WiserEarth
WiserEarth is an international directory and networking forum that maps, links and empowers the largest movement in the world–-the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice and the environment.
As we grow, we will need technical support in growing the software: adding plug ins, tools, and implementing the ideas that the community requests.
Our goal is to ensure that WiserEarth is accessible to all and available in various languages. We will need support in enhancing community ownership, increasing the diversity among the user base, and growing the breadth and depth of information on the site.
We will need specific support in marketing to key communities such as students and youth, who will be key players in expanding our user-base.
WiserEarth serves the people who are transforming the world.
It is an international directory and networking forum that maps, links and empowers the largest movement in the world–-the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice and the environment.
WiserEarth provides tools to help organizations and individuals find each other, collaborate, share resources and build alliances.WiserEarth establishes a means for organizations and people to leverage their experience, knowledge and resources, helping them to move towards alignment and collaboration with one another. WiserEarth provides the tools and a platform for this movement to see itself and become better connected.
WiserEarth is scalable and doesn't require extensive ongoing funding once built. Data will be user-generated as opposed to centrally managed, requiring few staff after public launch. Most of its expenses are in technical development and hardware costs. NCI is committed to raising money for these costs so that WiserEarth is always able to serve the community for free.
One of the main obstacles is to ensure that WiserEarth serves the global community: people in remote areas that do not have the resources but need the information or the connections that can be made through WiserEarth.
The WiserEarth Platform is the technology that makes the collective awareness, support, and communication possible. Using MySQL open source database as its backbone, we intend to make the software open source around its launch.
We are appealing the community to help us grow the software: adding plug ins, tools, and ideas that the community needs.
Our hope is to ensure that communities across the globe have access to WiserEarth. Right now we are developing a global communication strategy, identifying what it will take to make it accessible to all, and available in various languages.
WiserEarth was released in two stages beginning late March 2007.
First, a beta version of the site was released to organizations and people who were already aware of the project. Anyone who was interested can become a beta tester, by signing up at wiserearth.org. These beta testers provided feedback, tested usability, and helped populate the site, ensuring that WiserEarth is indeed ready for the community.
The official launch was on May 10th, 2007. This pre-launch was not publicized — news and awareness about the site has grown simply through word of mouth.
By May 3rd, WiserEarth had:
· 102,000 organizational records
· More than 1,000 resources, 600 users, and 250 events in the calendar
· 144,000 edits
· Visitors from 66 different countries including Nepal, Bolivia, Lebanon, Senegal, and Ukraine.
WiserEarth links organizations and people in new and powerful ways.
- The media, academics, students, politicians, and the non-profit world itself can better visualize the extent and comprehensiveness of global civil society.
- WiserEarth's structured data format combined with its comprehensive taxonomy makes it among the most powerful search tools available in the environmental and social justice fields.
- WiserEarth encourages social entrepreneurs, students, scientists, consultants and volunteers to construct personal profiles that will create opportunity and visibility for them, while providing organizations with broader pool of prospective talent.
- WiserEarth provides grassroots groups that cannot afford a web presence with visibility and access. Organizations have the full benefit of a database, clearinghouse and web presence without having to build their own.
- WiserEarth acts as a no-cost communication network for all organizations through the publishing and encouragement of voice-over-internet-protocol hook-ups (ex: SKYPE).
- WiserEarth generates geographic maps to locate individual organizations, or any collection of organizations, from street level to continents.
- It offers free postings for recruiting staff, volunteers, and interns and marketplaces to share surplus resources and materials.
- WiserEarth is scalable and doesn't require extensive ongoing funding once built. Data will be user-generated as opposed to centrally managed, requiring few staff after public launch.
- WiserEarth provides funders a comprehensive landscape of organizations engaged in specific program activities, a helpful tool to better evaluate programs and dockets.
Join WiserEarth now!
Visit www.wiserearth.org
The username and password will be down by EarthDay.
The username is demouser
The password is w3lcome
Go for it and vote for it!!
Jon Ramer
Innovative and meaningful!
WiserEarth is both innovative and meaningful. After considering all of the proposals, I was pleased to put WiserEarth on my list of most innovative NetSquared projects.
That said, I agree with many of the comments below. I hope that your team will think hard about leveraging existing technologies for your mission. It is important to realize that only a small percentage of open source communities are highly successful.
A better mouse-trap?
I wish WiserEarth already existed! The availability of such a tool-box would be wonderful. Hawken's new book will undoubtedly underpin its usefulness.
But, how can you avoid this going the road of so many better mouse-traps? In other words, the usefulness itself is not sufficient: people need to buy (into) it. What different basic needs are addressed in the very different groups of participants? And what 'reward' will they get from participating?
I'd like to offer my support in getting Wiser Earth off the ground. If you visit www.nabuur.com you'll see that the link we've built between local villages and their 'neighbors' in the global village would really benefit from its success.
Financial sustainability
I am struck that there is no advertising or paid listing model here. Clearly, this cannot be the purpose of the platform and heavy use of paid listings will set the wrong tone. However, there should be some simple discreet ways for content to rise to the "top". One way is user reviews, one way is paid listings. If I see a listing that is paid and poorly rated by the community, I can compare that to a listing that is highly rated by the community and unpaid. The key is striking the right balance. The exclusive reliance on philanthropic donations for technology projects has traditionally not been a sucessful long term sustainability model.
Open Source
The proposal states it will build the Wiser Earth Platform will be open source "around its launch" and the community will develop plugins. This version of "open source" will require Wiser Earth to bear the burden of engineering costs for the platform. Unlike a platform like Drupal (300+ engineers contributing to the last release) or Joomla or Plone, it is unlikely that a significant number software engineers will want to rebuild existing functionality (VOIP integration) specifically for yet another platform. The reason is that healthy open source communities come from a scratch your own itch principle. Ask any engineer whether it is faster to build their own platform and they will say let me use Ruby on Rails and we'll be done lickty split. They are right, but they have created yet another piece of technology that does not follow sustainability good practices... engage a broad community in the design, engage multiple software engineers and engineering companies in the creation, make the technology as connected with other people as you envision the users of the platform to be connected with one another. As a mission-based technology project, you might consider building your mission based effort off of an existing technology-based community. Each technical feature outlined above is already offered in most strong open source content management systems. If you choose to build a new open source platform, the experience of CiviCRM might be useful. It took about 2 years to reach the community tipping point where ongoing sustainability could be supported by the community rather than the founding organization. However, CiviCRM's design and development were transparent from day one.
Hello. I'm very intrigued
Hello. I'm very intrigued about this project, specifically I wonder if you have any sneak preview you can give now about how you plan to address such a diverse constituency as those working on poverty, social justice, and the environment?
Thank you.
Interested.
WiserEarth proposal
Sandra Dickinson
I would love to be a betatester for your project! Why don't you go ahead and make that betatester sign up a hyperlink from your proposal text?
(I opened a new browser window, typed in the url, and found the betatester signup email popup. I hope you get my message)
From my own perspective -- the most significant aspect of the WiserEarth project is the MAPPING of a global network of social entrepreneurs! Enabling us to SEE who we are and how we are already connected empowers us to strategically organize ourselves and tighten our connections in "affinity" clusters. Our ability to tighten connections lays a critical foundation for collaborative efforts in different arenas. I have personally felt the text-based nature of the most evolved web2.0 tools is a hurdle to overcome (I have tried to make my own pictures of who's doing what). I am excited to find a project that aims at VISUALIZING who we are and what we are all up to!
Your approach to your project has so much in common with my own - I hardly know where to start. But I'll start with this. For both of us, user-generated content is key to both our projects. An effective strategy to engage user participation is critical to success for both of us. I too seek global participation (ultimately).
For my own project - engaging ANY user participation is the immediate obstacle/challenge (not to mention the users you raise as your concern - those who don't have access to resources to connect!). Initial "playtest" results on my project indicate that most visitors to the first iteration of wiki and blog tools can't tell "how to" participate.
So, I've had to take a step back to a 'crawl before you walk before you run' kind of strategy. My next step is a tool redesign effort. Redesign to make it clearer "how to" participate. I suspect the redesign elements are really very simple. Its just that I'm too close to the project to see what they are (from the user perspective). I am in process of reaching out to a small group of folk to collaborate with me to see what those few simple redesign elements are. (of course -- potential "users" are the best source of this input!)
( that's why, as a potential "user"/betatester, I suggested the simple thing of creating a hyperlink to sign up ...) Perhaps you might consider adding to your project an elaborated description of your user engagement/participation/content-generation strategy. Many of us have this same challenge. We can learn alot from each other.
I would totally welcome your review and comment on my own proposal. Looking forward. Thank you.