IBM Advises City: "Make Burlington Synonymous With Green Tech"

On April 1, the city of Burlington welcomed a team of six international experts from IBM's "Smarter Cities Challenge Initiative." Their goal: Spend three weeks meeting with Burlington stakeholders to figure out how to reduce the city's carbon footprint. Seven Days previewed their arrival in the March 27 story, "IBM Wants to Help Burlington Reduce Its Carbon Footprint — No Strings Attached."

On Thursday night, April 18, after more than 40 meetings with over 150 people, the IBM team reconvened in Contois Auditorium with their findings and recommendations. Their advice was summed up in six words by IBM team member Christian Raetzsch of Prague: "Make Burlington synonymous with green tech." In other words, Raetzsch advised, build off Burlington's unique strengths, culture and infrastructure and use them to create a "new ecosystem" of sustainable, renewable energy.

The IBMers, who hail from Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Brazil and the United States — and whose consulting services over the past two weeks are worth an estimated $400,000 — focused their efforts on five areas: transportation, Burlington's new smart grid metering system, renewable energy, energy efficiency and stormwater lake protection. The team offered up four major recommendations, all of which will be spelled out in greater detail in a written report available within a month. Those recommendations include:

This Week's Issue: A Close Council Race in Burlington; Privacy Concerns Over License Plate Readers

Grab a bottle of your favorite spring water and sit down with this week's print or digital edition of Seven Days, featuring these news and politics stories...

• The most interesting race of Town Meeting Day 2013 might be in Burlington, where former Progressive council president Jane Knodell and newcomer Democrat and banker Emily Lee face off in Ward 2's city council contest.
• As automatic license plate readers see more use among the state's law enforcement officers, legislators are considering a bill to regulate the technology in response to privacy concerns.
• This week's cover story: Famously free-spirited Goddard College has had its ups and downs through the years. Can new president Barbara Vacarr stablize the school without sacrificing its quirks?
• In media news, three well-read winter sports magazines make an unlikely home in Jeffersonville.
• And in Fair Game, Vermont's "death with dignity" bill lives another day in the Statehouse, while Vermont's congressional delegation wants answers from Obama on the use of drones.

Read it all on the new Seven Days app for iPad and iPhone.

Vermont Video Game Developers Look to Legislature for Support

Political gamesmanship is common at the Statehouse, but on Wednesday, legislators played games of a different kind. That afternoon, a group of local video game developers set up their iPads and gaming consoles in Room 11, and invited lawmakers to stop by and play. 

It took some convincing — more than one onlooker muttered comments along the lines of "I don't play these things but my kids and grandkids do" — but eventually some of them got in the game.

Montpelier Mayor John Hollar took a turn at Swamp Talk, a word game developed by Montpelier-based programmer Chris Hancock. Sen. Anthony Pollina (P/D-Washington) learned the finer points of Overflow from Zach Bohn of Birnam Wood Studios. And Montpelier voice-over artist Jackie Weyrauch convinced Treasurer Beth Pearce to try Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, a console game Weyrauch worked on with Insomniac Games. 

Organizers of the pop-up Statehouse arcade included members of the Vermont Video Game Developers' Association, along with students and faculty from Champlain College and representatives from the Central Vermont Economic Development Corporation. They hoped to raise the profile of the local gaming scene and convince lawmakers to support it.

The $52 billion-a-year industry presents a big economic opportunity for Vermont, these advocates claimed in a press conference in the Cedar Creek Room earlier in the day. Pollina kicked off that gathering. He told reporters that the video game industry provides "clean jobs" that appeal to young workers. He wants the state to do more to attract those workers here.

"The way we market our ski areas is the way we should be marketing our digital economy," Pollina said. 

This Week's Issue: A Biomass Battle; The Revolving Door Spins Again

In this week's print edition of Seven Days, which you can read on your iPhone or iPad with our new free app...

• Community-scale biomass projects typically get the thumbs-up in Vermont. Not so in Plainfield, where neighbors are fighting Goddard College's plans to build a woodchip incinerator.
• Burlington's HowardCenter is taking a new approach to treating mental illness, called Open Dialogue.
• Vermont is number one on another list, but this time it's a dubious honor — the state is tops in the nation for underage drinking.
• Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) appears in our pages frequently, but it's not too often he pops up in the arts section. Here's a review of his new photography exhibit in Montpelier.
• In Fair Game, Vermont's public/private revolving door goes for another spin as Gov. Peter Shumlin's telecom czar, Karen Marshall, departs for a job at VTel — which just received a big state grant.

This Week's Paper: Burlington's Library Becomes a Haven for the Homeless; Use Your Smartphone to Fight Illegal Dumping

Here's the newsy stuff in this week's commemorative 12/12/12 edition of Seven Days...

• Librarians at Burlington's Fletcher Free Library are adapting to a changing job — which includes responding to the many homeless people that hang out in the library every day.
• With an app called SeeClickFix, the city of Burlington is taking a new approach to fighting curbside litter with the public's help.
• Meet Liz Miller, the former Department of Public Service head who now faces a tall task as Gov. Peter Shumlin's incoming chief of staff.
• In Fair Game: If Green Mountain Power execs didn't want journalists arrested on Lowell Mountain last year, what took so long to exonerate Barton Chronicle publisher Chris Braithwaite?
  
  And while the governor and two mayors visit a Florida air base to hear the F-35, learn about why a nearby, conservative-minded city is lukewarm towards the new jet.

Library photo by Matthew Thorsen

UPDATED: Bloomberg TV Barges In on Burlington's #BTV Hashtag, Twitter Chaos Ensues

UPDATED BELOW

Savvy Burlington-area residents have long used the hashtag #BTV to consolidate local content on Twitter, from the mundane (sunset pictures and lunch updates) to the serious (emergency management during storms). But #BTV is a simple hashtag that could stand for many things, and it's come under threat before — chiefly from users talking smack about state-run TV stations in Bahrain, Botswana and other B countries. (See "Burlington Meets Bahrain: When Twitter Hashtags Collide" from 2011 for more about that.)

But today, hashtag-jacking reached new heights when Bloomberg TV barged in. This did not go over well with Burlingtonians.

The news network had tried to use #BTV before, notably to collect Hurricane Sandy photos last month. But those tweets never caught enough traction to overwhelm Burlington content — until today, when the network pledged to use #BTV-tagged tweets in its iPad app while it aired a lunch-hour interview with President Barack Obama. Unfortunately for Vermonters, Obamarama trumped the Queen City, at least for a little while.

(Quick side note if you're new to Twitter and/or hashtaggery: No one "owns" a hashtag, so it's not like Burlington residents can complain to Twitter about having their hashtag swiped. A hashtag is really little more than a search archive of the tweets that include it. That's why Burlington locals were worried that their content would be utterly overwhelmed by Bloomberg TV's 105,000+ followers.)

The only way to fight back when someone jacks your hashtag? Flood it with your own content. This inspired a lovely round of trolling from Burlington Tweeters — which, in full disclosure, was egged on by this professional Twitter jockey. Below is a Storify showing the chronology of the great #BTV hashtag war of 2012, with political tweets on one side and gratuitous Lake Champlain photos on the other.

Morning Read: Leahy Privacy Bill Sails Through Judiciary Committee

Remember back when everybody was wigging out about Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) allegedly pulling a switcheroo and swapping out a bill that would increase electronic privacy for one that would erode it?

As you may recall, CNET's Declan McCullagh reported last week in a thinly-sourced story that Leahy had "quietly rewritten" legislation originally intended to require law enforcement officials to obtain warrants before accessing old emails. Citing anonymous sources, McCullagh reported that Leahy had flip-flopped and planned to back a new version of the bill "giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law."

Well, Vermont's senior senator put that rumor to rest Thursday when he presided over a unanimous Senate Judiciary Committee voice vote strengthening email privacy rules, as the New York Times reports:

Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, was an architect of the 1986 law and is leading the effort to remake it. He said at the meeting on Thursday that e-mails stored by third parties should receive the same protection as papers stored in a filing cabinet in an individual’s house.

“Like many Americans, I am concerned about the growing and unwelcome intrusions into our private lives in cyberspace,” Mr. Leahy said. “I also understand that we must update our digital privacy laws to keep pace with the rapid advances in technology.”