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Green Government File Sharing
by
Richard Young
With new mandates for greening everything
from energy, buildings and fleets to purchasing and management programs,
state and local government agencies face a supreme challenge.
How do these agencies, especially those lacking direct experience with
sustainability programs, bootstrap themselves without spending endless
time and budget?
SustainLane Government
was created in October 2006 to precisely
address that need. Its free website serves as an online nexus where
government officials working at the city, county, and state levels can
share best practices.
Thirteen Categories
The basic idea is file-sharing, like some do with music and video; but
through SustainLane Government what gets trafficked are detailed profiles
of sustainability programs. A government official uploads a document,
maybe a program report or innovative ordinance, and SustainLane Government
vets and catalogues the document according to 13 unique topics - such as
green building and development ,
energy efficiency, or
sustainability management - then
showcases it online for others to browse, search and download.
The project team at SustainLane Government calls these documents, “best
practices,” or “best management practices,” but really they’re official
strategies and tactics actually being implemented across the country with
dizzying frequency.
Anyone browsing the website can see, at a glance, what sustainability
policies and programs look like, and where the trends are catching.
Meanwhile, government professionals are given special access to download
the program documents and peruse information such as program budgets and
operational procedures. For these users, SustainLane Government provides
implicit details specific to city, county, and state organization—posted
by colleagues who they may never otherwise meet because they are in
another jurisdiction, role or department. A secure directory also allows
these officials to contact one another to learn the behind-the-scenes
knowledge that further contextualizes each document.
Who’s Behind the Project?
Leading the project is
Warren Karlenzig, who for many years advised major corporations in
“knowledge management”—the process of getting large businesses to
automatically inventory and quickly leverage what they, in fact, already
know. A couple of years ago, when Karlenzig began studying the
sustainability initiatives of major U.S. cities, he found that a
significant stopgap in urban greening was the fact that different agencies
within the same city weren’t properly coordinated. The result was that
agencies were not only duplicating the efforts of other agencies across
the nation, they were often even re-doing efforts from right next door.
Karlenzig advocates a process of sustainability management that is “more
holistic and systems-based.” In the past, city greening meant street and
sidewalk greening, city parks improvement, lawns, litter control, and
pollution mitigation around industrial plants. But new concepts of
sustainability recast greening to mean improving operating and economic
performance today based on what may be coming tomorrow, such as what type
of energy and development mix a US city will require to prosper during the
next decades. Energy, for instance, is a fundamental input that acutely
affects city operational budgets, air quality, commuting and urban
planning as well as neighborhood and economic development.
Sustainability management must look across traditional sectors that
emerged in yesteryears when such fundamental variables weren’t so
volatile: public works experts will now need to learn across disciplines
to coordinate waste-to-energy solutions with utility managers, and
vice-versa.
SustainLane Government is cognizant of this new learning curve, and its
website helps to get its users thinking across traditionally autonomous
government departments. This “cross-sector” approach seems simple in
theory but requires considerable effort in reconciling differing “mental
models.”
"Part of SustainLane Government’s overall goal is to provide officials
tools and a pattern language so that they can better solve problems
systemically among themselves," said Karlenzig. "We want to help them meet
the challenges of their jobs, careers, and the evolving futures of their
agencies."
Richard Young is the Research Manager for
SustainLane Government.
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