Elemental

What I’ve been reading about:

• The Game Plan : A solution framework for climate change and energy. – Great Creative Commons slideshow on climate change (via Dave Pollard).
• The Greenwash Guide – Futerra's pdf (44 pp) on Greenwash is a guide on how to spot, prevent and avoid greenwash for consumers, companies and agencies. Bonus points for having RSS on their news and a blog too!

mel starrs News climatechange, communication, creativecommons, Futerra, globalwarming, greenwash, presentations, slideshow, Sustainability

As an industry, we love acronyms.  For newcomers this may be confusing. 

I toyed with the idea of a seperate glossary page with links to sites, but that seemed quite a heavy workload.  So I compromised and added a WordPress plug-in which automatically displays acronyms (if I have defined them) when you hover your mouse over the text.

Try it: BREEAM, EPC, WRAP, CIBSE, DSM et al. You don’t get a link to a website, but I credit you all with the intelligence to stick the phrase in a search engine and then I don’t need to maintain broken links.

If you use WordPress and want to try it out, the plug-in can be found here.

Hope someone finds this of use…

mel starrs Geekery acronyms, plugins, wordpress

What I’ve been reading about:

• The Code is not enough – sustainability thinking part one – Building Design – Great article from Jon Goodburn at WAG on sustainability definitions – extended to include institutions – and covering a broad range of sub-topics. Zero-carbon is so last year…

mel starrs News construction_industry, definition, Sustainability

What I’ve been reading about:

• Business is polluting the environment, which we should all enjoy, just for the benefit of the rich – Madsen Pirie (Adam Smith Institute) on why more wealth is good for the environment.
• Jeff Sachs’s Common Wealth – Tyler thinks Jeff is being too optimistic in his new book – Common Wealth. Yet another book to add to my ever increasing wishlist. Not enough hours in the day to read…

mel starrs News Adam Smith Institute, books, carbon, Economics, emissions, Jeff Sachs, pollution, sachs, wealth

There’s a new sustainability forum over at Building (the brainchild of Phil aka zerochampion and Micheal aka Breezeblock). A guest post from Che Wall kicked off the proceedings and there is a flurry of activity since, no doubt helped by the inducement of a free iPod Touch for the first 50 posters.

Phil has asked for comments, so here are my thoughts.

From a practical viewpoint there are a couple of really good things about the forum, and a one really annoying one.

The main good point is also the annoying one, which is that RSS feeds are available for threads, but much like the government’s DCLG Discussion Forum any answers to the thread are not included.  They must both be using the same engine.  The only way to automatically get a thread’s answers is to put a reply yourself, which I suppose is one way to ensure a high participation of readers. You then get the thread replies by email.  As I have said many times, email should be reserved for actionable items, not passive items (like newsletters, for example).  So, kudos for having the RSS, but not quite a hit in my book. I realise I am in the minority in using RSS, so by no means a deal breaker for the majority of users.

What I do like is the fact I can add an avatar and my website to my profile.  A good tip I heard once for encouraging people to use avatars is to make the default someone no-one would want to be (Jeremy Clarkson might be appropriate for this particular forum…). I also like all the stats available, although the option of knowing how long each user has spent online feels a little ‘big brother’.

I found a very old draft post in which I was going to list what makes a good forum based on Kathy Sierra’s post “How to build a community, pt. 1″. Kathy’s is a good post and gives good tips on how to police the forum.  The basic premise is play nicely, and reward the users (Building win on that one straight away).  Kathy has 6 rules:

1. Encourage newer users–especially those who’ve been active askers–to start trying to answer questions
   One way to help is by making sure that the moderators are not always the Ones Who Know All. Sometimes you have to hold back the experts to give others a chance to step in and give it a try.
2. Give tips on how to answer questions. Post articles and tips on how to answer questions, which also helps people learn to communicate better. You can include tips on how to write articles, teach a tough topic, etc.Tell them it’s OK to guess a little, as long as they ADMIT they’re guessing
3. Adopt a near-zero-tolerance “Be Nice” policy when people answer questions
   Don’t allow other participants (especially the more advanced users) to slam anyone’s answer. A lot of technical forums especially are extremely harsh, and have a culture where the regulars say things like, “If you think that, you have no business answering a question. In fact, you have no business even DREAMING about being a programmer. Better keep your paper hat day job, loser.”
4. Teach and encourage the more advanced users (including moderators) how to correct a wrong answer while maintaining the original answerer’s dignity.
   And again, zero-tolerance for a**holes. All it takes is one jerk to stop someone from ever trying it again.
5. Re-examine your reward/levels strategy for your community
   Is there a clear way for new users to move up the ranks? Are there achievable, meaningful “levels”?

I forsee the main stumbling block will be the competitive environment and culture that pervades the industry. Open source culture has a long way to go in the industry although developments such as this forum all help. There’s a post up there at the minute on water which is remarkably open and useful, but the poster was unsure of guidelines on pimping their own or other’s products.  Kathy’s post covers this – clear guidelines would be a great help.

So I’m impressed but have a few wishes:

• full RSS feeds
• clearer guidelines on posting especially regards products and companies
• enticements for adding avatars and signatures etc

Good work guys.

mel starrs Geekery building, Forums, Jeremy Clarkson, Kathy Sierra, Micheal, Sustainability

These are my links for April 18th through April 19th:

• Construction Blog Practice – New blog from someone at Constructing Excellence
• Asus Eee 900 to hit shelves on 1 May – ZDNet.co.uk – Going to hold out for the new and improved version (plus the 7" is nigh impossible to source instore in the US)
• 11 April 2008 – iSBEM_v3.1.a Patch Release – We recommend all users to download and run the patch for iSBEM_v3.1.a which is available from the download page item 2.

mel starrs News asus, Blogging, CE, eee, isbem, laptop, May - ZDNet.co.uk, ncm, SBEM, Software, United States

Well, that post title may be a little OTT, but I am delighted to report that the complete technical guidance for BREEAM 2008 will be available to the public from June (thanks to Tom Saunders for letting me know).

Also available for comment until 18 May is a discussion document which looks at how well three of the most highly regarded Environmental Assessment Methods; LEED, CASBEE and Green Star  ‘travel’ when compared to the local UK benchmark BREEAM.  Download and comment here (registration required, 46pp. pdf plus 2 appendices). More on this when I get a chance to read it properly…

A related, but older (2004), document is available here (pdf, 118pp.), via bldgsim, an international Survey of Life-Cycle Assessment Tools, Assessment Frameworks, Rating Systems,Technical Guidelines, Catalogues, Checklists and Certificates. Includes LEED and BREEAM but not CASBEE or Greenstar.

In other news, Thomas Tredgold has risen from the grave and is commenting on blog posts and writing his own.  Either that’s a nom de plume or a very fated young man…

mel starrs Uncategorized BREEAM, CASBEE, Green Star, LEED, Thomas Tredgold, Tom Saunders, United Kingdom

Is is really two years?

Almost 360 posts, over 70 regular subscribers, almost 8000 hits in the past year*, including over 250 to BREEAM is a means to an end post.

*Over 20% of visitors use Firefox as their browser, most of the rest use IE.  Only 0.5% use Mac although one visitor found me using their Playstation 3, two with their iPhone. The two favourite screen sizes are 1024×768 (39%) and 1280×1024 (24%). 28% of readers are in London.

Guess I’m going to keep this up for the forseeable future then.

Some thoughts about the blog and where I see it going:

• I love using del.icio.us as a mini-blogging tool – 255 characters is usually enough space to comment on a news item and leaves me a lot more time to write “proper” posts
• Twitter is looking like a good way of micro-blogging but I’m not quite ready to add it into my main feed yet
• I still have a stupid number of drafts sitting around cluttering my mind, especially some book reviews I promised to publish over a year ago.  Mental clutter = distraction.  Will finish these in May once I get back to the physical copies of the books.
• The past year has been a whirlwind of scattered thinking.  I’m hoping to focus on topics in a more structured fashion for the next
• A bloggers to-do list is never finished.  The minute I get one thing done, I find another gadget or widget to play with or see some other niggle I want to fix.  All this on top of posting.  I must learn to accept this and realise things will never be complete.  Live with it.

Thanks to everyone who has read, commented or sent me emails in the past year, especially those who let me know when when my awesome web skills have broken the site.

mel starrs Geekery Blogging, Housekeeping, London, mini-blogging tool, statistics, twitter

These are my links for April 6th through April 8th:

• So you want to be an environmental performance assessor – Article from BSJ on EPC, etc. Interestingly, Gifford plan to have 6 assessors, but do not want to waste "good" engineers on the scheme. Certification already seen as a second tier profession and it has scarcely kcked off yet…
• An apple a day gets thrown away – via WRAP, the Love Food Hate Waste campaign finds over 4 million apples a day are being chucked out in the UK – scandalous
• Design for Good – Blogger jking has a useful history of green building. Favourite phrase re: BREEAM and LEED "a lot of scorecard-motivated 'eco-architecture' that lacked anything resembling a sustainable ethic"

mel starrs News BREEAM, building, certification, EPC, food, green, history, LEED, United Kingdom, waste, wrap

Ever noticed when you start thinking about a word or a topic, it starts popping up everywhere?  Found this great discussion over at Ann Thorpe’s blog:

Within the professional design framework there is little space for activism. At best, designers can legitimize activism by finding “win-win” solutions that meet client profit-making needs while also addressing social concerns. At worst, designers might find themselves using the activism associated with current social trends (eg concern over climate change) merely as a guide to enhancing consumer appeal for buildings, clothing, products and the like. “Greenwashing” is a classic example, where ecological concerns are addressed superficially (eg stating that “the package is recyclable” although no facilities actually exist to recycle the material) with the main aim of enhancing a product’s competitiveness and profitability.

The whole article is worth reading (and has a wealth of sources to plunder/add to wishlists too) but i shall be pondering this question for the next while:

How does design reconcile its conventional role as servant to commercial clients and their users with its potential role as transformative change agent and societal leader (read public service/not-for-profit sectors of the economy)? Does it have to? Will it remain primarily a ‘change agent for hire’?

Good question – any takers?

mel starrs Uncategorized Ann Thorpe