The Natural Capital Institute, the Interra Project, Portfolio 21 and Ecotrust invite the Portland civil society community to a presentation on WISER (World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility). WISER is an open source platform that enables private sector, civil society, and government to collaboratively address and solve social, economic and environmental problems.

Thursday, April 5, 2007
9:00am until 4:00pm
Doors will open at 8:15am for coffee and pastries
Billy Frank Jr. Conference Center in the Ecotrust building
721 NW 9th Ave, 2nd Floor
Portland, OR 97209

Cost: $10/person full day
Space is limited to 150 people, so register at Brown Paper Tickets

The morning session will include a presentation of Wiser Earth by Paul Hawken and an introduction to the Wiser Commons by Betsy Power and Jon Ramer.

The Wiser Commons is a member-centric network of cooperators creating a common-pool resource of sustainability focused information and tools. The Wiser Commons will develop and share cooperation agreements and protocols so that the work done by one organization/website can be easily and in some cases automatically repurposed by another. Measurable outcomes of participation in the commons include enhancing the quality, usefulness, and completeness of the information that each of us has access to and increasing the numbers of people viewing our shared information.

We will:

• present the WISER framework for connecting the civil society, private and public sectors
  
• demonstrate Wiser Earth, an open-source directory of over 100,000 organizations, people, and resources across North America
  
• have a strategic – not technical – conversation about how our cooperation can benefit the Wiser Commons and our respective lines of work.
  

After lunch, there will be smaller workshops around issues related to the Commons here in the greater Portland region. These will include:

• Wiser Commons Architecture and Infrastructure
  
• Wiser Commons Taxonomy
  
• Wiser Commons Governance
  
• Local Practice Groups
  

  If you are planning to attend please add yourself to the ATTENDR event website to learn about who is coming, who is interested in what topics, who knows whom, and who wants to meet whom.

  More information or inquiries about any of the above, contact Daniel Etra at Ecotrust, 503.467.0793 or detra@ecotrust.org.