I wonder if you remember the One Million Acts of Green campaign that was spearheaded by George Strombolopolous a couple of years ago? I thought it was a great idea. Everyone could easily register their act of green and share it with the world. The benefit of doing this of course was that it normalized public commitments to being a more environmentally friendly citizen. Well OMAG (that's the abbreviation just in case you were wondering), is still running strong. It is no longer just associated with the CBC and CISCO Systems; it has grown its own wings and taken flight. The group has been looking to find ways to branch off into new territory and one of the things that they dreamt up is to create a more personalized and interactive app for Facebook. This makes a lot of sense since the whole idea of the OMAG is to share your experiences in the hopes that it will inspire others to do the same. So to that end, the group has partnered up with universities to start creating c...

Unfortunately the day has come and we have retired our Foursquare account. Things were good while they lasted but now we have to go. The Office of Campus Sustainability will no longer be using Foursquare as a geo-location tool. There are couple of reasons why we are leaving the service (none of which have anything to do with the service provided by Foursquare... they are pretty awesome) but we will still be Green Maps as a tool to map sustainability on campus. Thank you to all the folks out there that contributed to our Foursquare account and who shared our tips. We really do appreciate your interest and we hope to see you again in another social media life. In the meantime, we will be transferring our sustainability 'check-in' tips and lists to the University of Ottawa's main Foursquare account. So don't worry, none of the information will be lost. The Office has had a Green Map account for many years and we hope to soon be launching new features and m...

Cher (e) candidat (e), je me présente, je m’appelle Katherine et suis la coordonnatrice au développement durable que tu espères remplacer en septembre. Je quitte, le coeur lourd, ce poste que j’aurai occupé un peu plus d’un an. J’ai tout d’abord commencé ici en travaillant sur le rapport STARS, mais fus transférée au poste de communications avec joie. Par la suite, ce poste est vraiment trippant, stimulant et exigeant à la fois. Qui aurait cru que passer du temps sur Twitter ferait partie de ma description de tâche?  Je me suis également occupée de l’e-bulletin mensuel, de faire de la promotion d’événements sur Facebook, ai rencontré des bénévoles sympathiques et traduit des textes jusqu’à ce que je ne puisse plus différencier l’anglais du français. J’ai aussi dû me creuser les méninges à plusieurs reprises afin de pouvoir explorer des styles d’écritures variés pour le site internet et les courriels aux bénévoles. De plus, on ne sait jamais ce qui pourrait arriver au burea...

I, Merissa Mueller, am the conqueror of cartography, maker of maps, artist of the atlas, and most recently the foursquare flunky. See, I’m new to foursquare. I have heard of it, mostly because sometimes on Facebook my homepage decides to tell me the locations of my drunken friends. Other than that, the concept is quite familiar because of my work with mapping but I had no experience with it until recently. I had created a foursquare account quite a while back for the office to which I added “lists” entailing where on and off campus you should visit along with a short “tip” about the building/location. Since I have no access to a smart phone (hell, I don’t even have a real calling plan on my crappy phone, just texting) I couldn’t go much further with our profile than that. I could not “check in” to places, upload photos to my profile, become the “mayor” of a spot and most unfortunately, I could not earn a single badge which made me feel horrible. I mean, even if you’re crappy at ...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo So coming off one of the best year's that we have ever had at the Office of Campus Sustainability we decided that we want to do better. But how can you do better if you don't know what the people want. That's where this post comes in. Last year was the first year that we serious dove into the social media realm (check out our Facebook infographic above detailing the success of our fan page). We decided that we needed to meet the community on their terms. Our social media sites ( Twitter , Facebook , Flickr , and Green Maps ) allow us to keep in contact with the community while creating an online scrapbook of our activities and initiatives. But we can do more. The tools can be used to create a dialogue with the community. Not just us pumping the information in one direction, but also allowing the community to tell us what they think and how they feel about the things that we are doing. I'll give you an example, if we launch a new recycling ...