Building a Wiser Commons: Portland

Last Thursday, Interra's Seattle-based team of change agents (Brittany Jacobs, Jon Ramer, Tova Ramer and I) met up with the San Francisco team (Michael Gosney, Brad deGraf, and Greg Steltenpohl) at "Building a WISER Commons: Portland," hosted Ecotrust at the Jean Vollum Capital Center. Jon, along with Howard Silverman of Ecotrust, and Paul Hawken and Betsy Power of Natural Capital Institute, gave presentations on WISER (World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility). Kit Seeborg's Worldchanging post describes what the intention of the event was. Based on the feedback we're getting, the event was a success by all measures.

Interra co-sponsored the event with Portfolio 21, Progressive Investments, Ecotrust, and Natural Capital Institute. Thanks to everyone who showed up, helped out and made the day so remarkable!

Mark Grimes, founder of Ned, took copious notes at the event. He writes:

Yesterday in Portland there was an all day Portland Wiser Commons conference in the amazing Ecotrust building downtown. The morning was talks from Jon Ramer, Paul Hawken and Greg Steltenpohl primarily regarding the Wiser business models with a dash of Interra here and other things. I had some great chats individually with Jon, Paul and Greg (I met Greg a couple years ago briefly at the Social Enterprise Association meeting in Milwaukee). The afternoon was open space, and a very dynamic session at that. What they are working on and ready to launch is very, very, very cool and will appeal to many people within o/net I suspect. I spent enough time with Jon and Greg to explain Ned and they both got it instantly, and also saw the prospect for collaborative working with the Wiser platform.

Jim Benson of Gray Hill Solutions and Cooperation Commons was at the event and blogged about it:

The goal here is not to create yet another body shop, but to pick specifically already funded projects to work on and, in the end, create an open-source platform that NGOs can easily deploy. This platform will (likely) allow NGOs to quickly publish information on their own sites and distribute that information globally.

Ecotrust's Howard Silverman, blogging at On the Commons, quotes NCI's Paul Hawken, at the event:

What’s interesting about this movement is that it’s completely atomized. It didn’t start in the center; it started from the outside; it started from, literally, the ground up. And this movement is about ideas, it’s not about ideology. Ideas open up possibility; ideas liberate. And ideas are always subject to change. They’re ongoing; they’re evolving. They’re up there for people to look at, and examine, and criticize.