We’ve gone green for our first Idea of the Week for December’s Social Innovation Camp.

Save The Jet Ski, entered by Andy Gibson, is a website which publishes how much carbon is used in all our activities – from making toothpaste to importing organic pineapples, from driving cars to riding jet skis – in an easy-to-browse format. And then lets users vote on what they want to keep, and what they’d be happy to give up.

The idea would be to create a public record of the popularity of different activities weighted against their carbon value, and compile a ‘hitlist’ of high-carbon activities that people don’t really need that could be fed to campaigning organisations, policymakers and the general public.

Equally, you get a list of high-carbon activities that people really value, to give to research organisations and funders to investigate ways to make these activities more sustainable.

Nice idea but the interesting bit is where Andy proposes to get the data from to make his idea work.

The wonderfully-named Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine – or AMEE for short – is a neutral, open platform for measuring the energy consumption of, well, everything.

In an effort to avoid the problems of carbon footprint calculations – that different methods aren’t comparable, static and date quickly or are simply arbitrary – AMEE draws energy usage data from over 150 countries, makes it comparable and allows you to create a carbon footprint for any activity or product. Their platform is already being used by the UK government, the Carbon Account and Radiohead’s tour carbon calculator, amongst others.

And it’s got an open API, so the data is accessible – perfect for building stuff at Social Innovation Camp and for use in Save The Jet Ski.

So if AMEE wants to be the ‘world’s energy meter’, what web-based tools can we develop which use this information to make a big social and environmental impact? These could be campaigning and lobbying platforms, awareness raising applications or tools to help people make informed decisions about their actions which have an environmental impact – similar to Save The Jet Ski.

So what else can AMEE do? You’ve got until Friday 7th November to send us your idea.

As the deadline to send us your ideas draws closer, we’re going to be choosing our favourite idea from the ones we’ve received so far and explaining what we like about it each week.