350 - Europe

Talking Points for WiserEarth

 

Q. What is WiserEarth?

WiserEarth (WE) is a community directory and networking forum for the hundreds of thousands of organizations addressing the central issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. WiserEarth helps these organizations locate each other, collaborate, share resources and build alliances.

 
Q. Describe the social impact of WE

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. This online tool is not meant to encourage people to sit at their computers to create change. It allows them to quickly and efficiently access the information, connections and alliances they need to address the issues they face in their communities.

 
Q. What is the “Movement” WiserEarth seeks to serve?

People are gathering and organizing around the world to address poverty, climate change, pollution, globalization, resource issues, hunger, and myriad other political, economic, and ecological problems that threaten all of us.

Collectively, this drive for a sustainable and just existence can be called a movement. WiserEarth provides this movement a way to see itself and become connected.

 

Quote from author, Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest (book that inspired WiserEarth): “The reason this is a movement is because if you take the values in this room and of all the groups in the database so far, and you put them up on the wall and you read them one by one, the fact is they’re all different, but they don’t contradict themselves. And that has never happened before. There is no movement on earth in our history that has arisen this way.”

 

Q. Why the need for WiserEarth?

 

-The hundreds of thousands of organizations and individuals that make up the largest movement on the planet and who work towards ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights, and political accountability work on issues that are systemically interconnected and intertwined

 

-The organizations and people confronting these issues are building blocks of a very different world

 

-Yet their effectiveness to prevent harm and institute positive change is undermined by the lack of a collective awareness, duplicative efforts, and poor connectivity

 

-What is missing is a map and directory of this network that includes the resources for communication and cooperation, created and managed by the community; in essence, an infrastructure through which to coordinate our efforts. That is WiserEarth's purpose.

 

-WiserEarth creates the space for this growing movement to see itself-enhancing visibility, collaboration and communication. Its tools help organizations become more accessible to each other and communicate at no cost

 

Q. How will WiserEarth help this movement? How will this translate into action?

WE has the potential to bring on a technological shift in how organizations and people will be able to connect with each other. WiserEarth is the mapping of a global network of changemakers. Having the capability to see who we are as a movement and how we are already connected, empowers us to strategically organize ourselves and tighten our connections into "affinity" clusters.  These connections lay a critical foundation for collaborative efforts within or across arenas that are currently disjointed. 

 

Q. What exactly does WiserEarth do?

• EXTENSIVE DATABASE: WiserEarth's structured data format combined with its comprehensive taxonomy makes it the most advanced search tool available in the environmental and social justice fields
  
• CONNECT WITH OTHERS: WiserEarth encourages social entrepreneurs, students, scientists, consultants and volunteers to construct personal profiles that will create opportunity and visibility for them, while providing organizations a broader pool of prospective talent
  
• GAIN VISIBILITY: WiserEarth provides grassroots groups that do not have a web presence visibility and access.
  
• ASSISTS FUNDERS: WiserEarth provides funders a comprehensive landscape of organizations engaged in specific program activities.
  
• VISUALIZATION TOOLS: WiserEarth will generate geographic maps to locate individual organizations, or any collection of organizations, from street to continent level.
  
• ALLOWS FOR JOB POSTINGS: WiserEarth offers free postings for recruiting staff, volunteers, and interns and will offer a marketplace to share surplus resources and materials
  
• BRINGS AWARENESS TO THE MOVEMENT: Academics, students, politicians, and the media can better visualize the extent and comprehensiveness of the global environmental and social justice movement.
• CATALOGS SOLUTIONS: WiserEarth participants can describe and catalog solutions to various environmental and social threats, rate the quality of the solutions, and make recommendations. 

Q. How is WiserEarth different than other social networking sites and/or "green" online resource clearinghouses?

• WiserEarth truly represents the breadth and the depth of the largest and fastest growing social movement in the world. The WiserEarth taxonomy of issues is the most comprehensive list of project areas of the world’s social justice and environmental organizations
• WiserEarth’s structured data format combined with its comprehensive taxonomy makes it a unique and powerful search tool.
• WiserEarth is a fast, comprehensive switchboard that will establish a means for NGOs, businesses, governments, individuals, social entrepreneurs, institutes, coalitions, foundations, and faith-, citizen- and village-based organizations to leverage their experience, knowledge and resources, helping them to move towards alignment and collaboration with one another.

Q. What different needs are addressed in the different groups of participants?

Applicable to All

• Provides ability for anyone to find out quickly and easily ‘who’s working on what and where’
• Helps people connect with people/organizations carrying out similar work
• Makes it easy to stay current with what’s happening in your field
• Allows you an opportunity to help your community by sharing your expertise

International NGO community

• Creates a level playing field where small orgs are just as visible as larger ones
• Visibility for your cause/ your organization (funders and potential partners can locate you and see information about your organization)
• Locate other groups in your region or internationally that are working on your cause
• Develop strategic alliances, share your experiences, knowledge and resources
• Identify potential funding opportunities
• Find volunteers, interns or employees
• Create a WiserEarth group for your community, where you can grow your network, facilitate discussions, share important information, and collaborate on joint campaigns

Student Community

• Research information relating to sustainability-focused organizations and non-profits
• Find volunteer, intern or job opportunities in the non-profit or NGO sector across the world
• Join a focused community on WiserEarth groups

Funders

• Identify new funding opportunities
• Better evaluate proposals and dockets - search a free, international directory of thousands non-profit organizations including contact details, map, area of focus and mission statement
• Give visibility to your foundation and the projects that you support
• Find volunteers, interns or employees

Q. What is the Technology behind WiserEarth?

The Platform for WiserEarth uses MySQL open source database as its backbone, and is PHP driven. All recorded information on WiserEarth is searchable, filterable, and fully referenced, leading visitors directly to the organizational record or website of interest. It has a combination of both structured data and unstructured data. Like a wiki, it is fully transparent and tracks all users' activities on WiserEarth.

 

Q. Is WiserEarth Open Source?

Only the WISER platform operates under an open source license as governed by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which makes the code and the application freely available for the good of the community. This includes certain agreements, which allow modification and further redistribution of the code and software without payment, but restrict users from selling it. The WiserEarth technology platform is available for download at SourceForge.net - http://sourceforge.net/projects/wiserplatform.

 

 

Q. What is the history of the project?

NCI’s Executive Director, Paul Hawken recognized the need for WiserEarth when researching his latest book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, and Why No One Saw It Coming. “I knew that if we could understand the connections and visualize the breadth of global efforts on behalf of social and environmental justice, we would recognize the largest movement the world has ever seen. WiserEarth is where this movement can begin to see itself.”

 

Project planning began in 2004, and in January 2005, the Natural Capital Institute brought in software engineers and researchers and consulted with movement leaders to begin building the database and envisioning its content. Over the next year and a half, NCI partnered with experts in open source software and increased its data-collecting capacity by training teams in Cuimbatore, India and Guayaquil, Ecuador, as well as dozens of volunteers with expertise in a variety of languages, focus areas, and geographic regions. The expanded team researched and added publicly available data from the Internet and other sources, honed the WiserEarth content standards, values and principles, and continued to develop the database infrastructure.

 

The site was officially launched to the public in April 2007. Initial funding for WiserEarth supported the critical phase of building the platform, populating the site with a base of content, and listening to the needs of partners and community members. Since its release, WiserEarth's functionality and tools have co-evolved with its users. No longer simply the world's largest directory of environmental, social justice and indigenous community-focused organizations, WiserEarth now offers users social networking tools and groupware for people to connect and collaborate around issue areas.

Q. How will this project be financially sustainable?

WiserEarth is scalable and doesn't require extensive ongoing funding over time. In other words, similar to Wikipedia, data and content is user-generated as opposed to centrally managed, requiring few staff after the initial boost to get it out there.

 

Most of the expenses for WiserEarth 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.

The more the community drives the project, the more the costs will drop.

 

Q. What's Next? What can I do?

WiserEarth will always be a work in progress. WiserEarth encourages and invites people to take on leadership roles in the following ways:

 

-Share WiserEarth with your network and encourage people to participate

-Join a Group related to your interests

-Join the WiserEarth Editors group and help monitor and improve the site

-Host a WiserEarth group for your community

-Invite friends and colleagues

-Present and promote WiserEarth at community events

-Use a WiserEarth group as an organizing tool to plan and follow-up on gatherings/events you organize

 

Q. What is the Natural Capital Institute?

 

The Natural Capital Institute is the fiscal agent for WiserEarth. It is a non-profit that is committed to the restoration of the earth and the healing of human culture.NCI describes pathways of change in books and research reports, and creates tools for connecting the individuals, information and organizations that create change.