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WiserCommons began in 2005 when WISER and the Interra Project began exploring ways to share both information and relationships between their organizations. It has since become a community driven effort to create a means for all organizations within the movement to share information that will benefit the community.
Organizations already post information, resources, and calendars to their individual websites, but it often remains in silos, unable to be freely and easily exchanged. WiserCommons was created in response: it will be a member-centric zone of activity within which members agree to create public goods to be freely used by all. It 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.
Meetings with dozens of individuals and organizations have occurred over the last two years to help define and refine WiserCommons’ goals. In the meantime, WiserEarth was launched, and several NGOs that have embraced the tool have found they have additional needs for information exchange services that are beyond WiserEarth’s current set of capabilities — needs, that when filled, will benefit the whole of the WiserEarth community. Thus, “WiserEarth Partners” is NCI’s term to describe the first applied efforts to create and make available public goods and information exchange services as envisioned under the WiserCommons.
WiserEarth Partners are interested in increasing WiserEarth’s information sharing capacity in several ways: Fast-tracking the lengthy and expensive documentation process required to open WiserEarth’s source code is of chief concern. WiserEarth Partners are also interested in “add-ons” and functionalities such as RSS feeds, document and attachment repositories, meta-calendars, and enhanced site navigation. And finally, this group desires more advanced cross-platform data sharing capabilities.
If your organization has embraced WiserEarth and feels it can assist the project by giving software engineering services or financial resources, please contact Peggy Duvette at duvette@naturalcapital.org. Many of these enhancements are time-consuming and costly—but are achievable by a committed cross section of engineers, funders, and community users working in common.
Picture the collective presence of all human beings as an organism. Pervading that organism are intelligent activities, humanity’s immune response to resist and heal the effects of political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation caused by ideologies, whether they are free-market, religious, or political. The quickening of the movement in recent years has come about through information technologies increasingly accessible and affordable to people everywhere. It arises spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts, resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and imbedded movement, spreading worldwide without exception and deflecting most generalizations. In a world grown too complex for constrictive ideologies, the very word movement may be too small, for it is the largest coming together of citizens in history.
— from Blessed Unrest
