims about climate change could be substantiated and whether the ad complied with taste and decency rules."

The ASA hasn't a hope in hell of validating the climate change science. It should concentrate instead on the taste and decency angle. When Sky News wrote about the ASA complaints, it received masses of contradictory comments (I ploughed through 94 of them). Goodness knows who Lisa is, but she made a good point when she said, "Upsetting children can never be right ... Why worry them so young when they can't do anything right now?!" Quite.

What is clear (if you didn't know already) is that climate change has become a religious debate and, if the Sky News commenters are representative of the population at large, the non-believers greatly outweigh the believers. And the powers-that-be are at their wits' end to turn us into believers.

The stupid thing is that the more rabid they become, the more they will turn off even the most reasonable citizen. Somehow the debate needs to become less accusatory and more inclusive. It might want to take into account that not everyone is the same or driven by the same values.

The latest EcoPinion Survey Report from strategic marketing agency EcoAlign parsed the attitudes of 1250 USA citizens and, in the process, identified five different categories of consumer. In terms of motivation to use new technologies and participate in new energy programs, they were: Cost-Conscious Saver (41%), Value Buyer (20%), Environmentalist/Green Consumer (19%), Traditional Consumer (10%) and Tech Enthusiast (10%).

The same messaging can't work with such a disparate set of people. Judging from that list, only 19 percent look as if they might fit in the 'believer' category in the USA. In Europe it may be different, but you can bet that the different categories exist. And it's therefore clear that a single message is going to fall on largely deaf ears, unless it happens to focus on the needs of the Cost-Conscious Saver.

And maybe this is a clue to the answer. Forget global warming, climate change, CO2 or any of that 'big-brotherish' terminology. Talk about simple financial and environmental sustainability through energy and fuel savings, through the avoidance of waste and other pollution and through the minimisation of raw materials.

In this way, instead of negative, frightening stories from those in power, the environmental tale can become a  positive one put out by everyone who is making an effort to improve our collective lot.

Why IT companies top Newsweek's green 500

Hats off to Newsweek for its green rankings of the 500 largest US corporations. And congratulations to Hewlett Packard for coming first.

Hang on... Hewlett Packard came out top? Surely a software company or some other organisation that is inherently more environmentally friendly should have topped the list? Yet four of the top five are computer companies. (The other was Johnson & Johnson.) Making computer equipment is known to be environmentally damaging. In fact, when Newsweek considered the environmental impact of the supply chain up to the point of delivery, it ranked these same four computer companies at 115th (IBM), 160th (Dell), 175th (HP) and 268th (Intel). Discrepancy or what?

The environmental assessments were done by a company called Trucost. Its methodology is widely regarded and is a heck of a lot cheaper than a company having to embark on a full lifecycle analysis (LCA) of its activities. Trucost maintains a research database of over 4500 companies which takes into account over 700 environmental impact measures. 

The results are not good showings at all for the IT companies but they are in line with what you might expect. However, their ratings rocketed because the Newsweek team decided to give 'green policies' equal weighting with 'environmental impact'. And it chucked in 'reputation' as well, for a further ten percent of the overall assessment.

The main elements of the green policies score were, 'climate change policies and performance, pollution policies and performance, product impacts, environmental stewardship and environmental management.' The reputation scores were derived from, 'an opinion survey of corporate social responsibility (CSR) professionals, academics and other environmental experts who subscribe to CorporateRegister.com and CEOs or high-ranking officials in all companies on the Newsweek 500 list.' Weightings were applied: 3x for CEOs, 2x for professionals and 1x for others.

You can see that the elements of the survey make sense individually and the outcomes can, no doubt, be argued mathematically. But the weighting of the scores, especially the importance given to the three major elements, has to be questioned.

Also, was it wise for the research to try and assess vastly different sectors against each other and come up with a common measure? If a company knows it is not damaging the environment too much, then why should it spend fortunes on PR and CSR to influence external perceptions and, hopefully, internal realities? At this point, one can almost feel sorry for Newsweek for having taken on such a challenge.

So is the report of any value to you? Well, yes. It does allow you to look at rankings by sector and this has the potential to be helpful, but only if you consider each contributing factor separately. You might be wondering (if you've read this far) how your potential suppliers stack up in environmental performance or in green policies. Whether you care about reputation as seen through the eyes of C-level executives of the target organisations and several thousand CSR professionals is another matter.

What you clearly don't want to do is take the overall results too seriously. Treat them as a guide. Perhaps think of them as a cake that contains all the right ingredients but which didn't quite make the grade because inappropriate measures were used.

And this doesn't just apply to the Newsweek story. If you are being told something which jars with your reality, see if you can dig around a bit for the underlying assumptions.

Collaboration and Control

Once upon a time, the boundaries of IT management were fairly straightforward. All your customers were inside the company and exchanging digital information with the outside world was highly controlled, if it happened at all. Not only that, but you sat down and figured out the business needs and then bought or developed the appropriate software which you then ran in-house. The users were obliged to take what they were given. Not quite easy peasy, but close.

Nowadays, users have their own views. They want to collaborate electronically with each other and with the outside worlds of business partners, suppliers and customers. They want to hold webinars, share screens, instant message each other, maybe even work on wikis together and comment on each others' blogs. You have to decide whether to allow these things to happen formally or informally. If formal, at least you have some control over what holes you allow in the firewall. If informal, you've probably given them web access and told them to behave themselves. Although the social media brigade will say, "Trust everyone," only you will know if that's going to work in your organisation.

If you do try to restrict what users can do, you'll be surprised at how inventively they'll sidestep your controls. Research suggests that if they can, they will. You are driven by the need to keep the enterprise system secure. They are driven, usually, by achieving results in the most effective way. These two drivers are not usually compatible.

Knowing that 'collaboration without travel' is at the heart of their needs, you start looking around at what's available. Broadly speaking, the bottom line is a choice between an externally hosted service and one you look after yourself. The externally hosted approach is a bit nerve-wracking because all your company's digital collaborations will be stored on someone else's servers. What if something goes wrong? The service provider could fold or you could simply fall out with it. Can you get all your records back? Will they be in a usable form? This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Some very major vendors are beginning to offer such hosted services. Perhaps you'd feel more comfortable entrusting your data to an IBM, a Citrix Online or a Microsoft, for example.

But the alternative, hosting it all yourself, brings its own problems. Scaling is one, but that's probably fairly easy to address. What about your own users, who are now merrily collaborating with each other, being able to collaborate with external partners of various kinds? Your lock down could end up as a lock-out. And, in these days of close collaboration between organisations, this could be greatly to your detriment.

If partners, suppliers or customers are running different collaboration systems to you (as many will), be wary of the glib salesperson who assures you that interoperability is a piece of cake. Ask to talk to real users with similar needs to your own. Find out if your licence terms allow you to extend membership of your collaboration systems beyond the firewall. Ask a few of your business partners if they would be happy to work in this way. After all, they may be just as nervous about engaging beyond their own firewall.

It's so easy to find private systems that satisfy internal collaboration and security needs. The danger lies in forgetting that, over time, the constituency you serve is increasingly likely to involve ever larger numbers of outsiders.

On environmental matters, who's at fault?

Compressed digital video works by having occasional reference frames which are updated by changes. It seems to make sense to publish a reference frame on environmental matters from time to time. So here's my first stab. Comments, as ever, are welcome.

Animals go about their business and leave no rubbish. Whatever they do leave becomes nourishment for something else - microbes, plants or other animals. Humans, on the other hand, have become adept at adapting nature's resources to things that are somewhat less naturally recyclable, either because of their semi-permanent nature (plastics for example) or because they are mixed and, therefore, un-recyclable (silicon chips, mixed fibre clothing and so on).

We also pollute the land, the seas and the air, not to mention inland lakes and rivers. I use the generalised 'we' even though some cultures and individuals live more in harmony with nature than others.

Not only this, but we deplete material resources at an unsustainable rate in order to satisfy the perceived 'needs' of an ever-growing population. Oil, coal and gas are the obvious examples - millions of years to lay down, exhausted in a couple of hundred. Known sources of many metals we take for granted (silver, gold, zinc, tin, lead, copper and uranium etc) are all likely to become exhausted in the next thirty years or so. If the glaciers keep melting, then the hope is that new deposits will be discovered. Which will buy a delay, but the end result will be the same. A rising population and widening consumerism will see to that.

In case you were wondering, natural gas, iron, aluminium then coal will last longest. But that will change as we seek alternatives to materials that are being exhausted.

I sometimes watch television advertisements and they drive me nuts. The worst offenders try to get you into a new habit by inventing a problem you never knew existed and then offer you a 'cure' for the condition. Anti-ageing creams and health drinks, for me, are the worst offenders. It amazes me that anyone falls for it. I cringe in anticipation of the "because you're worth it" and "take care" payoff lines. But then I think, "What am I doing sitting in front of a television that cost God-knows-what in material resources and gobbles electricity?" The answer is the same for everyone else who has a television: it's a low-cost source of information, education and entertainment.

Cars are a low cost, comfortable and convenient way of getting from A to B. It's little wonder we're addicted to them. Incandescent bulbs (RIP) were a great way of lighting the home. We haven't got a decent replacement yet, although a 12 volt lighting circuit of LEDs might prove a good idea.

It seems clear that, if the human race is to survive and thrive, it needs to change its ways. It needs to become more in harmony with nature and to put a proper value on the raw materials that remain. And, indeed, to exploit them while we have them in order to build whatever infrastructure we need for the future.

Mostly, what I see is companies jumping on the green or cleantech bandwagons in order to make and sell new stuff which is going to make the world better after these new things have been bought. And, frankly, I'm not sure companies have a great deal of choice unless they are hit by legislation, loss of markets or shareholder revolt. Yet, paradoxically, these same companies are made up of individuals who probably do care about the future of their families. (I'm not even going to try and square that particular circle.) 

And governments, which require the taxes from companies in order to balance the nation's books (ha!), are hardly likely to welcome too much shrinkage of the economy. They could replace taxes with 'fines' but that's probably not an election-winning strategy. They have much to lose were they to put 'growth' into long-term reverse. Encouragement of the right things and the removal of red tape would seem the right way to go.

And consumers, the people who are persuaded to part with their cash for all sorts of nonsense, are not going to be in a hurry to consume less although they might be persuaded to consume more of the right kind of things and less of the wrong. Providing their pockets don't suffer. Or, at least, not suffer too visibly. The recent car scrappage scheme is a good example - with the lure of a £2000 bribe - a lot of old vehicles went into the recycling loop and a lot of new cars were sold at more or less full price: a win for the showrooms, the recyclers, the manufacturers and the UK vehicle maintenance infrastructure. For the consumer, the lure of getting many times the market value of an old car somewhat eclipsed the repayment schedule and the embedded environmental harm in the new cars. I fell for it, eventually, and consoled myself that I'd bought a fuel-sipping recyclable car from a greenish car maker.

We, in the so-called developed world, are all trapped by our desires for a comfortable life whether we're politicians, business people or consumers. We find it difficult to imagine or face up to the scale of change that's needed in order to give future generations a chance. Professor David MacKay (see my Inside Track) has become the government's advisor on energy. His brutal bottom line is that we (in the UK) need to cut our fossil fuel consumption by 90 percent. Can you imagine that? I'm not sure if he's been hired in order to genuinely advise or as a way of gagging him. Time will tell.

But, if we're to achieve that, we need to invest in alternatives energy sources sharpish and his book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air is eminently readable, online (free) or offline (£20 in paperback). Perhaps he could start a 'without the hot air' series, taking a largely impartial look at raw materials and pollution.

The more clearly the facts are laid in front of us, the more wisely we can make our individual choices. In the end though, we will make a single choice: exploit what's left as if there were no tomorrow (our present course) or find ways of living sustainably. The alternative, a sort of in-between approach, will merely delay our tenure on this planet.

New Lotus?

If you were in the market for collaboration software, what would your reaction be if a major software publisher offered you an all-singing all-dancing suite of battle-hardened collaboration tools?

What if that publisher were IBM? What if it were Lotus? What if it were Microsoft? Bear in mind we're talking about the same set of tools, same quality in each case.

You have your preferences, right? And they have nothing to do with what's on offer. It's about perception of the brand. And that, as has been discussed exhaustively and exhaustingly, is an issue for a brand called Lotus. It can dance, sing, strip, do cartwheels and swing from a trapeze, but nothing it does will impress those who don't want to be impressed.

So why on earth does IBM persist in protecting the brand? Part of the answer lies in its existing base; let's not rock the boat for the 100M plus users. Part of it lies in a touching faith that the reality of the technical specs will trump the perceptions of the marketplace. As my colleague, Dale Vile, pointed out recently, the evidence suggests this is not the case. The respondents to the survey were readers of The Register, not best known for their love of Lotus, but this is the point - they are exactly the outsiders that IBM/Lotus needs to influence if it is ever to expand its market.

Let's forget any ideas of switching back-end servers and applications. If a company has Exchange and Outlook, or Thunderbird, or The Bat! (okay, I threw that in for good measure), then it's unlikely to change and, if Lotus ever thinks it will then its head needs examining. But some of the new Lotus offerings don't want you to switch anything. At best, it will run on your existing equipment and operating systems, at worst it needs a dedicated server - an appliance, in effect - and you don't need to fret too much about what's in it. Some of the offerings are provided as a service, so you don't even need to worry about installing, managing and updating the back-end, although you will still need to look after the clients.

You'd have thought that IBM/Lotus would be crowing about these things that don't depend on, let's say, a Domino server. You'd have thought it would be making the point right up front that the product is freestanding and can be popped onto a Windows or Linux server. But, no, it takes a while for non-Lotus folk to figure out just what can standalone and what has a dependence on a bit of Lotus-specific back-end stuff.

It's not like buying insurance, a camera or a car on the web. Some of these sites get you to 'radio-button' or 'check box' your desires and a shortlist appears, each showing its primary attributes. It's a matter of minutes to drill down to the product that best suits you. The Lotus site makes you drill and drill and drill. To give it credit, at the lowest level, all the information is eventually given, but finding it requires some diligence. You'll find no mentions of platforms on the Lotus product page unless you count the 'Collaborate in the Cloud' link to LotusLive. Drilling required. Click on 'Collaboration Software Products'. From there you can search by product category, product name or keyword. Since you're unlikely to know the names, then category seems best. Or you could use keywords. 'Microsoft' pulls up just two hits, Quickr and Quickr Content Integrator (team sharing tools). Following the latter reveals that it offers both migration from and coexistence with SharePoint and Exchange public folders. Hurrah! But this is hardly platform independence. More digging needed. And then, deep in the bowels of the documentation, is a list of platforms -including Windows.

When it comes to the Lotus Connections social software tools, once again no clues are given to its platform requirements. It takes a further seven clicks to reach the information you need. Lo and behold! it can run on two flavours of Linux and three flavours of Windows Server plus, of course, IBM's AIX.

At least with the Symphony page, it takes only one click to find out the platforms. But why is Lotus so coy about some of its products being multi-platform? A mystery, to be sure. Perhaps someone in Lotus would care to comment?

To summarise, we have a company here that wants to expand its user base into the wider world but it is, a) shy about telling us the information we need, b) makes it horribly complicated to discover, and c) hides the good stuff behind a brand that carries a lot of well-deserved baggage.

Given the company's irrational attachment to the Lotus name, here are some suggestions: 1) Improve the website, at least for the multi-platform and cloud stuff; 2) Make sure that the multi-platform credentials are at least hinted at on the home page. (Sure, it won't work with certain versions of operating systems, browsers, databases and so on, but this shouldn't affect the broad messaging. All it needs is a direct link to the detail.); and, 3) think about changing the name.

In view of the foregoing, may I take a leaf out of the politicians' book and suggest 'New Lotus'?

No, I thought not.

Evangelist: beware

Evangelists. Plenty of them hang out in the sustainability and collaboration fields where I work. Some irritate while others are acceptable. And this isn't because they necessarily reflect my views. (In case you were wondering.) The trick is to spot, early on, which variety you're faced with and make your excuses and leave if they're the 'wrong' kind.

Last week, the Free Software Foundation, wrote to the Fortune 500 companies (well, it didn't bother with Microsoft) essentially telling them they'd be mad to upgrade to Windows 7. The story was widely covered but few publications would have ended up with such a rich discussion as the Register. This is a hugely popular online IT publication which takes no prisoners. It has attitude and a healthy disregard for some of the tripe that emanates from the industry it serves. Readers are encouraged to comment on items and, this particular article quickly attracted 145 comments.

The interesting thing is that the article was about an evangelical organisation and it attracted evangelistic commentators, both pro- and anti-, as well as your everyday commenters. The end result is that anyone with the willingness to work through the comments, evangelistic or otherwise, would end up with an independent point of view, providing they read through with an open mind. If they didn't, they'd end up just strengthening their own prejudices.

The sustainability and collaboration folk are no different. The evangelists are noisy, in your face, on conference platforms, lobbying whoever and wherever possible, frequently on the web with their blogs, Tweets and comments. They exist everywhere, and always have. The big difference today is that they can be more readily heard.

You can get positive evangelists who show how life could be better. I have a lot of time for them, even if they turn out to be wrong. At least they're trying to help. Then you have the negative ones who are more intent on tearing down than building up. "This is wrong" or "you shouldn't do that" rather than "try this alternative" or "why not do this?". In pop psychology, the former are the I'm OK, you're not OK brigade - the same mentality, incidentally, as criminals.

A lot of evangelists are so immersed in their blinkered view of the world, that they forget (or ignore) the fact that, if adopted, their wheezes might cause more problems than they solve. We're shutting down coal and nuclear power stations to cheers from the acid rain and nuclear waste storage evangelists. But how deeply have they considered where the energy is going to come from? Or, alternatively, what impact on our lives a profound cut in consumption will cause? I venture to suggest, 'not a lot'. Out here in the real world, we have to find solutions, not just state problems.

In a way, the easiest ones to deal with are those that have 'Evangelist' printed on their business cards. They're being paid by someone to persuade others of the folly of their ways. You'll find these folk in many major IT companies. Others are not so obvious. Perhaps a company has plied them with gifts or other, more subtle, bribes. Recently I was talking with a Toyota (non-employee) iQ evangelist. Turns out she'd 'won' the car for a six month trial, in exchange for blogs and other social media outreach. Others are just total believers in 'the cause' simply because it makes sense to them within their own frame of reference.

The answer has to be to filter them as quickly as possible. Find out who pays for their evangelism in money or in other ways. Ask them what alternatives they know about in detail. And get them to tell you what the long term implications of their advocacy are likely to be. Some will slink away from the interrogation. Some will bluster, so you can take your leave of them. Those that will remain probably have a good and well thought out story to tell.

Lotus knows, but do you?

With the prospect of a conference call with Lotus today, I thought I'd better try (yet again) to get my head around the extensive and, as a non-user, confusing product set. First stop was the IBM/Lotus product pages. Quite a bit of enlightenment, but you sometimes have to drill down unnecessarily to dig out the information. For example, once you get to 'Alloy by IBM and SAP', why doesn't it have a short explanation like the next item, 'Lotus Connector for SAP Solutions', has? I knocked up my own outline so I could see all the information in one place. Sad or what?

Anyway, having kind of refreshed my memory on the product side, I turned my attention to a recent IBM Lotus event called an 'IdeaJam'. This one bore the theme of the company's latest marketing campaign called 'Lotus knows'. The purpose was to get a lot of people from the Lotus community to come up with, and comment on, ideas for getting the brand better known. The discussion was broken into four categories:

Lotus knows working smarter depends on great technology…

Lotus knows marketing is key to technology adoption…

Lotus knows technology is only great with client success…

Lotus knows the world is getting smaller, flatter and smarter...

A terrific idea, except it's a bit like asking a church choir what songs they should be singing. They're going to choose the easy ones, the catchy ones, the ones that appeal to the choir itself. At least, after such an exercise, the vicar will know how to motivate the choir. But whether the choir's choices match the vicar's or the parishioners' needs is another matter.

Still, Lotus' event was very successful by its own standards. Over 20,000 votes were cast on 928 ideas and 2246 comments were made. Ideas could be voted for or against. The top vote (302 net votes) went to putting Notes in more schools worldwide. Second top (209 net) was raising awareness of Lotus among the rest of IBM sales staff. This is astonishing when you consider that IBM bought Lotus fourteen years ago. Talk about hiding its light under a bushel.

Maybe, just maybe, Lotus would have benefitted much more and been able to direct its marketing efforts much more successfully if it were to have run ideajams with IBM mainstream staff and non-Lotus users out there in the real world. The danger is that they might say "Lotus who?" and refuse to participate.

Audience power and the death of deference

How do you feel if you're addressing a large group of people and some of them are hammering away on laptops and smartphones? Do you use your own kit when you're a conference delegate? If you're peeved at the first and averse to the second, then you are going to become increasingly uncomfortable as this behaviour becomes the norm.

Some would say that acting like this is disrespectful of the speaker. They make their judgements on their interpretation of what the audience is doing online. In short, they think that these delegates cannot possibly be paying attention. In fact, they could be doing a number of things, some of which are enriching their conference experience, some of which are not.

For example, they could be looking up things mentioned by the speaker, participating in the 'back channel', Tweeting what's going on, blogging, playing games, checking emails, or simply taking notes. In general, the speaker hasn't much of a clue which, unless they hear a sudden burst of laughter unconnected with the presentation. This would probably be a reaction to something that’s been said on the back channel.

More than ever, the speaker’s challenge is to capture and keep the audience’s interest and stimulate their thinking. Their ability to do this will largely determine the audience's subsequent behaviour. The audience mix will make a difference too. If they have different levels of understanding, their need to seek clarification online will vary. However, the knowledgeable are likely to be most active in the backchannel. And anyone could be making notes so the behaviour observable from the podium will be similar.

Many people claim to be able to multitask with ease - reading wikipedia while listening to a lecture, for example. With two incoming language streams, this seems an unlikely claim. It's more likely to be a case of rapid task-switching, taking advantages of pauses, dull bits and so on. Back channel activities are highly focused on the event in progress, with pretty terse individual comments. Classically, they're IRC (Internet Relay Chat), although IM (Instant Messaging) or Twitter are probably more common now. They provide a good way for audience members to keep in touch, questioning, commenting and, sometimes, reporting the action to the outside world. And, indeed, picking up feedback from outside.

Occasionally, when members of Freeform Dynamics are on the same conference call, we'll set up a temporary Skype IM group, so that we can raise and answer questions internally without wasting the speakers’ time. We might also comment to each other, “isn't this a rehash of the May announcement?”, or whatever. These things take seconds to say and read and barely ripple our concentration on the speaker. We can align our own understanding and, possibly, elect the most appropriate member of the team to ask the burning question(s) at the end. It works well and we believe that this approach helps us and the speakers get the most out of these briefings.

Some brave conference organisers have tried putting the back-channel on display to the whole audience. It doesn’t always work. While very 'open', it can be a destructive experience. A classic case was when an audience member accused the speaker of spouting bullshit. It provoked fury on the part of the speaker, followed by a massive discussion, which eclipsed the purpose of the presentation itself. Maybe it’s better to do what some others do which is to assign a colleague of the speaker to monitor the back-channel and use it to guide the subsequent Q&A and, maybe, the direction of the presentation itself.

Just as power is moving to the consumer in so many areas of life, so it is moving to the audience in conferences and other gatherings. This is especially true when they have online access to information sources, to each other and to the outside world. If the speakers are engaging and accepting of this new phenomenon, the outcomes can be positive and enriching. If they see it as an affront, then they’re going to find themselves increasingly out of step with our customer-empowered world.

A most important string to ICT's bow

In crude terms, the computer industry sees itself as the saviour of the planet and all who inhabit it. Take a briefing from any major ICT company and it will tell you a) how it's cleaning up its own act and b) how, by buying more ICT stuff, we and the developing world can create a bright and sustainable future for ourselves. The mathematics are fairly simple, if a computer system can run more efficiently and help companies optimise their manufacturing, mining, transport, power generation, power consumption etc, then it's a win all round. This is built on the assumption that the developing world is doing exactly that (developing) and that the west should help it, providing there's a buck to be turned in the long term.

God, that sounds depressing. But it's certainly the case that ICT can help. Problems start when trying to make things happen. Politicians waver this way and that, according to whether they're trying to be statesmen or representatives of their communities. (Think about wind farms and NIMBYs.) As a long-time sounding board for my rants and self-confessed 'Eco Worrier' (sic) Al Tepper says, "The political layer is where things won't happen." Indeed, individuals also waver hither and thither, according to what authority they've most recently read/heard from. It's hard for them to know which way to turn because of messages emanating from the proliferation of vested interests and fanatics. Exhortation and fanatical evangelism take the place of reason for many of them.

We've been here before, many times. The early days of PCs and the web are good examples. Those who could see value then were a tiny minority trying to persuade a slightly larger minority of the revolution that would affect everyone's lives. In the mid to late seventies, the editor of Computing didn't want to know about 'microcomputers'. Eventually, PCs and the web went mainstream, but the evangelists were at their most shrill five to ten years before everyone else cottoned on.

Greens go back 30 years, sustainability 22 years and the public web about 16 years and, related to this, social networking has been growing rapidly over the past six years. We ought to know what's going on in the sustainability/green space and we ought to have the means to share our discoveries (especially for websites and for bloggers that make sense) with others. In this way, we could create a momentum for change based on genuine understanding. It would be based on us as individuals pursuing what we feel to be right, quite independently of the organisations to which we are beholden (like our employers). Through social software, independent and informed communities could coalesce around relevant topics: energy, pollution, water, food or whatever.

This personal mobilisation is in no way a replacement of the predominant top-down systems. Energy suppliers, governments, the United Nations, newspapers and so on, will continue to exert their influence, but upon an increasingly knowledgeable constituency. Change will increasingly start at the bottom and work up, just as some of it will continue to start at the top and work down. As individuals, we each have the potential to separate the good from the bad and the authentic from the greenwash, through our online community connections. This isn't about exploiting the herd instinct (as much of social media does), it's about reason and establishing or finding 'reasonable' social venues to hang out and sharing your discoveries with similarly motivated others.

None of this could happen without the ICT industry. In fact, this could end up being one of the best strings it could add to its collective bow.

The truth behind the Google/Microsoft/NHS rumours

Before Monday July 6th, did you know that Google and Microsoft had services for storing health records? Thanks to an article in the Times and some related hysteria in other media, just about the whole country discovered that, "David Cameron was going to replace the bloated and expensive NHS computer system with a free one from Google. Or maybe Microsoft."

Except, of course, someone got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Let's face it, whatever we think of the NHS and its evolving computer system, it's not going to be replaced by a packaged service from anyone. Never mind that Google and Microsoft (and maybe BUPA) are supposedly the front runners.

No-one likes overspends on computer projects. And the NHS one due for delivery in 2014 - four years late and at a cost of £12.4bn - presents a wonderful target for the Tories. This seems to have been what caused all the excitement. From £14.2bn to 'free' at the stroke of a pen. Wow!

Who on earth thinks that commercial organisations like Google, Microsoft or BUPA will do anything for free? And who but the most naive will think that moving shedloads of detailed health records from one system to another is going to happen without horrendous cost and risk?

Still, it was a great headline and it, rather unexpectedly, put 'Google Health' in the frame. Whether involved or not, Rachel Whetstone, Google's Vice President, Public Policy and Communications, must be feeling jolly pleased with the outcome. (Incidentally, she's married to Steve Hilton, one of David Cameron's closest advisors. She dropped out of politics after a spell as Michael Howard's chief of staff during his failed election campaign. Oops, wrong horse.)

So what's the reality? The Google (Health) and Microsoft (HealthVault) systems both manage personal health records, or PHRs. They provide somewhere to create, store and share your personal health information and allow you to find related infomation, engage with health professionals and manage your medications. Both put the user in control of content and both are free to the user. This has little to do with the £14.2bn NHS system. At best it would take care of one element of it, the so-called 'Spine' Care Record Service (CRS) but with less information and more restricted access. Medical professionals need access to all manner of detailed information if they're to do their jobs properly and they're simply not going to get that from the personally-filtered subset of a person's medical information that the PHRs represent.

What's on offer smacks of a, "let's get to know your medical issues so we can fire appropriate ads at you". If not, one has to ask what the commercial motivations of Microsoft and Google are. Maybe it's to flog extra services: "Monitor your blood pressure, madam?" or "Remind you to take your pills, sir?"

With the baby boomers reaching retirement age, the market for health-related products and services is exploding. An increasing proportion are computer literate and have their own PCs and internet connections. And nothing is on their minds more than their health. (Okay, maybe their grandchildren and their pets.)

But let's not get carried away by recent newspaper reports. This is not David Cameron single-handedly demolishing the NHS IT budget. Sure, we'd love to enter what the Tories call a "post bureaucratic age", but let's start by getting rid of all the deeply intrusive information that the government already stores about us first.