Green Credits
Two electric cars, some of Australia's first charge points, and a small economy I invented to get Googlers to commute greener.
I led a small team of Googlers who brought a new electric car initiative into our Sydney office. We took the Mitsubishi iMiEV, installed some of the first charge points in Australia, and put two of the vehicles into the building. That was the easy part. The interesting part was getting people to actually change how they got to work.
So I invented a little economy. I called it green credits. If you commuted by green methods during the week, you earned points, and those points let you take part in a weekly auction to win one of the cars for the weekend. During the week the cars were booked on the calendar as green taxi replacements, so people could grab them for meetings across town. Each car was also a rolling hotspot, powered by the first Samsung tablet computers in Australia.
What I liked about it was that it turned a piece of hardware into a game with real stakes and real behaviour change. Nobody argues with you about sustainability when there is a car to win on Friday. If you want people to adopt something new, do not lecture them. Give them a reason to want it, and make the reason fun.