Energy Camp, the IT industry's first unconference dedicated to establishing a multilateral dialog between all IT constituencies on issues relating to running green technology and reducing energy consumption, was mentioned in a story by Brad Reed in InfoWorld. I, along with Redmonk principal analyst James Governor (author of the Greenmonk Blog) will be hosting Energy Camp in a few weeks. Somewhat ironically, ... ... we'll be hosting it in Las Vegas, the city that probably has the worst carbon footprint of any city in the world. Las Vegas happens to be the site of Interop this year and, thanks to the good folks at Interop (a sister outfit to InformationWeek under the TechWeb corporate umbrella), we secured some free space in the Manadalay Bay Hotel (site of Interop) on the day before Interop starts.

Wrote Reed:

Another big theme at this year's Interop will be green IT, a series of sessions designed to give IT departments ideas for making technology more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. Among the environmental IT issues due to be discussed are eco-friendly technology in data centers, as well as the proper role for the data center in environmental stewardship; tips for deploying a green IP telephony network; a presentation on how companies can invest in green storage; and a presentation on how smartly employing virtualization can save companies' energy use. Additionally, Interop will host a day-long "Energy Camp" seminar on the day before the conference starts that Heymann says will "open up the discussion to the whole community to ask for their perspectives on sustainability" and ask audience members for their ideas for how to make IT greener.

"Green IT is rising in importance by the minute," [Interop GM Lenny Heymann] said. "We decided for Energy Camp to move away from some of the more traditional conference formats by inviting more community comments to share their expertise with each other."

Thanks for the shout, Lenny!

Energy Camp is free to attend and anyone who comes will get a free pass into Interop as well. If you're interesting in going, we've got a registration page set up on the official camp Web site.

Also, we've got a wiki set up as part of the site and one of the reasons for the wiki is to tap the wisdom of the "crowd" by keeping track of all the cool ideas (one per page) that people are coming up with to not only save energy, but to help sustain the planet. So, what are you waiting for? You don't necessarily have to come to Energy Camp to join the "conversation." Any questions? Let me know at dberlind@techweb.com.