Published by Antoinette Siu on 16 Apr 2012 at 10:24 am
Where is Wiser Headed?
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Camilla Burg, our communications and outreach director at Wiser.org (formerly WiserEarth), talks about the five year-old sustainability network in this interview with Down to earth in France. |
This interview originally appeared on the blog Down to earth based in France on April 12th 2012 here.
The network is about to turn 5 years old and over the past 2 years has been made available in French, Bahasa Indonesian, Chinese, German, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish (and more languages are on their way). It now has 70,000 members–or “70 000 community managers“, as Camilla says. It thus seemed pertinent to have a discussion with her about how technology, applied to sustainability, is creating a new framework for addressing environmental and social justice issues.
How did the Wiser.org project start?
The environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken is the visionary behind the Wiser project. It all began thanks to book he was working on in 2005: Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, and Why No One Saw it Coming. He was writing about the combined social justice and environmental movement, and as he did, he realized that no one knew just how large this movement was.
So we started digging, and talking to as many people as we could.
After many months of research by hundreds of volunteers around the world, we realized that this research might never be complete and the more we searched, the more organizations and groups we found. At that time, Hawken asserted that there might be more than 1 million organizations around the world addressing environmental restoration, indigenous rights and social justice issues. The publication of these organizations through the Wiser directory then followed in the footsteps of the Wikipedia project: we invited the global community to help us complete this research work.
Once the organizational directory became available, visitors to the site would say, “I want to be part of this movement–I am part of this movement,” so the social networking tools were added onto the platform. Adding the “social layer” to the site made sense as we also wanted to be able to reach the people who are often isolated in their work, yet who carry out many local initiatives but do not belong to bigger organizations. The social network gives them the tools to grow their network and gain visibility and support for their work.
After five years of existence, what do you think technology mostly brings to social innovation?
The Internet gives us free and easy access to tools that help us pool our collective intelligence–for the first time, everyone can be a creator of content and groups. Even more importantly, we are able to share our ideas more easily as well as what works and what doesn’t. When collective intelligence is put to work to co-create new solutions to complex problems, we know that we are making technology work for us.
Projects such as ClimateLab and Ushahidi are helping us to share knowledge rapidly across the world in order to address global and local issues, ranging from the big thorny issues like climate change to ways to ensure voting is carried out democratically.
An NGO in the Brazilian favelas called Catalytic Communities is now able to share their solutions through Wiser.org, benefiting not just their own local community, but everyone across the world who can share their best practices. In Senegal, a rural organization called the Yakaar Niani Wulli Federation which supports the production of organic cotton and fair-trade goods has connected with an organization in France that is helping it to scale its operation, thanks to the network it created on Wiser.org. People need tools for connectivity and information to ensure that we don’t keep reinventing the wheel.
In addition, not all organizations can afford to have their own website. Wiser.org ensures greater visibility for their work, thanks to a high page rank on Google as well as millions of searches on and off the site. Communities in the South have very few occasions to be part of the conversation when it comes to sustainability, often waiting for solutions to be given to them. Yet, these countries need to co-create their own solutions themselves. They need to have access to the information in the same way as the global North. The world cannot repeat of the mistakes of the developed countries, in terms of consuming and polluting. So communities in the South have to be invited to play an active role in the growing global sustainability movement.
Do you feel that there is a developing understanding of the importance of sustainable living in society?
If we just look at France, for example, there are many exciting initiatives being created, such as Babyloan, La Ruche, Colibris and Transition Initiatives that are helping to grow collaboration around sustainability initiatives. Wiser.org has also helped put together WiserLocal gatherings, where changemakers can come together. On top of that, in 2010, we helped to host the very first Social Innovation Bar Camp in La Cantine, Paris.
On a larger scale, I feel that there is a real passion for change in France and in helping to create a more sustainable society, that the French philosopher and environmentalist, Pierre Rabhi calls “la sobriété heureuse” (self-constraining happiness). For me, the good life often means a plate of good (non-GM) food, and a few friends to share it with! Culturally, France has everything it needs to embrace a sustainable future. There is one constraint though: I think France needs stronger springboards to drive change. Technology can help, but France needs more business leaders (and investors) to take on a much greater role in driving the corporate sector to fully integrate sustainability and the triple bottom line into their businesses. If companies like Danone, which appear to becoming more aware of their impact and role in society, share their best practices on how to reduce the carbon footprint and explain how sustainability can become part of a business’s DNA, this can start to create some critical levers to reaching a global tipping point for change.
So you feel there is still a need for education and communication around this notion of sustainability?
Yes, indeed. The Web 2.0 has opened up a completely new dimension for communication : the power has shifted from the companies to the consumers. Today, we can find out virtually everything we’d like to find out about what we buy and consume. Greenwashing is out. Transparency, trust and sharing are traits of the open source movement and are also the traits of the social web. Clay Shirky, writer of Here Comes Everybody, says that when we change our communication tools, we change society. For the first time we have the ability to communicate in the form of many to many without owning a TV station. We are also able to create as many groups as we want to create with no limitations. If movements can be created online to help us understand how we can live more sustainably and learn to look after other human beings, we can start to create shifts in society. However, we still need to frame the issues so that global concerns, such as hunger, poverty and climate change, resonate with people’s daily concerns.
How do you see the future for the Wiser project?
We will keep translating our contents in new languages, thanks to our volunteers everywhere. We are also working on making the platform more easily available in more places around the globe, and also on mobile devices, which are more widely used in the global South, for instance. That is the big next step.
In conclusion, it might be fitting to finish on a quote from Wiser’s founder, Paul Hawken, who tells us that “we are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community”.
Wiser.org in figures:
- 70 000 members
- 8 languages
- a directory of over 114 000 organizations from 243 countries and independent territories
- 3000 work groups
- 341 issue areas relating to sustainability, that constitute the backbone of Wiser
- 12 WiserLocal events in France each year
- 13 countries with WiserLocal events
- 40 volunteer editors across the world and 100 volunteers
- 5 employees
- 8 million pages listed on Google
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Tags: blessed unrest, camilla burg, Clay Shirky, greenwashing, Paul Hawken, wiser, wiserearth
5 Responses to “Where is Wiser Headed?”
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Congratulations Wiserearth/Wiser on 5 years! I understand it’s important for social movements to feel they are making progress in order to avoid defeatism and burn-out. However my experience of 2 decades as a sustainability professional is that claims of progress are the most dangerous kind of greenwash, since actual progress solving any global problems falls far short of what is claimed and far short of what’s needed.
I reckon the web could be used for collective intelligence and I enjoy working with MIT’s Climate CoLab where the public can get involved in co-creating new solutions. However this is a much tougher task than we suppose and what happens instead across the web is much more like collective delusion. The same old ideas get reinforced by continuous repetition and new ideas get washed away in the data flood.
The web has a huge potential for co-creating change and for “creating some critical levers to reaching a global tipping point for change”. The challenge for a movement that mostly doesn’t move and for working groups that mostly don’t work is is to tap this potential. Best of luck!
Thank you so much James for your comment and thank you for all that you have brought the Wiser project over the past 5 years.
As you rightly pointed out, “the challenge here is to feel that progress is being made in order to avoid defeatism and burn-out” and also to be aware of any “collective delusion”.
As Paul Hawken when asked about whether we should be pessimistic or not – “If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”
New technologies and the tools that come with web 2.0 (including projects like Wiser and ClimateLab) may or may not help to create levers of change, but they do offer a feeling of hope and a sense that we are not alone in our ambition to create a better world for all. (in fact this is the most common feedback that I hear from the people that join the Wiser network).
However, any technical solution of course needs other levers of change. To create fundamental shifts in society that we seek, we need to come together as citizens of the earth to co-create the solutions to the critical issues affecting our planet at a political, economic and societal level.
“Be the change you want to see in the world” needs to be a mantra that every citizen of the world understands.
One thing is sure. We can’t give up. We have to keep going for the sake of our children.
The collective delusion IS the feeling of progress (when human responses to global problems over the past 40 years have been overall ridiculously ineffectual). Optimism and pessimism are both decoys – a false choice between delusion and disempowerment. In between these there is a choice to step out of the delusion and look into the vast gulf between where we are and where we should be. In that gulf we may find web platforms with 3000 working groups that really work and levers of change that really work.
Paradox is that keeping going as we have been is equivalent to giving up!
I think that Wiser ( former WiserEarth) should celebrate its 5 years and with honors, because the purpose of the Wiser platform has been reached as describe in the section about Wiser:
“Wiser is a global village for sharing and kinship-building for people who believe in a more just and sustainable world.
Specifically, Wiser helps the global movement of people and organizations working toward social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental stewardship to connect, collaborate, share knowledge, and build alliances.”
In my opinion Wiser is doing what it was set out to do.
It is up to each of us to use the platform in our change-making efforts, which again the article above illustrates the bigger successes.
When I joined Wiser I understood that it was created to bring people together to create new projects and collaboration or bring awareness to existing ones, never as an organization that would actually do the work for you or be directly responsible for the fate of the world.
I think however, that we need to work together as wiser members to offer solutions to make the platform better and to be used to its effectiveness.
There are a lot of groups that are inactive or that are not offering the support that they should and I know that the Wiser editors are already doing something about that ( actually getting rid of the inactive groups). I have also contributed to this topic. It is up to us to test the effectiveness of the groups and report to the editors so they can do something about it. It is so easy to sit in my computer and write about what is wrong or right about things, but we will only be part of the change when we offer solutions to problems.
The majority of groups on Wiser are doing a wonderful job and a lot of people are grateful to be helped in their efforts to make a better world.
Wiser, just a recommendation: You should have blog spotlights on some of the groups that are making change and how Wiser is helping them achieve it, so your followers can know about it. ( be glad to help reaching out to them if you need a hand).
Hi Sil, yes they should celebrate. Yet the challenge of members being able to build momentum from time and energy spent on the site has yet to be met. This is not just a criticism of the site but the movement as a whole, as if we are content merely to work towards our goals without ever checking our methods or effectiveness.
A search for groups shows around 2000 groups. I’m not sure the majority are really doing a wonderful job (credit to those that are!). I’d be impressed if more than 1 or 2% were actively doing anything. Levels of activity are not visible so it’s hard to know. Most inactivity in groups is a feature of the platform design so it’s avoidable.
Yes you should report suggestions to editors, or use the commercial support service if it works for you. This certainly can lead to improvements though it’s not so easy even for editors and I’m not sure that my efforts over the years have found ways forward for the platform. Anyhow everyone should enjoy the 5 year celebration and afterwards put their heads together on how to make platforms and movements with a chance of creating the change that’s needed.