Hello dear early beta users and friends! We just finished an important Sunflower meeting and I wanted to put up a blog post inviting you to introduce yourself and share with the community what you’ve been working on this week. Want to give it a shot?
I’m Marshall Kirkpatrick, founding publisher of Sunflower News, and this week I’ve been moving us forward toward beta testing the site! I wrote up the Onboarding questionnaire you saw, I sent off this week’s selections of climate Bright Spots to our contact in the UN (more info on that when we start sharing those stories publicly here on the Sunflower Blog!), I worked on our roadmap for the year, and I did a bunch of other work that can all be rolled up into: prep for welcoming in the first friends onto Sunflower.
Things are going well personally as well: my wife is ablaze with inspiration in painting, we’re building new strengths in our boundary-setting muscles with the people we meet, and it’s just feeling real supportive of growth and exploration right now over at my house. I did have a dream that one of my cats got sick, but hopefully that was a metaphor and can be dealt with!
That’s what’s going on over here. What are you working on? How are you doing? We’d love for you to share in a comment posted below. Thanks. We’re so glad you’re here!
I am so excited to be inviting people into the site!! We sure hope it can be super super useful to you!
Luke Conley here, writing in from Brooklyn. I am so excited to see this launch! I’ll be checking it daily and trying my darnedest to break everything.
Thanks Luke! We can’t wait to see what you break 🙂 And hopefully it will help with your climate projects, let us know!
Hello, my name is Orel Smith, and I am a member of the editorial team at Sunflower News. We are an organization that provides reliable and informative climate news to our growing community. I am thrilled to be part of the team that is launching our private beta and can’t wait for our community to see what we have in store. I am passionate about research and content production, particularly my work with one of our contacts at the United Nations. I am looking forward to sharing more about this project when we publicly launch it on our Sunflower News blog. Additionally, I am excited to help influence alternative narratives to climate solutions that focus on hope and optimism. I am eager to highlight the important work being done towards a just transition and a regenerative future.
Thanks Orel! Thanks for all you do!
Congratulations on this next big step… I keep asking myself how a news website with lots of the latest climate information is going to help us deal with information overload paralysis? Perhaps if it turns information into a direct action movement via network building then it’s possible?
Over the past quarter century I’ve found my most rewarding online experiences to be places where writing comments to share expertise leads to others who impress with similar expertise, especially if it gets us working together to create something of benefit to the real world, as in the living world of ecosystems, not the human built capitalist world that drives them to destruction.
So I’m hoping that all this news turns into a discussion community that turns into an real life action community that gives the participants a sense of ownership/being on the same team of something that rapidly grows into a powerful force for the benefit of all life on earth.
I love you Deane, thank you. Thank you for your honest critical thinking, combined with gentle, effective communication, your helpful view of opportunities, and your deep wisdom from powerful experience.
So on your question about information overload, that sounds like a good question we should answer in a blog post!
I’ll say for now that it is ironic, which I think is good, that all this information on the site is intended to help overcome information overload. The benefit here is in focus and prioritization. We aim to make it easy to see what’s got the most momentum among people, both in climate in general and in your areas of specific focus. That’s the role of our Top stories in each section, which is a ranked sort of the full river of news in the Latest section. I’ll flesh this thinking out a little more in a blog post and we can talk about it publicly, I would LOVE for us to be informed more deeply by the thoughts you and others have on it.
Second, on comments and connections. YES! Right now we are pointing people outward to Twitter to find existing conversations, and then asking them to come here to this blog to participate in new little conversations with our new little community we aim to build. The way you talked about online “places where writing comments to share expertise leads to others who impress with similar expertise, especially if it gets us working together to create something of benefit to the real world, as in the living world of ecosystems” – I love that! We aim for Sunflower to be a place where people can build bonds together to strengthen the network of connections in the climate movement, in defense of the earth. I’m excited to talk with you more about that, including about our online community events we plan on hosting after we launch the site publicly!
Thanks again for your thoughtful engagement. It’s a real blessing we are thankful for.
Hi all! I’m Nate Angell, writing from Marshall’s neck of the woods, Nch’i-Wána lands, traditional home to many peoples including the Clackamas, Cowlitz, Grand Ronde, and Siletz, also known as Portland, Oregon, USA.
I’ve long been a fan of Marshall’s and got the chance to work with him closely at Little Bird. I’m so glad that Marshall is now turning his awesome infodata superpowers to perhaps the most important challenge we face: the climate crisis.
I’m an evangelist focused on community development, digital communications, meaningful education, open technologies, and sustainable growth, now leading communications and community at Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org). I’ve worked across a wide variety of organizations, including open-source technology providers like Hypothesis and rSmart, Oregon startups like Lumen Learning and Little Bird, global communities like the Apereo Foundation, Mozilla Open Leaders, MYFest, and Virtually Connecting, and public/nonprofit institutions like Portland State University and the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry. I’m ABD for a PhD in American Civilization with a focus on critical media studies. Learn more about me on my blog: https://xolotl.org
The most climate-related work I’m currently involved in is the Open Climate Campaign (https://openclimatecampaign.org/), a new partnership we have at Creative Commons. We describe the campaign like this:
Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. The complexity of the climate crisis requires global, national, and local actions informed by multidisciplinary research.
The goal of this multi-year campaign is to promote open access to research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. If we are going to solve these global challenges, the knowledge (research, data, educational resources, software) about them must be open.
I’m super excited to engage in Sunflower News and see how it can help inform and connect our work at CC on climate with other activities and people. Knowing how Marshall’s mind works, I have faith that Sunflower may indeed be able to help with information overload in addressing the climate crisis.