I was recently joined RarePlanet’s advisory board after hearing about their cool vision. The concept puts environmental campaign managers into a social network where they share and learn best practices in online community management. It’s a two year program, and if successful, community managers earn a communications masters degree from the University of Texas – El Paso.
The range of topics is pretty diverse, from more sustainable agriculture and better management of a protected area to water conservation projects and even a 350 group. Though it’s early in the life of RarePlanet, the effort already has 1000 community members.
What I really like about RarePlanet is its focus on extended community of community managers, academics, super engaged conservationists and other hyper engaged people in the green movement. The long term vision is to create a place where campaigns can be dynamically crowdsourced by those who actually have experience doing them. It reminds me a lot of mastermind groups, where executives meet with other executives to drive their business forward.
Each campaign has a description, a theory of change, and a symbol of pride, which allows community members to share the concepts. Additionally, RarePlanet community users to share various campaigns with select social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Delicious.
It will be exciting to see if RarePlanet can become a leading source for collaborative green communications strategy and learning. I hope you will join us there, too.
Geoff Livingston is a regular contributor to the Live Earth blog.