Green Computing Meets the Social Web

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Billing itself as "a new global online community that provides free, easy-to-use tools to help participants assess, track, and compare business energy performance, share proven best practices to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and encourage sustainable innovation," Sun Microsystems launched a new site called OpenEco for businesses and organizations to calculate and figure out their carbon footprint and potential greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

As with all community and social-networking sites, OpenEco's success will depend on the uptake and participation of users. Those who log in can remain anonymous, but all are encouraged to share as much information as possible so that all can learn about ways to cut emissions and energy use and learn from one another. Whether or not this venture is simply greenwashing or a genuine attempt to address climate change issues, the project does raise the important issue that companies, governments, and NGOs will all have to work together to tackle the problem of global climate change.