Welcome to the Area of Focus Proposal and Discussion
The WiserEarth Areas of Focus taxonomy was created to classify the huge number of sustainability-related activities in which community members are engaged. As you can imagine, creating accurate labels has been an enormous challenge. WiserEarth currently has 46 main areas of focus and 372 sub-areas of focus, but we don't claim to have correctly captured and defined all of the fields in which our movement works. WiserEarth needs your help to improve this taxonomy's accuracy.If you feel that your work does not fall into one of these categories, or find that we have described one or more of them poorly, we invite your feedback: please propose new areas of focus, or submit a refined definition for an existing one.
To submit a new idea for discussion:
Label your idea with the heading <h2>Proposition Title</h2>, and give a two or three sentence explanation of the proposition and a definition if applicable.
To make comment about a proposition:
Please abide by the Values of the community AND always enter your username at the end of your comment. If you do not, your comments will be deleted. Begin your comment with either support or oppose and make sure a <br> is before and after your entire comment.
Social Entrepreneurship
USER: MarkGrimes: For Social Entrepreneurship I would suggest to the editor thinking about adding: Muhammad Yunus, Bill Drayton, micro credit, microfinance, micro loans, micro franchising.
Restorative Justice
USER: chaos weasel: Expecting this would go under the category of "Law, Policy & Property Rights". Or else "Human Rights & Social Justice". I see no near-miss that could be used as a broader AOF that would include it as a variant.Here's one draft description lifted from restorativejustice.org: "Restorative justice is a theory of justice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused or revealed by criminal behavior. It is best accomplished through cooperative processes that [respectfully accountably] include all stakeholders."
It derives from ancient traditions of indigenous people, who had not the dubious luxury of shadow projecting, scapegoating, stigmatizing, locking people up, and warehousing them indefinitely. It also relates to Restorative Practices in a broader context. It emphasizes an alternative to the prevailing dehumanizing rewards & punishments model of behavior control. I don't have an acceptably definitive short description, but defer to some contemporary specialists such as Denise Breton & Christopher Largent.
A couple basic references:
Breton & Lehman / The Mystic Heart of Justice
Hadley, ed. / The spiritual roots of restorative justice
Hope this helps.
chaos weasel
Design for Sustainability
I would love to see an area of focus entirely centered around design. Design is such an essential aspect of moving forward in a sustainable manner...This area of focus could be broken down to a number of different subportals: architecture, etc.
user: Molly
Comments (1 - 20 of 25)
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looking for "urban farming" and/or "urban agriculture", maybe i'm not seeing it?
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Hey, all:
I looked for "invasive Species" and only found it under activities associated with Marine Biology and Ecology. I suggest an Area of Focus entitled "Control/Eradication of Invasive Species" be placed in either Conservation or Ecology. Indeed, invasives impact a far broader range of habitats and ecosystems than just the marine environment. Thanks for the consideration. Re: Molly's suggestion, I agree fully with the need to include Sustainability in Design as a focus. Sustainability is pretty much a universal imperative. The alternative, the other side, is resource depletion, a practice in place for millennia, which is one reason we are in the state we are. SustainableDavid Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun! |
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Mmm... Finished reading through stuff at the Editor's Page.
Found out that, one of the role of Editors is to transfer suggestions, questions and bugs into their respective "container" in the form of an article such as this one (this explains the fact that this page is not editable by Users like myself). And that the automatization process within "Democratization" is designed replace this role of the Editors. However, I think, it might be helpful for users if they are notified about the function of this page, about the "Democratization" effort underway, and about entering their suggestion not here but through a new topic within the discussion forums corresponding to each need (suggestions, questions or bugs). Thus, the temporary solution, I believe, would be to write a notification and a link to respective discussion forums at the top of this page (including the advice of not doing it through Comments). And if possible, until "Democratization" and "a full-featured and usable" Discussion Forums is established, this article should be kept temporarily hidden from Users and Guests to prevent confusion. |
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I'm new here and am scavenging around the site for duplications and unnecessary redundancies. This page, in my opinion, happens to be one of them.
I think, in this beta phase of the site, every discussion regarding any aspect of the site's design, including AOFs should be done in "Discussion Forums". Any user who wants to improve any aspect of the site's design should go to one portal for it inside the "Discussion Forums". Instead of going to a page like this, or even worse, doing the discussion in the "Comments" section of a page. "Comments" should be reserved for a point-to-point one-way communication. Anything more thant that, should go straight to the "Discussion Forums" or "Send Me a Message". Examples: 1. I couldn't have found this page if I didn't look carefully at "Suggestions and Discussion on Areas of Focus" at the top of the "Browse Areas of Focus" page. The link to place there should have pointed to a "Site Design Improvements" portal within the "Discussion Forums" 2. In the discussion forums there are two topic which come close to the one discussed in this page, they are: - "New Areas of Focus" at http://www.wiserearth.org/forum/view/dcfd137839534b43807badc51923ab81 and - "Definitions of Current Areas of Focus" at http://www.wiserearth.org/forum/view/be36cdf949849700fe47297cbad52dd9 They should've come under the "Area Of Focus" subtopic within the "Site Design Improvement" portal within the "Discussion Forums" 3. In this page, normal user can only comment, while users who happens to be editors can edit the article and comment. Not a very neat way of conversing thoughts. That's all for now. I'm planning on scanning AOFs structure, definitions and presentation to consider possible improvements soon. Bowo |
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Hi Scott,
Thanks for you comments. I'll need to think more about the first part of your comment regarding the look and feel of the Areas of Focus portal, but I would like to respond to your comments on a men's portal. We have had a couple users suggest a men's portal and we've decided that their representation on WiserEarth was needed. In fact, I believe we will created a main Gender Area of Focus, and define all sub-portals to reflect both a male and female perspective. We've decided that there are no exclusively male or exclusively female issues, but two sides of the same coin and the Areas of Focus descriptions should encourage groups from the two sides to find each other and work together. We are working on the definitions and updates now. Should be out soon. Also, I've linked this wikipage to the two discussions we've had about this topic already if you would like to review them. Again, thanks for you contribution and thank you for all the good work that you do. Best, Mike |
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From a design and UI perspective, I think the look of the pages when you click thru to Areas of Focus really misses the boat. It strikes me as a demographic study more than a menu of options and I am hesitant to order anything from the menu. Why can't this page be a thumbnail image of each portal as the default (much like subportals are under most portals), its name, and at most a basic description? The list format could be a sidebar option if desired. All the numbers definitely need to go somewhere else though...
As well, on the positive side of all these numbers, I would really like to see numbers on the portals much more than on all the many subportals. Can we see these instead? As the editors of a portal, we never know exactly how much involvement we have, as there are overlaps in subportal totals and thus no way of knowing. The most badly needed portal? A MEN's portal. Wiser has women, children, and the elderly only, as though men don't need as much or more help in crafting the new world as these other groups. Let's have a MEN's PORTAL! I also agree very strongly with Molly that we need to break up design and have dialogued with Peggy about this. Scott |
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Re: Area of Focus
I suggest that Immigration legal services be added as a catagory. |
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<h2>Proposition Title</h2>
Please add Environmental Accounting as an area of focus! This is an emerging discipline in need of support and collaboration and it's very difficult to find current resources. |
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Hi Nathan-
Thanks for noticing! The keywords were removed by accident from the Living Wages portal page. You should find the keywords listed now. Please suggest any words/phrases you feel are missing from this list, the areas of focus definitions/keywords are in no way set in stone! |
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I noticed that in Living Wages, there aren't keywords, as there are in other areas of focus. Is it up to me to suggest a few, or do they exist somewhere?
Thanks, Nathan |
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Greetings from Earth, Nuet
A place where people who are studying/working on subjects that cross many disciplines would be a beneficial addition to WiserEarth. I believe that once we have a more complex discussion forum, users will be able to create meeting places around issues like those that interest you. peace, dan;el |
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ALTERNATIVE CATEGORY SYSTEMS NEEDED
In your 44/372 areas and subareas of FOCUS, I could not find one that is my "focus of action" although I have interest in all. What category would one working on making WISER EARTH function lie? I focus on complex patterns, from philosophies to emergent organizations. I often select META as a collection of categories that really don't fit the categorization process. A few other examples: Focus on vast individual differences in cognitive competency, learning, and epistemology as exemplified by the debate about Spiral Dynamics and other work into the deeper diversity of humankind. Who really are we humans - a query of significant import. I foresee one of the challenges of the WISER complex that in addition to the many areas of focus now attracting activism, there are thousands of invisible yet necessary areas of focus masked by hidden assumptions. This is a big issue, and I don't yet see where issues of this nature are to be discussed. This site is GREAT, and it may be premature for me to suggest major options: 1) Proposals for alternative category and subcategory systems. 2) Enable Cross Impact Matrix systems that enables persons to note where their attempted integration of sub categories is an important and primary focus in itself. |
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New AOF: Restorative Justice
Expecting this would go under the category of "Law, Policy & Property Rights". Or else "Human Rights & Social Justice". I see no near-miss that could be used as a broader AOF that would include it as a variant. Here's a draft description lifted from restorativejustice.org: "Restorative justice is a theory of justice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused or revealed by criminal behavior. It is best accomplished through cooperative processes that [respectfully accountably] include all stakeholders." It derives from ancient traditions of indigenous people, who had not the dubious luxury of shadow projecting, scapegoating, stigmatizing, locking people up, and warehousing them indefinitely. It also relates to <www.iirp.org/library/whatisrp.html> Restorative Practices in a broader context. It emphasizes an alternative to the prevailing self-defeating dehumanizing rewards & punishments model of behavior control. I don't have an acceptably definitive short description, but defer to some contemporary specialists such as Denise Breton & Christopher Largent. A couple basic references: Breton & Lehman / The Mystic Heart of Justice Hadley, ed. / The spiritual roots of restorative justice Hope this helps. chaos weasel |
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I would like to 1) suggest that 'greening' become an area, and 2) second the suggestion that a more cloud-like tagging-capable taxonomy be allowed. Thank you.
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The very fact you're all having this discussion seems to suggest that the people behind WISER haven't really grokked tagging - you simply can't create a taxonomy that works for everyone but should empower users to classify any object in any way they like using tagging like in delicious etc etc. sigh.
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<h2>Wildlife Management vs. Wildlife Law and Policy</h2>
I think that the definitions of Wildlife Management and Wildlife Law and Policy are very similar and should be discussed. I also think that the definition of Wildlife Law and Policy is too narrow in that it refers to U.S. wildlife law and policy. I propose that it is cited as an example, or the definition is made broader. -hapatrees |
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How about
biomaterials bioplastics There is a growing industry creating plastics from bio-based materials - both agricultural and forestry derived. And a growing movement to make sure that these plastics are made more sustainably than petroleum plastics are. There are issues in sustainable ag and forestry, green chemistry and good end-of-life reclamation (composting, recycling) to be addressed as well as a host of related social issues. See http://www.healthybuilding.net/biopolymer for more |
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Why can't you add a person like you would add an organization? For instance, I would like to make a profile for the architect/designer Paolo Soleri.
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More control over the image database would be great. You need to be able to delete images inserted into the database, or you need to have a way to archive older/unused material, otherwise things will get quickly out of control.
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1 to 20 of 25 Comments
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Perhaps under the "Worker" header category. Represents the segment of businesses owned by the people that work there. US Federation of Worker Coops and other regional and sub-regional local networks of worker coops exist and are activitely growing new locally/worker owned businesses and organizations.
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charles uchu