Introducing GreenTribe – an environmental action hub

Posted on 24. Feb, 2011 by timrayner in Campaigns we support, Open culture, The movement

This is an interview between Tim Rayner and Gabe Stern of GreenTribe.

Q. What is GreenTribe? What are you trying to do? How did it get started?

The Green Tribe is a place for people to find practical environmental information – how to recycle a computer, what is the most water-efficient shower head, who are their local environmental agencies – and a place for people to work together towards sustainability. We want to gather all the people that are working individually for the environment, and provide them with tools that they need to work together, and take action as a mass.

We started with the basic idea that a large portion of the population is concerned about the environment, and wants to work to make the earth more sustainable, but the task feels overwhelming, and a lot of people feel like their individual efforts are like spitting in the wind. We wanted to create a space where these people could gather, and be invigorated by the number of people working alongside them, and work together to turn their individual actions into something massive.

From there the idea evolved into something really community driven, and what we have now is a place where people can go to learn, share work they’ve done, brainstorm, problem-solve, create strategies together, and ultimately take action and swarm to borrow your terminology.

Q. The Directory is a central feature. You’ve decided not to use a wiki for this – why not?

Well, right now the directory has rudimentary wiki-functionality – we request that people add or delete links with our submission form, then we review the submissions and add them to the directory. We emphatically want to grow to be an open-source venue in all aspects of the site and movement. When I say all aspects I mean the directory, blogging, campaigns and initiatives, social-networking, down to the store where we’d like users to decide, and even create the designs and items we sell.

Our problem is we don’t know how to start and manage all of these things openly at once. We’ve taken a first step, but in the spirit of open-source culture, we want to know from our users how to move towards a more open infrastructure.

The task at hand is a bit intimidating, and daunting, so we thought it best to take steps forward and allow the components of the website to evolve towards openness naturally. So at the moment we can give people something to use, continue to update and add content to the directory, and invite participation. But this is something on which we would seek input and direction from our users. For example: what is the best program to build a wiki directory? How do we build that infrastructure? What are the imperative functionalities that we must consider before launching it? We’re hoping that the green community will engage us and help lead and inform us as to what direction we should go to best serve the community. We’ve taken the first step, and launched a site that demonstrates clearly some of our direction. It was really important to us to get off the drawing board and into action. Now that we’ve launched we want to open up the evolution of our site to the community, and see what works and how.


Q. Green Tribe is an Action Hub. What are your plans for building this side of the project? Any particular strategies you’d like to share?

The main thing we want to do with the “take action” part of the Green Tribe is open it up entirely to the community. We want our users to identify the problems that are important to them, research them, come up with solutions, and strategies for action, and take action together. So we’ve implemented what we think are some good first steps for creating community:

1. Our blog is the mouthpiece that brings everyone’s ideas together. We post news and information on people’s projects in the hope of igniting a spark. If we get some people that are interested, we’ll keep going, ask our users to research the topic and think of solutions. We publish the best ideas, and then start to talk strategy. We post the community’s ideas as they come in, and invite experts to write guest blogs. Once we have a viable strategy we initiate the force of our userbase.

2. On top of that we’ve got the green club registry, where we want student and community groups to register their information, so that people can browse through, see who’s active in their area, and lend a hand, and groups can get in touch with each other to offer support, and coordinate regional campaigns.

3. In the tout section we feature awesome environmental projects sent in by our users. The idea is to give other environmental groups blueprints to take on awesome projects with impact, and contact with groups that have successfully pulled them off.


Q. Eco-branding (clothes, tote bags, water bottles, stickers) is an important part of the Tribe. How do you understand the relationship between branding and building your social network/action hub?

The branding is important in two respects. One – we’re allowing groups to raise money for their organization through the sale of our merchandise, which could be a vital source of income to student and community groups that are often underfunded. Second, community is essential to the success of our project. We need a lively culture of people sharing ideas and working off each other to create the best solutions and campaigns. Branding is an important tool to raise awareness, and build mass. 


Q. What does the future hold for GreenTribe?

An active community of people sharing ideas, working together to solve problems, and organizing action. Really what we’d like to see the most is us stepping more and more into the background as the community grows, and our users assuming control of the processes – from contributing links to starting conversation, and directing the initiatives. Hopefully from there we create a snowball rolling downhill, picking up ideas, with more and more people participating in the movement until we have a massive populist tool that directs environmental change.

About timrayner

Tim is the creator of Philosophy for Change, a practical philosophy program on reflective change. He has taught at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, and run Philosophy for Change workshops for business professionals and the general public. Tim is the writer and creator (with Simon Robson) of Coalition of the Willing.

View all posts by timrayner →

Tags: 10/10/10, climate action, collaboration, highlight, movement camp, open stewardship, web 2.0