Grass Commons - Commoners' Quarterly

Commoner's Quarterly, April 2007

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:52:55 -0700

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!

Commoner's Quarterly, October 2006

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 13:18:19 -0800

Hi friends!

Here’s a quick look at what Grass Commons is up to:

In a sentence

We’ve just released version 0.4 of WagN, our open-source community research tool; and we’re preparing to wheel out a series of collaborative research campaigns on Hooze.org, our WagN-based consumer education site.

In more depth

What a great quarter it’s been! Full of serendipity emerging from our efforts to integrate “wikis” (as in Wikipedia, where users can edit documents on the web through a browser) with tagging (as in youtube, flickr, and del.icio.us, where little labels are used to relate videos, pictures, and webpages respectively). We call the combination “wagging” and the software “WagN.”

Commoners' Quarterly, March 2006 - First Edition

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 21:36:43 -0800

Grass Commons turned two this month, and we’re enjoying a bit of a growth spurt. With three new board members, more than ten interns, and a wonderful new Director of Development (Will Lana), we’re building a team that’s up to the task of getting people the information they need to steer markets toward the common good.

All the new energy is fueling some great momentum and emboldening us to try something new: funding ourselves! It’s true: we’ve volunteered two years of hard work organizing information for a sustainable economy, and we’re just now getting around to asking for donations.

With our dedicated in-house developers, enthusiastic volunteers, and elegant solutions to real-world problems, a small tax-deductible contribution ($50, $100, or $250) can have a huge impact. Your help now will make you one of the founding forces behind the world-changing projects we are bringing to life together: