WiserEarth

May 9, 2007 7:28 PM

WiserEarth is a user-editable relational database that aspires to list, categorize, and describe every non profit and civil society organization on Earth. It currently includes 104,304 organizations which can be viewed by name, location, or areas of focus. You can perform complex searches. You can post (or search) jobs, events, and resources. You can discuss areas of focus, such as Urban Forestry, Evolutionary Ecology, or government oversight and reform. You can also visualize the networks connecting these areas of focus and the various organizations.
posted by alms (6 comments total)

This has already been done.
posted by dhartung at 8:37 PM on May 9, 2007

Don't forget to go to Guidestar.org for financial information on that nonprofit (if US based).
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:32 AM on May 10, 2007

Guidestar is great, but it's not nearly as ambitious as this. It's not built from user generated content, and it's not structured and linked. You could say that WiserEarth is the web 2.0 version of Guidestar.
posted by alms at 4:34 AM on May 10, 2007

How, exactly, is this substantially different from idealist.org?
posted by Deathalicious at 6:22 AM on May 10, 2007

Idealist isn't a wiki. It's maintained by paid staff. Organizations can pay a fee to have jobs posted on Idealist, and organizations can submit their own organizational description. But fundamentally Idealist is modeled on the newspaper classified ad paradigm.

WiserEarth is a structured wiki. It's akin to Wikipedia, except that where Wikipedia uses flat files of html for each entry, WiserEarth stores all its data in a relational database, allowing much more complex functionality.

Like Wikipedia, WiserEarth is designed to be maintained by the community. Anyone can get an account and edit what's up there, create new connections, etc. Even the database schema is designed to be maintained by the community (although currently that's not enabled, and long term it will still be more controlled than general editing).
posted by alms at 6:59 AM on May 10, 2007

Sweet - thanks for this! I've been mourning the loss of BuyBlue.org, and this doesn't make up for that site going down, but I love a list of NGOs. Interested to hear about that database schema being maintained by the community - you mean so people can add categories as necessary, or something more complex?
posted by rmm at 8:01 AM on May 10, 2007