As famous Chicagoan Harey Caray would say, Holy Cow! That Greenbuild was the most productive, most informative, and most exciting on record, at least for me. Keep in mind, I have only attended two Greenbuild conferences.
If you want a recap of key Greenbuild events as I saw it them, then check here, here and here as I was live blogging from Chicago last week.
On Friday, the last day of the conference, I was absolutely exhausted. I had met with green building enthusiasts from Italy, Canada, and Cuba. I had looked at products, written blog posts, tweeted, sat on the innaugural Greenbuild Legal Forum panel, and attended countless stimulating talks. It was nirvana for my green building brain. But I was exhausted and it was going to take something special to catch my attention.
I found something special.
As I was meandering through the convention center floor, a television screen drew my attention. I mindlessly walked up to the screen and started watching a bar graph and dots appear. Then I began to process the information. Here is a link to what I was watching (thanks to Stuart Kaplow for sending me this link) and the following description:
"The Green Building Information Gateway (GBIG) is a novel information technology that provides an unprecedented view of the green building landscape and reveals trends, patterns and processes in green building practice. GBIG allows for the investigation and analysis of data about LEED-certified projects and the larger green building universe as a whole, and enables users to view green building in the context of other spatial and temporal factors.
The GBIG Illinois Pilot represents the first phase of development and a subset of functionality under development for the full portal."
The GBIG appears to be the start one of the most comprehensive attempts to study LEED growth trends. The pilot currently focuses on LEED growth in Illinois, presumably because the project was unveiled in Chicago. The GBIG should be the key to deciphering the future of the green building industry. Through the GBIG, we should be able to track growth of LEED certifications and green buildings by city, state or region once the project is fully developed.
What uses for the GBIG can you imagine?
