Digest version for busy world-savers:
- Grass Commons celebrated its third birthday last month with a new and greatly improved release of its mighty Wagn software.
- We’ve updated Hooze.org, a site for “organically grown” public data about products and companies, with the new, mightier Wagn features, and now we’re emboldened to ask for help:
- Vote before April 14th for Hooze & Wagn to win the NetSquared Innovation Fund Award. (more info and project endorsements below)
- Invite friends interested in the social and environmental impacts of products and companies to join Hooze.org.
- Lead a Hooze Digging research challenge by choosing a topic (coal, Walmart, recycled materials, bikes, etc) and seducing others with similar interests to flesh out Hooze content on that topic.
- Import! Do you have access to an existing database that you think should be on Hooze? Put together a plan to Hooze Your Data
- Donate to Grass Commons, a 501(c)(3) public education charity.
- Grass Commons has just begun work on a Wagn website for greening schools. Volunteers interested in joining the early research on this project are warmly welcomed!
A little deeper for people who still take time
Wagn Details
Wagn 0.5 is here! Fueled by lots of great feedback on the 0.4 release — much of it from you guys — we revamped the interface, and so far it’s been a real hit. Good-looking, easy-to-understand, powerful: everything our founders wish they were themselves. We’ve also introduced datatypes (dates, numbers, plain text, rich text, queries…), autosave, user administration, permissions, and more.
We have also started two mailing lists for those who’d like to be updated more frequently on Wagn news: one for wagn enthusiasts (users, fans, and site maintainers) and another for wagn software developers. Contact johnca@grasscommons.org if you’d like to be added to either list.
Hooze Renewed
Hooze.org, the original inspiration for the Wagn, is showing new life on the heels of the recent Wagn release. While folks have been excited about the vision and elegant design of Hooze for a long time, we’re now hearing things like “easy to use” and “attractive.” It’s still a bit slow and under-documented, but we think it’s ready for more action, and we’d like to invite you back.
We’re looking for people to lead (and join) “Hooze Digging” campaigns — drives to focus Hooze community researchers’ attention on a company (Whole Foods, Monsanto…), industry (oil, furniture, computer…), or social topic (sweatshops, water usage, gender equality).
We also want to begin helping people integrate existing databases into the system — or, as we call it, to Hooze Your Data. Some data (like a company’s environmental reputation) changes much more slowly than others (like inventory). Humans are great at the nuanced slow stuff, but computers are much better at the precise fast stuff, so Hooze is designed to accommodate both.
Bringing all of this together, our medium-term plan is now to find and fund a Hooze champion — someone with the full-time job of cultivating the site, its content, and, most importantly, its community. We’ve been spending so much time on development that we haven’t been able to give enough attention to community, which is really what makes or breaks a social site.
If you’d like to contribute in any of these ways, please contact info@grasscommons.org.
Grass Pastures
The new Wagn release is the first since October, largely because Grass Commons has been helping several outside projects get going in recent months, including MakeMeSustainable.com (due out in a few weeks), a site for assessing and improving personal environmental impacts, and AboutUs, a large public wiki pushing new advances in open source tools.
All very exciting, but we’ve realized Wagn and Hooze need our full attention to reach their full potential, so we’re now lunging forward with a renewed focus — and a renewed zeal for finding ways to fund this vital effort.
NetSquared
One way we’re hoping to find new resources is via the NetSquared Innovation Fund Award, which will bring representatives of 20 innovative projects together to present their work to a pool of investors, developers, and networkers. The Hooze & Wagn proposal has been praised in several blog posts, but the 20 projects are selected by user voting, so we need your help.
Please vote to bring funding and developer attention to Hooze and Wagn.
And if you’d like to multiply the effect by encouraging your friends to vote, here are some helpful urls to mail them:
Our proposal: http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/hooze-wagn-organically-grown-public-data-products-and-companies
About the award: http://www.netsquared.org/2007/partner/netsquared-technology-innovation-fund
How to vote: http://www.netsquared.org/projects/vote
Also, if you do vote, please take a serious look at the following project proposals submitted by friends of Grass Commons:
Green Schools
We also thought several readers might be interested in Grass Commons’ newest project, GreenSchoolToolbox. A Wagn website spearheaded by our dedicated and talented Board member Shari Aaron, GreenSchoolToolbox will be a resource for those interested in making schools cleaner, safer, and softer on the environment. Users will be able to share resources, develop metrics, track progress, and educate children about their impacts. Then when kids are steering wagns, watch out.
Donate
Well we just had to do our first annual filing with the IRS this year (never made enough before), and you may be interested to know that in each of the past three years, we’ve pulled in over 10 times as much revenue as the previous year. At our current rate of growth, we will overtake the global economy within the decade.
OK, so we’re not aiming for that, but we do have to keep growing to realize our goals. We need to bring in more experience, more diverse backgrounds, and more energy.
Please consider donating to Grass Commons on our website. One thing we’ve proven: we can make a little money go a looooong way. With your help, some very exciting changes are within reach.
