Welcome to Sunflower News! If you’re interested in using technology and online community to help connect, amplify, and strengthen the great work being done around the world in climate change mitigation, adaptation, and justice – then we invite you to join us. We’re building this site for everyone in the climate movement. There are two interrelated parts of Sunflower News: the tech and the community.
How to Use the Sunflower News Technology
You can use Sunflower News to efficiently discover what climate work and issues have the most momentum online today, in climate in general (see the Top News, Solutions and Podcasts sections of the site) and in the specific parts of the climate movement that you’re most interested in. The site updates automatically throughout each day.
Want some inspiration? Here are 10 things you can do with the news and information you discover here.
You can set up sections of the site to track your areas of interest by creating a free account and entering keywords for each section you’d like to create. Here’s what one part of my Sunflower News page looks like today, for example:
How it Works
Our team is building Sunflower News to track the work of thousands of organizations, activists, scientists, and others who are working on climate around the world. You can see our ever-growing directory of 1400+ sources here – and let us know who we should add! (Just send an email to Marshall@SunflowerNews.org)
Feeling overwhelmed by all the climate information out there? That’s exactly the problem we’re trying to help solve!
Right now we’re using Twitter and RSS feeds to discover the stories on the site, Twitter data to rank the stories, and then our small team of human editors to remove off-topic stories and select each day’s Editors’ Pick. That means it’s a hybrid method of expert knowledge, discovered through crowd-sourced data, which is then algorithmically and manually edited.
The Sunflower News Community: You’re Invited!
Leading up to launch of the site, more than 50 people from 35 organizations have helped us build Sunflower News. Special thanks go out to our official partner organizations: the newsletter and community Exponential View, the 50 year-old Indigenous-led NGO Cultural Survival, and Climatebase, the world’s leading platform for climate jobs and talent.
You’re invited to join us here on the Sunflower blog and at our regular community events: live and recorded video chats with scientists, organizations, activists and others from around the world. We’ll post about the events here on the blog and we hope you’ll contribute to conversations by posting comments on any of the posts you see. Tell us about your work! And please share your thoughts about the news being talked about here on Sunflower. We’re all here to learn together and connect.
Who Started Sunflower News?
Sunflower News was started by founding publisher Marshall Kirkpatrick and technical co-founder Brian Hendrickson. With a whole lot of help from friends and allies. Sarah Damian is the Sunflower News Editor!
All three of us live in what the colonial state calls Portland, Oregon, USA. (Look up your location here.)
Our backgrounds are in journalism, technology, startups, sports, and social sciences. We started Sunflower News in order to use the skills we built in other contexts to support one of the most dramatic transformations in the history of the world: the transition away from the extractive carbon-based economy. We’re working to help build a world of generative connections.
And we’re excited to connect with you. We hope you’ll give Sunflower News a try and let us know what you think! And if you’re not sure how to use the info you find here, check out this list of ways you can use the info you find on Sunflower News.