Tom Greenwood is Managing Director of Wholegrain Digital. We asked who his digital hero is.
Who is your digital hero?
Tim Frick, founder of Mightybytes.
What has he done to win hero status in your eyes?
Tim woke up to the environmental impact of digital technology years before anyone else did and he made it his mission to do something about it.
He wrote the first book on the topic, gave talks, wrote articles and created tools like EcoGrader to raise awareness.
How has his heroism helped drive digital?
The digital industry is slowly starting to talk about environmental sustainability as something that needs to be taken seriously, and if it wasn’t for pioneers like Tim putting the conversation on the table and keeping it there for many years, the action that we see today would likely not be happening.
What starts as a ripple becomes a wave.
What are the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
We need another hero to solve many challenges, but another one to highlight is the mental health challenge being perpetuated by many digital services.
What’s good for Silicon Valley is not the same as what’s good for us as humans, and we need a hero to lead us to a more healthy use of digital technology.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
Perhaps it was the creation of the first carbon calculator for websites.
It seems to have captured a lot of people’s imaginations and helped them to make sense of a complex and invisible issue. As a result it has acted as a catalyst for change within our industry, having now completed several million tests, orders of magnitude more than I ever expected.
