25. September 2023
M&M
The Internet is already responsible for up to 3.7% of global CO2 emissions, and that’s not even taking into account the energy required to support the rapidly growing demand for AI! And: Today, there are no standards or easy-to-implement measures to reduce this in our everyday lives.
In our VAST GREEN strategy paper, we have already set ourselves the task of bringing as many colleagues and people in our network along on our sustainability journey. Whenever possible, we look for partners or actions that promise us more visibility in the process: this is also the case in the context of the “Action Days Sustainability”! For this platform, the VAST FORWARD team has come up with a team challenge on the topic of “GREEN DATA”.
The focus is to create an understanding for the extent of the energy demand in our digital everyday life: Digital tools and data storage, emails and video calls, social media and programming – the list goes on and on for all the electrical helpers in our homes and workplaces.
With the GREEN DATA topic complex, we want to create transparency for ourselves as a team in this challenge, and also for our supply chains, and share actionable, CO2e reducing measures that we can apply and test in our Vast Forward network.
And we are raising awareness in our communities about the importance of digital infrastructure for a more sustainable future.
18 participants from our core team and our network were challenged five times in five days in our “GREEN DATA Challenge”.
Each day during the challenge period they had to answer one question. A link lead them to a participation form, which was only be accessible between 3.:00 pm and 3.15 pm each day. In those 15 minutes, each one had only one (1) minute to answer the question (of course, AI and Google support should be avoided). Results were collected in a Google Sheet.
Every day we updated and shared the status of the “leaderboard”, and it was worthwhile to participate, as sustainable prizes awaited the participants with the most correct answers and most points collected!
As part of this challenge, we shared all questions and answers, plus some hacks and tips on our VAST FORWARD Instagram channel: https://www.instagram.com/vastforward_official.
The goal of our VAST GREEN initiative and this VAST GREEN challenge remains to figure out how we can be more sustainable in our digital interactions and everyday work.
A week has gone by quickly, five questions, all pure guessing tasks, have resulted in the “Top 5” ranking – but we don’t want to make it too easy for anyone, and the prizes at the end were attractive. More on that in a moment.
First, on Friday, after the first five questions, we weren’t done!
After the 15 minutes were over, to guess for the last question on Friday, we met in a Zoom event, our the “Grande Finale” for the Challenge.
Here, everyone had just one more chance to enter the leaderboard by doubling their score with three more trivia questions!
After the top five were set, we went to the final playoff – we let fortune decide and had the top scorers play roulette against each other!
37 numbers, three colors – the top placed players bet in Zoom’s Chat, then it was “Rien Ne Va Plus” and famous movie scenes from “Run Lola Run” to “The Gambler” brought some casino feeling to our virtual round.
Three ladies, Nicky, Simone and Maria, had luck on their side! They shared the three main prizes and could choose between a Deutschland-ticket for one-year, a car-charging or car-sharing voucher – or a bicycle subsidy. All three chose the sporty option, the bike subsidy!
So, thank you to all participants!
It was a pleasure for us and we had a lot of fun with you, from the preparation to the final event! With this in mind, we are already looking forward to our next challenge – the theme will of course be GREEN DATA again!
