Sharing Information and Sustainability

From Guest Blogger and Office Intern: Walter Blair

Half way through my summer internship with the Office of Sustainability, something important clicked for me – I have the opportunity to explain some of the projects I’ve been working on so far, but what I’d rather do is explain what clicked because it is the foundation of my work at the Office and the work I hope to do in years to come.

Here’s the last 8 years or so of my professional life and how I’ve grown to think about the importance of sharing information…described in two paragraphs!

I studied chemistry and biology in college but by graduation time wanted to do something more hands-on than lab work. I spent a year working at an aquarium (a sufficiently messy hands-on experience) and realized that I missed learning new things via research. Though I hadn’t quite experienced it in my undergraduate work, I was still intrigued by the joys of novel scientific discovery promised to every hopeful science student. A year after I decided that I wouldn’t ever be happy in a science lab, I entered the M.S. Marine Biology program here at the College. Having just finished that challenging and often frustrating research program, I realize now that my frustration is not with lab work, but it is with information itself.

I do want to discover new things, but I can’t stand the thought that the information I discover could be lost in the shuffle. Someone told me that the average number of citations for a peer-reviewed journal article is between 0 and 1, meaning that a fair number of article are never referenced by anyone. How frustrating! What is the point of generating new information no one will learn from it? Just as I felt at the end of my undergraduate work, I wanted to find work that I felt was more application-oriented…I wanted to make a real difference.

Whew! Well here I am as a summer intern with the Office of Sustainability. It wasn’t chemistry or marine biology that I wanted to work on this summer – it was information. There is so much to learn about the world we live in – the quantity of information to which we have access has exponentially exploded (how many people were there sharing their life stories online 20 years ago?), and our ability to sift through all of that mess to find quality information and to digest it so that we can make practical use of it has gotten exponentially harder. What we know is often limited to what Google places at the top of the search list, and everything else gets lost in the shuffle.

We have big ideas and goals at the Office, but we face the same problems with information that everyone else faces.

On our side of things, it is difficult to achieve a steady flow of information within the office. Each intern works incredibly hard on his or her projects and puts the necessary labor into research and information gathering in order to inform their progress, but a student-led group is always challenged with rapid turnover as students graduate and move on. In order to stand on one another’s shoulders to reach greater heights, we need to retain all of the information we gather and ensure that it is easily accessed and passed along.

On the other side of things, it is difficult to communicate what we’re doing with the community, because everyone else is struggling to keep up with exponentially growing quantities of information. We are faced with the challenge of organizing and presenting information in such a way that everyone in the community feels that he or she has the time and energy to share what we are trying to share.

The Office of Sustainability is committed to working on this information problem, and there are a number of projects we’re currently working on that we think will improve access to quality information for us and for our community. From establishing a publicly shared research database that allows anyone to access and quickly digest important peer-reviewed information, to developing our social network in order to share instant news and feedback on community projects, to experimenting with cutting edge web design to provide easy and intuitive access to information on recycling and other projects, we are working on the information problem.

There is so much quality information that is overlooked and so many curious minds don’t have access to it. For me, it’s been several years of frustration in the making, but I am convinced that what I want to do as an intern and what I want to do wherever my career takes me is to help people build and improve upon our vast human knowledge in order to reach a more sustainable future.