Greenpeace 2.0?

I enthuse to Mar­t­in Lloyd in the office about my expe­ri­ence at the South By South­west con­fer­ence, and he responds with “so what will you do dif­fer­ent­ly as a result.” 

This is a man schooled in the “verb the noun with the object” school of Get­ting Things Done man­age­ment.

Well, where to start? My respon­se was a lame mum­ble about doing more of some of the things we’ve done in the past — we turned the nam­ing of a ship over to our sup­port­ers, we launched a mas­sive friend-get-a-friend appeal with the prize of a voy­age on a Green­peace ship, we got our users to design flash ani­ma­tions and illus­tra­tions in an out­pour­ing of cre­ativ­i­ty, we’ve used the var­i­ous con­ven­tion­al pres­sure mech­a­nisms to turn Coke around on cli­mate-killing refrig­er­ants, a reverse boy­cott to hold Ice­landic whal­ing in check and mar­ket pres­sure to save the Great Bear Rain­forest. We had the Cyber­center (Note to self — ban­ish that term, it’s soooooooooo last cen­tu­ry) to do that with. At the moment, we’re stuck with­out a high­ly func­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty tool, so even some of that “been there, done that” stuff is hard to imple­ment, much less new and funky exten­sions. And many of our cam­paigns are still focussed on the deci­sion mak­ing author­i­ties of gov­ern­ments and inter­gov­ern­men­tal organ­i­sa­tions, which just isn’t always a match to the places where Peo­ple are more direct­ly Pow­er­ful: con­sumer mar­kets, brand attacks, many-to-one pres­sure tac­tics.

But there are some things I think we can do and would like to do. 

–Turn a part or all of our home­page over to some of our A-list Online Activists and Ocean Defend­ers to bring a live­ly refresh rate and new per­spec­tives to www.greenpeace.org (and engage them in the task of site pro­mo­tion at the same time)

–Get a con­test going for a spot on the Antarc­tic voy­age next year — recruit the most Ocean Defend­ers, and you’re on — in order to dri­ve recruit­ment up and bring a fun chal­lenge with a real­ly cool prize to our activists

–Auc­tion of that ban­ner Mikey held up on the whale. That was a part of his­to­ry, and I betcha we could do real­ly, real­ly well with this one if we pro­mote it right.

–Get our activists into our plan­ning process. What an injec­tion of light it would be to go out of shop and kick open the ques­tion of how we apply all the pas­sion and will and imag­i­na­tion of our sup­port­er base to win­ning the most impor­tant envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges out there.

–Start pulling Fea­tured Blog RSS feeds and some of the great stuff out there on Tree­hug­ger, Grist, World­Chang­ing into a sin­gle resource spot — Green­peace as aggre­ga­tor. We can do so much more with RSS than we’re doing now. We built mas­sive RSS capa­bil­i­ty into the Green­peace Plan­et plat­form, we ought to use it.

–Run­ning with an idea Elaine Hill has been tout­ing of an inter­ac­tive comic fea­tur­ing Ocean Defend­er heroes, in which the sto­ry­board gets deter­mined by the audi­ence.

–The Green Wiki. Some­body at the old Cyber­centre sug­gest­ed this a long time ago, and it’s still a good idea. Take Tree­hug­ger, mash it togeth­er with Grist and Green­Liv­ing Tips and cre­ate an inter­ac­tive Wiki of ways we can all decrease our envri­on­men­tal foot­print. Tips rang­ing the one Ann Novek came up with of keep­ing a buck­et in the show­er to catch water for her plants to Make magazine’s step by step plans for mak­ing your own wind tur­bine.

Well, it’s 7:45 and it’s time to get ready for the day, bundle Doony onto the bike and drop him at school. More on this lat­er: I’m going to open this thread up to folks over at the Ocean Defend­ers com­mu­ni­ty and see what they have to say.

6 thoughts on “Greenpeace 2.0?”

  1. Hi Bri­an, No new bright ideas to offer but I did like what I read and the com­ments received. I do agree with the com­ment point­ing to a poten­tial­ly even more mas­sive horde of poten­tial sup­port­ers out there who might feel a bit out of place at present, but who would enjoy doing more ! (Ciao also to Gillo and Jen !). Bye for now, Simon.

  2. Gee I would LOVE to see pret­ty much all of this hap­pen.

    Turn­ing over a part of the home­page to sup­port­ers editorial/comment would make for fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing. The more voic­es the bet­ter!

    Allow­ing sup­port­ers in on the plan­ning process could also bring much need­ed ideas and cre­ativ­i­ty into cam­paign­ing and open up the organ­i­sa­tion. It could give GP the oppor­tu­ni­ty to hear, first hand, what it is peo­ple can do, and want to do for the Plan­et.

    I’d def­i­nite­ly be all for this.…okay now I’d bet­ter go cos I’m get­ting all excit­ed. Time for a cup of tea 😉

  3. Hel­lo all,
    May­be I’m a bit out of the top­ic, but I real­ly like Gillo’s state­ment ” How to bring Green­peace to the peo­ple”!

    A friend of mine , a mid­dle-aged 2 chil­drens moth­er, said to me yeste­day :” I just don’t want to talk , I would like to do some­thing for the envi­ron­ment, but I don’t want to chain myself to trees and climb onto pirate ships, what can I do?
    Well, well, I said , now we at Green­peace have a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty for folks like you… we need oldies for our GMO cam­paign.

    So tomor­row , Green­peace will have a demon­stra­tion out­side Swedish Meats office, urg­ing the com­pa­ny to label its prod­ucts , if the ani­mals have been feed with GMO-feed or not. Now , we are talk­ing about con­sumer pow­er.

    Lind­sey, the GPI cam­paign­er, said we want mid­dleaged peo­ple for this cam­paign, not 18 –years old activists with dread­locks… haha…

    But it’s real­ly great that mid­dle-aged peo­ple can feel they are real activists…

    And I will ask my friend to sign up as an Oceans Defend­eras well !

    BTW, we have a Green­peace activists site as well, where activists can dis­cuss, but sor­ry Satu, I real­ly feel that a site like this, that mix­es all kinds of peo­ple from the world is more inter­est­ing than a site exclu­sive­ly for Green­peace activists…

  4. Ah, Gillo — only some­one mind-meld­ed with the interenet would have found this blog-in-beta. I haven’t linked it any­where because I’m still tweak­ing it (orange links? dark­er back­ground?) but I wrote this entry in par­tic­u­lar for the Lizard­fish­es, Ann Noveks, and Blu­plan­ets of the world over at Ocean Defend­ers to see what bright sparks they might set off as well. Under con­struc­tion — com­ing soon! 😉 

    –b

    P.S. If the CIA were half as good as find­ing infor­ma­tion as you are, I’d be very, very wor­ried for the world.

  5. Some­one has been pub­lish­ing a weblog and I missed it… I’m get­ting old. But let’s go back to the sub­ject.

    Indeed, many good things have been done and oth­ers, such as those you men­tioned, are a nat­u­ral next step (very famil­iar I have to say). On the oth­er hand, bring­ing peo­ple to Green­peace is just part of it. To the ques­tion Mar­t­in asked, I’d answer: “What we’ll be doing dif­fer­ent is: bring Green­peace to the peo­ple”. But how you do this?

    There are a lot of ways Green­peace and its activists, employ­ees, etc. can con­tribute to the Inter­net com­mu­ni­ty, to those social net­works where issues are dis­cussed and advo­cat­ed.

    And I can see an exam­ple right here, right now. You, Bri­an, are telling your thoughts on this weblog, telling also about Green­peace in many ways. Great! But now answer my ques­tion: why isn’t this linked from any Green­peace site? 

    Green­peace and its cam­paigns invite peo­ple to be part of their com­mu­ni­ty. Like­wise, peo­ple expect Green­peace to be in THEIR com­mu­ni­ties.

    Inter­est­ing sub­ject. As usu­al.

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