Chicago can go Green with IT
Chicago proposes to become one of the Greenest cities in the world. Meanwhile, we’ve been in a holding pattern with respect to addressing the digital divide let along promoting digital excellence citywide. Chicago’s Digital Access Alliance placed environmentalism among the core platform. we need to be innovative with regard to green IT. It’s not just recycling and refurbishing. There’s some interesting thinking up in Canada. Here’s a set of links:
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
http://free-fiber-to-the-home.blogspot.com/
I’m thinking ahead for a moment. Knowledge workers could more readily work from home with reliable high speed communications networks, allowing audio/video, shared desktops, multimedia conference calling… and any number of undeveloped applications. None of this is new. What would be new would be commitment to network capacity and workforce policies that encouraged this. Instead we’re looking at the networks as a consumption driven amenity, and even there the public doesn’t get much bandwidth bang (or reliability) for the buck.
Think also what we’d be doing for neighborhood economies if more people worked locally?
Tags: economy