2010

As our community continues to grow -– WE are 48,958 working to co-create a more peaceful, just and sustainable world — we would like to bring you up to speed on some of the milestones we reached in 2010 and also give you a hint of where we’re going in 2011!

Going Local

Creating multilingual versions of the WiserEarth site was one of the main focuses of 2010. It resulted in the launch of WiserEarth in French, Spanish and Portuguese on May 4, 2010. This would not have been possible without the help of our 43 volunteers and two nonprofit partners based around the world who helped translate. We can’t thank you enough for this incredible collaborative effort.

This year, we’re looking forward to launching the site in at least another 3 languages including Turkish, Bahasa (Indonesian), Russian and hopefully Chinese. We need your help to make this happen. If you know anyone who would be willing to volunteer to help further this work, please contact Camilla [at] wiserearth.org

WE inspires a Social Innovation BarCamp

WiserTuesday gatherings in Paris helped to inspire the creation of the first Social Innovation BarCamp in France last June. Co-organized by WiserEarth members, it brought together almost 100 people to discuss subjects such as the use of media in conflict resolution, open money industrialization of social action and creative intelligence.

We’d love to see more opportunities for wiser earthlings to gather around the work we’re doing, share ideas, best practices and further support each other in 2011. If you’re interested in helping to host a WiserTuesday gathering in your town, contact Camilla [at] wiserearth.org

Facebook Integration and more

There was a host of changes and improvements to the site, some of which you may not be aware of. We thought it would be useful to highlight a few here:

  • Single-sign on: You are now able to sign-on to WE using the login that you use for Facebook, Google or Twitter (among others)
  • Send Message to all Friends – This was popular request last year and it was implemented a few months ago. You can now send a message to everyone in your network at the same time.
  • Email Alerts and RSS feeds – you can now subscribe via email to your WE searches or turn them into an RSS feed

  • Improved Search – we carried out a number of improvements to make search more effective
  • SEO of pages for non-English pages – basically this is Search Engine Optimization work which makes it easier for people to find WE pages when they perform a search on Google
  • Get Satisfaction – visit WE’s new support help desk which was implemented last year and where you can share any feedback or problems you’re having. We also love to hear about anything you’ve found on the site that works really well under praise!
  • Embeddable WE map – embed your WE map on your own website to show organizations, events or jobs in your area
  • Spam catching – This was an ongoing issue on the site last year, but we’ve put in a lot of work to ensure that we catch the spammers
  • User Self-Deactivation – The ability to delete ones’ own account was added to the member’s settings page
  • New Photo update – Created a new process to update photos used as your avatar in the community
  • New Homepage and Menu – New navigation and a new homepage was created during the year to make it easier for people browsing the site to find what they are looking for.
  • Twitter feeds for WE content launched in many major cities – You can now track content on WiserEarth automatically by following any of the WiserTwitterfeeds. See posts: WiserEarth launches US Twitter Feeds; WiserEarth launches European Twitter Feeds

In addition to these technical improvements, we continued to support the sharing of knowledge through WiserEarth’s API which supports content sharing among partners such as IssueLab (sharing nonprofit research), 350.org and Social Actions.

Some technical goals this year will include improving the joining process for groups, launching status updates in the dashboard and profile, allowing invitations to be sent to friends from other networks like Facebook, Google etc, and greater sharing with Facebook. We will also continue to work on usability to make it easier for you to get the most out of using WiserEarth.

The work of WiserEarth Community Members continues to inspire us: We had the chance to reflect in our blog in 2010 on some of the amazing work of our members. Take a look at some of these inspiring articles in case you missed them:

Fundraising Success

Thanks to the generosity of hundreds of members of our community, coupled with a foundation matching grant, $50,577 was raised towards the WiserEarth endowment. These funds will be used to sustain the servers that run WiserEarth for the next 5 years. Take a look at our shared reflections on this successful end-of-year fundraising campaign. We’re looking forward to another fundraising effort to raise a similar amount later this year.

Editors Meetup The 2nd Annual Editors Meetup took place October 2010. We welcomed Frank Patton, Eric Olson, Deborah Phelan, Timonie Hood, Michael Kwan, Narda Azaria Dalgleish, and our international team to San Francisco. Narda, one of our editors based in Scotland, reflects on the incredible journey she made to join the team in California.


Finally, the WiserEarth blog continues to share key learnings for nonprofits and activists. Here are some highlights from last year:

This year, we’re really looking forward to working with our community, to continue to grow and enhance WiserEarth. We need your input and help. Please feel free to drop by our support group to share your feedback or reflections or any of the ways that WiserEarth has helped you.

Thank you on behalf of the whole WiserEarth team!

Photo by VERY URGENT photography

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