If you’ve spent any time on the WiserEarth events, groups, or resources sections, it’s likely you’ve run into GreenEric. He’s the ‘Water guy’, always posting the latest activity, primarily on more efficient uses of the stuff. So who is he? What drives him? Could his answers to these questions inspire you to take a closer look at one of our most precious resources on earth?

First steps on WiserEarth

During a class at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA with permaculture activists Kat Steele and Ben Fahrer, Eric was introduced to WiserEarth. From there, he joined a number of groups including Northern California American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association.  He became an inspired contributor and administrator of this group and then expanded out to create the Graywater Solutions, and Green Infrastructure-Low Impact Development Solutions Groups.

Boots on the ground

Eric has a broad background as a civil and environmental engineer.  He designs and builds green infrastructure, including graywater and rainwater catchment systems, living roofs and floating treatment wetlands. He has been working primarily with Hyphae Design Laboratory, an innovative ecological design firm which emphasizes regenerative ecosystems in design and construction. He recently designed a graywater system for the Esalen Institute and led the installation as a part of Kat Steele’s Ecoliteracy in Action class.

Eric’s career path encompasses restoration and transition.  “I used to do projects where I was cleaning up soil and groundwater contamination.  While that is very interesting and valuable work, I eventually realized that it’s more important for our society to transition to a sustainable future.  Cleaning up messes from the past is important, but unless we can create sustainable systems, our systems and infrastructure will break down and then everything will be a mess.”

In the past few years, Eric has transitioned to working with sustainable water infrastructure.  “I work with people who want to be more sustainable with their water use, but don’t know how.  A lot of times, people will be doing a remodel or building a new house, but the builder or architect won’t have the expertise with water reuse and water efficient technologies, so they look to people like me to design them a system. I put it together and give them numbers, how much they save per year in gallons and dollars. They’re sold on the idea generally, but just don’t have the information.”

It affects us

Eric finds satisfaction in working out water-use solutions, and then spreading the news. WiserEarth is one tool in his getting the word out. “Water issues are big in California,” he notes of his home state. “It can be a challenge to make the economic case.  People want a quick payback, but water is getting more scarce and it will definitely be more expensive in the future.  California’s population is expected to double by 2050, and the supply is expected to drop due to climate change and a decrease in the Sierra snow pack.  The per capita water supply will keep dropping, so the only thing we can do is increase efficiency and reuse.”

Graywater, for the uninitiated, refers to any water used for washing in the home, everything from dishwater, shower, to laundry and sink, excluding toilet water. A graywater system treats and filters this water so it can be used for irrigation, supplementing water from the tap.

“In a sense, graywater is pioneering, ahead of the curve,” Eric says. “If we conserve water through efficient landscaping and graywater, every gallon saved is a gallon that doesn’t have to be taken from a faraway ecosystem, pumped across the state, treated and then pumped to the tap. And if you combine that with rainwater catchment, you can take the water from those watersheds and use it two or three times.  For example, we can design a system to catch the rain for free off the roof, store it, then use it to wash our clothes.  We take the graywater from the washing machine to irrigate an apple tree in the back yard, then eat the fruit, compost the apple core and build the soil, which sequesters carbon.  It’s all about closing the loop and modeling our human systems on the stable models of nature.”

Saving water also saves energy that is used to pump it, treat it to potable standards and then treat the wastewater before it is discharged to the environment.  According to the California Energy Commission, “water-related energy uses annually account for roughly 20 percent of the state’s electricity consumption, one-third of non-power plant natural gas consumption, and about 88 million gallons of diesel fuel consumption.”

“The potential is tremendous. We estimate that you can derive around forty gallons per person per day of graywater production, and half of that water is used for landscape irrigation,” Eric comments. “If you can make your landscape more water-efficient, use graywater and/or rainwater, you can save a lot of water and not feel guilty taking a nice long shower when you need one.”

Political issues play a role, and graywater professionals work to reassure public health officials about safety concerns. Eric has been involved with the graywater community in lobbying state officials to rewrite the graywater plumbing code. The code has recently been changed to allow people to install simple systems without a permit.

Making connections

Eric recalls meeting Frank Patton, one of the other editors. “I called him up six months ago, and talked to him about water and his experiences with the site.” The two had a common bond in their interests as well as relating on the challenges of forming online groups and distributing content, and later met in person at the editors meetup. He enjoys being a part of the editors’ community. “Participating in the editors group creates more unity and connection on the site,” he says, “and the local event was really nice.”

The site has also broadened his circle in some ways. Eric says, “WiserEarth is a way to encounter others that may not live nearby, often people that have created their own groups. It’s interesting to see the presence people can create online. It’s funny because sometimes I recognize people by their handle rather than their name and vice versa. Some people I’ve run into have said, ‘Oh, you’re GreenEric!’ It feels good to know that my efforts are being felt. ”

How to help

“I keep trying to get the word out about issues that I feel are important,” Eric says, “It feels good to post an event and make a connection.  It benefits both the people attending the event and the people hosting the event.  You make a connection and the network of sustainability is strengthened.”

His advice to people who want to get involved: “You can learn a lot of information from the resources on my sites, attend the listed events and get hands-on experience with workshops. Find an opportunity to get out there and get your hands dirty!” Eric concludes, “The main thing to remember is that WiserEarth is a constant creation of online community. Community is what we make it. I see a lot of groups where one or two  people are doing all the work. So get involved, start adding something, don’t just keep events to yourself, let other people know. Let’s make it a vibrant, active place to connect and build a sustainable network together!”

Eric’s graywater installation class at Esalen

More resources: WiserEarth Editors Group (editors moderate content, help make connections between members, and provide support to new members)

We are sharing some of our standard advice for designing an effective online group. We believe the key to any effective group is simplicity. Relatively few calls to action, a lack of clutter, and a limit to functionality. Do you have any ideas to share?

These suggestions are mainly about the design and layout of the group. We have written about purpose, membership, and content in other posts:

• Be upfront with your purpose: You created your online group for a reason. Share that somewhere accessible for your members, especially if you have a public group and want to recruit new members. On WiserEarth you can edit the tagline and description for your group by going to Admin Tools > Edit Group Details. A good example of this would be the Earth Charter + 10 Forum
• Emphasize only one or two action steps: Decide what you want your visitors to do and put those items at the top of your group. On WiserEarth you can use a Bulletin Board module and provide text and hyperlinks out to where you want your members to go. A good example of this would be the Weversity
• More functionality equals more frustration: For every new feature there is more to learn, more to tweak and configure, more to customize, more to read about in help documents. If you can choose which features to display on your group take advantage of it. For example, on WiserEarth, Group Administrators can add and remove any of twelve different modules. Just use the features that you need – it will make your group members happier.
• Go beyond text: Videos and photos can communicate a great deal of information in a brief and entertaining way. WiserEarth allows you to embed YouTube Videos and add photos, so you can quickly incorporate these alternate methods into your discussion. A good example of this would be Story of Stuff
• Allow for some white space: Research shows that readers enjoy websites more when they aren’t too dense with text.
• Make activity visible: Highlight your members’ contributions and stroke a few egos! If you can, look to see if your group has a way to track and share activity. On WiserEarth you can see group activity by going to Admin Tools > View Group Activity.

More resources: Overview of WiserEarth Groups, To create your group, click here, To see how others are customizing and using their group, click here

It’s great news that WiserEarth has become such a global resource for the non-profit environment and social justice community. But we need to help the billions of non-English speakers join the community for their nonprofit sustainability work. Speaking just English isn’t good enough! Can you help us by volunteering or chipping in?

Volunteer on a translation team

There are currently 4 translations teams with a total of 40 volunteers. As you are reading this, the site is being translated into French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. We are hoping to translate WiserEarth into at least five other languages including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic and Indonesian as well as one indigenous language over the next 12 months. Love to translate? 2 hours per week of your time will make a big difference: contact camilla [at] wiserearth.org if you are interested.

Chip in to fund local community managers

We currently have three local community coordinators in France, Mexico and Brazil (see their quotes below). More people are approaching to expand in other languages. Help us raise the funds needed to provide support or the local community coordinators and their teams of volunteers. Be a part of our global fundraising for this crucial part of WiserEarth! We have set a goal of $10,000 before December 15, 2009.

Help us make WiserEarth a true global community! Please pass on this appeal to your friends.

Best,

Peggy Duvette
WiserEarth Director

Juan Carlos, WiserEarth Mexico/Spanish Regional Coordinator “As the world grows smaller, the challenge of effective and multicultural communication, becomes more and more relevant to ensure a safe pathway towards a society living under the principles of cooperation, respect and justice; WiserEarth is key to meeting this challenge.”

Theresa Williamson, WiserEarth Brazil/Portuguese Regional Coordinator “The tools WiserEarth has developed for sharing content across civil society worldwide are powerful and in constant evolution. We are translating them with the specific aim of supporting Brazilian and Portuguese-language-civil society generally.”

Over the past 6 months, I’ve had the pleasure of facilitating a community of practice for funders supporting networks. The question that keeps coming up is: how to make the case that working through and investing in networks will produce the intended social impact? At the same time, the belief in network impact is becoming more widespread–-the potential for organizing without organizations, the power of developing a strategic understanding of webs of relationships, and the promise of openly sharing both data and new knowledge.

This piece was originally published on WorkingWikily by Diana Scearce.

There is more and more experimentation with network models for social impact. There are a handful of funders investing in these experiments. Yet there is only limited evidence to make the case that networks work. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make that case. As a strategy consultant, not an evaluator by training, I come to this with truly a beginner’s mind. Here a few things I’m learning about assessing network impact in collaboration with the network funders community of practice.

• Top of the list: assessing the impact of networks is really hard.
• People participate in networks for multiple reasons (and similarly, funders fund networks for multiple reasons). It’s hard to align around and clarify desired outcomes – and/or figure out how to assess progress towards multiple sets of outcomes.
• Network impact can be hard to see. It’s difficult to measure causality (or even simply track activity) in decentralized, complex systems with lots of players.
• Some of the most powerful network impact may be unexpected. How do you measure the impact of emergent, self-organized action?
• Finally: it can take a really long time to achieve measurable impact.

Added to the challenges is the fact that, according to evaluators I’ve spoken with, the tools for assessing emergent systems are lacking. (Social network analysis does seem to be promising in some cases, though it is resource-intensive). Kudos to the evaluators who are bravely taking on the challenge of measuring network impact!

Challenges aside, what can you measure? I really like the framework set out by Madeline Taylor and Pete Plastrik in Net Gains, and Bruce Hoppe and Claire Reinelt in “Social Network Analysis and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks” (both highly recommended reading). In both these thought pieces, the authors outline three levels of network impact to consider:

• Connectivity: what is the nature of relationships within the network? Is everyone connected who needs to be? What is the quality of these connections? Does the network effectively bridge differences? Is the network becoming more interconnected? What is the network’s reach?
• Overall network health: how healthy is the network along multiple dimensions (participation, network form, leadership, capacity, etc.). How have participants been impacted by the network?
• Field level outcomes: what progress is the network making on achieving its intended social impact (e.g. policy outcomes, innovative products)? How do you know?

The network funders community of practice has been working on this question: how do you make the case, and what principles to keep in mind when assessing the impact of networks? Here are few starting points:

• Be clear about 1) the network’s value proposition, 2) expectations for the network, 3) to whom is the network accountable, 4) the donor’s role in the network
• Pay attention to network history and context
• Gather data from diverse perspectives, including feedback from constituents outside the network
• Emphasize learning over near-term judgment, so that the purpose is not punitive
• Focus on meaningful contribution toward impact
• Integrate into an ongoing process of network learning and adaptation
• Build capacity to conduct self-evaluation

What are you learning about making the case for network impact? How do you know networks work?

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The climate change movement has been gaining momentum in recent months. We’ve felt it building at organizations like 350.org in preparation for the major UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen this December. We had a call with social media coordinator Joe Solomon of 350.org to get a sense of what it’s like to be in the middle of it all, and his thoughts on how to effectively network for a cause.

The person: Joe has roots in technology and social change, and figuring out web-connected community solutions for an array of causes. He was the Director of Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge and joined 350.org to get closer to the point of impact. “The climate movement affects many of the issues of our time,” he said. “It’s also a matter of survival.” The desire to help the world came early for Joe: he can remember drawing pictures against rainforest logging in third grade.

The connection: He’s no stranger to WiserEarth, having helped us network with NetSquared for our first WiserTuesday Paris event!

The plan: At the time of the interview, 350.org was leading up to the International Day of Climate Action, and Joe mentioned excitedly: “Twitter and Facebook are on fire right now! It’s such an offline, collaborative movement that explodes onto the online scene. We’re really riding a wave, with at least two dozen active 350 organizers on Twitter – with accounts like @350Vermont, @350Peru, @350London — And so many new people are jumping on board, asking, ‘Where am I going to be on October 24?’”

The advice: Joe has been working in the social media arena for some time, and offers some tips on how to get impact:

• Highlight your partners’ efforts: “350 is a super collaborative campaign. We’re trying to build and demonstrate a movement, and like any open movement, it’s not about us — as much as it’s about a collaborative groundswell of organizations, organizers, rock climbers, messengers, bloggers, super models, photographers, you name it — all working to get us back to 350. We’re always trying to highlight our friends at Greenpeace, TckTckTck, Avaaz, Powershift, 1Sky, Oxfam, Transition Towns – and hundreds more, plus all the thousands of grassroots organizers who are the reason why we’ve collectively come this far…. How can your organization act more like a movement and shine the light on what others are doing to change the world with you?”
• Try open threads on Facebook: “As a way to support the conversations that were already happening, we started inviting organizers and supporters to connect around ‘open threads’ in Facebook. Literally, we would start an update with ‘Open Thread:’ and then share quick updates and a few questions. So far, we’ve had some very positive results.”
• Start or support a Twitter hashtag for your cause or sector. In the global climate movement headed towards Copenhagen, there’s #350ppm, #COP15, #FABTreaty, and others. What hashtag can help your cause area connect, share resources, and collaborate for more effective impact?
• Group people together using TweepML: This is a way to highlight a group of community members via a list that any Twitter user can follow all at once. 350 tries to employ this to connect organizers to each other.  Joe says, “There are also Twitter Lists, but what’s great about TweepML is community members can actually follow each other. The stats from the 350 Organizers list claim to have generated over 1,300 followers. Now we just gotta figure out a way to help the 1,077 350 badge wearers connect! Ideas welcome!”
• Don’t feed, inspire: In the days before the International Day of Climate Action, 350 turned off all feeds. They don’t pipe their blog into Twitter or Facebook, and purposely choose where to share that people will find useful and inspiring, and can connect around. The feeds are still off.
• Get face to face: “We’re way ahead of ourselves in mastering how to connect on Twitter, Facebook, and other online communities. We’ve discovered the most brilliant ways to build our lists. We’re all of us social media gurus. Now it’s time to invite our supporters outside, empower them as leaders, and together transform our communities for the changes we all seek. WiserTuesdays are an amazing step in this direction.”

The hope: Joe says, “In December (next month!) world leaders from every country on the planet are meeting in Copenhagen to craft a global climate treaty. What’s at stake at that meeting is massive — a treaty that’s in line with what science and justice demand could be key to turning the tide on global warming and getting our planet back on a sustainable path.

“The hope we can act on is that we keep the pressure on, through delivering 350 photos directly into the hands of our leaders, and other actions — December 12 looks like it’s gonna be big — to help world leaders see just how powerful and global this movement has become.”

The reward: “It’s incredible to watch all of us rise together, to be a part of this call to action around a scientific data point that’s above our organizations’ walls and shows how widespread and collaborative the climate and social justice movement really is,” Joe reflects. “Many thanks to WiserEarth for all your support, for being such a great resource, and for inspiring calls to action as strong and adorable as this one:

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Last Monday, WiserEarth hosted its first ever face-to-face gathering of our volunteer editors. Seven California-based editors plus a few staff met to discuss the role and future direction of editors. We didn’t just talk, but engaged in a friendly game of four-square. How does your organization take volunteer moderators to the next level?

The WiserEarth editors group is a group of active members (currently 42) who moderate content, support new members, and help people network. In order to become an editor you have to have been on the site for at least three months, use it heavily, and be somewhat knowledgeable about WiserEarth’s policies. In return, you gain some special content-moderating privileges and the active engagement of Bowo, WiserEarth’s Chief Editor.

For some of our editors it was the first time they had met face-to-face despite years of online collaboration. But in no time we were working away on the common goal of improving the editor role at WiserEarth. Some of the lessons learned from the gathering can be summarized as follows:

• Make tasks bite-sized: We live in hectic times, deadlines and discrete tasks are real motivators.
• Make sure responsibility goes hand-in-hand with training: If there is a certain level of expertise you want all your moderators to have, engage them with a set of fun (but brief) tutorials and be available for questions.
• Face time matters: In online communities, it isn’t always possible to meet face to face, particularly if you work with a global community as we do.  In this case, a phone call or video chat is advised. But if volunteers do live close by, invite them to stop by. In an hour, you can often find out who they are better than in several months of online contact.
• Focus on the people, and good work follows:  Your volunteers have their own reasons for wanting to donate time to your organization. If you figure out their passions and give them tasks which ignite those, you will have loyal helpers.
• Engage your volunteer moderators’ unique skills: Some will be wonderful at networking, others at building your content, still others at monitoring. Observe carefully, then guide them to the positions they are the strongest in.
• Have fun with them: Whether online or in person, volunteers return to sources of enjoyment. If you make some time for playing games, joking, and keeping it light, they’ll have a higher tolerance for getting down to business.

All in all, a very successful meetup! Do you have further ideas for activating your volunteers in higher positions of responsibility? Let us know!

Left to Right: Mike Kwan, Angus Parker, Bedy Yang, Roger Eaton, Peggy Duvette, Frank Patton, Deborah Phelan, Eric Olson, Wibowo Sulistio, Honore Louie, Timonie Hood, Kerry Vineberg

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We would like to encourage you to become involved with the International Day of Climate Action! The momentum is building for Copenhagen…

In our last climate change post, we gave you background and a list of actions you can take. Now here is a little more detail on one of them. This Saturday, October 24, 350.org, along with a groundswell of friends and allies, is calling on individuals and organizations across the world to take action against climate change.

They encourage incorporating the number 350 into your event, at an iconic place in your community, and then uploading a photo of your action to the 350.org website.

With your help, 350.org will deliver these global images to the media and world leaders. Let’s show how diverse, large and unified the climate change movement has become!

So this Saturday, be a part of it! See what your community is up to in the climate change movement, or start your very own transformative action!

Find an event near you

Related post: Blog Action Day – Climate Change 2009

Where would WiserEarth be without the hard work of its contributors? If you’ve added an event or an organization, a resource or a job, you are one of our valued contributors. Each small step we take adds up to a huge wave of sustainable knowledge and action. We’d like to take this opportunity to profile some of our most prolific contributors who make WiserEarth the community it is today. Thanks for all that you do!

Kathryn McCallum (kathrynmccallum)

Why she’s on WE: I work collaboratively on environmental campaigns and WiserEarth gives me incredible tools to communicate with my teams. Having the wiki pages cuts time as we share and work on documents. The instant chat brings us all in the same place without having to install different software. The file library feature helps us share documents without having to email them back and forth. The whole workspace ends up being a diary of each person’s contributions to the project.

I have yet to really take my contribution into the wider WiserEarth community. So far I have mainly used it as a tool to communicate with project teams. I work from home and my teams are spread all around Australia so it makes collaboration powerful. Because the climate crisis is so urgent, collaboration is more important than ever. I also have two small children, so WiserEarth means I can check the workspace, without needing to commute and leave my home.

What inspires her to contribute: The purpose of my work is threefold: to leverage digital networks for climate action; to explore ways of communicating that lead to action and engagement; and to find the tipping points toward a vibrant, safe climate future.

A few favorite contributions: I’ve used WiserEarth as a workspace (The Hero Generation). It’s a tool to get things done.

John Rainbird (jonrainbird)

Why he’s on WE: I expect the same reasons many others are  – to connect with other folk passionate about justice and protecting this beautiful planet, the learn and finally hopeful to help effect some useful change.

What inspires him to contribute: I enjoy sharing my ideas and thoughts and getting feedback from others on them – I find that there is great synergy when a few people bend their minds to a common issue and  new ideas emerge and occasional revelations that elevate your own understanding of the issue.

A few favorite contributions: I have learned a great deal from so many people, it’s hard to choose I’m afraid.  I do really enjoy the sharing of great quotes though – like the one Bowo posted recently: “War does not determine who is right, only who is left…” – Sylvie Schapira or “The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones.” – John Maynard Keynes 

Juan Manuel Ledón Roig (ledon)

Why he’s on WE: I’m on WiserEarth because here I find a powerful way for creating meanings, sharing values and connecting the hearts of wonderful people, groups, organizations and communities of action… Based on the Truth that we are all one, I believe WiserEarth helps us to make this sense of Unity more visible, conscious and useful in order to build, all together, a better world.

What inspires him to contribute: What inspires me most to contribute is the possibility to create strong synergies of talent which help to turn “impossible dreams” into realities.

A few favorite contributions: EcoSITE (solution) and PAE Mexico (group)

Anthony Robinson (anthrob)

Why he’s on WE: I’m on WiserEarth primarily to use the space provided to our group (Commons Governance Work Group) both as a window for the research we’re doing to the WiserEarth community, and as a collaborate space for ourselves.

What inspires him to contribute: Wanting to share information and ideas with anyone inside or outside of our group.

A few favorite contributions: Bibliography, SIFCo Case Study (Slocan Integral Forestry Cooperative)

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In honor of Blog Action Day, we are sharing a few ideas about how to get involved in the Climate Change movement as the Copenhagen Conference nears. We will highlight a couple of unusual ways to contribute your energy to the cause and provide you the tools to seek out local opportunities.

As you probably have heard, the world’s leaders are meeting in Copenhagen from Dec 7-15 for a critical conference, the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009. So here is a bit of background on previous proceedings and what’s on the table this year:

The conference is also known as COP15. This stands for the 15th Conference of the Parties to the 1992 international climate change treaty, The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (or UNFCCC). The now-famous Kyoto Protocol, begun in 1997, is actually a set of binding rules applied to this treaty. The treaty itself contains no emission limits, so these limits must be determined through such protocols.

COP15 is designed to address the impending end of the Kyoto Protocol’s timeline (2012) by applying the Bali Road Map. The Bali Road Map (adopted at COP13) aims to finalize a binding framework for emissions, and other steps to curb climate change beyond 2012.

There are three pre-Copenhagen negotiation meetings this year, in Bonn, Bangkok and Barcelona, the first two of which have already occurred. The key discussion points include:

• Targets for emission reduction for industrialized, newly industrializing and developed countries and their varying responsibilities,
• Reducing the impact from deforestation (REDD), and
• How to transfer existing “clean” technologies to the developing nations.

What do you think? How should these problems and others be addressed? Here are a couple of ways you can participate and have your voice heard:

Find a Climate Change-related organization near you by using WiserEarth. Just click on this link and add in your location for a list of local organizations. Then click the links to find the contact information and websites. Many local organizations are addressing Climate Change in compelling but not so obvious ways. For example, Native Energy sets up windmills on Native American lands to reduce the use of fossil fuels, and Chicago Wilderness is a network of volunteers that maintain remnants of prairie ecosystems that are a sink for climate change gases. Volunteer and be a part of the larger movement!

The UN-led Seal the Deal Campaign aims to galvanize political will and public support for reaching a comprehensive global climate agreement in Copenhagen in December. The petition will serve as a reminder that our leaders must negotiate a fair, balanced and effective agreement in Copenhagen, and that they must seal a deal to power green growth, protect our planet and build a more sustainable, prosperous global economy that will benefit all nations and people.

Register for the 350.org International Day of Climate Action October 24. In case you haven’t heard – 350 is the most important number in the world – it’s what scientists say is the safe upper limit (350 parts per million) for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Speak Out: Tell leaders what you want to protect at Planet Change. Our leaders must include natural solutions to climate change in their legislation and agreements – tell them what you want to protect.

Watch and help promote Current TV’s green-themed video journalism at: current.com/green Or you can take it to the next level and become a journalist: if you’ve got a climate change story, you can become a member and submit a “pod” or short nonfiction video through their Current Journalism program.

Building a vibrant online community is hard work. It’s so easy these days to start online groups – for example, a few clicks and you can have a working group on WiserEarth. So what do you do if you start to think your community-building effort is going nowhere fast? You have lots of options – so don’t be antisocial and leave a ‘zombie’ group out there.

Failure is relative. As we’ve said before, it really helps to set goals and milestones early on, so you can measure your progress as you go along. Also, benchmark you expectations with other community managers to see if you’re being realistic. You may well find what you consider a failure is seen as a wild success by another. But also be honest. Don’t overestimate the interest people have in your issue, or forget that your prospective audience may be happily discussing your issues somewhere else, including at face-to-face meetings. So when you have come to the conclusion that you have a failed community on your hands, consider your options:

• Reinvest: Be patient. As Martin Reed says: “Too many people throw in the towel too early.” You can’t have the ‘if you build it they will come’ mentality. Strong communities take months and years to build, not days or weeks. Remember it takes time to build relationships, get people comfortable with the technology, and evangelize.
• Seek new investors: If you can’t put more effort into your community, look to see if anyone else is interested in the challenge. There may be an existing community member who is dying to take on a leadership roll. A change in leadership with new ideas may be what is needed.
• Merge: Look outside your community at the ‘competition’. Are there any community managers that would be interested in absorbing your membership base and content? Look for fit along culture, mission, technology, geography and demography.
• Close: In other words, shut down your group without finding a home for your members or your content. Of course, it’s the fastest thing to do, but you made an implicit promise with community members when they joined the group. Shouldn’t you honor it?
• Zombify: The least attractive option is to stay up online but without any formal acknowledgment that your community has ceased to exist.  In this case your group will lie zombie-like, waiting to grab unsuspecting people who think they have discovered a live community. In addition, you are also contributing to the ‘noise’ of the internet, making it harder for people to find what they are looking for.

WiserEarth is itself wrestling with the issue of public ‘zombie’ groups. Our current idea is to not list any groups in our directory that have less than five members or have been inactive for more than six months. What do you think of the idea?

Whatever you decide, be sure to engage your community transparently as you move along in this process. You may find community members feel a great deal of ownership and want to help out or at least be consulted. Depending on your situation, the ultimate decision on what to do may need to be made by your community. That is after you have investigated all the options and provided your recommendations.

Related resources: Is it time to give up on your online community? by Martin Reed, Why (most) online communities fail by Laurent Haug,  What we learned from Fashmatch by Jonathan Gheller, WiserEarth Group Description

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Car wrapping can take outreach to a new level while driving home new connections. Here’s an idea that’s definitely not preaching to the choir.

By adding a car wrap, any car can be converted into a full-body bumper sticker.  Car wraps are thin adhesive plastic custom-printed with graphics, messages, website or event information.  A car wrap completely covers the car and perforated panels can be used on the rear windows.  Car wraps can totally change the color of a car, and can be removed without damaging the paint.  They last 2 – 7 years, and can be ‘patched’ to update information.

I recently had my new Prius wrapped with a 350.org International Day of Climate Action design, created as part of a design competition.  Based on my experience, car wraps offer tremendous outreach opportunities.  I do feel guilty about the vinyl wrap material though and challenge product designers to develop more sustainable green car wraps.

Here are some tips for potential wrappers:

• Designing the wrap: Be sure to work with an experienced car wrap designer.  Many car wrap shops have connections to designers and portfolios you can review.  Keep the design simple so that your message is large enough to be seen when you’re on the road driving by at 55 mph!
• Crowdsourced wrap design: To share the message about your cause and (hopefully) get a great design, you can enter a brief in a car wrap design competition.  This provides more opportunities to create buzz and you’ll be able to choose from multiple designs.
• Roland’s design competition runs through May 2010 and accepts free brief uploads.  The 350.org International Day of Climate Action design I used was created by submitting a brief in this competition.  The competition is giving away over $40,000 in prizes and draws talented designers. There have been four 350.org entries so far and 45 more are planned.  There is a small fee if you choose to use a competition design, but it’s lower than a standard wrap design fee.
• Installing the Wrap: Once the design is finalized on your car templates, wrapping only takes 1-2 days and costs around $2,100.  Discounted pricing is generally available for wrapping multiple vehicles.
• Rapping about the Wrap: I’ve found that people are really interested in learning about 350.org and car wraps.  One person commented, “That’s a lot better than a car that says ‘Just Married.’”  People walking by and even drive thru employees have started conversations with me about what 350 means – now that’s outreach!

Have you seen any other nonprofit car wraps?  Please share your car wrapping for change ideas and suggestions.

In case you haven’t heard – 350 is the most important number in the world – it’s what scientists say is the safe upper limit (350 parts per million) for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. On October 24th, you can join people all over the world taking actions for a safe climate future. Visit: http://www.350.org

Three weeks ago, we asked you to share your passion or favorite organizations on our fan page wall, and win fabulous prizes. The day has arrived to award prizes to our great fans who spread the word about WiserEarth and talked about their passions and favorites. Thank you for growing our numbers to over 1,000 fans!

As promised, winners were selected randomly from qualified entrants. These results will be announced on Facebook as well. If you are a winner, please contact Peggy with your mailing address so we can mail you your prize!

Without further ado, we present the winners!

Grand Prize: Pachamama Awakening the Dreamer Symposium:  Clinton Callahan

Grand Prize: Bioneers Conference ticket: Ryan Van Lenning.

Recipients of autographed copies of the Blessed Unrest

• Kathi Frank
• Juan Manuel Ledón Roig
• Susie Fraser
• Sneha Rooh
• Cheryl McGovern
• Josh Hogan
• Brooks Cole
• Dana Patterson
• Lalia Helmer
• Dariel Gardner
• Allyson DeNieu
• Susmita Barua
• Maria Joao Soares
• George Osner
• Gabriela Cardenas
• Mike Zeidler
• Paul Salinger
• David Salinger
• Marc Paré
• Jessica Viola

Congratulations to our winners, and thanks to all our amazing and passionate participants! Please continue to share your passions and stories with us at the WiserEarth Community Newsletter, by e-mailing editors[at]wiserearth.org with the word “Newsletter” in the subject line!

Jennifer Ruwart, Global Program Director of WorldPulse, recently sat down with us to talk about her new program Voices of our Future. Together with the Press Institute, the OpEd Project, and the Empowerment Institute, Jennifer is creating a network of 30 emerging leaders who will harness the power of web 2.0 to broadcast social change news from the frontlines of some of the most forgotten communities in the world.

World Pulse began with the vision of Jensine Larsen, then a journalist in Burma and the Amazon, who noticed that many important stories never received global attention. World Pulse, the online media organization she founded, aims to change all that by engaging women writers to share their stories via a print magazine, bimonthly e-magazine, and PulseWire, the community newswire service. Women from over 140 countries follow PulseWire, where women can speak for themselves to the world and collaborate to solve global problems.  As Jennifer notes, “We have an editorial cycle of empowerment where women come onto PulseWire, connect, collaborate, and tell their stories in their own words. As their breaking stories rise to the top, other women’s stories provide context to these current news events, which you’re just not seeing anywhere else.”

The problem for World Pulse is, as Jennifer explains, “Many women that we’re targeting are just coming online for the first time. They don’t have regular access to the internet, they don’t know the basics of journalism, and then need a peer-support network to be comfortable sharing their stories with other people.” Whereas previously PulseWire had relied purely on submissions, World Pulse wanted a grassroots network of women correspondents breaking stories from underheard regions of the world. Jennifer saw this as an opportunity to teach women in the Global South about about web 2.0 and journalism, and these ideas merged to culminate in their newest project, Voices of our Future.

The project is centered around citizen journalism, rapid-response reporting, and op-ed writing, and trains women to report on the issues in their often tumultuous countries. World Pulse, in conjunction with partners, is now actively mentoring and supporting 30 women correspondents in 21 countries, from Mexico to Kenya, from Palestine to the Philippines. Jennifer shared with us the process by which they selected and nurtured the new network:

1. Open Application – 500 women entered, in a four-week long series of writing assignments, and praised the process as an enjoyable task, rather than an arduous application.
2. Selection Process – Ultimately, 30 were chosen based an on aggregate score, and in the later stages, voting by judges. According to Jennifer, the selection criteria ultimately “focused not on grammar or punctuation but poise, clarity [of] voice [and] accessibility to an external public.”
3. Mentoring, Training, and Stipends – Each correspondent receives writing assignments and support for the duration of the six-month program (including post-training). World Pulse has partnered with the Empowerment Institute to provide a mentor for each, who supports and nurtures them through the technical, financial, political, and emotional challenges. The Institute also recruited, oriented and coordinated ongoing support calls for the mentors. In addition, correspondents received online “editorial midwives,” through The Press Institute: professional journalists and editors who would guide them through the nuts and bolts of ethical journalism and the process of reporting in general. The Press Institute and the Op Ed Project generously donated their curricula for the first year of Voices of our Future, continue to participate in monthly question/answer conference calls, and provide ongoing journalism-specific support for correspondents. The Busemeyer Foundation provided need-based technical stipends for internet access.
4. Award – The Empowerment Institute is awarding a full-time scholarship for their certification program next year, allowing one correspondent to come to the US two times in 2010 for more training and exposure.

Jennifer also shared a few of the challenges they’ve faced developing the program. One has been language barriers: one correspondent who spoke no English had to drop out. A second is Internet access, and another correspondent was unable to participate until World Pulse provided home access.  Others have faced delays due to political and social upheavals.

Jennifer notes that the program has tried to strike a balance between maintaining commitment, producing a high-quality product, and being flexible and patient with the needs of the women, many of whom face oppressive government regimes and other delay-causing situations out of their hands.

Voices of our Future has already provided some great results despite being only partway through. Here are a couple of highlights so far:

• Halima, a Sudanese woman living in Saudi Arabia, was Skyping with Lubna Hussein (a Sudanese journalist sentenced to flogging for wearing pants) the day she was arrested. She courageously chose to publish the story. PulseWire was one of the first news wires to break the story, which later showed up in the Huffington Post and on the front page of the New York Times.
• Gertrude in Zimbabwe shared the best practice of women opening up a day center for AIDS orphans. This was picked up by Women’s News Network: the first of the program’s writings to be picked up by an external organization and re-broadcast to an even larger audience. She also met a woman she had not had social access to before. When she said she was doing a story for PulseWire, they connected and have now formed a task force for sexual violence against women.
• Gifty Pearl, from Ghana, met her mentor Cathy, who traveled to the country for work. Gifty Pearl so impressed her mentor’s colleagues through her intellect and her passion that she is now in contract talks for a project in Ghana.

The sheer volume of resource donation and the rapid success of the program have been profound. “I’ve never seen something develop so effortlessly and so fast, and with such a high impact,” Jennifer says. “I just think that we are filling a need, and people are responding to that need.”

This project was made possible by The Starry Night Fund of the Tides Foundation and the Beyond Our Borders Fund of the Colorado Foundation for Women.

Maybe you should be making better use of web services like YouTube, Slideshare, and Flickr. Here we share what makes these services so valuable as a complement to your own web publishing efforts, be they a website or a blog, and how they will enhance your social media efforts.

What is embeddable media? It’s when you take content that exists on one website (like a video on YouTube) and include it in an article that you publish on another. So why would you want to embed media from another site, rather than have it as part of your own like an attachment? Here we share the six arguments for why you should embed:

1. It’s viewed more often: Most services that allow you to embed their content have significant numbers of people on their own sites. This allows you to get two audiences for the price of one. For example, you may only have a few views of a YouTube video on your own website but many times that number on YouTube itself. On top of that, other people may embed your content on their sites. So you get a viral distribution of your content that wouldn’t be possible if you hosted it only on your own website.
2. It’s talked about more: Many services have social elements built in. For example, you can create channels to house your content, you can make friends, you can develop followers that subscribe to your content, and you can get feedback and encouragement. It all adds up to another way to make your content more relevant and accessible to your community.
3. It’s in the right format: Your content is optimized. Rather than just supporting one file / program / operating system, most services will take a file and make it viewable on all standard browsers. For example, SlideShare will take Powerpoints, OpenOffice and PDFs as an input.
4. It offers more functionality: For example, in the case of Flickr, you can turn a group of photos into a slideshow, or in the case of Slideshare, your readers can download your presentation in the file format of their choice. Or in the case of Google Docs or Zoho you can open up editing of your content.
5. It gives you free and easy-to-use statistics: Most services keep track of how many people have viewed your content and some show how many times it’s been embedded on other sites. Then if you aggregate your content in a channel (e.g. YouTube Channel) you can see the entire viewership across all your videos. It’s a nice set of data points to bring back to your colleagues, board and supporters.
6. It offers lower cost & better performance: Serving videos and other large-sized content from your servers can slow down your website and cost you money for the extra bandwidth. Generally, Google is going to provide a faster, more reliable service than you can!

If you want to see more advice on how to embed videos, music, presentations, PDFs, spreadsheets, documents and more into the webpages that you publish, read Amit Agarwal’s excellent post on How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website. WiserEarth currently allows embedding of YouTube videos, CurrentTV, GoogleVideo, Flickr, and PhotoBucket. We also use SlideShare and PollDaddy on our blog. Let us know what you would like to see available on WiserEarth by posting a comment below.

When Theresa Williamson, Executive Director of Catalytic Communities, was searching for a place to build her online community, she turned to WiserEarth. Now with three free WiserEarth Groups (Portuguese, Spanish and English) that work alongside CatComm’s own website, the organization can direct more of its energy toward helping Brazilian favela communities.

Theresa Williamson, the founder of CatComm, took some time out to talk to us about her work and how her organization is using WiserEarth. The story starts in 2000, when Theresa moved back to her roots in Brazil to conduct PhD research in city planning. She visited squatter communities, called favelas in Portuguese, and became inspired by their self-sufficiency and can-do attitude. The number of favelas has since grown from 600 to 1,000.

Theresa explains, “Communities were doing everything from setting up daycare, living centers for the elderly, soup kitchens, environmentally-friendly brick manufacturing, HIV prevention programs, fluoride treatment, to their own sewage systems, just about anything you could think of.”

She realized that no one was aware of the creative ways these communities were addressing their needs. As the internet began to spread to Brazil, she founded Catalytic Communities to network these communities together and increase their visibility.

She and others, initially on a volunteer basis, started an outreach office and community center in Rio, along with a website focused on community solution-sharing.  Eventually they developed a site to support community social networking. However, their approach did not have as many information-sharing capabilities as they had hoped for, leading them to seek other options. Soon they discovered WiserEarth, which already had much of the functionality they needed, plus a community interested in what CatComm had to share. Theresa says, “We were very excited about finding WiserEarth, because we were spending lots of money and time on developing a complicated website. Using WiserEarth means we are reaching new audiences and we can focus on our mission of outreach, direct support, and technical assistance to communities.”

So starting this summer, Catalytic Communities began to port their solutions and communities over to WiserEarth, while maintaining their branding and identity with a simple organizational website. They have already loaded an impressive 250 solutions into WiserEarth and set up three WiserEarth groups for each language in which they work. As a result, they have had the extra time and money to develop a complementary blog-based organizational website that launches today. Check it out!

Along the way, CatComm has also contributed to WiserEarth’s goal of global accessibility by spearheading our site’s translation into Portuguese. Seven volunteer translators have been hard at work and we are scheduling a launch around January 2010. CatComm will also be managing the site in Portuguese by providing a full-time Portuguese Chief Editor (like Bowo for our English version). The unreleased translation of WiserEarth in Portuguese is already being put to good use, as Theresa explains: “I just got back from doing a training in the Amazon with indigenous community leaders, and I used the beta Portuguese site to set up a group out there.”

Theresa also shared the fascinating story of Neuza Nascimiento, originally a cleaning lady from the Rio favela of Parada de Lucas, who learned to read by cleaning house for someone with a wonderful library. She began her own project when her nine-year-old son, with nothing better to do, declared his intention to go the community Funk Ball, an unsavory party in the street run by drug traffickers. On that day, she said she would take him and friends on a field trip instead. She took them to a park, and the next week the kids asked her excitedly where she would take them next. She slowly built a project, attended training, found mothers to help, arranged discounts with museums, circuses and buses, and, with the help of CatComm’s network, raised funds and formed her own nonprofit. That same field trip project, A Look Into Other Things, is now on WiserEarth.

Catalytic Communities is just one of the many inspiring organizations on WiserEarth that continues to grow and demonstrate the power of an effective network.

Related Posts: Don’t over invest in your website

Help send WiserEarth to Atlanta, Georgia next spring! We’ve entered four panels for the Nonprofit Technology Conference 2010. Please vote for your favorite idea!

NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference 2010 (NTC ‘10) takes place April 8-10, 2010. It’s the place for nonprofits to learn how to use technology effectively. We’ve entered four proposals ranging from social fundraising to community engagement, and now it’s time to vote! The more votes from you the more likely one of our panels will be chosen:

• Do you have the right balance of online/onlife communication? (vote here)
  
• It’s a Small World After All: How to Use Niche Social Networks to Spread your Message. (vote here)
• Eight Steps to Community Engagement. (vote here)
• Social Fundraising: Getting their attention without address labels (vote here)

We’re already excited! Don’t forget to vote at NTC 2010! Thanks for all the work that you do, and hope to see some of you there.

“Reveillez l’entrepreneur social qui est en vous’ (see above for my translation of this French title) was the name given to this inspiring one day event for social entrepreneurs which I attended last Thursday at la Ruche in Paris. A one day workshop where inventors of sustainable solutions to socially responsible start-ups came together to exchange ideas, connect and re-energize.

La Ruche (French for beehive) is a collective workspace in Paris dedicated to social innovation and entrepreneurship. It focuses on helping to build communities which support collaboration and the sharing of best practices.  They currently have 50 residents there working full-time and about 20 part-time.

World Cafes as a way to create collaboration through conversation

What I enjoyed about the event was that it wasn’t your standard faire of formal presentations. Instead, it was set up as a series of networking and learning opportunities. Social entrepreneurs would be led from one session to the next by hosts carrying chalk boards inviting them to participate in different ways. From visits to the la Ruche workspace to panel discussions, to live video conference link-ups with representatives from similar entrepreneur workspaces in Toronto, Edinburgh and New York, there was pretty much something for everyone.

However, the sessions that drew the most interest were the World Café conversations where participants were invited to sit at circular cafe-style tables and initiate discussions. Each group would be invited to come up with ideas and solutions for questions and problems faced by entrepreneurs; What is a social entrepreneur? How to accept and avoid making mistakes? How to make networks work? Participants were invited to exchange different perspectives, make notes on white boards and doodle on paper table cloths to record their conversations.  After about 1/2 hour, they were invited to change tables (leaving one person behind), meet a new set of people and carry their ideas to a new table. After several rounds of conversations, all the groups presented back their discoveries and insights to the whole group. While the World Cafe concept isn’t brand new, it is a good reminder of how bringing people into small discussion groups can be a powerful way of sharing collective energy helping to expand the concept of conversation into effective problem solving sessions. It’s also a great way to meet people. Tom Atlee of the Co-intelligence Institute writes about ‘conversation’:

We are in conversation — all of us, all the time, at more levels than we know — turning together. Waking up is our emerging realization that we can converse more consciously, learn to do it more knowledgeably and heartfully, inspired and inspiring, and thereby evolve together with — and into — greater wisdom, wholesomeness, and grace… turning, together.” (Source: World Cafe Community Blog)

Interested in creating your own world cafe conversations, find out more or join in the conversations taking place at WiserTuesdays in Paris, or set up one of your own WiserTuesday events by contacting me: camilla[at]wiserearth.org.

Workspaces for social entrepreneurs can now be found in many cities around the world. Here are just a few (please do add more in the comments section): Toronto, Canada – Centre for Social Innovation New York – Green Spaces Paris – La Ruche Edinburgh – The Melting Pot London – The Hub Bristol, England – The Hub

The WiserEarth blog has been running for six months and we thought it was time to find out what you think. So we’ve got a simple poll for you. Let us know what you would like to see more of in the future. And whatever other feedback you want to leave, positive or negative, just make a comment.

Please help us to make this resource more useful to you. Thank You.
Angus, Bowo, Camilla, and Peggy

Photo Credit

Issue #3 of our community newsletter focuses on collaborations which are moving WiserEarth closer to its goal of global accessibility: the launch of a novel Parisian community event; translation of WiserEarth into new languages; and the debut of a new search experience to make finding people, groups and events that much easier.

• Parlez-vous le français?: Meet Tatiana Alem, a member of WiserEarth in Different Languages, who is translating WiserEarth content from English to Portuguese.
• WiserTuesdays: Go Local! Go Live! WiserEarth’s first official face-to-face networking event, WiserTuesdays, launches in the City of Lights on October 6, representing a novel collaboration between WiserEarth Paris, NetSquared and Paris’ La Ruche.
• What are you looking for? In the last week of September, something very useful, but very subtle, will be changing the way you use WiserEarth. We’ve listened to your frustrations about our search feature not giving you the results you want, and our team has been hard at work.

Special thanks to those who have already contacted us with story ideas for upcoming issues. As we go to press, our editorial team is sorting through your messages. So keep those emails coming! Send success stories or article ideas to editors [at] wiserearth.org and include “Newsletter” in the subject line.

Related Posts: 1st Newsletter: About, For and By the Community, 2nd Newsletter: A Deeper Look at WiserEarth

Photo source: kool_skatkat

Let’s face it, it’s easy for a nonprofit to get seduced by the latest web technology and distracted from their actual mission. This is even more the case with open source tools like Joomla!, Drupal, and Plone that promise free social websites at the touch of a button. What many people don’t realize is the cost of customizing some of these so-called free tools often runs around $40,000 in consultant fees and staff time. On top of that you are saddled with ongoing maintenance and hosting costs. Running your own souped-up website appeals to many because it implies control and ownership. But does this really help you in today’s social web? Here is a checklist to review before you take the plunge:

1. What is your goal? Take a step back and articulate what you want to achieve in terms of outcomes. For example, we want “the mayor to adopt a goal of recycling 80% of municipal garbage.” You may be surprised to realize that you don’t need a technology solution at all.
2. Where is your audience? If 90% of them have Facebook accounts you probably want to go to their online home. Don’t unrealistically expect a large proportion of them to sign up for your website. Conversely, if 90% of your audience doesn’t go online, look to an offline approach and consider targeting the 10% who are online as influencers and disseminators of your content.
3. What is your budget? Nonprofits are tightening their belts as never before. Can you really afford a costly new technology project? Have you got a contingency plan if your project goes over budget? Web-based tools offer a world of possibilities for free or very small fees of around $20/month.
4. Is controlling your brand a driver? One argument for managing and hosting your own web presence is that it offers you control. But I would argue that gives a false sense of security. Managing your brand today means listening to conversations on the social web that others are having about you and engaging those people when there are inaccuracies.
5. Can you afford not to experiment? Hosting and managing your own web presence is a lot like buying an airliner and getting in the cockpit expecting to fly it from day one. There’s a reason budding pilots start off training on Cesnas – they’re cheaper to buy, easier to fly, and have low maintenance costs. Most online communities fail – better to learn the basics on a free or low-cost platform so you know what works and then upgrade later on. Who knows, you may find you don’t ever need to upgrade.
6. What functionality do you really need? Simplicity draws people into using a website. The latest technology often just puts people off. ListServs like a Yahoo Group may be all you need – in which case, why do anything else? Don’t let a missing ‘nice-to-have’ feature put you off from using a lower cost option.
7. Do you have your focus on community building? Online communities usually fail not because of the technology used, but because no one took the time to think through the community’s purpose and then manage it on a day-to-day basis. If you don’t own the website, you can focus your energy and budget on the people, not the technology.

We are not suggesting that nonprofits give up their simple websites or abandon their domains. Instead, think hard about where to invest your energy and resources going forward. Beth Kanter goes as far as to have a ‘Rule of Thirds’ - spend 1/3 of your effort and money on your web-presence, 1/3 on one-way communications like direct email, and a 1/3 on social media. In other words, don’t over invest in your website. More broadly, think about integrating your website with external services. For example, use your static website for the basics like contact info, staff and board member lists, and simple program descriptions. Then point to an external service(s) for your social community(s).  Below is a list of free or low-cost technology that you might want to consider. As always, remember to start with your goal in mind, not with the technology!

WiserEarth

• What: Easy to use, and surprisingly high-tech, WiserEarth Groups offer nonprofits a place to store files, conduct discussions, stream feeds, share resources, promote events, and map their members.
• Features: Member profiles, Events listings, Jobs Listings, Resource Listings, Organization Listings, Solutions Listings, Related Groups, Discussion Forums, Wikipages, RSS Feed (in), Group Search, Files, Comments, Ratings, Friend Feed, Recommended Content
• Audience: 30,000 nonprofit professionals and activists as members, and over one million visitors per year, 50% from the US, 30% from Europe and Canada, 20% from the Global South.
• Tip: Consider making multiple groups: for example, one for board members, one for staff on a specific project, and one for members. With a few clicks you can share the same content in all three groups.
• Price: Free for nonprofits, no advertisements
• Examples: Women’s Earth Alliance, Catalytic Communities, Northern California American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association

Ning

• What: Your own customizable social network with groups. Still each Ning network functions in a silo so its a little hard to share information between networks although there are sub-groups within each network.
• Social aspects: Member profiles, Events listings, Related Groups, Discussion Forums, Wikipages, RSS Feed (in and out), Group Search, Files, Comments, Ratings
• Audience: Broad cross-section.
• Tip: Not only are there 50 themes to choose from but you can ask a designer to customize the look even further.
• Examples: TransitionsUS, BioDiversity Research Institute

• Price: $24.95/month to go ad-free, $24.95 to remove promotional links, $4.95/month to point your domain name to the homepage, $10/month for premium support, and $9.95/month for an extra 10GB storage and 100GB bandwidth

Facebook Fan Page

• What: Simple lifestream for broadcasting information, board for member discussions, streaming feeds supported.
• Features: Member profiles, Events listings, Related Groups, Discussion Forums, Wikipages, RSS Feed (in), Comments, Ratings, Friend Feed
• Demographics: Broad cross-section.
• Tip: Stay away from Facebook Groups which don’t allow you to post into your member’s lifestreams. Secure your username for your fanpage like www.facebook.com/username
• Price: Free, although with advertising
• Examples: Beth’s Blog, WiserEarth

Linked In Groups

• What: Simple groupware with discussion forums, streaming feeds, and posting jobs.
• Features: Member profiles, Jobs listings, Related Groups, Discussion Forums, RSS Feed (in), Group Search, Files, Comments, Ratings, Friend Feed, Recommended Content
• Demographics: Professionals networking for jobs
• Tip: Don’t forget to cross-post content in larger existing groups with an overlap with your target audience and subject area.
• Price: Free.
• Examples: WiserEarth, Building Green

Yahoo Groups

• What: ListServ allowing web and email reading and posting. Why mess with success? If you want to exchange information using email – which can be accessed on dial-up on any computer – go no further.
• Features: Member profiles (limited), Events listings / Calendaring, Discussion Forums, Polls, Group Search, Files
• Demographics: Anyone with a Yahoo Account
• Tip: Due to the volume of email traffic generated by active groups there is a risk of burn out. You may want to stay moderated and invitation only.
• Price: Free.
• Examples: AfricanBirding, developmentjobs

Google Groups

• What: Discussion forum / ListServ supplemented with simple wiki editable pages.
• Features: Member profiles, Related Groups, Discussion Forums, Wikipages, Files, Comments, Ratings
• Demographics: Anyone with a Google Account
• Tip: Due to the volume of email traffic generated by active groups there is a risk of burn out. You may want to stay moderated and invitation only. A little easier to use than Yahoo Groups and most people already have a Google account. But not as many features.
• Price: Free
• Example: Sask Biodiversity Conservation Planning Group, Audubon Chapters of Florida

Twitter

• What: Microblogging service for sharing your latest content and listening to your community.
• Features: Member profiles, RSS Feed (in and out), Search, Comments, Friend Feed
• Demographics: Tech savvy crowd but becoming more mainstream
• Tip: Use TweetDeck to filter traffic into specific categories for easier monitoring.
• Price: Free
• Examples: WiserEarth, starfocus

Wordpress.com

• What: No hassle hosted blogging
• Features: Member profiles, RSS Feed (out), Polls, Search, Comments
• Demographics:Broad cross-section
  
• Tip: Not to be confused with Wordpress.org, the self-hosted version of the same open-source software.
• Price: Free, or pay extra for your own domain and to be advertising free.
• Examples: Greener Loudoun, Philanthropy Potluck

Photo Credit

The folks over at The Monitor Institute have been working with The Packard Foundation to explore this question. Their conclusion? Don’t worry so much about the social media tools and realize that you are building a social network. You need a ‘networked mindset’ characterized by ‘openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action’. We encourage you to read the full paper ‘Working Wikily 2.0′ but here is a summary of the more important points for people working in the social sector.

The paper starts by saying the new tools and the networked mindset are fundamentally changing the way we work. We can now:

• Self-organize without centralized planning and infrastructure
• Spread ideas and form groups more quickly than ever before as the new tools allow them to connect with others instantaneously and virally
• Overcome barriers to collaboration to find others who share specific passions, and to take on larger projects that would have previously been unthinkable
• Access knowledge, leadership, and expertise in places that were once beyond reach
• Share information quickly and with little effort, making more resources available and enabling people to easily build on the work of others
• Come together and disassemble as needed to achieve goals

This will allow us to “re-imagine our social activities— like organizing people, learning, generating ideas, and sharing information and knowledge—but with the potential to do them bigger, better, faster, and cheaper than ever before.” Nonprofit organizations, consultants, and members will continue to exist, but increasingly they will function and be seen as parts of broader networks collaborating towards common goals. This is great news for the social sector where most nonprofits are small and the challenges they address are overwhelming for one organization alone. It also echoes a similar point made by Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest: “Individuals are associating, hooking up, and identifying with one another. From that meeting and experience they are forming units, inventing again and again pieces of a larger organism, … assembling these into a mosaic of activity as if they were solving a jigsaw puzzle without ever having seen the picture on its box.”

To take advantage of this opportunity for social change we need to view our communities as social networks and learn new skills to manage them. Fortunately there are “user-friendly tools for data capture and social network analysis [that] now allow us to visualize the previously invisible web of relationships between people and organizations” and there are numerous case studies like Boston Green and Healthy Building Network that will show us how to use them.

Networks are not always the answer. Use a more traditional approach when your effort calls for specialized expertise or verifiable accuracy, efficiency and speed of execution, a command-and-control leadership style, and when it involves private and proprietary information. But realize that the term ‘network’ refers to a wide variety of structures and situations. The Monitor Institute has a nice typology to explain this:

Finally, the Institute shares their “Eight Lessons to Help You Start Working Wikily”:

1. Design your experiments around a problem to solve, not the tools.
2. Experiment a lot, invest in understanding what works and what doesn’t, and make only new mistakes.
3. Set appropriate expectations for the time and effort required.
4. Prioritize human elements like trust and fun.
5. Understand your position within networks and act on this knowledge.
6. Push power to the edges.
7. Balance bottom-up and top-down strategies for organizing people and effort.
8. Be open and transparent; share what you’re doing and learning as a matter of course.

Resources: Working Wikily 2.0, Monitor Institute Blog

Related Posts: Network Mapping, How to weave a tighter community, What network stage is your community?

We are always on the lookout for good advice on how to build stronger online communities. Recently, we read ‘18 Rules of Community Engagement’ by Angela Connor. In less than 90 pages she shares plenty of hard-won tips and advice. Angela Connor is the Managing Editor of User Generated Content at WRAL.com. In the 18 months after launching their online community, GOLO, she grew it to over 11,000 members. It’s well worth the short read, especially if you manage a community - online or offline.

If you are trying to grow and nurture your online community like us, you will appreciate her approach. Before Angela gets into ‘the Rules,’ she first presents three short framing chapters. The first, ‘If you build it, will they come?’ dispels an old myth. As Angela says: ‘Providing the tools is only the first step toward building and growing communities and it isn’t the most important one.” She goes further by sharing why communities fail and the importance of community managers. In the second chapter, called ‘User participation and the 90-9-1 principle’, she suggests that a community manager’s goal is to break the paradigm. In the third chapter, called ‘The road to engagement,’ she shares her bottom line: “Give people something to talk about, engage them, and provide useful information’. Sounds simple enough, but remember to follow ‘The Rules“:

1. Stroke a few egos
2. Don’t be pushy
3. Provide useful information
4. Ask Questions
5. Use your influence
6. Pour on the compliments
7. Know and respect the culture
8. Complain, Complain, Complain!
9. Make it Personal
10. Seek expert advice and opinions
11. Ask for help
12. Accept and respond to criticism
13. Make small talk
14. Tune out troublemakers
15. Showcase and acknowledge good work
16. Don’t try to please everyone
17. Manage expectations
18. Realize your work is never done

Book information

• Amazon: 18 Rules of Community Engagement
• Author: Angela Connor
• Publisher: Happy About
• ISBN-13: 978-1600051425
• ISBN-10: 1600051421

Related posts: Eight steps to community engagement. For a further review of the book, check out a post by Martin Reed over at Community Spark.

We are always on the lookout for good advice on how to build stronger online communities. Recently, we read ‘18 Rules of Community Engagement’ by Angela Connor. In less than 90 pages she shares plenty of hard-won tips and advice. Angela is the Managing Editor of User Generated Content at WRAL.com. In the 18 months after launching their online community, GOLO, she grew it to over 11,000 members. It’s well worth the short read, especially if you manage a community - online or offline.

If you are trying to grow and nurture your online community like us, you will appreciate her approach. Before Angela gets into ‘the Rules,’ she first presents three short framing chapters. The first, ‘If you build it, will they come?’ dispels an old myth. As Angela says: ‘Providing the tools is only the first step toward building and growing communities and it isn’t the most important one.” She goes further by sharing why communities fail and the importance of community managers. In the second chapter, called ‘User participation and the 90-9-1 principle’, she suggests that a community manager’s goal is to break the paradigm. In the third chapter, called ‘The road to engagement,’ she shares her bottom line: “Give people something to talk about, engage them, and provide useful information’. Sounds simple enough, but remember to follow ‘The Rules“:

1. Stroke a few egos
2. Don’t be pushy
3. Provide useful information
4. Ask Questions
5. Use your influence
6. Pour on the compliments
7. Know and respect the culture
8. Complain, Complain, Complain!
9. Make it Personal
10. Seek expert advice and opinions
11. Ask for help
12. Accept and respond to criticism
13. Make small talk
14. Tune out troublemakers
15. Showcase and acknowledge good work
16. Don’t try to please everyone
17. Manage expectations
18. Realize your work is never done

Book information

• Amazon: 18 Rules of Community Engagement
• Author: Angela Connor
• Publisher: Happy About
• ISBN-13: 978-1600051425
• ISBN-10: 1600051421

Related posts: Eight steps to community engagement. For a further review of the book, check out a post by Martin Reed over at Community Spark.

Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, has some interesting things to say about the rise of social media and its impact on membership based nonprofits. He says, the world has moved on from the old model where non-profit called you a member, you gave them money, and they gave you a newsletter. This was a one way communication approach, with the organization at the center like a star, broadcasting light to its members. Now smart nonprofits are moving to convene small groups of members interested in specific issues thereby fostering lateral links that function independent of their organization. David Wilcox over at the Social Reporter blog has written a nice summary post about the video below. You can also listen to Clay share his thoughts directly:

Photo Credit

Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, has some interesting things to say about the rise of social media and its impact on membership based nonprofits. He says, the world has moved on from the old model where non-profit called you a member, you gave them money, and they gave you a newsletter. This was a one way communication approach, with the organization at the center like a star, broadcasting light to its members. Now smart nonprofits are moving to convene small groups of members interested in specific issues thereby fostering lateral links that function independent of their organization. David Wilcox over at the Social Reporter blog has written a nice summary post about the video below. You can also listen to Clay share his thoughts directly:

Photo Credit

WiserEarth is now sharing our information through Social Actions - a web service that gathers events, groups, jobs, and donation opportunities from more than 50 sources.

Social Actions helps people find and share opportunities to make a difference. Not only are these actions available on the website but they are also syndicated through more than 35 widgets, plugins, extensions, and mobile applications. That means the next time that you create a public event, group or job on WiserEarth people on all sorts of different websites are going to find out about it.

This has all been made possible through the WiserEarth API which was developed with the support of the WiserEarth community.

WiserEarth is now sharing our information through Social Actions - a web service that gathers events, groups, jobs, and donation opportunities from more than 50 sources.

Social Actions helps people find and share opportunities to make a difference. Not only are these actions available on the website but they are also syndicated through more than 35 widgets, plugins, extensions, and mobile applications. That means the next time that you create a public event, group or job on WiserEarth people on all sorts of different websites are going to find out about it.

This has all been made possible through the WiserEarth API which was developed with the support of the WiserEarth community.

WiserEarth is connecting people working on social justice and the environment issues. We have set a goal of 1,500 fans on Facebook by September 31st. Join now for the chance of winning cool prizes.

WiserEarth serves the people who are transforming the world. It is an international directory and networking site that connects and empowers the largest and fastest growing movement in the world - the millions of people and organizations that address social justice, poverty, and the environment. WiserEarth was founded by Paul Hawken and is based on his book Blessed Unrest.

To become part of the community of changemakers follow these three easy steps:

1. Become a Fan of WiserEarth on Facebook: www.facebook.com/WiserEarth*
2. Share your passion or favorite organizations on the Facebook Page Wall
   
3. Update your Facebook status to “Become a WiserEarth fan, share your passion, and win a prize http://www.facebook.com/wiserearth“

22 winners will be selected randomly and will each receive one of the following prizes:

• 1 pass for a Pachamama Awakening the Dreamer Symposium anywhere in the world (One available).
• 1 day pass for the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California from October 16-18 (One Available).
• An autographed copy of Blessed Unrest dedicated in your name (20 available)

The results will be announced on Facebook and the WiserEarth blog on October 1st.

Help us spread the word!

* Existing Fans are eligible if they complete steps 2-3

WiserEarth is connecting people working on social justice and the environment issues. We have set a goal of 1,500 fans on Facebook by September 31st. Join now for the chance of winning cool prizes.

WiserEarth serves the people who are transforming the world. It is an international directory and networking site that connects and empowers the largest and fastest growing movement in the world - the millions of people and organizations that address social justice, poverty, and the environment. WiserEarth was founded by Paul Hawken and is based on his book Blessed Unrest.

To become part of the community of changemakers follow these three easy steps:

1. Become a Fan of WiserEarth on Facebook: www.facebook.com/WiserEarth*
2. Share your passion or favorite organizations on the Facebook Page Wall
   
3. Update your Facebook status to “Become a WiserEarth fan, share your passion, and win a prize http://www.facebook.com/wiserearth“

22 winners will be selected randomly and will each receive one of the following prizes:

• 1 pass for a Pachamama Awakening the Dreamer Symposium anywhere in the world (One available).
• 1 day pass for the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California from October 16-18 (One Available).
• An autographed copy of Blessed Unrest dedicated in your name (20 available)

The results will be announced on Facebook and the WiserEarth blog on October 1st.

Help us spread the word!

* Existing Fans are eligible if they complete steps 2-3

We’ve written before about how you can view your community as a network. Here we use the ‘network lense’ to show how communities typically evolve and what specific actions you might want to take to get to the next stage.

Source: Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving by Valdis Krebs and June Holley

Related posts: Using the Network Lense: Mapping your Community, How to weave a tighter community

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