Why Go Green?

Aside from the pocketbook reasons, travel also has one other huge and ever-growing concern - the carbon costs to the environment. One 4,000 kilometer (2,500 mile) flight for one person emits 760 pounds of CO2 - which is equivalent to 5% of a US home's electricity use for one year. Not to mention the money out of your pocket for that pricey plane, train, bus ticket, or tank of gas. Sometimes traveling for work is unavoidable. Other times, though, new and emerging technologies for virtual meetings or Web conferences can save your organization or library's budget as well as the environment. You can leverage these computer technologies to reduce your organization's travel costs as well as reduce CO2 emissions.

You might ask, "what's the damage from all this travel?" or "what difference will one trip make?" and to find the answer for your particular travel needs, you can calculate the carbon cost of past or future flights with the Terrapass Carbon Footprint Calculator or the Climate Care/Lonely Planet Calculator to see how it all adds up. The EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator translates CO2 usage (in tons) to equivalencies like barrels of oil used or percentage of a home's electricity use for one year to give you an idea of just how much those cross-country flights cost the Earth.

So, how can virtual meetings help your organization lower costs and reduce environmental damage at the same time?

How Do Online Meetings Work?

Virtual meetings and online conferencing services provide live or "synchronous" interactive meetings in which each participant sits at their own computer and is connected to other participants via the Internet. There's also usually an option to record or archive a virtual meeting, so even if your schedule doesn't work with the time the event is held live, you can still check back at a later point to see how the meeting went, learn about the resources shared, listen to speakers, or view slides and demonstrations.

The software for a virtual meeting can be either a downloaded application on each attendees' computer or a Web-based application where the attendees enter a URL to enter the conference. These can be anything from low-cost, purely Internet and phone-based conferencing services to more complex multimedia applications like Adobe Connect Pro, which allow virtual workgroups to use the Internet and webcams to see each others' faces on their monitors, hear their voices on computer speakers, deliver presentations, edit files, and collaborate on whiteboards.

We Are Living in a Virtual World

Another option that's growing in use and popularity is employing virtual online 3D worlds like Second Life to have participants create "avatars" (an online digital persona) to literally hold a live meeting in a virtual location - or sim - where you can see, talk to, and engage with other avatars virtually using chat and voice features, as well as physical gestures.

Whether your organization just needs to save some money, lower your carbon footprint, or both, online conferencing tools and virtual spaces can provide lively meeting opportunities to share ideas with your constituents or board members, "attend" conferences, conduct trainings for your supporters, and get work done without ever leaving the office (or your home).