Earth Hour
Last March, Sydney had an event called Earth Hour. This involved getting everyone to turn their lights off for an hour, to see how far we could reduce energy consumption. Street lights were kept on for safety, but it was quite surreal to look out and see everyone start turning lights off. It certainly made you think about how many lights and appliances you leave on, just because it is inconvenient to turn them off.
Well, it was a great success and Sydney ended up saving about 25 tonnes of CO2 emissions. This year, it became a global event. At 8pm on the 29 March 2008, millions of people participated in different cities around the world.
Working with Leo Burnett, we created the site using Ruby on Rails, with Radiant for content management.
- We created a process that pulled in user content each night from Flickr and Youtube, to form a “quilt” of images on the home page about Earth Hour.
- We built a 3d visualisation of where people signed up from, so people could see participation around the world
- When a user encourages a friend to also join, they form part of a 3d tree of friends
- Distributed authoring of news feeds for each of the participating cities, as well as live updates during Earth Hour
- Integration with a Facebook application
The site itself was extremely popular, with 4.2 million unique visitors a day during the event.
Visit Earth Hour
or check out the archived version of the site to see how it was during the event.
