EDFix Calls - Summary
By EDFix Calls - Summary
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Podcast Description
The EDFix Calls are a topic-focused set of conference calls hosted by the EDF Innovation Exchange and produced by Jerry Michalski. The calls take place on the 2nd and 4th Monday of each month at noon eastern time (9am PT). Also see full-length EDFix podcasts on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=348637752
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Future of Green Podcast: Barriers and Gamechangers | Barriers & GamechangersSummary (11 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Future of Green - Full (57 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Get Call Updates by Email %CODE1% Darcy Winslow, Founder of DSW Collective and Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Founding Chair of SoL, the Society for Organizational Learning joined the Future of Green Open Conference Call to discuss their experiences working to make businesses more sustainable. Winslow worked at Nike, Inc. for more than 20 years, and starting in 1999 helped initiate Nike's ambitious sustainability initiative. In addition to his classic business management tome, The Fifth Discipline, Senge is author of The Necessary Revolution, a well-regarded guide to how systems thinking can help bring about a more sustainable world. A few of the many insights from this call are: Winslow and Senge choose to work with groups that are already inclined to a sustainability mindset. They avoid situations where they must change people's minds; where they would be "pushing rocks up hill". Senge describes how the reaction "I need a business case to justify a focus on sustainability" may be a red herring: it may be a legitimate request for help to explain the program, but it could be a deliberate obstacle to avoid action. It took years before the changes at Nike were widely adopted. Winslow works through the timeline from her start in 1999 when some senior managers were "allowing" her work to happen; to the point about six months later when her project was "apprehended" by management and required to show return on the pilot projects they were implementing; through 2006 when the project finally "tipped" and was widely accepted by top management. She talked about this last step as "nirvana" when leadership is making it happen - integrating resources, manpower, and responsibility throughout the organization. Senge argues that every change situation is different but has common elements amongst which are the need for perseverance and patience. He suggested that organizational change requires a paradoxical stance that is at once committed to change while respectful of the company culture - "the essence of who we are." In the Nike example, Winslow targeted "creatives" as key influencers in the corporation and approached individual designers, developers, and engineers, before eventually approaching Marketing (a "tough sell"). She garnered a group of 100 champions throughout the organization and worked with them to develop a common language and a common goal, a "north star," to guide their efforts. In discussion with host Jerry Michalski, Winslow and Senge talked about the importance of followers as well as leaders, the need to "leave ego at the door," and the importance of networks of relationships. Winslow argued that shared resources, bandwidth, and investment are necessary to address the sustainability challenges we're facing. She highlighted the CERES project BICEP and GreenXchange (discussed in an earlier EDFix Call) as two organizations promoting collaboration to respond to these needs. | 2/16/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EDFix Call #11 Afterthoughts: Light-duty fleets – The next ten years | EDFix Call #11 - Summary (12 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes EDFix Call #11 - Full (64 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Get Call Updates by Email %CODE1% With Jim Motavalli, we dove into the part of fleet management most like the everyday cars we drive: light-duty fleets. These fleets include rental cars, small government vehicles and light trucks and SUVs. There are some 8 million light-duty trucks, vans and pickups in the US. The strategies for reducing greenhouse gases include alternative fuels, hybrid drive trains and telematics (for example, remotely directed cruise controls and other governor mechanisms). There are also more ambitious initiatives, like the Better Place battery-switching systems currently in prototype with Tokyo cabs. We’re also seeing vehicle sharing grow in many cities, from commercial ventures like ZipCar to peer-to-peer local rentals like WhipCar. Noteworthy: one shared car takes 15 to 20 off the road. Insurance companies are starting to sort out the details, while social networking services make it easier to trust potential renters. Small things matter, too, from improved aerodynamics to tire and battery maintenance. There’s no one magic answer, but efforts on every frontier will create overall improvements. | 11/30/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EDFix Call #9 Afterthoughts: Reconnecting with The Commons | EDFix Call #9 - Summary (10 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes EDFix Call #9 - Full (54 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Get Call Updates by Email %CODE1% An archaic German word -- allmände -- refers to goods used jointly by members of a community. This call was an exploration of such goods with German Commons activist Silke Helfrich. Five years ago, Helfrich helped organize a conference in Mexico that brought together experts in agriculture, biodiversity, genetics and more. An Argentine participant asked about folding in the concepts of open source software, precipitating a useful discussion about Common Pool Resources and their governance (you may remember CPRs from EDFix #5, with Charlotte Hess). Three notions bubbled out of those conversations, relative to these shared resources: access, usage rights and control. The culture of open source software gives everyone the right to read, write and use the code. Why was that kind of governance not happening with land, water, seeds and other resources needed for biodiversity? Duke professor James Boyle and others have described what's happened to The Commons as a second enclosure movement. During the first Enclosure movement, many physical Commons were replaced with private landholdings, but often with some loopholes to soften the blow. For example, the Magna Carta has a little-known companion document, the Charter of the Forest, which gave commoners access to enclosed lands for firewood, grazing their pigs and a little more. Historian Peter Linebaugh has a marvelous, slow-burning talk about this forgotten charter. This quick historical background is a platform for Helfrich's thesis: that we have become accustomed to delegating responsibility for these Commons to the State or the Market, and we need to regain the capacity to talk about The Commons and re-engage in its governance. Our earlier call with Charlotte Hess taught us that the people closest to a Commons are most likely to understand how to govern it. Helfrich believes we need to share our knowledge better, so people are better equipped to make wise governance choices. We also need to make some important vocabulary distinctions. One she finds critical is between property, which is permanent (until sold or transferred), and possession, which is temporary. What Governments and the Market will do depends largely on what society honors and rewards. Is the best company the one with the most patents, or the one that creates the most good with its innovations? (Think GreenXchange, from EDFix Call #6.) How, asks Helfrich, do we change the reward system? Commoning is not easy. It takes time and patience. There's no panacea. Each solution will be different, but the core notions are the same. Commoning is a social process that can reconnect the relevant stakeholders in ways that are beneficial in the long term. Many foundations, institutions and research centers are changing how they handle intellectual property, but Commoning doesn't fit comfortably into most of their charters. One useful step forward would be to reexamine their charters and missions to incorporate these ways of seeing and acting. | 5/17/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EDFix Call #10 Afterthoughts: Developing a Vision for Greener Fleets | EDFix Call #10 - Summary (11 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes EDFix Call #10 - Full (52 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Get Call Updates by Email %CODE1% We hit the road April 12 with a series of open conference calls regarding a pressing matter in greening business – truck fleets and logistics in general. We had a fodder-filled discussion on the issue co-hosted by Jason Mathers, who leads Environmental Defense Fund’s work to promote greenhouse gas management in corporate fleets. We talked through two particular sectors of interest for fleets - light-to-medium-duty vehicles and heavy-duty on-road tractor trailer vehicles. Already having conducted a considerable amount of work in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from light-to-medium-duty fleets, our current challenge is to maintain the momentum EDF has created in this area while shifting our focus to heavy-duty fleets. On the lighter side of fleet vehicles we have found a number of opportunities to reduce greenhouse gases including right-sizing vehicles, but are faced with the challenge that these options do not work for the heavy-duty vehicles which are responsible for 80 percent of emissions from corporate owned-vehicles. We talked through the two current efforts in the light-to-medium market. First, the greenhouse gas management framework made up of seven major fleet management companies who work with the operators of fleets to measure and keep records on the performance of fleets, focusing on greenhouse gas reductions as a goal. We are also monitoring the kinds of vehicles being brought into these fleets and how vehicles are being used. The good news is, fifty to sixty percent of light-duty fleets are actually measuring what they’re doing. They have seen some 20% reduction in greenhouse gases in some fleets combined with lower life cycle costs. The next conference calls will bring these conversations into tighter focus, looking for actions we should take today and plans for what we can be do over the next ten years. The next EDFix call will be held on May 3 at 9 am PT (noon ET). We will then resume holding these calls on the second and fourth Mondays of the month with the May 10 call. Please join us for this conversation May 3, 2010 at 9am PT (noon ET). Here's the dial-in info: Phone number: +1 (213) 289-0500 Code: 267-6815 | 5/2/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EDFix Call #8 afterthoughts: Building "Plumbing" for Business Sustainability | EDFix Call #8 - Summary (12 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes EDFix Call #8 - Full (52 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Get Call Updates by Email %CODE1% Brian Behlendorf of Collabnet, Apache Foundation and most recently the US Government's Connect project, joined our EDFix call on March 22 to talk about open source approaches to addressing social problems. (I apologize for the poor audio quality on the recording of this very interesting call. Future recordings will be better.) Two key insights I garnered from the call: Active Community Building When US CTO Aneesh Chopra invited Brian to join the Connect project it was already underway and, in fact, had released an open source software package. What Brian started to work on was building an open source community to encourage use and contributions by others, ranging from the 26 government agencies that share health data to the many different constituencies, large and small, in industry. To build an engaged community, Brian focused on using an open development process including public coding "sprints", using open development tools for managing code releases, issue tracking and building a public discussion stream that anyone could join. He also reached out to those constituencies, including taking a trip to Houston for the recent HIMSS conference where he participated in a showcase with 50 other Connect users. Shared Code Is Plumbing I'm interested in better understanding commercial interests in open sourcing products and how this might serve business sustainability. Brian suggested that open source infrastructure can be developed to solve generic problems -- problems where companies would prefer to "split the cost". This infrastructure is "just the plumbing" that sits underneath products the commercial sector does compete with. Moving On -- To Transportation Though we may dip back into the Sustainability Commons periodically, calls 8 and 9 are the formal conclusion of that module of the EDFix Conference Calls. Starting with the April 12 call (at 9am PT), we'll switch to a module on Sustainability and Transportation Priorities, during which we'll be focusing on the opportunities for improving environmental performance in the transportation space. Corporate truck fleets are a major opportunity for greening business. The first call will be with my EDF colleague, Jason Mathers, who will describe the lay of the land. Don't miss it! | 4/10/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EDFix Call #7 afterthoughts: Principles of Change – Macrowikinomics | Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics and its forthcoming sequel, Macrowikinomics, joined the EDFix call on Feb. 22 to give us his insights into new approaches for large-scale change we will increasingly see for addressing global issues. EDFix Call #7 - Summary (9 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes EDFix Call #7 - Full (51 min.) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Get Call Updates by Email %CODE1% His thesis is that problems like climate change won't be solved by global initiatives like COP15 alone. We also need myriad small, distributed experiments and social innovations. These will help change percolate to every corner of the planet through willing participants, rather than relying on mandates or regulations from above. As Wikinomics describes, we're seeing creative new approaches to collaboration in efforts like open source software projects and Wikipedia. It was encouraging to hear Anthony describe how these approaches are being demonstrated in small projects (like Carbon Rally and CARMA) as well as adopted in large enterprises like IBM. Anthony's recent work helps to explain broader principles that enable these change strategies. He emphasized transparency, openness, and collaboration but also the concept of integrity and the need for inter-generational thinking. Mobile phones are very quickly connecting communities that are so poor that it seemed they would remain unheard forever. Business, governments and society are finding new symbiotic relationships. The next EDFix call, on Monday March 8, will build on these themes to explore how principles learned from development of Open Source Software can be applied in other business settings. We'll be joined by Brian Behlendorf, who was part of the community that developed and managed the hugely successful Apache web server and is now applying what he learned to his work on health IT working with the Department of Health and Human Services. Please join us! Phone number: +1 (213) 289-0500 Code: 267-6815 Get Updates about EDFix Conference Calls If you'd like to get announcements about upcoming EDFix conference calls and the results with podcast releases, please sign-up here: %CODE1% | 3/7/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EDFix Call #6 afterthoughts: Cutting Holes in the IP Funnel | EDFix Call #6 - Summary (9:01) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes EDFix Call #6 - Full (42:36) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Get Call Updates by Email %CODE1% John Wilbanks from Science Commons and Kelly Lauber, Director of Nike's Sustainable Business & Innovation Lab, joined us on the February 8th EDFix call to discuss the GreenXchange project, which was announced at the World Economic Forum in January. Highlights from the call included: an explanation of the new patent tools that GreenXchange will provide, including a research non-assertion pledge to encourage more non-profit research on commercial patents and and a model patent license which inverts the traditional patent and allows reuse of the technology. a discussion of a "3rd layer" of language to allow constraints on top of the model patent license. These constraints would allow a patent-owner to share the patent with exceptions (e.g., not with direct competitors). Wilbanks explained these interventions as "cutting holes" in the intellectual property funnel so that knowledge to generate innovation will leak out to other organizations that might put it to work, while preserving the IP originator's rights. GreenXchange is beginning what will be a multi-year process with release of the legal language. The next steps are to recruit more or the right early partners, study what leaders like Nike are doing with their patents, and build a network. Wilbank's goal is to add a zero to the number of companies using GreenXchange every year. One of the surprising insights, via Lauber, is that Nike's legal team was a champion, not opponent of this new approach. She explained that their team had already been looking at open innovation and saw the upside that GreenXchange offered. She says that Nike is particularly pleased by the research opportunities that have been created and sees a huge opportunity. Wilbanks echoed Bill Joy's observation that most of the smart people are outside your company. Once the IP community has a standard infrastructure in place for searching and using patents across companies and even industry sectors, network effects can kick in. That's the goal for the next few years. Listen to or download the podcast of the full discussion (43 min.) or Jerry's summary of the call (9 min). Be sure to join upcoming EDFix Conference Calls. | 2/17/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EDFix Call #5 afterthoughts: Governing the Commons | Call summary. One useful model for thinking about goods in the Commons is the four-square matrix at the bottom of the Common-pool resource page in Wikipedia, which maps excludability against rivalry, dividing the world into four categories of goods: private goods, common pool resources, public goods and club goods. Charlotte Hess, Jesse Ribot, and Ruth Meinzen-Dick have been deepening our common understanding of this territory. They help us on our quest to define the "Sustainability Commons." | 2/7/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EDFix call #4 afterthoughts: Open Data | EDFix Call #4 - Summary (7:48) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes EDFix Call #4 - Full (43:39) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Get Call Updates by Email %CODE1% On January 11 we talked with Greg Norris and Jeff Rice about the open data requirements and effects of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). They are working to aggregate data across supply chains that would help anyone calculate specific sustainability footprints: think beyond carbon footprints to other footprints for the carcinogenic, water-consumption, fossil-fuel and biodiversity effects that different products and processes have. You could envision analyses for safety, living wages, child labor and community impact. Early LCA efforts took a physicist's perspective, assessing what compounds a particular process leaves as by-products, for example. Now, using Linked Open Data methods from the semantic web, analyses can take other perspectives, such as an economist's. The natural question to ask is: why would a corporation share openly the raw data of its supply chain? Doesn't that reveal state secrets? One of the keys to corporate collaboration is focusing on the impacts of the supply chains. At that level, companies are jumping in. Owens Corning, for example, is funding the open-source Earthster project, which itself just spun out a data-interchange-standards project named Poseidon. (In a future EDFix call, we'll discuss Wal-Mart's Sustainability Index project.) Existing vendors in the LCA space such as GaBi, SimaPro and OpenLCA are joining the open effort, too. The availability of large amounts of open data should make their software and analytic skills more valuable, not less. As better structured data meets better analytic tools and deeper frameworks for analysis, our ability to make difficult choices should improve. Now we need to figure out how to boil down those decisions so that normal folks in everyday life can benefit from them, too. Please join us for our next EDFix call on January 25, at 9am Pacific, on Governing the Commons. You can also: Listen to or download the podcast of the full discussion (44 min) Get a taste by listening to or downloading Jerry Michalski's brief summary of the call (8 min) Find out how to participate in upcoming EDFix Conference Calls | 1/24/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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EDFix call #3 afterthoughts: Community and the Commons | EDFix Call #3 - Summary (:10) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes EDFix Call #3 - Full (1:12) Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes Get Call Updates by Email %CODE1% Our third EDFix conversation, Deeper into the Commons, took us into an interesting exploration of the relationship between community and the Commons. We got there with two guides who tend different Commons in different ways. Kenoli Oleari is a black-belt in large-group process. He described his work with groups convened by the California water board and another agency working to improve storage tank cleanups, but the riveting story (and his sharpest memory of a Commons in action) was a clinic in Kenya that turned down a big USAID grant, then struck out on its own, with almost no resources. It became a major regional resource, yet when the Gates Foundation did a survey of medical facilities there, the clinic didn't get included in the count. Our other guide, Neal Gorenflo, recently launched Shareable.net, a blog that describes what's working in sharing communities around the world. Neal struck a note that resonated with Kenoli's stories, about necessity: often natural interdependence is critical for building both community and Commons (and not always both simultaneously). As an example, Neal mentioned A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, in which Rebecca Solnit describes the extraordinary solidarity that often arises after disasters. This discussion provoked many questions, including: can a Commons survive if it doesn't matter deeply to anyone? Please join us for our next EDFix call on January 11, at 9am Pacific. You can also: Listen to or download the podcast of the full discussion (1 hr 12 min) Get a taste by listening to or downloading Jerry Michalski's brief summary of the call (13 min) Find out how to participate in upcoming EDFix Conference Calls | 1/5/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 10 Episodes |
