WiserEarth Beta Launch
Announcing the Pre-launch of WiserEarth
Greetings Friends and Colleagues,
WiserEarth is here! We've arrived at the pre-launch -- the point where a growing community will begin settling into WiserEarth and making it home. You are invited to start exploring the site before the public launch in May.
You can access the beta site by clicking on the following link and entering the username and password:
WiserEarth
username: demouser
password: w3lcome
As you may know, WiserEarth is the first open source network for global social change. It is a community directory and networking forum for the largest and fastest growing movement in the world: the hundreds of thousands of organizations addressing the central issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. Content is created by people like you from around the world.
Please take some time to use the site. We encourage you to:
* Create or edit your user profile and begin exploring
* Add organizations, events, jobs, or resources you'd like to share
* Provide feedback on your experience. You can go directly to the feedback page to fill in the WiserEarth survey or post comments on any page of the site
* Share this site with your grantees, colleagues, and friends
The WiserEarth community will guide the development of WiserEarth from this point forward. Knowing the passion and ingenuity of this community, we have no doubt that some remarkable things will emerge from you.
With thanks and appreciation for the work you do,
The WiserEarth Community
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Natural Capitalism Bias
The entire site has a bias towards natural capitalism that reduces its ability to be a general social justice platform. For instance, in their list of 400 issues, LGBT appears once (whereas it could easily be broken down into lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and ally categories - and that's only for starters). By contrast they have an extremely large number of environmental categories, including ones for things I haven't heard of: felids, lagomorphs and many others.
Similarly, while they give war/peace several more categories, they don't list specific issues like the US Occupation of Iraq or the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
For traditional social justice issues, relating to labor, women, LGBT, war/peace - their issues list sucks.
As such, the site appeals to middle-class (or upper-middle class) whites who care about the environment. It'll be interesting to see if they can break out of this mold.
It'll also be interesting to
It'll also be interesting to see if their top-down approach to building a directory works. My theory was that you needed to engage people, to get them to take the minimal first step of adding their organization (and themself) to the site if you were going to have a serious hope of them keeping their information current. Thus my system requires that people add themselves.
WiserEarth started off by adding over 100,000 organizations. Will people update these records? If WiseEarth only engages 10% of these people (and probably only half of them will keep their records current) - they could end up with a very bad data set.
What makes it more difficult is that their initial data is already bad. They had CampusActivism.org in Serbia and Montenegro. On general inspection, it looks like perhaps 10% of their data has fairly obvious bad locations (ex. a group with "Ontario" in its name is mapped to the sparsely populated northern part of Manitoba).
If they can create an online community, and build up enough activity around the site then that is their best hope for keeping information current.