We just concluded our third TechSoup GreenTech campaign after three weeks of great tips, actions, and content to reduce energy use on your IT. My GreenTech cohort  Anna Jaeger and I would like to thank the many of you who entered our Unpower Yourself Contest to report in on the things you've been doing to use less electricity with your computers. It looks like our 5 Things You Can Do in 5 Minutes to Reduce Your Power Use was a useful approach to identifying small ways you can make an impact.

Nearly everyone who entered the contest reported that they're now turning their IT equipment off at night, closely followed by those who are setting their power management (sleep) settings on their computers. About half of our respondents will start using smart power strips, and a quarter vowed to buy EPEAT gold- or silver-rated computers. The big surprise is that fully half of those who entered the contest are "deep green" and either spread the word on this or signed up with Climate Savers Computing Initiative to join the IT energy conservation movement.

The responses to our question on whether or not people tended to experience resistance in their organizations to making these changes was another surprise with most saying they did not. Those who did experience some staff skepticism overcame it by being able to prove the money saved by using things like Verdiem's free Edison software that calculates the money, energy, and CO2 saved over the course of a year by setting sleep settings.

There are many sides to the green IT field, but in my humble opinion, energy and materials conservation are core to seeing change.

In the course of doing this campaign, Anna and I became much more informed in two areas of rapidly emerging computer technology: virtualization and cloud computing (also known as software as a service or SaaS). These are pretty technical areas, so we hope we brought some clarity to them. We feel pretty certain that both of these areas of green IT will look very different in a year or two ' especially the rapid development of cloud computing.

We'd love to know if we covered these topics to your satisfaction, so if you have any comments, please email us or start a conversation of your own on our forums. You can view all of the resources and discussions that took place during our campaign here.