We hope the Obama camp will choose to go green with technology. As with all change, there is an initial opportunity to lay out a road map for greener technology choices. Since they will be hiring a CTO, we hope that Chief Information Officer will choose to save on meetings and implement an across the board government requirement for online meetings whenever possible.

Not only, as we have discussed here before, will online meetings save time but travel costs as well. Imaging how much the government will save in airline flights, car travel and hotels.

There is actually a bigger opportunity here. When the government awards a contract to a contracting company the government specifies it’s requirements. They could require the contracted company to use online meetings and software. It is not uncommon for billion dollar and multi-million dollar contracts to be awarded. Imagine if a Lockheed Martin or other larger government contractor received a 1 billion dollar contract and all those individuals they employed were encouraged and required to utilize online meetings every change they got. The amount of fuel from lack of flights and amount of time, which also saves money, would be substantial.

We humbly suggest, and hope, that the Obama CTO will implement video conferencing and online meetings as a requirement. This is not a request for them to give a contract to a company to install $100,000 video conferencing units but instead to use an open source or other product to enable every government worker to host and participate in online meetings from their computer whether at work or at home.

Let’s go green and online meetings will be one of the many tools to do that.