Vienna, November 4. 2013 – Inspiration and initiative, rather than bans and regulations should motivate the citizens to adopt more sustainable lifestyles in future. This is the aim of a recently launched European research project, which will inspire thousands of users to develop a collective awareness of environmental issues. The project, which is being implemented by a prominent international team collaborating with the MODUL University Vienna, is developing and applying the very latest web technologies. One online platform makes use of “Games with a Purpose” to record, analyze and leverage information about the environmental behavior of users throughout the world to motivate them to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. Among the project’s highlights is a newly-developed web editor that offers registered users the possibility of jointly developing environmental strategies. To this end, it provides relevant and up-to-date information from global media and social networks in real-time.
The climate is changing faster than our habits. Strategies to promote behavioral change therefore are the key to combating climate change. Working in collaboration with the Swiss World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF Switzerland) and a consortium of international partners, the MODUL University Vienna is adopting a novel approach to this problem: as part of the new EU project DECARBONET, a collaborative web platform is being developed which uses the very latest digital possibilities to inspire social change and capture such change with analytical methods. Clever online games and competitions are used to increase awareness of energy-saving measures. At the same time, the aggregated results of thousands of individual actions are presented to the participating users to encourage them to pursue sustainable lifestyles based on community spirit.
Energy-Saving Behavior
This feedback mechanism is just one aspect of the platform-s capabilities. It also enables the analysis of the resulting behavioral changes and provides policy makers and business decision makers with ideas on how to fulfill political and economic energy-saving objectives effectively. Outlining the other possibilities offered by this new collective awareness platform, Professor Arno Scharl, Head of the Department of New Media Technology at the MODUL University Vienna, explains: “It exploits the significant potential of new media to support grassroots movements. User-generated information is used to motivate people to adopt a sustainable lifestyle, and simultaneously provides a basis for the shared development of novel socio-political strategies.” As part of the DECARBONET project, a radically new concept to edit Web documents is being adopted to support this development process.
Developed by MODUL University Vienna, the Web editor enables the global integration of climate-relevant information from thousands of media channels and hundreds of thousands of social media users –in real-time and, on request, from specific geographic areas. This innovative tool will already play a crucial role in the early months of the DECARBONET project. During this period, approximately 50 recommendations on energy-saving behavior will be adapted by the project partners for use in a climate quiz for Web and mobile platforms. These recommendations were originally developed by WWF Switzerland and thus focus on the Swiss context. They are now being adapted for DECARBONET with the support of the new web editor. As part of this process, the co-authors of a specific energy saving strategy are automatically offered climate-related documents from global news reports and social media in real-time. These documents are selected based on their particular relevance for the co-authoring process. Following the adaptation and possible extension of the energy saving strategy recommendations by the participating co-authors, the tips are integrated into the online quiz to engage users in a playful and entertaining manner. Users can thereby be made aware of sustainable lifestyle choices through questions on energy consumption and corresponding recommendations.
Global & Local
Anonymized quiz answers will then be used to identify energy-saving habits. The ingenious aspect here is the platform’s ability to recognize and exploit geographic differences in energy-saving behavior. Professor Scharl explains: “Our associated partners, like the World Bank, America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), are very interested in tailoring their socio-political strategy recommendations to local conditions. Our platform guides this process in a user-friendly and interactive manner.” Again the new web editor will play a crucial role in this process. It will enable the joint development of strategies by providing timely access to the most relevant information from global – or, if desired, regional – online media so that the new strategies can be constantly tailored to embrace the knowledge and opinions of different stakeholder groups.
This function of the web editor is based on the results of the TRIPLE-C project at MODUL University Vienna. The project, which was launched in 2010, was funded by the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund and resulted in over ten publications – the latest of which describes the new web editor in an article for the renowned scientific journal “IEEE Internet Computing”.
Further information
• DecarboNet – A Decarbonization Platform for Citizen Empowerment and Translating Collective Awareness into Behavioral Change / www.decarbonet.eu
• Department of New Media Technology | www.modul.ac.at/nmt
IEEE Publication: Scharl, A., Hubmann-Haidvogel, A., Sabou, M., Weichselbraun, A. and Lang, H.-P. (2013). “From Web Intelligence to Knowledge Co-Creation – A Platform to Analyze and Support Stakeholder Communication”, IEEE Internet Computing, 17(5): 21-29. http://eprints.weblyzard.com/72
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