In October of 2022 we celebrated five years as an incorporated 501(c)3. Some teams may throw a big party to celebrate, but we decided to design a new website to commemorate the milestone. Our completely re-visioned website better showcases our mission, work to date, and current programs available to our users.
In our first five years, our team worked closely with our biggest champions to build out a suite of products and services in line with our mission: to build digital infrastructure in support of the environmental movement. We have closed out half a decade creating codebases from the ground up and releasing APIs that make our stakeholder’s data central to environmental decision-making. This commitment to building solid, foundational software and services has made the next phase possible: supporting an even bigger segment of the environmental movement with our offerings. We are consolidating our various offerings under our standard Commons brand. The first step in this effort has been a complete migration and overhaul of our organization’s website, ourcommoncode.org.
Our newly designed website provides visitors with clear information about what we do and how we do it. Because our offerings target various segments within the environmental space, we needed to make sure that our website clearly illustrates how our organizational vision serves all of our target users. Therefore, the new website showcases how our products align with the needs of each of the sub-sectors in the industry that we serve.
- Watershed management groups can easily identify the value that Water Reporter will add to their monitoring work to both wrangle and amplify data;
- Restoration funders and professionals can create incredible tracking portfolios with FieldDoc;
- Environmental legal groups and community organizers will be able to build relational, geospatial enabled database-powered applications with Commons Atlas.
- For individuals looking to connect with like-minded colleagues and build out monitoring standards and access capacity-enhancing resources, we offer free membership to the Water Data Collaborative’s Mainstem Network.
Over the past five years, we have built a comprehensive portfolio of partner stories that highlight the value that increased data management capacity through software strategies brings to individual players and organizations in the environmental space. These works demonstrate the outcomes achieved in part due to adoption of our products and services. Going forward, we seek to expand this index of stories to demonstrate how supporting the environmental space with robust software can dramatically expedite the restoration and improvement of our natural world.
Speaking of services
Visitors to our website can now explore all of the products and services that we offer from our main page. From each product page, users can create accounts or log-in to access their data. We also make it easy to find inspiration through partner stories that highlight how our products have been integrated into leaders in the environmental movement. For the first time ever we've also brought our blog in-house. The move away from Medium allows us to better utilize third-party applications like Observable and Cargo to embed data analytics visualizations into our articles.
We hope that this new website provides a convening space for our growing network where they can discover new resources intended to help catalyze data-driven decision-making across organizations, collaborations, and environmental goals. For anyone looking to stay up to date on the latest system updates, in-depth data journalism pieces, and thought pieces on how to adopt the latest digital infrastructures into your organizational goals please join our mailing list.
We've found time and time again that the best opportunities to adopt integrated strategies come from building off of existing experience and knowledge from those we aim to support. We hope this website showcases our effort to aid the environmental movement in building the digital infrastructure that creates connections and opportunities to support our leaders on the ground, in courtrooms, and in legislative halls working to address the critical pollution and climate issues facing our environment.
