Last year, the 2009 Greener Gadgets Design Competition produced 13 contenders to be voted on at the conference.  There was a wide variety of entries, such as a digital water meter to see how much water you are using (or wasting) in your daily life, laundry solutions, and a cute little pig that makes you pay for your power consumption.  But the invention that won it all last year is the Tweet-a-Watt.  A Kill-a-Watt (TM) power meter was converted in order to send a user's daily KWH consumption to their Twitter account wirelessly.  The inventors thought this would be a great idea to have someone's power consumption out there for the world to see.  It might also bring on competitions that benefit the environment (who isn't up for a little competition of who can have the lowest energy consumption??!!).

So, where is the Tweet-a-Watt today?  The inventors have created a website  which gives you the option to buy a kit ($90) to create your own Tweet-a-Watt system or the plans to build one on your own.  In the description written for the competition last year, the inventors specifically state that they created this as an "open source hardware" project, where anyone can buy the materials and build one themselves.  They published all of the information so that anyone could take the schematics and the idea and run with it however they like.  Obviously they were not looking to make money off of this project, which is nice.  They must have just been happy enough to create something that might help us pay attention to (and have accountability for) what resources we are consuming and push us to make a change.