I’ve been working out of Istanbul for the past couple of weeks, helping Greenpeace Mediterranean manage web and new media comms as they launch a high profile ship tour through the arabian gulf and eastern mediterranean sea by the Rainbow Warrior. I’ll be working back and forth a bit between Ottawa and Istanbul over the next few months.
I’m refamiliarizing myself with the global web tools and publishing platform that Greenpeace International has developed over the past few years, and I’m impressed by how their systems have become truly global in scope. It shows up in small ways, such as viewing the single, shared list of 100+ internal email lists that covers every GP office, region and campaign, and also in more siginficant ways, like working with Planet2 - Greenpeace’s global content management system that lets you browse and search pretty much every GP website around the world at once and be able to clone images, articles, etc. over to your own site - including proper captions, photo credits, licensing info - with a single click. Sweet!
Building a broad content management and sharing environment like this is as much about creating the culture as it is about creating the tools, and Greenpeace is making slow, but steady progress to develop a cadre of content managers who really do think globally and publish locally.
This past week we brought the Let The Sun Shine ship tour website online, marking the start of focused effort to engage the public in the Arabian gulf states and eastern Mediterranean in an alternative energy/climate change and nuclear disarmament campaign. It’s an experiment in web publishing from a different kind of mobile platform - a Greenpeace ship. My counterpart Hussein Fakih, who is the regular webbie for this office is posting blog updates, photos and articles from the ship (in English and Arabic) either through wireless net when they are in port, or by satellite email when they are not anywhere near a terrestrial connection.
Of course, Greenpeace does this sort of thing all the time, as anyone who has been following events the around Japan’s antarctic whale hunting fleet will already be aware from watching youtube videos posted directly from onboard the Greenpeace Esperanza near the coast of Antarctica (okay, so that expedition has a bigger budget for telecomms than we do).
My other task here at GP Med is to help with capacity building and strategic comms/fundraising planning. GP Med is a fairly new and small office in a region that Greenpeace is targeting for development in the coming years. If the past year’s growth in website traffic is any indication, then the future looks bright (and busy).
The Greenpeace Mediterranean office runs 4 websites (english, arabic, hebrew and turkish) and they are averaging between them something like 200% growth in visitors over the past year.
More interesting is where that growth is happening. Visitors to the website from Arabic-speaking countries from the gulf states through the middle east and across North Africa have grown between 400-800% in the past 12 months — an incredible, emerging online audience that is really the first of its kind for Greenpeace - a pan-arabic information gateway.
Very interesting …
