New White Paper: Government and the Immersive Web
Today, I am happy to highlight a white paper that went live today from the Center for Digital Government, with support from Avaya. This paper is titled Government and the Immersive Web: Making Government More Cost Effective, Transparent, Collaborative and Human, and gets to issues that are very near and dear to my heart, using technology to make society, government and the economy work better.
Paper Summary
This paper discusses how an increasingly realistic, three-dimensional, and human Internet can help government communicate, save money, increase citizen participation, attract Millennials into the workforce and deliver better overall results. It reviews the public policy benefits of this convergence of technologies and explains how barriers to adoption can be overcome.
So, what is the immersive web and how is it green?
Defining the Immersive Web The immersive web is the marriage of the rich, 3-D, spatial audio, presence-conscious aspects of a virtual world with the immediacy and social networking characteristic s of Web 2.0. This mash-up of social networking and 3-D video game technology has ushered in a new set of powerful tools for public governance that are especially well-suited to train staff and host internal meetings, as well as engage a technology- savvy citizenry. It has also brought about a new generation of applications that bring the human-to-human aspect of interaction into the field of online government.
What makes the immersive web green is that it enables the replacement of resource and carbon heavy activities with ones that make better use of resources. This process is often called Dematerialisation – the substitution of high carbon products and activities with low carbon alternatives e.g. replacing face-to-face meetings with videoconferencing, or paper with e-billing.
Here is an example, “An early pilot conducted by the state of Arizona showed that taking only 4,000 state employees off the road for a year generated benefits of 5.25 million fewer miles driven, 175,000 fewer pounds of air pollution, and a $2,000 savings per worker on gasoline.” IN total, 5 out of the 6 immersive web projects from around the world highlighted in the paper had some green benefits.
The Green Benefits of the Immersive Web
Since the communications, efficiency and operational benefits of this new generation of technologies are so compelling, it is easy to lose sight of the equally important role it can play in achieving government’s green objectives.Consider how:
• CO2 emissions and associated costs could be reduced with virtual, instead of physical meetings
• Road-miles and associated costs could be reduced through effective telework that preserves the human element
• Government workers could be hired all across the jurisdiction, instead of only in congested, urban areas that already have poor air quality
Postscript: welcome to new avaya blogger
Also, want to extend a hearty welcome to Paris Pitts, the newest addition the avaya.com blog team. Paris is a Client Principal for hospitality and retail with Avaya Global Services and you can check out his first post here.
Welcome Paris and happy blogging
Posted by Wilson Korol at 13:18 on April 16, 2010