Aggregating + Connecting the Community

Since our first event in 2001, Web of Change has been growing, maturing, and getting more exciting every year. Each time we produce a successful convening we get more and more clarity on where the whole thing should evolve to next. After 2 sold out events in '07 and '08, we've decided to make some moves to extend our model and expand our impact in the world. Welcome to that.

The Web of Change website has been, up until recently, merely a site that promoted our events - sharing bios of participants, presenters and conveners, publishing our agenda as it is developed, and building momentum and excitement for the big day when we all gathered at Hollyhock or MaRS. Fun if you were coming, not all that useful if you weren't.

This year we decided to make some big changes, that we felt were in alignment with how our industry has grown and the role WOC is growing into playing in it. 

We're hoping with a bit of extra effort we can help this community connect and make magic together not only twice a year but year round.  We developed a plan to turn the WOC site into more of a community hub for our sector, with a new vision to aggregate and share the best content from the most interesting people in our exciting sector, and share it with an even broader community through our site. 

After the lovely (and irreplacable) Sarah Pullman moved down to Oakland to explore a career in the healing arts, we hired Kori Brus as our new communications and outreach person. Kori is formerly a direct response fundraiser at Ecojustice (Canada's EarthJustice), and was also the online campaigner for the successful Vision Vancouver civic election campaign that elected my friend (and former Cortes Island resident) Gregor Robertson to the Mayor's seat in Vancouver. He knows the space well, has a curious mind, and is a great writer, and he became our point man to pull this new vision together.

We don't have a business model to pay for all this new content yet, but we're hoping that

• a) more of our WOC alumni share their great stories of change and impact with us, so that
• b) more people come to and are influenced and turned on by the site, so that
• c) we can have a bigger impact on our industry and our world.

If it works, eventually we're hoping more sponsors will show up and help carry the load.

Like everything Web of Change has always been, this is a fun (and lightly held) experiment. Got thoughts on how we can support your work better? On how we can build the community? How we can partner with others doing similiar great work in the space? Want to help us do it? Please share your thoughts with us, through a comment or send an email to info at webofchange dot org so this site combined with Twitter and Facebook can become a vibrant connecting point shining a bright Web of Change light into all of our professional and personal lives. We hope you enjoy our first effiorts. Thanks for visiting.