Guest contributor David Flint writes about the formation of a new BCS Specialist Group on Green IT, whose objectives will be to promote Green IT. This group extends the BCS's current coverage of green issues in the Ethics and Data Centre groups.  David attended the group's inaugural meeting, and writes about it below.

The objectives of the Green IT group seem, in the short-term, to mainly mean actions to reduce energy use by IT systems.   At the first meeting of the Group last month, the formal business - about as interesting as such things ever are - was followed by presentations which showed the likely coverage of the Group's activities. This part was better attended (which may owe something to the food provided which was particularly good for a free BCS event).

Bob Crooks, the Green IT lead for Defra, explained how Defra's IT dept. had measured its GHG emissions and created a plan to become carbon neutral - eventually.

John Boyd described how GM2, part of the UK's largest paper distributor, had won the BCS's "Green Organisation of the Year" Award for 2008. The main steps were standardization on a thin client architecture, virtualization of the server farm and implementation of a Storage Area Network (SAN). The key products were Citrix, VMware and the Compellent SAN. GM2 is also promoting teleconferencing and discouraging travel. Simple ideas but energetically applied.

Professor Margaret Ross gave a rapid summary of the actions that PC users should be encouraged to take to reduce energy use. The biggest contribution seemed to come from turning off screens when not needed but some points were much less obvious. A supporting leaflet is available online: http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.23936.

Finally, Toby Abbott of Hannover Consulting described work sponsored by the Communications Managers Association. The work looked at the environmental benefits of homeworking, remote call centres and teleconferencing though conclusions are sparse as yet.

The speeches and contributions from the audience brought out two points:

• There's a lot of uncertainty about energy used or saved by various actions.
• We know enough to be able to reduce emissions and save money - starting today.