Social Ch@nge

Oh, climate change.  Oh, the UN. A giant concept and a giant organisation, both with limited access points for the public, guarenteed to make you feel small, disempowered and unheard.  Well, it’s that time of year again: it’s the UN Climate Change Conference, and this year it’s happening in Poland! 

As a Warsaw resident, I got super excited about this. I thought – hurray, a chance for Poland to access all of the issues around climate change. Take recycling. This is a concept that has not really taken off in Warsaw: public bins are available everywhere, but only to recycle glass and not for other basic elements like paper. What’s more, few Gen Xers or baby boomers recycle because it’s seen as dirty and a pain in the butt – which it is since you have to lug your recycling for blocks to the bins after the one door-to-door program was shut down earlier this year. Now, before you imagine that this is because Poland is somehow underdeveloped or uninformed – consider that nearly the entire population listens to the radio and buys at least one paper every day, that we are all on the internet and that there are two cell phones for every person. If you want to get a message out, UN, now is your chance!

And they are trying.

Conference websites have to be clear, pretty, interactive and  – unlike a normal non-profit website which caters to a target audience – useful to thousands of stakeholders with radically different needs.  To this end, the UN Climate Change conference website has some really good elements for members of the public looking to get informed about climate change. For example, they’ve organized very complex issues into the category of ‘Essential Background’ and an ‘Issues Quickfinder’ that makes it easy to get up to speed. They also include background on recent climate change conferences and set out their priorities clearly on the homepage.

Unsurprisingly, their efforts to make all of these issues intelligible are interspersed with glacier-sized chunks of jargon and a labyrinthine ring of links.  Worse, they’re using social media only as a transmitter, not for interactivity: this means that you’re welcome to watch a press release hosted by Youtube, but no discussion is invited.

It doesn’t have to be like this – for the last few years a main feature of the International AIDS conference websites (the latest was in Mexico) has been a ‘Global Village‘ part of the site for citizen organizing, as well as extensive site for youth to organize together.  Still, the Climate Change conference has just started, and so far I’m mostly impressed with how the UN has coordinated with the media to get their message out over Polish radio, media and the internet.

The shocker is that week’s loser is the usually web-savvy social change organisation Avaaz.  Two weeks before the climate change conference they sent out a message to all their Polish members, asking for help with logistics in Poznan. We offered to volunteer translate over the internet, or to translate in person in Poznan. No response. We went on their website to see what they were doing around the conference and what other activities we could get involved in online. No response! All the climate change info they have up right now is about their work in 2007. Where’s the community discussion, the petition, the outreach between countries, the face on a global problem?  Since when is the UN doing a better job of getting personal online than Avaaz?