I can do that. | Sustainability Advocate

Today I submitted a proposal to Google’s “Project 10 to the 100th,” which is a call for ideas to change the world, in the hope of helping as many people as possible. They are funding up to five ideas selected by an advisory board and have committed $10M to the program. I asked for help in building out a collaboration platform (community) on EarthSayers.tv. Community is one of eight categories.

According to the Website, “A selection of Google employees will review all the ideas submitted and select 100 for public consideration. The 100 top ideas will be announced on January 27, 2009, at which point we will invite the public to select twenty semi-finalists. An advisory board will then choose up to five final ideas for funding and implementation. We plan to announce these winners in early February.”

Here are some of the answers I provided on their entry form:

What one sentence best describes your idea (150 characters)
Increase sustainability awareness through community collaboration and with Web content that inspires people to say, “I can do that.”

What problem or issue does your idea address (150 words)

Low awareness.

Presently a Google search on sustainability yields over 31M results, up form 15M in 2007, a good sign. However, the U.S. is sixth in search activity according to Google Trends, behind Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, and Canada. This is the measure of low awareness.

Where to start?

On the video search engine, Blinkx, there are over 73,000 sustainability search results, up from 20,000 in 2007, and for the prototype we aggregate our content via a database connection to Blinkx. The sheer volume of the results and the heavy duplication of content begs for further organization and clear direction to the question, “where to start?” As one business leader once exclaimed: “Searching is one thing, finding is another.

If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how (150 words)

The sustainability learning cycle begins for millions of people with a Google search on the term sustainability.

“The most important problem in the world today is not global climate chaos or violence. It’s people’s feeling of powerlessness. It is the problem beneath all the problems.”

?Frances Moore Lappe at the World Future Council.

They deserve to hear and see the people actually involved in the sustainability movement so they can learn by example and be moved to believe, “I can do that.”

Only recently has an educational resource appeared on the first page, Wikipedia, and we see EarthSayers.tv as a video-based companion resource with greater inspirational power.