CIT Shows its Green Side at the NIH Earth Day Celebration

As part of its support of NIH's Greening Initiative and Environmental Policy, the Center for Information Technology (CIT) showcased some of its greening efforts at this year's NIH Earth Day celebration on April 22. The annual Earth Day event at NIH highlights ways for everyone at NIH to "go green" both on campus and at home.

A live web meeting demonstration

The CIT exhibit focused on the advantages and capabilities of online collaborative services such as Web Connect and streaming (or downloaded) videocasts. By connecting geographically distant participants online, these services enable you to save much of the time, money, and energy usually spent traveling to various meetings and events.

On-site, CIT staff Teresa Church Nuzzo, Wendy Lord-Toussaint, and Norma Stern used several laptops and a wireless connection to host a live Web Connect meeting with full video and audio between the booth on the lawn in front of building 1 on campus and the CIT Fernwood offices, where video team members Ghazal Behzadnejad, Lawrence Hammond, and Elliott Ware stood ready to wave to the visitors of the exhibit.

The live web meeting allowed visitors, on campus, to chat in real time with the staff at the remote location, something that proved to be especially fascinating to the young attendees participating in Take Your Child to Work Day. There were even reports of dancing and enthusiastic waving in front of the webcam, a sure sign of the immediate sense of involvement inspired by the web meeting experience.

The benefits of online collaboration

Going digital for your meetings (Web Connect) or informational sessions (VideoCasting) allows you to reduce travel costs – and these include not only the standard costs you normally think of, like airfare and hotels, but also local travel, like the time and gas needed to go between campus and Fernwood—while increasing your overall audience size without adding major expenses. Cutting down on travel requirements is not only a green strategy, it also ensures higher participation among both presenters and the audience. People can join web meetings who wouldn't have been able to attend in person—as in the case of a doctor who literally finished doing surgery and then gave a presentation online.

Videocasts on the iPad

A big draw at the CIT booth was the iPad displaying a videocast of President Obama's visit to NIH, demonstrating that the CIT VideoCasting service can function on the most up-to-date mobile technology. Like Web Connect, videocasts enable information sharing without travel, reducing costs while increasing the size of your potential audience. Whether live streaming or downloaded at your convenience, videocasts allow you to view a meeting presentation from wherever you are, making it easier for information to be shared and people to collaborate regardless of geographic distance.

It should be noted that part of the big success of CIT's iPad videocast demonstration at Earth Day was due to the presence of an enthusiastic and technologically-savvy assistant: Wendy's 15-year-old son Justin, who expertly took charge of the iPad display and helped show off all its features.

Other presentations

A slide show presentation at the booth offered visitors unfamiliar with the NIH Data Center the opportunity to learn about its convenient location on campus, its strong security features, its implementation of greening strategies, and the availability of regularly-scheduled tours of the facility. Those interested in getting a closer look at some of the greening techniques employed at the Data Center—or those intrigued by the retinal scanning required for entry to the Data Center—found information about signing up for a tour on the CIT Training website listed on the web links handout cards at the booth.

Exhibit handouts also included copies of the Interface issue (#240) that focused on the Greening of the Data Center, brochures on CIT's greening efforts, and CIT website links.

Questions and more information

If you would like to know more about CIT's collaborative online services, please visit the CIT Video Services website or the CIT Service Catalog. If you have any questions about the Data Center, CIT's greening policy, or any of the services mentioned in this article, contact the NIH IT Service Desk online at http://itservicedesk.nih.gov or by phone at 301-496-4357 (6-HELP) (local), 866-319-4357 (toll free), or 301-496-8294 (TTY).

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