Blog.CityCarbon.com

Our August plans are progressing nicely.  In the last week we’ve:

• got the site moved onto a faster server, using Acceleration.net’s virtual dedicated server hosting
• planned out collaboration with Program for Resource Efficient Communities and added their logo to website
• improved some crucial infrastructure (very gory details here)
• fixed our summing bug and recalculated the rankings based on the new scheme
• added a new feature: city-wide graphs

There are a lot of questions that can be answered by this data, and the city-wide graphs are a nice first step, we can see how the age and size of a house matters to carbon footprint.

July has been a busy month!

There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work, and we just published a minor UI change: if a search only returns one home, it will automatically pull up the details page for that home.  We also had a week where the map pins weren’t colored properly, which was fixed this afternoon, as well.

We’re hoping our other efforts will come to fruition in August:

We identified one significant problem with our CO2e ranking system.  We were averaging and summing incorrectly and coming up with CO2e numbers that were too low.  We have a data fix ready and, in the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out new rankings that should be more accurate.  We’ll be removing some outliers and running more of the calculations offline.

We also have a new design in the works, this time created by artists, not programmers.  The initial mock-ups look very nice, and we’re really looking forward to the face-lift.

We’re currently working with the University of Florida Program for Resource Efficient Communities to solidify and expand our partnership.  They are interested in developing the science behind a ranking system, and that should be a big improvement over our current “sum it all, let the user sort it out” technique.

Last but not least, we received some data from GRU regarding the physical locations of their meters, so we should be able to do some geospatial matching to import more Gainesville homes.

We received a phone call Friday (6/27) morning… 45 minutes (and about 65 tons of adrenaline) later, we welcomed a WCJB TV20 field reporter into the Acceleration Programmers Office.

Ms. Erica Rodriquez interviewed and filmed Ryan Davis, Director of Programming, for about 20 minutes. The result of which is the news segment below - brief and containing not one sound bite or quote - however, this was our first ever experience with a news entity and Ryan’s first ever on-screen appearance and we cherish it nonetheless. The experience was surreal, to say the least. And, we now have a memory that makes a great story and brings a laugh every time we think about it.

Gainesville-Green.com segment aired on WCJB TV20 Friday, June 27, 2008.

That’s right Dave, turn off those lights!

Gainesville Mayor, Pegeen Hanrahan, announced Gainesville-Green.com during a session at the 2008 Serve to Preserve Florida Summit on Global Climate Change. The video of that session may be downloaded from the conference website.

The Palm Beach Post also ran a story on the conference and Mayor Hanrahan’s remarks.

Gainesville-Green.com was included in the presentation given by Hal Knowles at the 17th Annual International Emission Inventory Conference “Inventory Evolution - Portal to Improved Air Quality.”

The full presentation, Realizing Residential Building Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions: The Case for a Web-based Geospatial Building Performance and Social Marketing Tool, may be downloaded (pdf) from the conference site for viewing.