Digital Green Doors

Domestic environmental technologies (DETs) such as solid wall insulation, ground source heat pumps and rainwater harvesting have an important role to play if the UK is to meet its environmental objectives around carbon emissions, water conservation and energy use. Many such technologies are cost effective and simple to install, and schemes such as the forthcoming Green Deal make them financially possible for more people. However, if they are to become widely adopted they must be seen as a 'social norm' within communities. An effective way to do this is to encourage interaction between 'local experts' who have installed such technologies, and their neighbours. In this way, best practice can be spread through a community. Digital technology can be used to promote this, by providing information about local experts, mediating communication, creating enjoyable games through which people interact, and rewarding those who contribute their time. This project will work with Bristol Green Doors, a community interest company which promotes events to support communities in shared learning around DETs, to develop and assess a set of distributed mobile services to inform, entertain and engage local community members in sharing best practice. It will also look at how local business recommendations that emerge from such sharing can be tracked and assessed for effectiveness, and so potentially monetised in an online business model.

The project will investigate (i) whether and how digital technology can be used to catalyse the spread of best practice within communities, and (ii) whether and how this results in a demonstrable impact on the local economy which can be digitally tracked. It's four objectives are:
A. Understand how best-practice sharing around DETs currently takes place in the community, what barriers there are, and what ideas stakeholders have for improving it.
B. Develop in collaboration with the community a set of distributed services to support best-practice sharing and recommendation tracking.
C. Assess the effectiveness in spreading best practice, acceptability to the community, and impact on local business of different feature sets and functionality the distributed services provide.
D. Assess the project with regard to generality of lessons and insights; identify both general and more situation-specific learnings for use in digital enablement of community best-practice sharing and the stimulation of local business.

The resulting services will be deployed in the Bristol area by Bristol Green Doors, resulting in increased engagement with DETs by the community. The service platform will be released open source, for use by other organisations involved in community engagement with DETs, and training will be provided through engagement workshops and documentation. The more general research results will be shared with businesses, policy makers and community organisations interested in the spreading of best practice within communities through workshops and publication in both academic and popular venues.

The most immediate beneficiaries of our research are Bristol Green Doors and the communities connected with them, who will benefit directly and immediately from the trials and the software we develop. Bristol Green Doors will benefit from improved engagement with their services, and people in Bristol (especially owners of 'hard to treat' houses) will benefit from a better understanding of domestic environmental technology options available to them. Local businesses associated with domestic environmental technologies will benefit from an improved flow of 'leads' and resulting business contracts. The community will benefit from increased social cohesion.

The next tier of beneficiaries of our research are the immediate group of stakeholders who make up our Stakeholder Advisory Board, together with their customers and partners. These will get an intimate understanding of the potential of digital technology to spread best practice in a community, what works and what doesnt, both specifically to promote DET uptake and also more broadly. They will also gain access to open source software and methodological guidance to enable them to experiment and apply the approach. For most of the stakeholders, it will allow them to develop products and services to offer their customers to encourage energy and resource efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. In other cases (NGOs, Local Authorities) it supports their strategic objectives of reducing carbon emissions and improving social cohesion. Through this, we expect the research to influence more broadly the sectors represented on our Stakeholder Advisory Board - utilities, IT services, mobile services, gaming, carbon reduction services, local government and sustainability NGOs. It will disseminate an awareness and understanding of the effectiveness of different digital services in supporting dissemination of best practice within communities.

More broadly the research benefits society, and local and national government with associated objectives and targets, by providing a new and innovative approach to improving the sustainability performance of domestic properties, encouraging volunteering, and improving social cohesion.