WiserEarth's is now fully open source!  The platform code has just been posted on SourceForge into a nice 4mb tar package for the community download.  We'll post up the accompanying documentation and support files as soon we can!

https://sourceforge.net/projects/wiserplatform/

Thanks,
Honore

As a brand new member of WiserEarth, and also relatively new to the whole field of ways in which the web is developing, I'm very encouraged to find this conversation going on here. I like the frankness and directness of the conversation here and welcome both the original suggestions of Josh and the way people at WiserEarth have responded to them

As a relatively new user of Facebook, I have been intrigued to see its possibilities as a tool of communication - which are for the most part used in relatively trivial ways - and I think if you can get this site to be as user friendly as Facebook normally is or even better superior to Facebook that would be great.

By the way, if you having issues about funding developers have you thought of linking up with a University IT course. I read some interesting articles from a blog about how Stanford University had incorporated into one its courses an activity that got its students to develop Facebook applications

http://facereviews.com/2007/12/16/how-to-get-16-million-facebook-application-users/
http://facereviews.com/2007/12/19/wall-street-journal-covers-stanford-facebook-class/

Now as far as I can see the students at Stanford are earning money from doing this but I'm sure it would be possible to find a university that wanted to help develop something more socially oriented. Maybe you even have people on this site who could help offer this or find a way to offer it. And also that is why I guess it is important that you become truly open source

Glad to be of service Honore. Hope I didn't said something out of line there.

By the way, actually, putting an org's info into WiserEarth might actually helped that org's google search ranking. Though I haven't had an experience with orgs, googling for my name returned my WiserEarth profile on top of the search result (I've only been in WIserEarth for about 4 months), while my blog came second (I've blogged for about 8 months), and all my other online presence info came afterwards. This indicates that WiserEarth is quite optimized for search engine (at least for the name of people).

Though my online presence (commenting in blogs, writing online article, etc.) is still quite minimal, putting my info on WiserEarth jumped up the result in Google. This might suggest that the same result can be expected for a small organization with minimal web presence who wish to be more visible in Google's search result.

So, again, putting personal and organizational info into WiserEarth (and Wikipedia) actually helps out both party to be more "visible" online (especially in Google's search results, and Yahoo's for that matter). And once searcher clicked through to go to the org's WiserEarth profile, they'll discover multiple paths to make connection and collaboration with that organization through WiserEarth tools (beyond the usual online tools).

Wow, Bowo, you did an excellent job relaying the historical development of WiserEarth, and how it's grown from just a directory to offering a more diverse set of tools for our community. The site is rapidly evolving in many ways, and much of that is driven by what requests we hear from our community.

Our site is designed with the intent to engage our users, rather than just have them be passive browsers. It's certainly an interesting challenge, as we have to design for very minimal levels of tech-savvyness at times, and take into account human psychology when developing the user interface.

I won't add much more beyond what you've written, but the goal has definitely been to migrate users to WiserEarth as their go-to site. Which makes points like what Jknauer stated all the more valuable - finding out the obstacles preventing people from fully transitioning to WiserEarth is critical to our success. Having been able to identify data-silo-ing as one of these obstacles is great, as now that we know one of these issues, we can start looking into the solutions available to address the problem.

In reponse to Josh's important question:
"1) APIs so other web developers can build websites based on the data in your database. Your system is really a silo of data at this point and while it may have a few compelling features is Yet Another Isolated Database that beleaguered non-profits need to update without generating much value for themselves. Why update here when I can update my org's listing on Wikipedia which has exponentially more users?"


Although both are wikis, I think Wikipedia and WiserEarth have different approaches in regards to organizations.

Wikipedia, as the name suggest is an encycopedia, a big lump of information. It just happens that Wikipedia has become so popular (in their fourth year I guess) that when an organization put it's listing in Wikipedia, there's a chance that more people will come across that listing after a googling. But that's just about it, people will read the listing, will go to the organization's website from a link on that page, and interact with that organization from there with traditional means (email, phone, etc.).

WiserEarth on the other hand, is much more than a wiki (in the sense of a big lump of information). It is first and foremost a huge directory of people and organizations who works toward a just and sustainable world. This imply that the information they carry into WiserEarth is more specific than that of Wikipedia's (which is a general purpose wiki). The kinds of information contained in WiserEarth has a wider range than that of Wikipedia's, from personal profile and organization info, to jobs, events, conversations (in discussion forums and in groups), best practices, etc.

Following that first major feature of WiserEarth as a directory, it is also a place to (easily) make connections (expand network of people and of organizations), to share resources (know-how/expertise, job info, financial resources) and to collaborate (through groups, events, project building, etc.).

Further down the road, when Groups have a mailing list feature, a website feature and a means to perform financial transactions (and other major feature upgrade), WiserEarth can truly be the perfect place for an organization to concentrate their online presence and effort.

But then again, WiserEarth is still in the very early stage of development (about 7 months), where certain important features are yet to be implemented, and the number of user is still too small for the network to have the dynamics it was intended to have.

Nevertheless, as more and more people and organizations move their online presence and effort into WiserEarth, the value of putting and updating an organization's listing (and being involved in it's dynamics) in WiserEarth will, I suspect, be much higher than to do so in Wikipedia (this of course, does not mean that an organization should delete their listing in Wikipedia. Both will reinforce each other) or in the traditional means they previously used (separated website, groups, conventional social networking site, online file repository, etc.).

But this is just my humble opinion, the folks behind WiserEarth should provide more convincing reasons.

That's a very good point - we should update the documentation we have on our site to reflect the current status of our open-source efforts, especially since we now have a fulltime developer working on it and can give a much more accurate estimate as to when the source code will be released to the public.

Paul's vision for WiserEarth always, always included it being open-source - there was never any back-and-forth on this matter, which is why we've always been so openly confident and deadfast in stating that WiserEarth is an open source project. Which in truth, it really is - it's built with the intent of being open source, but it's as you've stated - we went with a different development path so that we could prepare a strong enough platform that other developers would find useful upon release.

I really do want to emphasize that your feedback is welcome, and openly honest critiques are just as valuable as glowing praises. I sometimes have to remind myself that WiserEarth has only been launched since April 22nd of this year, so it's really only been out for a little over 6 months. We're a young site with non-profit resources - which is why talking to experienced developers in the community has been a great source of knowledge for us. Your ideas are very much appreciated, and I do hope that as you return to the site, you'll see the improvements we're making to the site. But as always, feel welcome to open up topics and spark discussion - threads like this is what we would love to see more of on WiserEarth.

Thanks,
Honore

Hi Jknauer,

You bring up some very good points, and I'll address them one by one, starting with the most pressing one - "Is WiserEarth Really Open Source?"

Currently, we have not yet released the code base for developers to take a look at. We just signed the dotted line hiring an extra developer strictly to work cleaning up our code to release it, so I anticipate this will be done within the next 3-4 months. Please keep in mind that we have a very small team of 2-3 developers, so not everything has been able to be given proper attention given the expansiveness of our website.

APIs - We're looking at Google's OpenSocial platform and considering how that would fit in with our core offerings. Again, this is a project that can't be done within a day or two and needs full-time attention from our developers. We are not a venture capital funded organization that has $45 million in free cash to burn through and hire developers on the spot - we have to carefully pick and choose a fine balance between shoring up our existing features and working on adding new ones to the site. I do ask for your patience, but again, I understand how this is frustrating from a developer's point of view.

RSS feeds - this is a feature that we're implementing in an upcoming release cycle.

JKnauer, I thank you for your suggestions - these are all very good points that helps remind us of the bigger picture when we're bogged down in day-to-day projects. We are not trying to be a data sink, and we are looking heavily into data-sharing ideas like Open ID and offering APIs. The limitations on this has never been based on philosophy and principles, but rather real world constraints of time, resources, and funding.

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out our latest updates page to see what our development team has been working on: http://wiserearth.org/article/d4616679443647767999981a8b3dd14f

Features you really need to add:

1) APIs so other web developers can build websites based on the data in your database. Your system is really a silo of data at this point and while it may have a few compelling features is Yet Another Isolated Database that beleaguered non-profits need to update without generating much value for themselves. Why update here when I can update my org's listing on Wikipedia which has exponentially more users?

2) Open your source code. I see nothing but lip service being paid to "open source" implementations of your code. That probably helped you raise money with naive funders who don't understand what open source really means, but by not having a public repository for all versions of your code, you are not really living up to the promises made in your mission. Opening your source code could also help to involve other developers so that you're staff of two coders can get some help from a broader community.

3) Alternative feeds of data. This relates to #1, but there's no excuse for you not to have RSS at the very least, and certainly KML output would also be easy for the geo data. This just reinforces the general belief that your system is a data sink and that you are trying to just suck people to your website. That type of behavior doesn't really help the movement.

Bottom line, the current state of the system architecture does not at all match the words used on the About WiserEarth page. It's very popular to throw around the term "Open Source" but your project is not acting in a way that conforms to the Open Source Initiative's definition of the term (see: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd). If you are not aware of these principles, you should be and should change your use of the term as necessary. I sincerely hope you open source your code and start walking the talk.

-Josh Knauer