From Professor Haddad’s Environmental Politics and Democratization seminar (in conjunction with the Sustainability Office) comes this campus-wide energy saving contest! If you participate, you’ll help save energy AND money for financial aid (and maybe win some additional cool prizes):
Wesleyan is engaging in an exciting collaboration with a new social networking company called JouleBug. JouleBug is an IT company aimed at using social networking technology to help make it fun and easy to develop a culture of sustainability in our community.
The first phase of this collaboration will begin with a campus-wide contest led by Prof. Haddad’s Environmental Politics and Democratization seminar (GOVT/EAST/ENVS 304) in conjunction with the Sustainability Office. The contest will run from Monday Nov. 11th through Sunday November 24th. Teams must be created by midnight on November 10 and can be made up of anyone from the Wesleyan community. Team captains can sign their teams up here. Individuals can also participate without a team just by getting the JouleBug app and using it on campus.
The contest is designed to help our Wesleyan community have fun while also increasing our awareness of everyday sustainability actions we can take. Please note: All residential energy savings generated through our efforts will result in dollar-for-dollar contributions to financial aid (See President Roth’s blog).
We will be hosting a kick-off dinner with pizza on November 11th in the College of the Environment from 6-8pm.
We will also have a clothing swap event on Thursday November 21st from 3-5 in Usdan. Our final celebration will be during reading period at a place TBA. Potential prizes for the competition include: Middletown Cash prize, massages and care packages during reading week, and a Spring Fling guest pass.
In addition to having fun with sustainability, we will also be gathering as much data as we can about how our community responds to the JouleBug campaign. To the extent possible, we will also study how well the self-reported data on JouleBug corresponds with actual changes in behavior. For example, if we have hundreds of JouleBug participants claiming to be reading their assignments digitally and not printing, we should see a drop in the number of pages printed on the network computers. If people are not printing because of their participation in the JouleBug competition, we should see lower printing numbers among JouleBug participants than among non-JouleBug participants. To the extent that any individual-level data gets collected, all data will be anonymized, so no personal information will be used during the data analysis.
The contest this fall will be a first step in what we hope will become an ongoing and successful collaboration to improve Wesleyan’s sustainability and generate increased money for financial aid.
TL;DR: “Like” and follow Wes JouleBug on Facebook, and stay tuned for our kick-off event! Until then, download the app, create your team, and start saving some $$$ AND energy!