Communities will learn about and care for their local environment and plan for a sustainable future. They will "think globally and act locally"

The Climate Champions Facebook application is a project of We Can Solve It aims to harness the existing social relationships and viral nature of the Facebook platform to empower people to educate their friends, family, classmates and colleagues about global warming and to engage a wider audience in helping to solve the climate crisis through a mix of activism and personal practices.

Our hope is that Climate Champions will significantly raise awareness of the climate change crisis and generate significant policy impact to help solve it. In addition, the application is structured to provide a win-win situation -- for every friend a user recruits, every petition they sign, etc., money will be donated to supporting climate change solutions via the We Can Solve It campaign.

Our country is facing the Iraq War, the War on Terror, the Drug War, environmental policies, support for Africa, education, and health.

Our congressional representatives are supposed to represent our interest, but are under increasing pressure from lobbyist, corporations, and big money. 

Govit is a website that is inspired to help balance the power, and get your voice heard on the issues.

•  On Govit you can learn about popular legislation, and discuss it
• Vote on legislation and have your vote sent instantly to your representatives
• Compare your votes to your representative and other members
• Connect with other members and rally support for issues

As part of our digital Inclusion work, we are developing a holistic approach to media change. We realize the importance of creating a digital infrastructure that is accountable to and sustained by the community it aims to serve and support. The development of a community based DigiMapping system enables community members to identify and track their local technology assets over time would be helpful in creating a infrastructure that comprehensively addresses the access needs and concerns of historically marginalized communities and groups on their own terms.

A mapping system that focuses on neighborhood technology assets offers a strengths-based approach to developing priorities, and would address the limitations of needs-based development. For example, county-wide needs surveys that are designed to extrapolate results down to the neighborhood level neglect specific neighborhood trends. In addition, county-wide surveys are often landline/telephone based, and exclude important segments of the population such as those without phones or permanent homes. Factors such as language, calling hours, and sample diversity are variables that weigh heavily on the quality of survey data, and yet are easily dismissed once decisions are made. By focusing exclusively on what is deficient in a community, needs-based approaches fail to incorporate the positive characteristics of a neighborhood into the survey. This gap has social implications that are beyond methodological. Our goal is to create a new method which better reflect neighborhood needs, desires, assets, and capacities which would translate into more effective and sustainable improvements for communities.

The information available through our proposed DigMapping system would be helpful for funders, policymakers, researchers, and organizers engaged in sustainable development, technology infrastructure, and community building strategies.

Climate Adaptation 2.0 will empower people to develop their own climate adaptation strategies at the individual, family, and community level by combining local knowledge and frames of reference with existing data layers and models.

This project will produce a working model on one island in the eastern Caribbean demonstrating how communities can become empowered to develop their own climate change scenarios and strategies. This will be applicable in small island developing countries in general, and in coastal zones worldwide.

Inhabitants of coastal zones everywhere are vulnerable to natural hazards linked to climate change. Nowhere is this vulnerability more acute than on small tropical islands. In the eastern Caribbean, natural hazards usually take the form of extreme weather events. Climate models suggest that the intensity of tropical storms will increase, and also that dry seasons may become more pronounced, resulting in both floods and droughts. In addition, sea level rise is expected to hasten coastal erosion, and the rise in sea surface temperature is expected to further impact already stressed coral reef environments. All these factors are expected to have profound implications for livelihoods of island inhabitants, either directly (e.g., stressed reef resources result in declining fisheries) or indirectly (the quality of tourism destinations erodes, leading to a loss of revenues and jobs).

Government efforts to address natural hazards have a general myopia with regard to needs and concerns at the scale of communities. Communities cannot find their reference points in official maps and strategies. This project will mash up "official" geography, climate models, and community maps to develop a climate vulnerability atlas that is accessible at the community level.

Muriel Kramer - Chair of the Hopkinton, Mass. Board of Selectman - recently noted the problems of community building. She said that, "The problem we have . . . is with visioning, that ability to see how all the pieces work together - for example, how economic development can work with conservation and preservation. It can be hard to get people to imagine how all those pieces, that seem divergent, might work toward a unified whole."

Very aply put.

After working for four years in for a community building organization, I would say that by and large the greatest challenge was for members of the public - who were interested in becoming involved in building up and improving their own community - had a very difficult time understanding how all the pieces of their community system fit together.

The UrbanVision mashup will change all that by bringing together divergent data from numerous sources across the web in a single easy-to-understand source that will help any budding community building volunteer or activist gain the necessary tools to comprehend how their own community is put together and how they can make a decisive impact for good, armed with the understanding. In essence, this mashup will help build the future volunteer community leaders who will know what needs to be done and how to get things done.