During this years SAP Developers Challenge (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/wiki) Team Insomnia created a solution to provide tracking of an individuals carbon footbprint. The solution integrated SAP Transportation module, an online shopping cart and Facebook
For this blog I will cover only the Facebook application as it has received a lot of interest.
You can see Team Insomnias presentation on you tube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpEtRvFjqfQ) .
When running the application in Facebook the user can see an instant summary of their current footprint along with their friends footprints. This provides a view not only of the users environmental impact, but also allows competition between friends.
The carbon footprint here can be offset by selecting an amount and then making a purchase through a 3rd party site. The purchase can be made by the user, or as a gift from a friend, as can be seen in the screnshot below.
In the right hand column your friends (Facebook friends) carbon footprints are displayed. You can navigate to your friends detailed view from here.
Other tabs (in the flash object created with Xcelsius) show details of the individuals consumption.
Or a history of consumption and footprint.
By decoupling the facebook application from the shopping cart we have a standalone application that let's user manually track their carbon footprint. There are already existing tools that allow carbon costs of flights and other items to be calculated so that the values can be entered.
There are many ways that this can be enhanced by integrating with other applications that allow tracking of carbon footprint. In an ideal world this would all update automatically, or perhaps more accurately, in an ideal world the problem would not exist.
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