Affinity Group News: Calculate Your Computer's Carbon Footprint, New Drupal Group, and Austin 501 Tech Club on Facebook

Earth Day spurred some conversation on NTEN Discuss about how to figure out carbon emissions for every watt a computer uses per hour. Dean Matsueda wrote that he had seen and used carbon-footprint calculators online to gauge household, car, and air travel C02 emissions but would like to drill down to more specifics, like computer use.

Walt Daniels gave this response:

Carbon footprint is a simple multiply if you have the watts/hr and number of hours. watts/hr is what is hard to come by for most computer setups unless you have a meter on it because the usage depends on too many things,like duty cycle and how you have the power savings features on your computer set.

Gavin Clabaugh lets us know that to do it right, you need to meter the machine. He uses a Kill-A-Watt (a simple one costs about $20).

And Dave Shaw, H4 Consulting, added:

How to Find and Hire a Website Consultant

Seth Schneider, Communications Director, Transportation and Land Use Coalition

NTEN member Seth Schneider of the Transportation and Land Use Coalition led a session about how to find and hire a company or consultant for your website project at the recent Bay Area Drupal Camp in Berkeley, CA. The participants generated a slew of helpful tips from their collective experience as both clients and consultants. Although the tips focus on hiring someone for website projects that use the the open-source Drupal content management system, many of them pertain to hiring a consultant for any website project.

Code For Change This Summer

If you’re a college student or soon to be graduate with programming skills, consider putting them to use for a good cause! This summer U.S. PIRG is hosting a new program in which interns will improve CiviCRM, the contact relationship management component of CivicSpace and many Drupal websites.

Specifically participants will work on improving features like online petitions and tell-a-friend functions, making CiviCRM a standalone application that integrates with CMS like WebGUI, and getting it ready to use for PIRG’s network of advocacy organizations. And since we’re talking about open source code, all this work will go back out to the community. This is great news for other nonprofit organizations that use, or want to use, CiviCRM.

Find out more about this program and how to apply.