BlueVia invited the Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Office of Telefónica and the ITU to the Activate conference of the Guardian to share the Green ICT Application Challenge.
The first part of this participation included a weekend at the Guardian’s office in London, where developers could build applications to save the world, in the framework of the (H)activate Summit. The second part includes the presentation of the results of this weekend in the Activate Conference on Wednesday 22nd of June and a future market deployment with the support of experts on applications.
Bluevia, Nokia and The Guardian provided all the facilities to make them feel comfortable on an informal and friendly environment. High-speed internet connection, free APIs access, expert advice, drinks and snacks were the ingredients to have more than 50 developers working to save the world.
The Green ICT Application Challenge was promoted since the beginning by tweeter. In the (H)activate Summit we decided to take an space in the room to be available for any question. With certain curiosity, some developers came to ask us what a green application was and why companies as Telefónica and an UN Agency as the ITU were doing this. Suddenly the challenge was not to develop the application, instead it was to explain to inquiring hackers that this is important and that we needed them to develop green apps for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
After several hours, coffees, snacks and “coding” wonderful results happened. Around 30 applications were presented with amazing demos. For our suprise lots of them includen the “green” factor. Recycling geo-referenced points, carbon calculators or green purchasing apps were some of the examples displayed. These results were incredible and now we expect to have lots of participants for our Challenge.
Developers have everything to save the world: energy, knowledge, attitude and motivation to do great things in short periods of time. If we manage to engage them in understanding the importance of Information and communication technologies for climate change abatement, they will become the Green ICT heroes we need.
The Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Office and BlueVia are pleased and proud to promote this Green ICT Application Challenge. We look forward to have thousand of green applications available for our customers 🙂
