WiserEarth

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

~ the obituary ~

The origin is a box of business cards. Paul Hawken had spent years speaking at events where people from small environmental and social justice organizations handed him their details, and at some point the volume of cards became the observation: there were far more of these groups than anybody had counted, and none of them knew about each other. That became Blessed Unrest in 2007, a book arguing that the largest social movement in history was underway and was invisible because it had no center.

WiserEarth was the list. It opened on Earth Day 2007 with the organizations Hawken's researchers had found, over a hundred thousand of them, and it worked like a wiki: any group could claim its entry, correct it and describe what it actually did, and anybody could search across the whole thing by issue or by place. Later it added the social network parts, member profiles and groups and discussions, and the site became Wiser.org.

The problem with a directory of real organizations is that the real organizations have other work. An entry created in 2008 by a volunteer who left in 2009 is wrong by 2011 and nobody at the organization knows the page exists. Keeping a hundred thousand of those current is a permanent staffing cost with no revenue attached to it, and a nonprofit funded by grants has to justify that cost against doing the thing the directory is a directory of. On 17 March 2014 the site announced it would be archived and shut down, giving 10 April as the date, and it was finally closed on 22 April, Earth Day, exactly seven years after it opened.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was actually for ~

The argument underneath the site was that the movement's weakness was not size but legibility. Hawken's claim was that one to two million organizations were working on some version of the same problem, that this made it the biggest movement in human history, and that it looked small because it had no headquarters and no membership roll. A searchable index was meant to be the thing that let those groups find each other without anybody being in charge of them.

It was also unavoidably a product of the English-speaking nonprofit world. A group in a country where none of this vocabulary translates was never going to hear about a taxonomy hosted in California, which means the directory of everybody was always a directory of the part of everybody that reads English and attends conferences.

~ the same grave as the other directories ~

Every ambitious human-maintained index of the 2000s went the same way. The Open Directory Project had tens of thousands of volunteer editors and still could not keep up with a web that grew faster than they could categorize it, and Yahoo's directory, the original map of the internet, was finished off by a search box. WiserEarth had the harder version of the job, because its subject was not web pages but organizations made of people, which move offices and change names and quietly stop existing without updating anything.

Search did to all of them what search does. If you want the name of a river conservation group in your province you now type that into a search engine and get an answer, possibly a wrong one, without a human editor anywhere in the chain.

~ what came next ~

The organization did not so much fail as get folded up on purpose. Peggy Duvette, who ran it, described the ending as part of an organic process that includes disassembling as well as growing, which is a generous way to describe a shutdown and, in this case, close to accurate. On 1 May 2014, a week after the site closed, Paul Hawken and Amanda Ravenhill took over the nonprofit and turned it into Project Drawdown, which went looking for the hundred most substantial ways to reduce atmospheric carbon and published the result as a book in 2017. That project is still running, and it is the inverse of WiserEarth: a short ranked list of solutions maintained by a small research team, rather than an enormous open directory maintained by everyone.

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