Some of the site's new features include:
- Consistent, easy-to-use navigation within the site;
- Databased content for fast, precise information;
- A Multimedia section that is designed so you can click on any
picture in the site for a big, glorious, but fast-loading
version;
- The ability to forward any picture or articles on our site to
your contacts as an e-card or email, or to print any page;
- Quick loading, any-browser, no-frames content; and
- XML support so you can receive Greenpeace news feeds on your
Palm Pilot, Cell phone, and other gadgets.
This is only the beginning. We've developed Greenpeace Planet's
backend software as an in-house, open-source project. What you see
today are the core features of a Lego-like project, and we'll be
adding new snap-on capabilities as we go.
The Story behind Greenpeace Planet
Greenpeace, like many activist organisations, faces unique
challenges in getting our message out via the web. Perpetually
understaffed and under-resourced, we needed a tool that would allow
any of our campaigners or information officers to send their
research, insights and warning messages to specific audiences, and
also provide those audiences the opportunity to get active and make
a change. We needed a tool that would allow our web editors based
around the globe to publish in any language, any alphabet, at any
time. It had to permit them to get information out under tough
conditions -- from the middle of the Amazon or the middle of an
ocean, or when activists are chained to a smokestack, with a laptop
and a satellite phone.
It had to be designed in a way that would fulfill the purer
principles of database design, information management and worldwide
engineering standards.
It had to be designed in a way that would allow the whole site
to grow as times changed and the world accelerated.
And most of all, it had to build in tools for discussion and
community-building.
Why communities? Why build space for discussion? Because Greenpeace doesn't win environmental victories. Public opinion does.
Public opinion is what stopped nuclear testing and protected
Antarctica from oil and minerals exploration and created the
moratiorium on commercial whaling; not Greenpeace.
Public opinion is what keeps the worst abuses of governments,
chemical giants and petroleum conglomerates in check.
What Greenpeace provides is the lightning rod: the highly
visible attractor to the power of public opinion. Sometimes that's
information -- like the warnings about Global Warming that we were
making decades ago. Sometimes that's drama to call the public's
attention to an abuse -- like our highly televised confrontations
with Russian and Japanese whaling fleets in the early 80s.
Sometimes it's drama backing quiet implementation work in the
conferences halls of an international treaty -- like our successful
efforts to ban ocean dumping of radioactive materials and to stop
international trade in toxic waste.
We exist to create fair, fully informed debates in society about our planet's future. Because when the debate is fair and informed, we win == and that means the planet wins.
The Internet has the potential to become the place where fully
informed debates about our planet's future take place.
It has the potential to become not just the collective mind of
civilisation, but the collective conscience as well, and a core
resource for global democracy.
It certainly has the potential to be more than a global shopping
mall.
Today, we're witnessing the globalisation of our world's economy
and information infrastructure, the rise of peer to peer journalism
and peer to peer activism. And with the rise of global consumer
markets comes the rise of global consumer campaigns. Greenpeace
Planet is one place where where all those forces can gather.
Public engagement
At the same time that we began discussing the concept of
Greenpeace Planet, Greenpeace was in the midst of discussions about
the nature of our campaigns and the concept of "Public
Engagement."
We saw some interesting trends. Back in the 1970s, Greenpeace's
messages were catalytic warnings about environmental threats that
needed attention. Nuclear bombs were still going off in the
atmosphere and spreading "perfectly safe" radioactive fallout
around the world. The great whales were being hunted to near
extinction. Toxic chemicals filled the air and water.
To get our message out about these threats, Greenpeace created
what Robert Hunter, a Greenpeace founder, called "Media Mind Bombs"
-- visually compelling dramatisations of David-like opposition to
these Goliath-like forces.
We spoke to the public via the only means we had to reach a mass
audience: television, newspaper, and magazine stories.
With the rise of the Internet, we suddenly had the capability to
speak in an unmediated voice, to open a two-way communication
channel between our supporters and our opponents, and to open the
organisation to the creativity and energy of direct input.
Greenpeace India launched the first version of its website on
15th August 2000, with a unique cyber-action. We set up online
computers in the settlements around the contaminated Union Carbide
gas disaster site in Bhopal to allow the survivors to send emails
demanding justice, directly to Union Carbide. The launch took
technology to voiceless, disconnected victims and empowered them to
take action. Direct action.
Over 6000 survivors and their supporters from around the world
joined us in this action and the sheer bulk of cyber-mails forced
Union Carbide, a corporate criminal, fugitive from justice in
India, to shut down their server for almost three days. Since then
we have used our cyber- activist community and our supporters to
use the power of cyber-action to send a message to the forces that
matter to initiate change, to help us protect the planet.
Have a look through the site. Get informed, get inspired, get angry. But most of all, get out there == raise your voice, and change the world. Why just surf, when you can make waves?
P.S. Dear visitor, like we said earlier, this is your site,
created to bring us all together to protect the planet, and we
would be grateful if, as fellow-activists, you report back any
glitches, bugs, connectivity issues and general problems on the
site to our 
. Thanks
and welcome to our Planet!