WiserEarth serves the people who are transforming the world. It is a community-editable international directory and networking forum that maps and connects the largest movement in the world – the hundreds of thousands of organizations and concerned individuals within civil society that address social justice, poverty, and the environment.
WiserEarth provides the tools and a platform for non-profit organizations, funders, social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists, scientists, and citizens to find each other, make connections, build alliances and share resources.
WISER stands for World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility.
The more than one million organizations and the one hundred million individuals who actively work towards ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights, and political accountability work on issues that are systemically interconnected and intertwined. However, their effectiveness to prevent harm and institute positive change is undermined by the lack of a collective awareness, duplicative efforts, and poor connectivity. A widely diverse network of organizations is the best defense against injustice, but to be effective, it needs to be connected and intelligent. What is missing is a map and directory of this network that includes the resources for communication and cooperation, created and managed by the community; in essence, an infrastructure through which to coordinate our efforts.
WiserEarth provides this movement a way to see itself and become connected.
The WISER Platform is the technology that makes this possible. Using MySQL open source database as its backbone, all recorded information on WiserEarth is searchable, filterable, and fully referenced, leading visitors directly to the organizational record or website of interest. Users who access the site will have online links to NGOs that maintain a web presence, as well as the many thousands of organizations that do not have a web presence. Filtering of structured data results in more useful query results.
The software is open source under the GPL 3.0 license, which allows for
the use, modification, or sharing of the software without restrictions.
It is released under the name 'WiserPlatform', and can be downloaded at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/wiserplatform.
WiserEarth is based upon six fundamental principles that are applied to everything we do:
Transparency
WiserEarth is open to full public scrutiny. Likewise, users who edit and add content are asked to fully identify and make themselves known to the community. The software upon which WiserEarth was created is open source. WiserEarth does not charge fees or accept advertising.
Respect
WiserEarth honors the uniqueness of each individual and organization with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, and religious beliefs.
Community
WiserEarth is community-driven and is not centralized, bureaucratic, or turf-based. WiserEarth is about understanding each other, building bridges, creating friendships, and celebrating the rich dimensions contained within the global community.
Networking
WiserEarth enables connectivity and networking, the exchange of services or information between different individuals, groups, companies, or institutions. From a technical perspective, it means that WiserEarth will provide for all types of connections so that low-bandwidth Internet users can also access the information and tools provided on the portal.
Collaboration
WiserEarth brings people together to share information across the global non-profit community, and help create alliances. By working together, we can work smarter, and use our resources more efficiently and effectively.
Visibility
WiserEarth enables small organizations to become more visible, as well as the entire network itself — only by holding such a "mirror" up, can the movement recognize its value and power.
If you are new to the WiserEarth community, you may also want to read the community guidelines before you begin to add or edit content on this site.
Preliminary work on WiserEarth began in late 2004. In January 2005, the Natural Capital Institute brought on researchers and technical experts to begin building the database infrastructure.
Over the next two years, a global team of researchers and volunteers from Cuimbatore, India to Guayaquil, Ecuador joined the WiserEarth project. The team brought on volunteers with expertise in a greater variety of languages; partnered with experts in open source software; and increased data-collecting capacity by recruiting and training international research teams. They researched and added publicly available data from the Internet and other sources, honed the WiserEarth Content Standards, continued to develop the database, and refined the structural elements. The site was officially launched to the public in April 2007.
WiserEarth will always be a work in progress. WiserEarth encourages and invites people to take on leadership roles and help maintain an Area of Focus portal, facilitate a resource category, support a help desk, start a discussion, invite friends and colleagues, and present and promote WiserEarth. Many more features need to be added including new tools to support WiserEarth groups, event calendars (allowing users to personalize event listings according to their areas of interest, specific date ranges, and geographic regions), a project builder to spur collaboration, blogs, incorporation of streaming media, and more social networking features. We hope WiserEarth community members will donate their time and intellectual property to help develop these features, and make WiserEarth a true global resource. The history from this point on out is collaboratively written by all of us—the community.
I Want to Help WiserEarth - How Can I Get Involved?
Please visit our Media Relations Page.
Let's Build WiserEarth Together!
Support WiserEarth with your donation.
See WiserEarth Supporters for a list of all donors and funders.
|
Flag comment for removal peggy 22 days ago
Thanks for your comment
|
|
This comment was removed by a WiserEarth editor for the following reason:
Irrelevant to the page (please review community guidelines |
|
Greetings,
Hope all the work done should be done with awareness & understanding the results / consequences.
The best thing to change is the education & delete the system of categorizing humans by race, religion, region.
Metta |
|
Greed and Poverty
Imagine a world where stability is the norm and instability is the exception. In this world we are imagining, there are no shortages of life's basics: food, clean water, shelter and a healthy environment. Although competition may still exist on many levels, it is no longer concerned with life's necessities, but only with the non-essentials--those extra things that make life more fun and exciting. But this time, these non-essentials are no longer allowed to have a priority over life's essentials. Instead, our necessities are a part of a globally-protected agricultural zone. How can this imaginary world become a reality? Let's look at our situation and see: If every square mile of land were occupied, there would be around 5 acres per man, woman and child. That seems like plenty of land until you factor in climate, terrain, deserts, swamps, pastures, infertility, forests, barren rock and general misplacement of buildings on top of agricultural lands. That reduces the available arable land to only about half-an-acre for each person on the planet. Again, half-an-acre of usable gardening space/farmland per person seems like plenty of room until we consider various environmental abuses, incompetent soil management, government interference, inequitable land distribution, laziness and greed. Hopeless, you say? Perhaps--but maybe not insurmountable. When nations unite, great things are accomplished. This world has been given so many bright minds and abundant natural resources. I really believe that we have the ability to change this world into the kind of place that God originally intended. There have been times of relative peace and prosperity when nothing seemed impossible. Consider the years of post-World War II, when the world seemed to awaken from a nightmare to discover life anew. Then our dreams were golden, when no dreams were too large, and life was fresh and hopeful for millions of people all over the planet. Surprisingly, those countries which had suffered some of the greatest losses were among the first ones to rebuild. Their tragic memories were changed from sorrow to renewed vigor, a zest for living, and ultimately the rebirth of civilizations that had been destroyed by war. This rebirth sought a new world full of opportunity and fulfilled dreams, where everyone had a chance to build a life of hope for their family. These were not idle dreams, but were instead realities that were achieved by millions of families throughout the world. We are once again poised at such a crossroads. Will we, as citizens of the world, make a decision to seize this opportunity to fulfill our destiny and our dreams, or will we be satisfied to live in the shadow of former greatness, under a cloud of disillusionment and shattered hopes? How can we begin to realize these hopes and make them our realities? We need to unite globally with others who share our vision of an achievable, prosperous and fulfilling life for all of our citizens. One good place to begin is by supporting efforts to reclaim arable land for agriculture. These are lands that have long remained unused through misappropriation and neglect. Let's insist that cropland no longer be used for building construction sites. Let's further insist that every vacant lot be made available for shared green spaces in every city and town on this planet. Let's remove all unnecessary buildings which are mislocated on arable land, and finally let's insist that cities, towns, industrial sites and other infrastructures be placed on sites which are unusable as arable acreage. When this has been accomplished, we will notice a startling thing--we have now increased our arable acreage to between 1-2 acres per person globally. When these crops have been planted, harvested, and properly stored, transported, sold at a reasonable profit and consumed by a thankful public, we will have achieved an economic substrata that is immune to inflation. Think about it--all the efforts to increase our available arable acreage, plant, harvest, store, transport and sell these agricultural commodities globally, will now be standardized into an ever-increasing quest for a sustainable and globally-affordable food supply that is no longer dependent on the former conditions of supply and demand. Our food supply will no longer be held hostage by the highest bidder and warehoused for the purpose of price-gouging and price-fixing. Alarmists will squeal that this will remove any incentive to sell agricultural products. They base this argument logically on other failed attempts at agricultural utopias. But they have forgotten that we now have the available ingredients for success at our disposal. In addition to all the bright minds, we have unprecedented infrastructures in place for communication, transportation, storage, security, preservation, fertility, nutrition, mechanization, in addition to a protected global agricultural zone that is immune from fluctuations that affect non-essential items that are a part of the supply and demand superstructure. We know, and have known for a long time, which agricultural items have proven to be successful in the past, which are high-demand items versus low-demand, nutritionally superior, practical and sustainable. We also know quantities and calories of consumption based on current levels, and which supply levels fit the ever-improved global diet which includes a much-wider spectrum of all basic food groups. What then remains for us to accomplish these goals in our lifetimes? First, we need the shared vision of ending hunger and reducing poverty. We may never succeed in eliminating poverty, but we are on the verge of at least ending starvation and malnutrition. These are achievable goals which need only proper planning by the greatest minds on the planet, the investment of time and energy necessary to accomplish them, and the agreement to global cooperation and mutual aid that befits a committed and humanitarian society. Let us begin now to move in this direction, trusting that God will empower us to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over all" that God has placed under our supervision.
Mark Overt Skilbred
|
|
This comment was removed by a WiserEarth editor for the following reason:
Posting made on incorrect page. |
|
RE: Questions about whether WiserEarth is open source. The software for the WiserEarth platform was released in early April 2008 as open source under the GPL 3.0 license, which allows anyone to use, modify, or share the software without any restrictions. It was released under the name 'WiserPlatform', and can be downloaded at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/wiserplatform
|
|
Hi, only users with "Editor status" (see community roles) can remove organizations. The best way to bring an organization to the attention of an Editor is by leaving a comment on the page.
|
|
How does one remove a listing for an organization that no longer exists???
|
|
|
Thanks for your comment - WiserEarth has received some unwanted attention from a few non-community minded people who have been sending unsolicited messages. We wanted to let you know that we are aware of this issue and have de-activated the account of those spammers. We are also working on several ways to prevent this from happening in the future including:
1) The ability for any users to easily report a spam 2) The ability for WiserEarth Administrators to get automated alerts when a user sends more than an "X" n umber of messages/hour To discuss this issue, suggest ideas or report a spam, please go to: http://www.wiserearth.org/forum/view/f73bff908ef07fc66c718465a5544584 For more information on the spammers, and the type of messages they sent, go to: http://www.wiserearth.org/article/4675d3ede2894297713e3d1 2778032b5 With thanks for the work you do Camilla |
|
Hello WiserBeings, ;o)
Hopefully this is useful. In response to my WE profile, I've received two email messages recently from two (apparent) separate females looking to be in touch. Neither created a profile so I invited them to, and instead they responded with messages that were alike each other, and are clearly scams (or their familiar preludes. I've rec'd similar messages from 'pretend' clients for my business.) May be best to not pay attention to them, but if you want names so they can be removed from the system, please just email me directly. Keep up the Loving work! Jessica |
|
Hi - bowo directed me to a conversation about this very topic at:
http://www.wiserearth.org/forum/view/9775e0601b61f9ecbe146df704e77beb (for any one else who comes across my rant and wants to comment) Thanks bobo! |
|
|
I'm saddened by the terms you list for including an organisation in the list (at http://www.wiserearth.org/organization/new_pre) under 'Organizations that do not qualify for inclusion'. It seems there is still some closed minds around who can actually contribute to a 'just and sustainable world created by community. In my opinion ANY group of people (regardless of organisational structure) can do it so by excluding those who do not confirm to a pre-set organisational structure you exclude some innovate participants and reduce the diversity of the movement.
For example, I have set up a company (just me right now) that provides advice and support to organisations with their campaigning. While my clients include the biggest non-profits (Greenpeace, WWF, Amnesty, Oxfam, etc), having that work also means I can do things for smaller/independent campaigners and thus their issues. I set it up as a company because other formats in the UK are more complex, expensive and with more constraints. I see the work I do is as valuable as many NGOs on the list - and I am definitely part of the movement regardless of your classification. So - I humbly suggest that you consider a change in your criteria for inclusion. I am not suggesting that you open it up to anyone, but more that for those currently on the list of 'Organizations that do not qualify for inclusion' you review them on a case-by case basis (perhaps a role you can ask the community to take on) Cheers, Duane |
|
|
This comment was removed by a WiserEarth editor for the following reason:
|
|
|
This comment was removed by a WiserEarth editor for the following reason:
|
|
The source code should be released within 3-4 months, as we just hired a full-time developer to work on that portion of the WiserEarth project. We'll announce this and also provide a location to download on our "Latest Updates" page (http://wiserearth.org/article/d4616679443647767999981a8b3dd14f)
Currently, we have no APIs for developers to access our database, but it's a feature we are looking into after we have released the source code for WiserEarth. |
|
Since the above article makes the following statement, " All software will be open source" where can we go to download this source code? Do you provide any web services or other flavor of XML access for remote calls into your database?
|
|
This comment was removed by a WiserEarth editor for the following reason:
|
|
Hello, what do you mean by: We hope to put it open source as soon as possible. ? (first paragraph). I have the experience that every member can already update the database.
|
|
This comment was removed by a WiserEarth editor for the following reason:
|
