Wiser.org

» see wiser.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Paul Hawken spent years counting. Writing Blessed Unrest, he kept trying to work out how many organizations around the world were pushing on environmental or social problems, and the number kept refusing to stop growing. He landed somewhere above a hundred thousand and concluded that the movement was real but had no idea it existed, because nobody had ever put it in one list.

Wiser.org was that list, launched on Earth Day 2007 under the name WiserEarth. It worked like a wiki. Any organization could be added or corrected by anyone, groups could form around a topic, and the whole thing was cross-indexed by issue area rather than by country or size. A village water project in one place could be found next to a national policy institute in another.

It grew steadily rather than dramatically. By September 2012 the directory held over 114,000 organizations against roughly 71,900 registered members, sorted into 47 issue areas that broke down further into 381 subcategories. Peggy Duvette ran it as executive director for most of that period.

This is not a room I was ever in. The years line up with my own, and the internet it used was the internet I was using, but NGO directory infrastructure is one of those categories you only ever meet if your work walks you into it, and mine walked the other way. I came to this the way anyone would now, from the outside, reading what other people wrote down while it was happening.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was actually for ~

The idea underneath was that fragmentation was the movement's real problem. Hundreds of thousands of small groups working on overlapping problems, none of them able to see the others, all of them re-solving the same thing. A directory was a strange answer to that in 2007 and it is a stranger one now, but the reasoning held: you cannot coordinate with people you cannot find.

What made it unusual was that it was open at the edit layer rather than curated. Most attempts at this problem before and since have been someone's proprietary database with a search box in front of it. Wiser let the organizations describe themselves and let anyone else correct the record, which is why the entry count climbed the way it did and also why keeping it accurate cost the non-profit more of its capacity every year.

~ the postmortem ~

On 6 January 2014 Duvette sent members an open letter saying changes were needed and raising the possibility that the site would be archived to the Wayback Machine rather than kept running. On 17 March she confirmed it. The stated plan was to close on 10 April, and the site actually went down on 22 April, Earth Day, seven years to the day after it had opened. Whether that was deliberate or just how the schedule slipped, it is a tidy ending.

The people went on to other things immediately. Hawken and Amanda Ravenhill started work on what became Project Drawdown from 1 May 2014, which is the climate-solutions book and organization that most people know Hawken for now. Pieces of what Wiser had built went to Guidestar and TechSoup, both of which still hold nonprofit data at scale. In 2017 the domain itself was taken over by an unrelated research institute, which is the ordinary fate of a good name once the thing behind it stops paying for it.

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