Can a billion mouseclicks save a planet?
Thanks to everyone who participated in our online opinion polls and discussions about the redesign, and who've sent suggestions for improvements. We designed the site to help us with this mission:
To communicate clearly our warnings about planetary threats. To prompt value-based debates about how to stop environmental abuse and how to create solutions. To inspire our visitors to join us and take action, and to provide them with the tools to rapidly affect change.
Some of the site's new features include:
- Easier navigation to your own language and country, and support for worldwide character sets like Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, and Thai.
- Consistent, easier-to-use navigation within the site
- The ability to discuss stories via our Cybercentre and sign up as a Greenpeace Cyberactivist
- Databased content for fast, precise information
- Click on any picture in the site for a big, glorious, but fast-loading version
- The ability to send any picture on the site as an e-card, or email or print any page
- Action links on every page: Action, not words!
- Quick loading, any-browser, no-frames content
- 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 get their research, insights and warning messages to specific audiences, and get those audiences active in making a change.
We needed a tool to 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 chained to a smokestack with a laptop and a satellite phone.
The way it was designed had to be done with an eye to the purer principles of database design, information management and worldwide engineering standards.
It had to be designed so that we could grow the whole site as the 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. We wanted Greenpeace Planet to provide one place where all those forces can gather.
Open Source Software
Our technical staff here at Greenpeace have links not only to the environmental movement, but also to that hotbed of technical radicalism, the Open Source movement.
In the world of Open Source software, the workings of a software system are not jealously guarded as a commercial secret, but shared openly among a worldwide community of programmers who work collectively to improve the functionality, stability and the security of the software for the benefit of all.
The best-known and most successful Open Source project is the Linux operating system. Greenpeace's first internet server in 1994 was a Compaq 286 desktop computer running Linux, and our intranet and Internet systems have been proud, subversive champions of the Penguin Flag ever since we served up our first pages via Gopher, and our first website exposing the secret route of a plutonium shipment. (If you don't know what a "286 desktop" or "Gopher" were, just do what computer technology does: move on.)
In our view, the most important thing about Free Software is not the economics; it's the politics. Not "free" as in "free beer," but freedom as in "free speech".
OpenSource projects can empower non-commercial activities, like online activism, in ways that corporate and built-for-profit software projects simply cannot.
Look today at the number of e-commerce tools available. You can pick any one of hundreds of software tools to help you sell running shoes on line, for example.
But how many tools are out there to create a global demand that those running shoes be made in an environmentally sound and humanly compassionate way?
That's the gap we believe needs to be addressed. And that's why we're building Greenpeace Planet as an Open Source project, with the aim to share the software with other environmental and human rights groups.
When it came to choosing the software we would build this in, the choice was (eventually!) obvious: the Open Source version of ArsDigita Community Systems
(OpenACS). ACS was the software that built Scorecard, the gold standard for environmental information and community building software.
Scorecard was created by the American environmental group, Environmental Defense.
Scorecard serves up vastly detailed information about toxic pollution at a national, state, and local level for the entire US. It provides links to government officials, to activist groups working on particular problems, to discussion threads and online petitions and to legislative routes for demanding information and promoting action. It bridges the gap between serving up passive information and creating a collaborative environment for action. (You can read the Scorecard story here.)
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 70s, 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.
In the late 90s, we created our first web-based community of supporters on the Internet: the independent, virtual nation-state called "Waveland."
Waveland brought together people from all over the world bonded by a roughly common set of values to chat with one another, bounce ideas around, swap pointers to environmental actions and solutions, moan about politics or just yack.
Many people became regular and popular commentators. Some folks spent hours on the site every day. It was a self-policing, self-promoting, and self contained little world, to the point that the community actually continued to grow and extend well beyond the end of the campaign it was built for -- and so past the point that Greenpeace was officially paying attention.
Then the Internet service provider that hosted Waveland for us went bankrupt.
The server where Waveland citizens had been living in daily contact with one another was seized. Entire personalities, relationships, and discussion threads that had made up thousands of people's Internet homestead were gone in an instant.
The organisation that hadn't been paying attention was suddenly inundated with messages of protest.
One Waveland citizen who wrote said she'd met her husband on a Waveland discussion board. Another said he felt like he'd lost his home and all his best friends.
Meanwhile, back in Australia, a converging trend was happening. Greenpeace and Adbusters had launched a campaign to demand Coca-Cola live up to the promise of a "Green Olympics" in Sydney.
Coke still used climate-killing chemicals in their refrigerators, despite the ready availability of alternatives. An Internet campaign was launched to pressure the CEO of Coke to convert to climate-friendly technology.
We planned for a long drawn out conflict. Instead, the attack on Coke's brand quickly became widespread. The company went into a panic about its global image.
Within months, Coke capitulated.
One of the reasons the effort had succeeded was the swift peer-to-peer promotion of the campaign's website via aligned communities on the Internet.
It was out of these lessons that the Greenpeace Cyberactivist Community was born. We recreated the threaded discussion features of Waveland, added the ability to have your own home page, to sign up for a regular campaign alert newsletter, and made the site our primary organisational discussion board and the centre of our online activism campaigns.
In its first year, the Cyberactivist Centre attracted over 65,000 registered users and hundreds of thousands of visitors who joined us in dozens of effective online actions.
Community members also named a Greenpeace ship (the "Esperanza"), helped design their own site, gave advice and feedback to a new Executive Director in an
"open
house" discussion, sent a volunteer to the Amazon, and helped translate articles into hundreds of languages.
An Italian activist helped stop a destructive road project half a world away in New Zealand. A Japanese activist successfully challenged a proposal to put a dangerous nuclear fuel processing plant in a small town in Japan by targeting the town Mayor with a cyberaction demanding a referendum.
An Australian filmmaker and a Belgian naturalist met via the Cybercentre and ended up collaborating on a film about Sea Turtles in the South Pacific, and throughout, the Cyberactivists maintained a steady stream of dialogue with Greenpeace staff and volunteers, offering advice, criticism, and good ideas.
Organisationally, Greenpeace was making a commitment to "Open Campaigning" -- to becoming an "Open Source" organisation building campaigns with the collaboration of a worldwide community. To build that community, we needed to turn to the web.
Building a global website, building a global conscience
In conceptualising our new website we leapt right in, Greenpeace style, with impossible ambitions (what would you expect of an organisation that considers "saving the world" to be an achievable mission?).
We bit off far more than we could chew. But eventually we figured out the way we wanted the system to work, and then we settled down for the sheer effort of getting a project this big off the ground and into development.
Internally we had to talk to many people about why this was a good idea. We wanted to try and change the world using the Internet and we had a few ideas on how to do it right.
The people at Greenpeace who worked on this directly came from all over the world: from Italy, India, Thailand, Australia, Argentina, England, France, Canada, the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and China.
A global consultation process can take a really, really long time. A menu item that can be expressed in three letters in English may need half the screen in French or German.
A layout that looks gorgeous for anybody who reads left to right may not work for users who want content in Hebrew (right to left) or Japanese (top to bottom).
Flags are inappropriate as language indicators for an organisation that believes in breaking down borders. It's impolite to address an email newsletter to a Dutch person using their first name. Some colour schemes that look peaceful in Latin America look angry in China.
Also, since we're activists, feedback from some folks was delayed by their being thrown in jail, setting out on ocean-crossing voyages, or disappearing on hush hush missions for weeks on end. Finally, we had agreement, and we had commitment from every Greenpeace office worldwide to convert to our new system within two years. The only problem was, we still didn't have it working!
The last days were frantic as we fixed bugs, tweaked designs, and punched content into the new site. We were still hammering away on big campaign pushes at the same time, working with our campaigners and Cyberactivists to deliver Brazil's moratorium on Mahogany export and the International Whaling Commission's refusal to lift its moratorium on commercial whaling.
We pulled people in on shifts, with all hands on deck, living on pizza and adrenaline, as the world of Greenpeace hummed around us in a continual state of agitated activism. Volunteers saw the bags under our eyes and kindly took up burdens above and beyond the call of duty.
As zero hour approached the project manager was living on techno music and crisps, the chief web editor was babbling incoherently, and the systems administrator had his eyes propped open with matchsticks. The sixth floor of our office in Amsterdam was glowing by the lights of computer monitors deep into the night.
Finally we switched sites over, staggered off to bed, and then came in the next day to make sure the new baby was stable. If you're reading this, we met our short-term objective and launched Greenpeace Planet.
We're probably, at this moment, catching up on our sleep. So now it's your turn. Help us meet our mission. 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?
By Brian Fitzgerald and Danielle Hickie
You can discuss this article with other Greenpeace supporters at the Cyberactivist Centre by clicking here.
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