Oh, climate change.  Oh, the UN. A giant concept and a giant organisation, both with limited access points for the public, guarenteed to make you feel small, disempowered and unheard.  Well, it's that time of year again: it's the UN Climate Change Conference, and this year it's happening in Poland! 

As a Warsaw resident, I got super excited about this. I thought - hurray, a chance for Poland to access all of the issues around climate change. Take recycling. This is a concept that has not really taken off in Warsaw: public bins are available everywhere, but only to recycle glass and not for other basic elements like paper. What's more, few Gen Xers or baby boomers recycle because it's seen as dirty and a pain in the butt - which it is since you have to lug your recycling for blocks to the bins since the one door-to-door program was shut down earlier this year. Now, before you imagine that this is because Poland is somehow underdeveloped or uninformed - consider that nearly the entire population listens to the radio and buys at least one paper every day, that we are all on the internet and that there are two cell phones for every person. If you want to get a message out, UN, now is your chance!

And they are trying.

Conference websites have to be clear, pretty, interactive and  - unlike a normal non-profit website which caters to a target audience - useful to thousands of stakeholders with radically different needs.  To this end, the UN Climate Change conference website has some really good elements for members of the public looking to get informed about climate change (The surprise loser is Avaaz - click here for more...)