Energiforsyning i Arktis – hvilken vej vælger Grønland? - Artek ...

Figure 5: RSS feeding from three sub-sites and presented at www.nordsesil.net
4. Online resources as a facilitator
The paper has hitherto introduced the
practical work of NordSESIL.net and
elaborated on the services that are currently
being developed. However, the online tools
and resources described are now only meant
to connect the targeted stakeholders – the
stakeholders themselves can establish
online networks and use these as facilitators
to implement sustainable energy projects.
The following case and description of online
tools explains this.
4.1 Case: KEENER
KEENER (Kentish Energy Efficiency Network
Embracing Renewables) is “working to make
a sustainable community - energy,
transport, buildings, food, water, education
& social cohesion”. Kentish is s small
community in Tasmania with a population of
app. 6000 persons and KEENER is quite
simply an online community network that
uses a Ning site to share knowledge and
information. Through this network the
citizens of the community has effectively
initialized a campaign to promote the
implementation of solar water heaters.
Firstly, a user on the website made the
other users aware of a substantial solar hot
water rebate introduced by the Australian
Government 2009, and hereafter the user
created links to websites that informed
about the rebate. Secondly, the users (after
having obtained knowledge on the rebate by
following the before mentioned links) of the
online community decided to group together
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and make bulk orders of solar water heaters
from the manufacturer and subsequently
they were all reimbursed through the
government subsidy.
The case effectively illustrates how a small
community can pool its resources and
benefit from this – economically and
knowledge-wise.
4.2 Free online tools tools
As described in the case above, the Kentish
community applied Ning as a tool to
leverage the task of introducing sustainable
energy into the community. Ning, is an
online platform for people to create their
own social networks. It is a free service –
although commercial solutions exist as well.
However, Ning is not the only provider of
tools that can assist and support
communities in initializing and creating
projects. I.e. NordSESIL.net has been
developed entirely with free online tools and
only modest investments – such as platform
upgrading to keep the site free of adds. A
small list of free online tools that
communities can take advantage of are:
� Ning: Creation of social networking
sites. Many functionalities such
membership base, announcement to
members, discussion forum, blogs,
photo archive, groups, events, etc.
� Wikispaces: Wiki (def.: easy creation
and editing of interlinked web pages)
hosting service providing a number of
advanced functionalities. Free to create