WiserEarth serves the people who are transforming the world. It is a community-editable international directory and networking forum that maps out and connects the largest movement in the world – the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice, poverty, and the environment.

WiserEarth provides the tools and a platform for non-profit organizations, funders, social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists, scientists, and citizens to find each other, make connections, build alliances and share resources.

WISER stands for World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility.

What Does WiserEarth Do?

•  Its' comprehensive taxonomy (described on the site as Areas of Focus) combined with its database of over 100,000 organizations based in 243 countries, territories and sovereign islands, makes it the largest, freely accessible, international directory of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
  

•  Just like Wikipedia, WiserEarth invites its users to create and edit content on the site.
  


•  It is free of advertisements and commercial entities.
  
  
• WiserEarth encourages its users to create personal profiles so that they can build visibility for their work, create connections and contribute to the conversations taking place on the site.

•  WiserEarth provides groups for networks that want a unique space to gather, share resources, collaborate on projects, and grow their network
  
  
•  WiserEarth provides grassroots groups that do not have a web presence with a web page driving visibility to help  their work.
  
  
•  WiserEarth provides funders a comprehensive landscape of organizations engaged in specific program activities.
  

•  WiserEarth provides geographic maps to locate individual organizations, or any collection of organizations, from street to continent level.
  
  
•  WiserEarth offers free postings for the recruitment of staff, volunteers, and interns and plans to offer (in the future) a marketplace to share surplus resources and materials.  
  

•  Academics, students, politicians, and the media can better visualize the extent and comprehensiveness of global civil society.
  
  

Why is WiserEarth Needed?

The more than one million organizations and the one hundred million individuals who actively work towards ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights, and political accountability work on issues that are systemically interconnected and intertwined. However, their effectiveness to prevent harm and institute positive change is undermined by the lack of a collective awareness, duplicative efforts, and poor connectivity. A widely diverse network of organizations is the best defense against injustice, but to be effective, it needs to be connected and intelligent. 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.

WiserEarth provides this movement a way to see itself and become connected.

The Technology

The WISER Platform is the technology that makes this possible. Using MySQL open source database as its backbone, all recorded information on WiserEarth is searchable, filterable, and fully referenced, leading visitors directly to the organizational record or website of interest. Users who access the site will have online links to NGOs that maintain a web presence, as well as the many thousands of organizations that do not have a web presence. Filtering of structured data results in more useful query results.

Principles

WiserEarth is based upon six fundamental principles that are applied to everything we do:

Transparency
WiserEarth is open to full public scrutiny. Likewise, users who edit and add content are asked to fully identify and make themselves known to the community. The software upon which WiserEarth was created is open source. WiserEarth does not charge fees or accept advertising.

Respect
WiserEarth honors the uniqueness of each individual and organization with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, and religious beliefs.

Community
WiserEarth is community-driven and is not centralized, bureaucratic, or turf-based. WiserEarth is about understanding each other, building bridges, creating friendships, and celebrating the rich dimensions contained within the global community.

Networking
WiserEarth enables connectivity and networking, the exchange of services or information between different individuals, groups, companies, or institutions. From a technical perspective, it means that WiserEarth will provide for all types of connections so that low-bandwidth Internet users can also access the information and tools provided on the portal.

Collaboration
WiserEarth brings people together to share information across the global non-profit community, and help create alliances. By working together, we can work smarter, and use our resources more efficiently and effectively.

Visibility
WiserEarth enables small organizations to become more visible, as well as the entire network itself — only by holding such a "mirror" up, can the movement recognize its value and power.

If you are new to the WiserEarth community, you may also want to read the community guidelines before you begin to add or edit content on this site.

History

Preliminary work on WiserEarth began in late 2004. In January 2005, the Natural Capital Institute brought on researchers and technical experts to begin building the database infrastructure.

Over the next two years, a global team of researchers and volunteers from Cuimbatore, India to Guayaquil, Ecuador joined the WiserEarth project. The team brought on volunteers with expertise in a greater variety of languages; partnered with experts in open source software; and increased data-collecting capacity by recruiting and training international research teams. They researched and added publicly available data from the Internet and other sources, honed the WiserEarth Content Standards, continued to develop the database, and refined the structural elements. The site was officially launched to the public in April 2007.

What's Next?

WiserEarth will always be a work in progress. WiserEarth encourages and invites people to take on leadership roles and help maintain an Area of Focus portal, facilitate a resource category, support a help desk, start a discussion, invite friends and colleagues, and present and promote WiserEarth. Many more features need to be added including new tools to support WiserEarth groups, event calendars (allowing users to personalize event listings according to their areas of interest, specific date ranges, and geographic regions), a project builder to spur collaboration, blogs, incorporation of streaming media, and more social networking features. We hope WiserEarth community members will donate their time and intellectual property to help develop these features, and make WiserEarth a true global resource. The history from this point on out is collaboratively written by all of us—the community.

I Want to Help WiserEarth - How Can I Get Involved?

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