WiserEarth is another example of online technology being used to support the greater good. WiserEarth was inspired by Paul Hawken, Executive Director of the Natural Capital Institute, which sponsors the project. In their words:

What has been missing is a map and directory of our network that includes the resources for communication and cooperation; in essence, an infrastructure through which to coordinate our efforts. WiserEarth…provides a way for us to become better connected and more effective at working together.

Now two years old, WiserEarth has amassed over 110,000 profiles of progressive organizations — and you can search their database to find organizations and causes that you might want to support. They’ve nicely created interactive searchs that you can slice by organizations, people, groups, events, jobs, resources, solutions and areas of focus. They also have an interactive map (of the world – using Google maps) so you can zoom in and locate organizations in space as well as conceptually. So you can explore in whatever way suits you best.

Beyond that, you can connect with others to share ideas and build your network, and can create a group for your own community of action. We can’t speak from personal experience about how well the organizing aspects work, but the database of organizations is quite complete and is truly impressive.

[Note: WiserEarth has just recently (April 2009) begun an effort to open its database so that search results and data from WiserEarth could be embedded on other websites. This would allow you to build a search box on your blog or website that would search WiserEarth’s data and display it on your site. We provide a similar search mechanism for our DLF knowledgebase of ethics and peace-related resources. This effort, OpenWiser, is soliciting donations to complete the software that will support this open API – they need to raise (USD)$10,000 to carry out the work.]

This is one article in a series that features organizations that work in the areas of ethics and peace.

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