wiser
WISER
World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility
WISER Project Overview And Progress Report[1]
December 2006
“It is perhaps not too much to say that, in the first decade of the new millennium, humanity has entered into a condition that is in some sense more globally united and interconnected, more sensitized to the experiences and suffering of others, in certain respects more spiritually awakened more conscious of alternative future possibilities and ideals, more capable of collective healing and compassion, and, aided by technological advances in communication media, more able to think, feel, and respond together in a spiritually evolved manner to the world’s swiftly changing realities
than has ever before been possible.”
RICHARD TARNAS
Summary
WISER serves the people who are transforming the world. It is a collaboratively written, free content, open source networking platform that links NGOs, funders, business, government, social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists, scientists, and citizens. WISER creates the space for civil society, the private sector, and government to collaboratively define, address, and solve social and environmental problems. 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. Their effectiveness to prevent harm and institute positive change is undermined by the lack of a collective awareness, duplicative efforts, and poor connectivity. We are moving from a world that is shaped by privilege to a community created world. This massive change in the loci of power calls for a new system of awareness, support, communication, and collaboration. That is WISER’s purpose.
While the themes of recent history are unknowable and far too supple to be categorized or labeled, common global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, ecological activism on all levels, the need for localized economic control, the rights of the child, changes in governmental structure and citizen dialogue, calls for autonomy, the concept of the commons, the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, the creation of food webs, the retrieval of agricultural sustainability, the spread of multiculturalism, the concern for refugee populations, the building of a culture of peace, the drive to prevent drastic climate change, the demand for radical transparency in politics and decision making, the greening of the city, the creation of mass movements, and the push for human rights. These themes take specific shape in the form of public benefit organizations (called NGOs or non-profits) that collectively comprise the largest social movement in human history, in socially responsible business practices that are permeating all of commerce, and in responsive local governments who are moving to embrace sustainability as the key to a better life for their citizens. This movement is rewriting the rules as to what counts as truth, and what constitutes value.
WISER is currently being applied to non-and for-profits in the form of WiserEarth and WiserBusiness respectively. We anticipate the formation of WiserGovernment.
Fundamental Principles
WISER is based on seven fundamental principles:
· Transparency. WISER is open and subject to full public scrutiny always..
· Neutrality. WISER is impartial. It is objective. It does not take sides.
· Diversity. WISER is based on respect for the uniqueness of human life and embraces all dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, and religion.
· Community. WISER is owned and operated by its community. Content is free of copyright; all software is open source; all information can be repurposed and used by others.
· Collaboration WISER shares information across geography, culture, and language. By working together, we become more intelligent and humane in our practices and more effective in our use of resources.
· ]Networking WISER promotes and provides better connectivity between individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments. It will operate on all bandwidths and in most languages.
· Visibility WISER allows the invisible to become known, the small to become seen, and the network to be mapped.
Capabilities, Functions, & Offerings
WiserEarth promotes positive social change by empowering the largest and fastest growing movement in the world—the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice, poverty, and the environment. WiserEarth provides tools to help these organizations find each other, collaborate, share resources and build alliances. WiserEarth…
· Contains the most extensive database ever created —over 100,000 organizations based in 243 countries, including contact details, maps, areas of interest and mission statement.
· Offers advanced search tools enabling users to find out quickly and easily ‘who is working on what’ and ‘where’ so that organizations can leverage their experience, knowledge, and resources.
· Provides funders with an information landscape of all organizations engaged in program activity in their field of interest, a helpful tool to better evaluate proposals and dockets.
· Makes information available to help grantees move towards greater alignment and collaboration with other groups.
· Provides an instant and effective means for many people to give small amounts of money to organizations all over the world thereby broadening the global philanthropic base.
· Offers free listings of jobs, positions, and resources for organizations, prospective employees, interns, volunteers, and students.
· Supports individuated calendars that notify users of any and all events in their specific geography regarding their areas of interest.
· Establishes the means for bioregional hubs to empower local and living economies.
· Facilitates free or extremely low cost VOiP communication between listed organizations in the world (Skype and MINO).
· Includes a relational and editable database of organizations and individuals searchable by areas of interest, geography, type or organization, profession or pursuit (for individuals), and scope of activity.
· Contains the first detailed taxonomy of the organizations within civil society.
· Provides lists of resources including books, conferences, events, other databases, definitions, magazines, articles, podcasts, streaming audio and video, maps, research reports, and educational opportunities.
WiserBusiness is an open source knowledge base upon which a global standard for responsible business behavior can be founded and cared for by the wider community. It will hone and standardize the criteria determining responsible business behavior, link customers’ social and environmental priorities directly to companies via consumer feedback and company evaluation mechanisms, and supply companies with the latest solutions. WiserBusiness
· Encourages radical transparency as a new model for business
· Provides businesses with the resources and guidance needed to implement responsible business practices
· Creates a space for industry members to share innovative techniques and learn from one another.
· Provides in depth evaluation of the impact of doing business on an industry-by-industry basis.
· Supports partnerships between businesses and non-profits to find creative solutions to social and environmental challenges
· Empowers a consumer by revealing the companies and the embodied values behind every brand.
· Gives consumers a mechanism for direct feedback to companies.
· Encourages a place-based economy.
· Reveals regional economic synergies, providing companies with a mechanism to streamline their resource inputs and waste streams.
· Contains the first detailed taxonomy of responsible business practices.
Additional features of WiserBusiness include:
· Best practices: The methods, measures, and examples of responsible business by category and industry.
· Industries: A framework for understanding social and environmental issues related to a particular industry.
· Companies: A database of companies and their track record with respect to responsible business practices.
· Organizations: A list of non-profits and government agencies working to promote responsible business and ecological practices.
Platform & Applications
WISER Platform is the technology that makes the collective awareness, support, and communication possible. The software and information generated by WISER is created under open source license as governed by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which makes the code and the application freely available for the good of the community. It allows for certain terms, which allow modification and further redistribution of the code and software without payment, but restrict users from selling it. Any and all iterative improvements made to the code by subsequent users are available to all users. The theory of open source is simple: when code is subject to modification and change by many programmers, it rapidly evolves and improves. It is the same principle that informs all of WISER. If we can provide a means to freely exchange information and communicate ideas, it will vastly accelerate understanding, social evolution, and adaptation.
The core elements of the platform that will be common to all uses are:
· Relational database structure housing information on organizations, businesses, individuals, responsible practices, and resources including books, conferences, events, other databases, definitions, magazines, articles, podcasts, streaming audio and video, maps, research reports, and educational opportunities.
· Categorization of and ability to search all information by areas of interest, geography, organization type, industry, scope of activity, responsible practices, and profession or pursuit (for individuals).
· Community editing and contribution tools to allow content to grow organically.
· User management to track the history of all edits and establish an editing hierarchy based on community-voted credibility ratings.
· Open ID to allow users and user preferences to move seamlessly between all WISER applications.
· Arrangements of entities and resources into Interest Portals around areas of interest, industries, practices, and regions. These portals would allow for the incorporation of features to increase connectivity and discover synergies between organizations, businesses, the government, and individuals.
WiserCommons began when WISER and the Interra Project explored ways to share information and relationships. From that first meeting it has grown into a community driven effort to create a means for all organizations to share information. Currently, organizations are posting information, resources, and calendars to individual websites, but this information cannot be freely and easily exchanged. It remains in silos and most users do not necessarily know where it is or how to access it. WiserCommons is a member-centric, control-free zone of activity in which members agree to cooperate in the creation of public goods to be freely used by all members of society. WiserCommons will establish cooperation agreements and protocols so that the work done by one organization/website can be easily and in some cases automatically repurposed by another. This represents a pooling of resources, precisely the activity
WISER hopes to foment. NCI will act as fiscal sponsor for WiserCommons and supplies the tools for it to succeed. NCI and Interra have spearheaded this effort together and will continue to do so until it has the necessary infrastructure to be run by its members. Participating member organizations in WiserCommons to
Measures of Merit
The success of WiserEarth will be judged in five ways: the growing breadth and depth of information contained in the database; increased usage of features and ownership of the information by the organizations and individuals themselves; the transparency of the site’s development process; the relationships that are built and the collaboration that is engendered between groups; and the increased awareness about global civil society in the media, and with students, politicians, and businesspeople. We are dedicated to developing a true global resource, one that embodies and mirrors its tenets. The success of the project depends on our ability to create a tool that is so useful that people throughout the world will want to be part of the WiserEarth community.
· Usage of features and ownership of the information by organizations and individuals over time (measured through website traffic analysis including number of unique and repeat visits, navigation paths, referring sites, use of editing tools, number of APIs downloaded, number of links/cross references to the site).
· Growth in the breadth and depth of the information contained in the WiserEarth directory (measured by the number of organizations in the database, number of countries included, number of languages provided, as well as ongoing accuracy of information post-launch).
· Market research studies with WiserEarth’s user base to ensure that all audiences (non-profit professionals, community leaders and organizers, activists, funders, academics, and students) are being effectively reached and served.
· Tracking of media coverage and commentary.
Measurements of Success for the WISER platform will be assessed by:
· Non-directory specific site enhancements (continual updates and improvements to the site including community-developed plug-ins for connectivity).
· Once donation mechanism is offered, total dollars donated to organizations across the world.
· The initiation of new non-profit projects initiated as result of networking through the portal.
· Efficiency of fund use due to reduction in duplicate efforts of non-profits working on same projects.
· Things happen and are created that we didn’t predict.
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[1] Natural Capital Institute 3 Gate Five Road, Suite A Sausalito, California 94965 415/331-6241 www.naturalcapital.org. Editor’s Note: Images and screen shots as well as a table of topics, short staff biographies, and a discussion of marketing plans have been left out. Visit WISER at http://www.naturalcapital.org/wiser.htm.