Environmental Facebook

Credit

I've written a number of posts concerning collaboration. It's probably my biggest passion within the environmental movement. In fact, yesterday, during my Environmental Case Studies class, I was asked what my passion is within environmental sustainability. While other people mentioned sustainable food or energy, I just can't pick a topic that is most important. I believe that they are all almost equally important and need to be worked on by everyone. Most importantly, people need to be working on environmental issues in a collaborative manner. 

Collaborative sites have started to pop up, but none has had the type of interactive success that the general sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have had. Of course this is due in part to the more targeted audience of sustainability, but I would still like to see a more comprehensive site. Hopefully I will eventually be able to put together some such site, or witness its creation. This is, after all, about advancing the movement as quickly as possible, not about who gets credit for it. Components of my dream site would include:

1. Quora Factor - a component where members can ask questions and receive answers from professionals and then vote up and down each answer. Quora has been incredibly successful in my eyes in promoting interactive discussion
2. Klout Factor - This encourages users who receive positive feedback from the community and ranks members based on actual knowledge. This also deters spam and uneducated posting.
3. User Profiles / Facebook Factor - This would actually be more like about.me where users can link they other accounts like Twitter, Facebook, and company pages, and write a short about me.
4. Pinterest Factor - The boards on pinterest and Quora have also taken off, exposing people to interesting and cool pictures and articles. These boards could be linked to people's profiles.
5. Categories/Tags: No more than 10 categories or tags to organize information. When people are able to independently tag their material, organization becomes difficult and people who may be working on similar projects often don't realize it. Of course each category can be further subdivided. 
6. Events / Meetup Factor: The site Meetup.com has been incredibly successful in connecting people with similar interests and uniting them at physical events. This helps increase attendance and promotes networking.

Oh I wish I knew enough code to actually create this...

What else would you

Collaboration

When I started my blog, I didn’t really have a sense of direction. I knew I wanted to contribute something to the environmental blogosphere but wasn’t exactly sure where to start or what to focus on. As I wrote random articles and used social media to market my site, a pattern became evident: competition and isolation within the environmental movement rather than an atmosphere of collaboration. 

I encountered many experts at the events I was attending and blogging about, but as one speaker said, there were “silos of information with no conduits connecting them.” In order to make the biggest impact possible, people from all sectors need to be working together – sharing ideas and resources.  Rather than create just another blog among the thousands that focus on “going green,” I wanted to contribute a solution to the discontinuity I was witnessing.  I came up with Experts’ Opinions on Sustainability and asked bloggers from around the world to answer questions on sustainability. Combined we could harness our over 20,000 Twitter followers and multiple sites to really create a discussion. 

I’ve now begun to see a trend towards these uniting sites – The Urban Cnoversion, 2Degrees, EcoDesk, and other sites with multiple contributors.  I hope the environmental movement can continue in this direction to harness the incredible ideas and resources we have as a combined force. Collaboration within the environmental sustainability movement is really my passion and I hope to continue working on projects that help this sector in the coming year.