WiserEarth Suggestions

To Progressive Techies Everywhere,

We, the undersigned, would like to invite you to join us in an experiment. It’s an experiment in crowd-sourced funding for an important technology project, one that would benefit the entire progressive movement: developing the WiserEarth API.

We need your help raising $10,000 to make this project happen. Please make a donation today.

Here’s why: WiserEarth.org, the website launched in 2007 by Paul Hawken’s Natural Capital Institute (NCI) has already made tremendous progress toward its dream of providing a searchable, user-editable (wikified), online database with records on every organization in what Hawken calls the “movement of movements.” It’s a massive catalog, containing the hundreds of thousands of organizations around the globe working for social justice and environmental restoration, from neighborhood groups to international NGOs.

WiserEarth staff and volunteers have so far indexed more than 110,000 organizations. Over a thousand organizations are now using WiserEarth’s group tools. And the WISER platform was released as open-source in early 2008.

Yet one of WiserEarth’s greatest potential benefits has yet to be realized: the ability for other organizations to access and display WiserEarth’s wealth of data through their own websites. Imagine being able to have the greatest database of social change organizations ever assembled pumping through your group’s site, opening up new opportunities for collaboration. Imagine being able to show your users what organizations and individuals are already active in their area, just waiting to be mobilized. Look at the explosions of creativity around the Twitter, Google and Flickr APIs, and imagine all of the possibilities that emerge when we open up our digital doors to the datasets that can power a movement.

That requires completing the WiserEarth API. NCI’s developers are most of the way, but we’re told they need $10,000 to finish the project. NCI doesn’t have the money available to do it on their own, so we offered to help.

That’s why we’re appealing to you, the people and organizations who would most benefit from having access to this powerful resource. $10,000 is not a lot of money. A single large organization or foundation could easily cover it. But we believe that getting lots of progressive organizations and individuals to kick in smaller amounts to complete the WiserEarth API will do two important things:

1. We will all be more likely to use the WISER API, because we will be directly invested in its development.
2. Such a collaborative effort will impress bigger funders, who may have held back on supporting WiserEarth to date because relatively few organizations are using it. They will be more likely to support further development of the WISER platform, to all of our benefit.

Can you or your organization donate just $10, $20, $200, or $500 (or more) to help finish the development of the WiserEarth API? If just one hundred of us give an average of $100, we’ll meet this goal.

Sincerely,

NOTE: The OpenWiser project is an independent initiative organized by Leif Utne and Jon Warnow. All funds go directly to Natural Capital Institute to support the development of the WiserEarth API. Donations are tax-deductible.