energy.dare blog

Before you sign up to participate in the experiment that is energy.dare, there are a few things you should note:

Trish’s disclaimer

energy.dare is my current brainchild and I hope to use elements or all of what I learn from this website and its participants for my thesis research project. No personal identifying information will be collected from you unless you so give it. No personal information will be used in my research thesis without your express permission. This might not be all the appropriate legal jargon you’d find on other “professional” sites, but it is still my promise to you; hopefully, you get the point. I’m just interested in what you’ll find and experience while you’re here at energy.dare. So thank you in advance for helping me with my thesis! If you ever need to contact me, please feel free to do so at energy [dot] dare [at] gmail [dot] com. I will try to respond as quickly as possible.

Things to do as a Dare blogger

1. Once you create your WordPress blog account, please sign up for energy.dare so that I have your preferred nickname, email, age, city and province, as well as your blog url.
2. Please publish a post on your Dare blog at least once a day. It can be as long or as short as you’d like. Record the temperature setting of your thermostat and the weather and temperature outside according to the Weather Network. If you have a thermometer handy, please also note the actual temperature inside your apartment/room/house. Feel free to include pictures, videos, etc., if you’d like.Remember that you are writing about how turning down your heating has affected you and people around you. Did your participation with energy.dare inspire any random conversations about the environment? Did you tell others to try it? Do you have any energy.dare-relevant plans for tomorrow or the next week? Any insights or thoughts on how we might be able to get people to be less dependent on their heating and/or air-conditioning units would be great! General eco-centric thoughts and ideas are also highly encouraged.
3. energy.dare only works if you actually turn your heating down. Everyone’s comfort levels are different, but I’m asking you to push those boundaries as much as you can. If you normally set your thermostat at 25C and walk around in T-shirts and shorts during the fall and winter seasons, maybe you can try turning down your thermostat and wearing a long-sleeve shirt, donning a bathrobe or a sweater. I’m not going to tell you when to turn it down nor how much, because I want you to be the judge of that. Do it slowly and gradually at your own pace over the course of the 30 day period. Regardless of how low you eventually go, I’m still very thankful for your help and participation.
4. Please allow comments on your blog posts. Whether you require commentors to be registered, or if you’ll allow anonymous posts, I leave that up to your discretion. Part of the reason I started energy.dare was to foster an environment for discussions and exchange of ideas.
5. I am going to reserve the right to take you off the list as a Dare blogger, at my discretion, if there is any content in your blog or comments that are too disrespectful in any way towards anyone. I’d like to keep energy.dare as accessible, open and informative to as broad an audience as possible.

Tentatively, the energy.dare experiment is only going to take 30 days, and I’m hoping enough people will have signed up for it so that everyone can start in November 2008. One month of experimentation, and then I’ll have to devote the rest of my time on analyzing and writing this all up into my thesis. Now go create a blog at WordPress and you’ll be ready to sign up for energy.dare. Thanks again for your help!

If I there’s anything else I’ll update this list, but I don’t want to encumber you with too many rules and regulations. But I did want to set some ground rules and give you some suggestions so we can get the most out of energy.dare. If you have any thoughts as to what needs to be changed or added to this list or energy.dare, please send me an email!