Brett Milner handles the technology and information management needs of the campaign, and wrote this entry as a guest blogger.

Just before New Years Day 2009, I was approached by a long-time business acquaintance about some advice on a laptop purchase.  Nothing too involved.  But what he was planning set a whirlwind in motion, and has grown into a full-tilt endeavor: Ward Cammack for Governor of Tennessee
 
In talking to Ward, and learning what much of this was about (protection of our resources, turning our energy production challenges into opportunities, exploring how conservation could boost profitability for business, and steering the state towards long-term prosperity instead of a narrow focus on short term gains), I was pleased to discover a few things:

Here was someone who understood that environmental concerns vs. business success is a false choice, just like free markets vs. consumer protections, security vs. liberty, or public works vs. profit-driven investment. Allowing these to be cast as zero-sum games is giving up too easy.  Ward was completely in tune with this "pragmatic mode of liberalism", and because of his experience had a deep understanding that the key to prosperity in our communities was in partnerships between these different elements.  He had real experience developing exactly these kinds of win-win scenarios.
 
Here too was an opportunity to meet the information management needs of the campaign in a way that didn't contradict what the campaign was about.  They needed to be fully mobile, yet fully operational- office space was still being worked out but that wasn't going to keep them from getting down to business.
 
Ward agreed completely- whatever we did not only had to be mobile, but had to have as low an environmental impact as possible.  We had to walk the talk, be consistent with our ideals.  If you've ever seen Jeff Barrie's film Kilowatt Ours then you understand the impact every time you turn on a light, especially here in Tennessee with our heavy dependence on coal-fired plants.
 
From an information systems standpoint, running a campaign is at least as complex as running a small business.  You need a phone system, an email system, and a sales/customer relationship management system (or donors and supporters in this case).  Without getting too deep into the geeky details, this is at least three "servers"- computers designed to handle simultaneous access by multiple users.  If you're going to do it right, you need redundant systems with failover and backup capabilities.  Just as in a business, you don't take chances with your data.  You also have routing and switching equipment to tie it all together and provide a remote connection back to the office.
 
The total "energy bill" for all this equipment is likely to run well over 3 or 4 kilowatts.  Then there's the environmental impact of the work done by shipping it all in, having it setup and installed, and disposing of all the shipping materials.  Small in the grand scheme perhaps, but that makes us no less responsible for minimizing our environmental impact.
 
Fortunately, we didn't do any of that.  We have no servers.  Everything we needed was implemented as a web-based service, except for things that have to be physically present (like a fax machine or a laptop computer).
 
What we use:
 
Google Apps for Business - provides email, shared calendars, shared documents and spreadsheets with multi-user editing and revision control, private video storage and web site building tools.
 
Salesforce.com - provides a highly customizable contact database for sales, marketing, tech support, fund-raising and campaign-related efforts.  Includes many data analysis and tracking tools.

Squarespace - is a web service that combines fully-managed site hosting with top-notch design tools, and is one of the greenest internet companies in existence.
 
Phone.com- A virtual phone system.  Yes, you still have to have an actual phone somewhere, but with this service you can make cell phones or even plain single-line phones act as part of a managed system, complete with extensions, call routing, transfers, voicemail and schedules.
 
In the case of these web-based services, no additional equipment had to be installed on our behalf by the companies providing these services (made clear by the fact that when you sign up, the service is available within seconds).  That's where the real energy savings comes in- these services exist for us as accounts on already existing large "farms" of servers.   The amount of energy required to handle any one customer on any of these services is exceedingly small.  From Google's page regarding their Green data centers.
 
...the energy used per Google search is minimal; we use about a 0.0003 kWh of energy to answer the average query. In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query.
 
Salesforce.com is similary efficient- more than 55,000 customers, running on just 1000 servers.   Even under a full load, that's less than a 20-watt bulb per customer account, to handle their entire sales, marketing & support databases.

Squarespace has taken measures to ensure that everything it does is powered by wind. Not just in the case of their servers and datacenters (which are designed to be 20 times more energy efficient per website hosted than traditional solutions) but also in their office space. Going beyond electricity use, they run an almost paper-free office and recycle as much as possible.

Of course individual computers for people are still needed, and so we are exclusively laptop-based and all wireless.  Fewer resources needed to manufacture than desktop PCs, and lower power usage.
 
These aren't completely new concepts, as the information technology industry has been edging towards "cloud computing" and "virtual infrastructure” for some time now.  What's truly relevant here is how this can have a direct positive result for Tennessee if we plan right.
 
Since everything Google does is a web-based service running in large data centers around the country, they have become very innovative at finding ways to make these as green as possible.  This is not simply out of environmental concerns; there is a very real business need and advantage to keeping the energy costs as low as possible.
 
(As a supplier, the campaign appreciates Google’s reducing vulnerabilities by investing in solar and other alternative sources and cooling methods, and the example for smaller companies set by Squarespace – another sign of the pervasive shift under way in U.S. strategy.)
 
Their methods have become a model for other data center companies. And every business or organization running their services on such a data center lowers the energy they use even more. For example, two of their centers run on 100% recycled water, and by 2010 they expect recycled water to account 80% of their total water usage in data centers across the country. They use an evaporative cooling method, which lowered the energy overhead of their centers from the industry average of 96% all the way down to 19%. They have a large, 1.6 megawatt solar panel installation at their headquarters that required no extra real estate to build (it was installed on the roofs of their buildings and parking garages) and will pay for itself in 7 1/2 years. The full details can be found here.
 
So how can this help Tennessee? If our state becomes a leader in alternative energy production and energy conservation technologies (one of Ward's stated goals), we become one of the prime producers of goods and services for companies renovating their data centers, building new, energy-efficient ones, and following Google's lead by investing in solar power for their offices. And as the use of cloud computing is expected to only increase, we can take advantage of this intersection of between two growth industries- information technology and alternative energy- and turn it into real prosperity for our state.
 
This is the kind of win-win scenario that we need to be looking for and using to unite people. Environmentalist or business investor, liberal or conservative, we all succeed when these are the kinds of ideas we put our efforts into.  That's what Ward and this campaign are about, and why I'm glad to be helping.