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Pitch

Spectrum of "green" rating system Facebook app and/or search plugin with supportive website for innovation and action, globally and locally.


Description

Summary

Climate change is a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about leading to denial, overwhelm or apathy.

Moving toward sustainability in the face of it involves a vast myriad of changes across all sectors locally and globally.

Everyone needs a voice in shaping our sustainable future and pressure for change needs to come from the bottom up.

Efforts made to shift cultural attitudes thus far have mostly involved throwing more and more of the same overwhelming information at people.

With no real way for people receiving that information to involve themselves in the conversation about solutions, many people become overwhelmed and apathetic or stay in denial because the immensity is just too hard to take in with no real ways to impact change.

To have cultural impact on the climate conversation, people need good information to make sustainable choices and government, businesses and organizations need to know that people want them to move toward greater sustainability.

Rating systems for various pieces of the overall picture have been developed by committees within governments or organizations but, these are mostly static, limited in scope and don't include the voice “of the people.”

We've seen the people using the power of their online social networks spur change. This project would provide tools to people to impact the climate change conversation by developing an app for rating all Facebook pages for “greenness” coupled with a supporting website for crowd-sourcing local resources and community visioning for innovative solutions.

Sustainability is a spectrum. No one's got it right yet. So, this will provide evolving community created metrics that utilize the power of peer pressure to recognize sustainability efforts and accelerate of innovation.

Green Thumbs Up's simple yet powerful strategy shifts from the us vs. them denial conversation by starting from the assumption that we all benefit from greater sustainability.


Category of the action

Changing public perceptions on climate change


What actions do you propose?

Provide crowd-sourced method for people to endorse companies/organizations based on what is individually important to them while providing nuanced feedback to companies/organizations from all industries/sectors.

Develop Facebook app as a form of web-enabled collective intelligence which:compares the text on each Facebook page to a list of terms related to sustainability and creates a sub-list by finding those terms within the text for each page. The app then shows that list to users when they visit a page and asks them to endorse those terms and gives them the opportunity to add their own (protected by a stop list of words that would not be allowed).

Draft mock-up of endorsement user screen:

Mock-up

The app would also provide for a "green thumbs-up" rating system of 1 to 5 green thumbs up to recognize sustainability efforts and a "green thumbs-down" option to show disapproval as well as a written review comment field option.

This system will make it easy for users to quickly rate all Facebook pages for sustainability and communicate that information to both the page and their social network on Facebook.

Facebook pages will be encouraged to document their sustainability efforts on their page so that terms can be endorsed by visitors and will receive user input about their sustainability efforts.

Terms that are frequently added by users would become part of the list of terms used to search pages to create the sub-lists for user endorsement.

Because Green Thumbs Up's method of rating "greenness" will be based on endorsing terms as well as a more static thumbs up system, it can evolve as solutions emerge that are not yet even an inkling in our collective minds eye to meet sustainability evaluation needs that will vary by place and culture.

Dynamism and adaptability are built in to the rating/endorsing methods as new criteria or wording develops over time.

Aggregating user responses means that the people together will create an evolving lingo to describe and empower sustainability providing culturally based peer pressure to encourage wider spread mind-set and behavior change.

Since sustainability is not a time limited event and involves so many facets of our lives, the app would also draw people into the sustainability focused web platform which would provide various forms of additional information on these topics as well as interactive features to support and accelerate innovation locally and globally.

Facebook pages that achieve a "green thumbs-up" rating of 3 or higher could be invited to showcase and promote themselves on the web platform which would also give them opportunities to engage with other sustainability focused innovators online.

The Facebook app would also take advantage of Facebook social viral opportunities to further spread sustainability topics and make them more a part of the every day conversation rather than continuing the perceptions that sustainability is a side issue and actions related to it are "alternatives." People and pages seeing the ratings will be drawn into the conversation not from "is climate change real?" arguments but from a collective expectation that we all need to be more sustainable.

Individuals could also develop their own keyword lists (tags) with these personal lists being used as filters when they look for local businesses/organizations on the web making it quick and easy to find local resources that best meet their preferences.

The supportive web platform's tools would include a directory filtered locally for users of these sustainability innovators making it easy for individuals to find businesses, organizations, etc near them that are acting to increase their "greenness" while also making it easier to shop and interact locally based on personal sustainability values.

This online set of tools helps connect people to each other locally and to thinking in relational terms about the larger, dynamic environment to address human needs like food, shelter, water, waste recycling, energy, community, health, spiritual fulfillment, justice, and livelihood. The tools encourage new thinking in a particpatory environment, and that new thinking is supported to create new appropriate tools, methods, projects and approaches.

The web platform would support both global and local networks so that members can participate in global discussions as well as easily find local events, businesses, organizations and other members near them to encourage online and offline interactions and actions.

For events, the web platform would a employ crowd-sourced calendar (that can be filtered locally) on which anyone could submit events making it just as easy to find sustainably minded local events as it is now to find movies, theater and sporting events.

The web platform would provide opportunities for local and global discussions as well as community visioning boards. The visioning boards would be a place for individuals, businesses, organizations, community leaders, policy makers, educational institutions, neighborhoods and more to create and share ideas for solutions to meet emerging sustainability needs.

Rather than leave funding of these solutions to the whims of governments, non-profits, banks or private enterprise, the web platform would provide tools for local crowd-funding. Like micro-loans have spurred developments where before there was no possibility, micro-crowd-funding can make it possible for good ideas to get "seed" money to germinate these new ideas without requiring complexities such business filings or 501(c)3 status.

Some examples of projects that would benefit from this kind of micro-crowd-funding would be community solar projects, community greenhouses, community gardens and much more.

One project here in Minneapolis that sparked this idea was the "Chicken Coop Co-op" where several people got together to build and tend a chicken coop on one persons land and all benefit from sharing the eggs and the deeper connections with neighbors in their community.

This kind of project doesn't need much money but without adequate funding might fail to come to fruition. Micro-crowd-funding could fill this gap as well as the gap for start-ups that need initial funding to build sufficiently to then go on to pitch for more traditional forms of funding.

Because users from all over could see and interact with efforts in other communities, good ideas could spread like seeds on the wind to other communities and those good ideas could be implemented with less effort because communities could learn from each others attempts and successes.

The crowd-sourcing interactive features could also easily be utilized by businesses, non-profits and governments as a channel to crowd-source ideas to meet their specific needs for solutions.

Marketing through social media and press channels will be needed to get the word out to potential users about the app and website.

The "green" rating concepts discussed here for a Facebook app could also or alternatively be built as a search engine plugin for Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

Both the Facebook and search engine approaches could be built as add-ons as discussed herein or alternatively could be  developed in conjunction with those companies to incorporate these features into their platforms.

All features can be built to be accessible via mobile as well and can be fully integrated geo-location features.

Regardless of how the features are incorporated, providing everyone with ways to rate and review "greenness" and sustainability will have a direct impact on the conversation and culture around the shifts that we all need to make toward greater action in the face of climate change creating a greater acceptance of the need for change throughout societies.


Who will take these actions?

I am a web designer and have already built much of the coding infrastructure for the web platform which is in the process of being optimized for brand/identity, usability and speed.

Facebook app development is in initial stages and would benefit from help from someone more skilled than I at that type of coding.

The project would also benefit from others with skill sets in effective branding, social media marketing and press campaigns.

A team to support the app and site interactions will become necessary as user population builds.


Where will these actions be taken?

The strategy of Green Thumbs Up is primarily online and the work of the project can be done by people working online so geography is not a limiting factor for most actions.


How much will emissions be reduced or sequestered vs. business as usual levels?


What are other key benefits?

Green Lingo's strategies will help increase our local and global "green" voice while building more resilient communities and produce a multiplicity of positive actions beyond protesting to legislators.

Sustainability rating and review systems may become mainstream and expected web-wide.

Like the evolutionary process that developed humans and our wonderful interconnected web of life on earth Green Thumbs Up builds on useful technological evolutions from various tech "species" and brings these evolutions together to create something greater than the sum of its parts to support the shifts we must make as humans on a finite planet if we are to survive.

It supports the shift from overwhelm/apathy/denial to every day sustainable actions and breakthrough innovations.


What are the proposal’s costs?

Initial funding in the range of $10,000 could get the project's coding and branding completed with possibly a bit left over for initial marketing trials.

Costs will ultimately depend on the scope reached but could be offset by monetizing site membership, charging for advertising and fees for micro-crowd-funding.

Profit is not the motive yet the goal would be for the app and platform to be self-sustaining financially.


Time line

The proposed actions of this project can be built out over the next few months and in place for people to utilize long-term.

This project combines an app and platform that can evolve over time to meet changing needs and even the coding of the platform itself provides for flexibility to create new interactive tools very quickly (in under a month) to meet new community needs.

Actions created using these tools by communities will be phased in at whatever pace is appropriate for each innovation for its community.


Related proposals

Perhaps Green Thumbs Up provides the tools needed in this proposal: An open source ‘Climate Safety Toolbox’ where news, culture, ranking and benchmarking are the drivers.

Toolkit

 


References

Seeds of this sustainability rating system were brainstormed at the recent Hack for MN - part of the National Day for Civic Hacking. It won the "Most Likely to be Commercially Viable" award.

Facebook turned red for Marriage Equality. Next up: Facebook turns "green" as users rank pages for sustainability efforts

Declaration of the Four Sacred Things

The Earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth.

Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.

To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standard by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.

All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance; only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.

To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.

To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.

   --Starhawk