Europe it's time to lead!

Over the summer I attended a seminar talking about values and asking: 'how well do your values align with those of your employer?'. I never felt that 'building earth's most customer centric company; a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online' conflicted with my values but it didn't excite me either.

Climate change on the other hand is something that I care very deeply about. European leaders are about to make some key environmental decisions. The timetolead.eu micro-site is a campaigning site for CAN Europe, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and WWF. The point of the campaign is to encourage our European representatives to set policies which will keep global warming below 2 degrees. The site explains briefly what's so special about 2 degrees (above 2 degrees we risk runaway global warming). It also maps a temperature change to given policies and positions e.g. the current proposals of the EU commission will lead to an increase in the range 2.4 to 3.6 degrees. For a more detailed understanding of what will happen at 2 degrees, 3,4,5 or even 6 then read Mark Lynas' excellent book Six Degrees.

The site is built with Flash (written in Flex) and Django. Django handles the internationalisation really well; the site is in six languages but the emails sent to MEPs are available in the native languages of all 27 member states. The admin interface that Django provides is great and perfect for a project like this which has a small number of content submitters.

The tight time frame has made it a challenging project; it launched last night, on schedule, less than a month after the first conference call. Although it's been challenging (especially for the development team) it has been immensely rewarding. Launching projects is always great but launching projects you really value is so much more satisfying.