I’ve been away for 48 hours in Istanbul, where I was invited to attend and speak at a conference for a global NGO. I’m sorry I didn’t have more time to spend in the city, but the tantalising glimpses of it I was able to snatch during cab rides and a trip into town for dinner gave me plenty of food for thought - something which I’ll expand on in a later post. But I’ve been thinking a lot over the last couple of days about how transitory a lot of our jobs - and lives - are these days, and working with a big international organisation as I have been for the last couple of days has brought some of that into focus, along with other things.

This isn’t the first thing I’ve done for an international NGO, and not my first experience of talking to a group of people from the same company (profit or otherwise) who have come together from all corners of the world to discuss and refocus. Something which I’ve noticed on each of these occasions, though, is that the bigger the organisation, the less they seem to talk about the core issues (what are they trying to achieve/what is the product), and the more the conversation seems to pivot around process and politics.

With that in mind, there’s something to be said for startups and the flexibility and focus that they can have.

Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to write about Dopplr for a while. This time last year, almost to the day, I sat in a dingy bar in the Mission with Matt Biddulph (among others - hello George!) drinking Anchor Steam while he told me all about what he and the team were planning - a new way for groups of people to track where each other were going to be in the world, and make discoveries and arrangements and recommendations based on that information.

I must confess that my initial thought was that while this sounded interesting and more than a little cool, this was ultimately a service which would be incredibly useful to about 500 people - the web conference junkies and new wave of indie consultants and entrepreneurs who seem to be permanently on the move - but that the rest of the world might not really need such a thing.

Since then, it’s been launched and lauded in all corners, and seems to be gaining plaudits for both the core product and, crucially, the smart way that the team have designed, built and socialised new features and partnered with other services like Flickr. It’s all very newweb and usable and innovative and they deserve great praise for that - there have been many other sites and services launched in the last few years which manage none of the above and yet still, mystifyingly, attract investment.

But one of the problems which I see in Dopplr is that it almost glamourises travel, especially long-distance travel. By plane. While there’s no stipulation that trips lodged in Dopplr need to be international or airborne, given the audience that’s the way it pans out - and even the maps on the site look like those flight paths diagrams you find at the back of the on-board airline mag (though this is obviously down to the way Google Maps visualises things, rather than by Dopplr design).

When I arrived back into Heathrow this morning, I checked Twitter and saw a note from Bobbie Johnson saying

“The combined carbon footprint of my Twitter friends right now? Approximately Jolly Green Giant sized. They’re all in transit!”

He’s dead right, too: in our incestuous little new media conference and consulting/journalism and jaunts social whirl, there’s a lot of people on their way this week to SXSW in Austin, and last week the big draw was ETech in San Diego. Whenever there’s a big event on, the host city lights up on Dopplr, as geeks lock on to the homing signal of branded schwag, uncomfortable seats, namebadges and sponsored drinks. And the rest of the time, even within my relatively small group of Dopplr contacts, there’s always at least one person thousands of miles away from their home city during any given week.

None of this is Dopplr’s fault, obviously, but it’s concerning, because it makes travel the subject of more than a little fetishisation. A Dopplr map, after all, featuring only local trips (or hyperlocal, even), does not make for a great badge to be displayed with pride.

So I think it’s time Dopplr started helping people to count and track the environmental cost as well as the social value of their various trips - and then help users to do something about it. What I’d propose they instigate is severalfold:

1. For each trip, you can choose the method of transport
2. The mileage of each trip is calculated and displayed, and can be added to a running total (this number is very useful for people doing accounting at the end of a year about their activities)
3. The carbon footprint of each trip is calculated (appropriate to method of transport - train, plane, car, etc)
4. A running total of carbon emissions through trips recorded on Dopplr is kept per user. Maybe it’s even displayed publicly.
5. Each event also has a running total of the carbon footprint generated (and not yet offset*) by Dopplr users attending
6. You can select whether you have already offset the carbon emissions for any particular trip*
7. You can (through a partner) choose to offset your carbon emissions* for a particular trip, or overall, or at least make a dent in it.

Basically, I’d like to see all the social and web-smart features which have been so effective in building the Dopplr service put to further use in helping people to recognise and act on the consequences of all that travel. Why not reward people for trying to achieve balance, rather than just have an impressive, brag-worthy list of trips? (NB this is also my pet peeve with airlines and their reward incentive schemes, but you can see what’s in it for them…)

There’s something about cumulative data which is powerful, and can be both sobering and inspiring in equal measure. Back in January, inspired by Bobbie’s post about the miles he clocked up in 2007, I completed my own calculation and discovered that I’d managed to rack up 14,583 miles throughout 2007 which, while nothing like BoJo’s 53K, is still a lot. And according to CarbonCounter.org that’s still 8.64 metric tons of carbon, which can be offset for something like $100. So I did.

In the last couple of years, I’ve tried hard to keep the balance. I offset my carbon consumption for each year (and something like Dopplr could really help me to keep track of a big chunk of it and do it more easily, rather than relying on remembering every trip and then inputting it all into a calculator like this) and the company I work for offsets the carbon cost of all travel, but crucially, I also make choices.

In the last six months alone, I’ve actively chosen not to travel five times - to Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Austin and San Diego respectively. I’ve weighed up the opportunity of going, and the value of being at an event or meeting or in the same geographic location as someone else in particular, and I’ve decided on those five occasions that the cost (environmental, financial and opportunity) outweighed the benefits of attending (as much as I would have enjoyed each).

I don’t want a halo or anything. I’m far from the most environmentally responsible person on the planet, though I do try to do my bit and keep a personal balance, and anything which encourages or makes it more efficient for people like me, with frequent reasons and opportunities to criss-cross the globe, to do the same would be very welcome indeed.

* I realise there’s a lot of debate about the value of carbon offsetting, but let’s think about it this way: since the most environmentally-sound decision you can make is not to travel, and that’s not an option for whatever reason, then taking the trip and doing nothing at all to try and lessen its impact is worse, right?

Update: There must be something in the air! A few hours after I write this, MattB revealed that, together with AMEE, Dopplr will be “adding carbon footprint measurements to every journey for its alpha-user-base and will roll the service out to all users by the end of March.” Data is a great start. Now, help me to DO something about it!…