Green is the New Green

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) meets in Milwaukee this week with a big agenda.  Interestingly, NASCIO is dedicating two sessions to sustainability. 

Oregon state CIO Dugan Petty, who has chaired a NASCIO working group on the greening of IT, will convene a workshop on equipment lifecycle in greener government.  I have been asked to moderate a plenary session with a high power panel:

• Ken Theis, Chief Information Officer, State of Michigan
• Peggy Ward, Chief Information Security Officer of the Commonwealth & VITA Internal Audit Officer, Commonwealth of Virginia
• Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar, Google

 The big themes from the discussion -- including energy savings, telework and LEED-certified data centers and the alignment between green IT practices and the larger policies and politics of sustainbaility -- are drawn from two documents:

• NASCIO's Green IT in Enterprise Practices, the work product from Dugan's working group; and,
• The Center for Digital Government's Simply Green, my take on a few steps that state and local government can take on the road to sustainability.

Today's discussion also comes just days after Google and the venerable old school GE announced they "would work together on technology and policy initiatives to promote the development of additional capacity in the electricity grid and of "smart grid" technologies to enable plug-in hybrids and to manage energy more efficiently" [See the full story in the New York Times.] 

It will be good to tease out the arc from the origins of climatesaverscomputing.org to the smarter electrical grid -- in both of which Google was a significant player -- with Weihl, Theis and Ward.