Clean Energy Challenge Project Background

The Clean Energy Challenge was Next Agenda’s first comprehensive project.
 

It was our first use of our new form of this immersive video and scaled-up online collaboration. This was a project in which we developed and evolved all the core offerings that we continue to work with anyone on, including the immersive video coverage of an event, the online collaboration around that video and scaling up participation off that video. And, as in this case, we can design and facilitate the physical meeting with an eye towards how it can best be leveraged online and engaged on the web.

The project was an audacious attempt in advance of the Copenhagen gathering around climate change to gather 200 top experts in clean energy technology, as well as experts in politics, business, media, finance - around a highly-designed workshop, in which we were trying to figure out how America could get all of its electricity onto clean energy as fast as possible, even as fast as ten years.

Next Agenda was the catalyst of this project, and we convened 200 of these top experts from around the Bay Area and around the country at the Presidio in San Francisco for a kickoff event which opened up these topics for more collaboration online and stimulate thinking on what might take place after Copenhagen. We designed the entire daylong meeting, from the early morning to the end, and indeed, this was not your normal meeting. We invited technical experts to lay out what was possible in the next ten years, and in the morning we worked in breakout groups around some of the big ideas on how we could accelerate that process and move as fast as we can.

In the afternoon we looked at not the technical side but the opposite, the social side, in terms of what it would take to finance these things through business and finance what it would take to change peoples' attitudes through the media, what it would take in politics to get the kind of legislation we would need to help shift the country in this dramatic fashion. Again in the afternoon, we had a number of innovative breakout groups, working on specific projects. We ended with more synthesis at the end where a lot of the threads of the day were pulled together and set up for online work.

We shot the entire proceeding in a very comprehensive way, with roving teams of video journalists, taking in everything on the stage but also capturing what happened in these breakout groups, sometimes in discussions of 30 plus people, or even as small as three or four. We captured everything that was happening on the whiteboards and all the different ways that people get their ideas out.

We then edited that video into a variety of video packages, including a short documentary on the challenge we face, an overview done from a journalistic perspective on what happened during the day so that anybody who missed it could, in a ten-minute documentary, vicariously experience the beginning, middle and end of the whole process. We also produced a movie-style trailer on the challenges that we face, with a question of climate change and a goal this audacious.

During the conference, we conducted 80 side interviews, and we captured all kinds of additional material so that we were able to produce montages of many people answering the same questions. We used a lot of different approaches to video that would help people who would later come to the website understand as fully as possible what took place there. In this case, we also designed a new website, which was built on a collaborative platform that was geared towards this large-scale problem solving. It was built on Drupal - we developed it, we developed some original tools, including our question and answer forum, which allowed anybody to answer questions that we posed to the group, as well as an interactive whiteboard built on Flash that allowed users to get a quick overview of the entire proceedings of the conference and drill down into all the video which relates to the different subsections.

We began collaboration on this website, using new tools, including Google Wave, which was way ahead of its time, and a tool which we pushed to its fullest, but then Google later stopped development on (although there is an open-source version out now that we can talk to you about as well.)

For this first project, we had cracked a new model for videoing these events, we had built a new platform which allowed high-level collaboration which we could use for later projects, including the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and we had learned a lot about taking on collaboration both face-to-face and online in the 21st century.