Five years ago, on October 1, we launched Worldchanging as a venue to find, discuss and imagine the world's most innovative solutions to the planet's most pressing problems. Since then, we've found a great and diverse global community of readers, won prizes and awards, put out a best-selling book, and published 8,500 stories about how to change the world. In the process we've not only grown substantially (becoming the second largest sustainability site on the web, according to Nielsen online) but gathered an amazing network of allies who are among the world's leading sustainability thinkers.

On October 1 of this year, we'll be announcing our next major project. We're incredibly excited to be taking the editorial work we've developed over these last five years to the next level, and we hope that all of you will join us in trying to make that work as useful and innovative as possible. On that, more to come.

In the meantime, we thought we'd use September as an opportunity to review what we've done so far -- a sort of Worldchanging greatest hits. All this month, we'll be highlighting the tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future that have inspired us so far.

Here are a few of our favorites from the very beginning:

Worldchanging Interview: Timothy Burroughs of ICLEI USA

Worldchanging Interview: Founder of the WorldWatch Institute, Lester Brown

Consolidation: Sometimes it's the Simple Solutions

Open Source Architecture, The Power of Collaboration

Worldchanging Interview: Mark Shorrock

Capitalism 3.0: The Book Tour

Worldchanging Interview: Ed Mazria

Understanding the Sixth Extinction

Saving Silence

Rehabilitating the Los Angeles River

This piece is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Photo Credit:Flickr/fleMmA, Creative Commons license.

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H24ever,
Doug Starfield

Posted by: Doug Starfield on September 12, 2008 2:14 PM

Five years ago, Worldchanging was a fresh, welcoming forum of a bunch of down-to-earth thinkers who spoke straight from the heart. They all signed their names and as we read each interesting article we readers could build that virtual relationship with the authors.

I don't understand the rationale of signing everything with "Worldchanging Team". What exactly is hiding behind that team name? Is the writing being "outsourced" or is it being computer generated? And you expect individuals across the globe to develop a warm and fuzzy about Worldchanging.com as you project a nameless unidentifiable persona?

A few years ago, it was a daily ritual for me to visit worldchanging.com and spend an average of 30 to 60 minutes enjoying the fresh eprspective. I did not need an email reminder then. I most certainly do now.

Subbarao Seethamsetty

Posted by: Subbarao Seethamsetty on September 12, 2008 8:04 PM

Sorry, I take it back. I spent a few hours on the site after a long gap and yes, it is still awesome and yes, there are always references to the names of the authors inside the articles.

Cheers,
Subbarao Seethamsetty

Posted by: Subbarao Seethamsetty on September 13, 2008 6:01 AM