2008 Strategies for Green IT at Penn:Minutes

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March 26, 2008

Kickoff meeting

• Group introductions
  • We went around the room, introduced ourselves, and stated why we were part of the team, and what we hoped to get from it
• Defining team goals and deadlines
  • We defined Green IT as anything we as IT professionals can do to reduce Penn's Carbon footprint
  • We talked about the basic items that our group is tasked with, including the following:
    • Researching, developing, and documenting a list of recommended actions that IT departments and users could take to "green up" their standard way of operating.
    • Adding to the current list of consumption information about computing technology commonly deployed at Penn.
    • Developing content for both users and LSPs along with providing a list of resources, both internal and external to Penn, which are useful to departments and individuals in their greening effort.
      • We should focus on targeted information with additional resources available, rather than inundating people with links.
  • We are tasked with establishing a baseline for future efforts rather than developing policy to be implemented immediately
• Next, we refined our groups focus by gathering feedback from participants
  • We discussed current sustainability efforts underway at Penn
  • We talked about the difficulties of getting departmental cooperation when departmental managers are not directly paying for the electricity consumed within a department
    • Identified individual building electricity metering as one item that may be in our list of recommendations
• Next we broke the larger group into sub-teams
  • We decided that two large sub-teams would be more effective than smaller groupings
  • Sub-teams were defined as:
    • Datacenter / Server
    • Desktop / Enduser
  • Subteams will be tasked with meeting regularly when full group meetings are not scheduled
  • It will be up to the subteam to come up with the list of items that they want to target and to set meeting dates
  • We talked about identifying subteam leaders as the facilitators of the subteams, but did not identify any enthusiastic takers initially
  • Team co-leads David and Bob will likely act as the subteam leaders going forward
• Set tentative dates for full-group meetings
  • 4/9, 4/30
  • We will make a call prior to the 4/30 meeting as to when the full groups should meet after that date.
• Set expectations for documentation and deliverables
  • Specific deliverables will include:
    • Adding to the current list of consumption information about computing technology commonly deployed at Penn.
      • This will include using equipment like the Kill-a-Watt to monitor energy usage
    • Developing content for both users and LSPs along with providing a list of resources, both internal and external to Penn, which are useful to departments and individuals in their greening effort.
• We have several deadlines:
  • May 2 - Presentation to the University Green working group on our efforts to date
  • May 5 - IT convention - Moderated discussion on Green IT
  • 2nd or 3rd week in may – Presentation to SUG and IT Roundtable
• Finally, we asked people to sign up for one of the two subteams and dismissed the meeting