Funding the WiserEarth API: CivicActions Offers Matching Donation

I like many others was completely blown away by Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest. The last 3rd of the book is a compendium of non profit and non governmental organizations around the world that are working on social justice, human rights, sustainability, environmental and indigenous people’s issues as well as many others. Hawken’s describes these groups collectively as a movement, the largest movement in the history of the world. A movement that is decentralized and global. (you can watch this video to get an idea)

The Natural Capital Institute, founded by Hawken and others launched Wiser Earth in 2007 and since then have indexed more than 110,000 organizations, many of them non-US based.

The millions of organizations and individuals who actively work towards ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights, and political accountability address 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 incomplete connectivity.
WiserEarth provides the ability for organizations, businesses funders, social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists, scientists, and citizens to find each other, make connections, build alliances and share resources.

Last week Leif Utne and others launched OpenWiser.org to crowd source funding for completion of the Wiser Earth Open API. The API will allow other developers to build websites that utilize the wealth of information collected and maintained on Wiser Earth. While at the NTEN NTC in San Francisco, Jenn, Sadie, Ian and I had the opportunity to talk with Peggy Duvette, WiserEarth’s Executive Director, and Angus Parker, the Program Director, and talk about WiserEarth and the open API project.

We believe that the API will enable the creation of innovative applications and mashups, and look forward to the creation of a module for Drupal that can access WiserEarth’s data and present it in new and creative ways on Drupal websites.

UPDATED: CivicActions is offering a $500 matching donation from now (Monday morning) through the end of the day on Wednesday (midnight Pacific time on May 6th). CivicActions will match any individual donations of $150 or less, up to a total of $500 towards OpenWiser.org’s goal of raising $10,000 to fund the completion of the Wiser Earth API. Double your donation by making one today!

Note on the update:We just wanted to clarify that our commitment is to match smaller donations, not a single big donation