Messages from the Pale Blue Dot

Helping Communicate the Periphery As It Becomes Central to the Debate

Director’s Cut - Friday, 5 June 2009

Originally published as part of a series of articles appearing in our publication Linkages Update at http://www.iisd.ca/whats_new/directors_cut130.html

Helping Communicate the Periphery As It Becomes Central to the Debate

By Kimo Goree, Director of IISD Reporting Services (IISD RS) - [email protected]

This week in Bonn, during the Climate Change Talks, IISD Reporting Services team members can be found not only in the negotiating rooms, but also taking notes and photos at a number of key side events. Each morning, side-by-side with the Earth Negotiations Bulletin at the documents counter, you can find copies of our “companion” publication at this meeting, ENB on the Side.

From 1996-1997, during the negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the nature of the climate change meetings began to evolve. The annual gatherings called the Conference of the Parties, the negotiations of the Berlin Mandate and the meetings of the UNFCCC subsidiary bodies began to grow in both size and importance, with many participants coming not to participate in the negotiations but only to attend the growing number of side events held concurrently with the official meeting.  It was my feeling that the side events provided an increasingly fertile arena for the development of new ideas, many of which eventually fed into the main negotiations. In addition, many of the side events provided information on the activities of specialized agencies, governments and non-governmental organizations involved in new research and implementation. The organizers of these side events invested considerable resources to assemble experts for fascinating presentations that sometimes were, unfortunately, sparsely attended. In 1998, at the UNFCCC COP held in Buenos Aires, in an attempt to capture the rich content of these side events and communicate the ideas exchanged during them to our larger, internet-based audience, IISD began publishing a separate report each day on the side events. 

As a result of our success, in 1999 IISD Reporting Services developed a new product called “ENB on the Side,” to be distributed side-by-side with the Earth Negotiations Bulletin and to report on side events at meetings covered by the ENB. This publication was supported by the UNFCCC Secretariat at meetings of the UNFCCC from 1999-2005 and in 2002 the UN Development Programme (UNDP) provided funding for our coverage of the two final preparatory meetings in New York and Bali for the World Summit on Sustainable Development and at the Johannesburg Summit later that year.

In March 2006, IISD Reporting Services published ENBOTS from the Eighth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, held in Curitiba, Brazil. Then, in 2006 and 2007, with financial assistance from UNDP, IISD published ENBOTS from CSD 14 and CSD 15 in New York.

Now, after more than ten years publishing ENB on the Side from key meetings, our archives contain a rich history of ideas that were first discussed publically in side events and eventually were mainstreamed into the negotiations. If you do a text search for “REDD” (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries), you will find references to REDD in side events covered by IISD Reporting Services far before the concept reached the official UNFCCC negotiations. Many other discussions of funds, emerging issues, institutional initiatives and trends that we now consider to be central in the climate policy debate were first presented in meetings captured by our reports. Our coverage is often the only record of these side events and we would hope that the ideas that germinated on the margins of the negotiations were promoted through our coverage and distribution to tens of thousands of readers, projecting the ideas far beyond the handful of participants in each side event room.

IISD owes the success of ENB on the Side to both the UNFCCC Secretariat, who funded our coverage of climate change side events for many years, and to UNDP, who has partnered with us to provide coverage during the World Summit for Sustainable Development meetings and two sessions of the Commission on Sustainable Development, and now, more recently, in the preparations for the Copenhagen climate change talks. We are very proud that both the UNFCCC Secretariat and UNDP have joined to support our activities “on the side” here in Bonn at this round of negotiations.

Be sure to visit our ENB on the Side coverage of the current climate change talks in Bonn: http://www.iisd.ca/climate/sb30/enbots/. During this crucial round of negotiations, ideas that emerge in the side events will no doubt find their way into the solutions being negotiated as delegates prepare for the final debates in Copenhagen this December. For certain, the record of these events will show how vital the discussions on the margin are to the long-term health of the climate policy ecosystem.

Working to Reverse the Knowledge Flow OUT of Africa

Director’s Cut - Thursday, 14 May 2009

Originally published as part of a series of articles appearing in our publication Linkages Update at http://www.iisd.ca/whats_new/directors_cut129.html

Working to Reverse the Knowledge Flow OUT of Africa

By Kimo Goree, Director of IISD Reporting Services (IISD RS) - [email protected]

The Earth Negotiations Bulletin has, for almost two decades, assisted policymakers by not only synthesizing the outcome of international policy negotiations but also by communicating the outcome of these meetings to decision-makers worldwide. While the policymakers who attend these meetings enjoy the benefits of our daily reports as they work, the larger audience for our summaries is following the decision-making process from offices in multilateral development banks, regional economic commissions, international development agencies, and development and foreign ministries, primarily in developed countries. These readers rely on the information we provide to assist them in tracking the policies and priorities governments have set, and in making decisions based on those policies regarding how financial resources should be allocated. The multilateral assistance system is all about resource flows; redirecting and directing flows, halting flows, increasing flows and the decisions on where, when and how much should reach different initiatives are based on the policy decisions that we communicate on a daily basis.

In conversations with our readers, we identified a gap that was articulated by individuals working as decision-makers in these international organizations and by regional policy-makers, particularly in Africa. Most of the problems encountered in both environment and sustainable development activities were not international, but were local and regional in nature. The cultures, traditions and approaches of each region shape not only the problems, but also the solutions, as identified by those working at the ground level. At the same time, international meetings identifying international solutions were the focus of most communication sources. Although regional policy-makers often met to discuss and agree on regional solutions to regional problems, the outcomes of these meetings were not being successfully communicated to the international audience. Our readers asked us if we could begin attending and reporting from more regional meetings.

In 2006, IISD Reporting Services approached the Government of South Africa Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT) with a proposal to begin providing coverage of regional meetings in Africa as part of a program of support for the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). We felt that the outcomes of meetings such as the African Ministers Council on Environment (AMCEN), the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW), the African Ministers’ Council on Science and Technology (AMCOST) and other regional meetings on issues such as biodiversity, climate change and desertification were not being communicated out of the region. For decades, the development and environmental policies in Africa had been set in a one-way flow from major developed country capitals into the region, without substantial input from regional policymakers on their regional policies and priorities.

The Government of South Africa was very receptive to our proposal and suggested that we should also create a network for the exchange of policy information on sustainable development between regional policymakers in Africa. In addition, they suggested that IISD should write non-prescriptive policy briefs before major upcoming meetings to assist regional governments in their preparations. In 2007, the South African Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism signed a US$190,000 agreement with IISD to begin work on IISD’s African Regional Coverage Project, with the agreement that IISD would begin fundraising for the second and third year funding for this project. In 2008, funding from Germany’s Ministry for Development Cooperation (BMZ) and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) completed the project’s funding for the first three years, through the end of 2009.

During the last three years, this project has reported from over 24 intergovernmental meetings, including: the UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Africa’s Development Needs; Africa Carbon Forum; First Inter-ministerial Conference on Health and Environment in Africa; African Ministerial Conference on the Environment; African Water Week; African Committee on Sustainable Development; African Ministers’ Council on Water; and the African Ministerial Council on Science and Technology. The project has also published Briefing Notes to highlight the outcomes of several African Union Summits, as well as meetings of the UN-Human Settlements Programme and the MDG Africa Steering Group. In June 2008, as part of this project, South Africa’s Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Marthinus van Schalkwyk launched the booklet “Environment and Decision Making in Africa: 2006-2008, which documents the history of environmental decision making related to climate change, water, biodiversity, and desertification.

As a result of the success of IISD Reporting Services’ African Regional Coverage, we have begun plans to expand our regional coverage into two areas. In early 2009, an agreement was signed between IISD and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Plans are currently underway to replicate this project in Asia and the Pacific, in partnership with the UN Environment Program Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, based in Bangkok. We are currently making plans to begin fundraising with governments in Latin America and Asia and the Pacific in order to expand our coverage of regional meetings.

Knowledge Work in a Virtual Organization

Director’s Cut - Friday, 17 April 2009

Originally published as part of a series of articles appearing in our publication Linkages Update at http://www.iisd.ca/whats_new/directors_cut127.html

Knowledge Work in a Virtual Organization

By Kimo Goree, Director of IISD Reporting Services (IISD RS) - [email protected]

With some luck, the creation of our organization, IISD Reporting Services, occurred during a very propitious time in history. Or, perhaps, looking at the situation in reverse, it might be said that the panoply of new communication tools that were invented in the last two decades provided the right environment for an organization like ours to flourish.  Either way, we have certainly taken advantage of the emerging internet technologies to create a new way for a team of environment and sustainable development policy wonks to work together from all over the planet, creating a steady stream of highly regarded knowledge products.

One of my favorite books is Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, by Thomas Malone from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.This study, undertaken during the second half of the 1990s, looked at some of the new ways that businesses were working and concluded that the organizations of the next century would be both decentralized and externalized. Although we were never part of the MIT study, as IISD Reporting Services grew during the 1990s, we could certainly have qualified as one of the “interesting organizations” that Malone and his team studied: http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/io.html. These organizations were, according to Malone, “interesting” because of their:
Organizational structure or approach to organizing work (for example, "virtual companies," companies with a unique collaboration with suppliers or customers, etc.)
Strategic approach (globalization, alliances, use of information technology, etc.)
Remarkable success (in agility, productivity, new product development, etc.)
Innovative approach to a common function (marketing, finance, human resources, etc.)
Area of application (electronic markets, advanced technologies, etc.)

As always, necessity is the mother of invention. During the early 1990s, as we began to grow, I watched several other non-profit organizations lurch from one financial crisis to the next, burdened by the cost of expensive office space and dozens of staffers on the payroll (who were either terribly overworked or worried about being laid off between projects). How could we avoid these sorts of problems? Three aspects of IISDRS that characterize our organization now were not so much planned, but were adopted due to our lack of financial resources and the need to get work done as cheaply and quickly as possible.

The Decentralized Organization: Is it possible to create an organization without a center? In 1992, the three founders of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin were living in Canada, the US and Brazil, putting together the funding and format for this new publication without a budget for phone calls or faxes. We found that, except for the times when we met to provide coverage for a UN meeting, we really didn’t have to live or work in the same place because we could do all of our planning, writing and editing using this new, cheap alternative called “electronic mail.” Over the last seventeen years, we have continued to work virtually and as we hired additional staff, we discovered it made a lot of sense to base people in low cost centers and have them work from their homes. This approach both saved us money and allowed our small team of full and part time workers the flexibility to raise children and live where they wanted. Even now, our Operations Manager works from near Köln, our Digital Manager handles all our websites and lists from Bogotá, the Deputy Director works from his home near San Francisco, our Online Editor logs in from outside of Washington DC, the accountant keeps the books at IISD Headquarters in Winnipeg, the Thematic Experts provide updates to the Climate-L.Org Editor in Barcelona, our French translations are done from Tunis and our Spanish texts are prepared in Buenos Aires. The Reporting Services “office” in New York is one small room full of filing cabinets, books on environmental policy and several computer workstations. All of our work is done using email, Windows Live Messenger chats, Skype video calls, threaded discussions and document sharing on SharePoint and our web servers located in Canada.

Harnessing Intellectual Capital: Most businesses, profit and non-profit, have various forms of tangible capital: buildings, patents, land and/or equipment. These companies have a lot of money tied up in offices full of people sitting at computers. However, IISDRS is a different kind of organization that has focused its energy on accumulating intellectual capital. By making ourselves into a people-centered team, valuing the distributed brain power that each of our staff and consultants contribute to our online publications, we have invested in creating a cerebral collective. In the book, Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances And Results from Knowledge Workers, author Thomas H. Davenport writes about harnessing organizational brain power and concludes that the best way to motivate a virtual team is to provide them with the shared benefits that come from participating in a “community of practice.” Our Reporting Services team members not only earn money while on contract with us, but between meetings they share in the rich exchange of environment and sustainable development policy, news, insider intelligence and information gleaned from the meetings all of us attend.

Scalable staffing: Last month, during the middle week of March, we had thirty people working on staff as well as at a water meeting in Istanbul, a forest meeting in Rome, a fish meeting in New York and a plants meeting in Buenos Aires. The following week, just the five full-time and four half-time staffers showed up, online, to work each day.

Working with a pool of trained consultants (the ENB Team), all of our teams at meetings are hired on short-term contracts, allowing us to “scale-up” for the seventy meetings we attend each year and “scale-down” just as quickly. This allows us to keep our fixed costs to a minimum and gives us the staffing flexibility we need to cover several simultaneous meetings in various cities during busy times, yet still survive during the slow months of July and August without having to worry about an expensive payroll.

Nonetheless, despite the many advantages of having a virtual organization, there are limits to the things that can be done electronically. During one week in May, two dozen members of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin Team will gather here in New York for internal meetings. For some of the participants, it will be the first time they have met despite working together, online, for years! For four days, we’ll put aside the computers, chat sessions and streaming video for some good, old-fashioned face-to-face conversations about the future of IISD Reporting Services. There is some comfort in knowing that even for the most virtual and “interesting” of organizations, some basic things never change.

IISD Reporting Services and Knowledge Management

Director’s Cut - Friday, 3 April 2009

Originally published as part of a series of articles appearing in our publication Linkages Update at http://www.iisd.ca/whats_new/directors_cut126.html

IISD Reporting Services and Knowledge Management

By Kimo Goree, Director of IISD Reporting Services (IISD RS) - [email protected]

As the new internet technologies have developed, IISD Reporting Services has been far out in front of the curve, pioneering new and innovative ways to communicate. It’s easy to forget that when we first began publishing the Earth Negotiations Bulletin in 1992, there were no websites, no digital photos, no social networking sites and very few people had email. Most organizations were structured around limited flows of information and there was a strong link between access to knowledge and power. As the internet grew, so did we, helping to change the way that knowledge and information on environment and sustainable development is communicated.

During the initial years of publishing Earth Negotiations Bulletin, we posted our reports on the early NGO networks, like Econet, Greennet, Pegasus and the Web. These early UNIX-based systems would synchronize their databases using dial-up lines between San Francisco, London, Sydney and Toronto, allowing the NGO community to share emails and discussions on a global basis. Our early reports were part of a movement to promote transparency in international decision-making and gave citizens around the world their first look at what their governments were saying in international fora.

Now, with web sites, emails, social networking, twitter feeds and instant messaging, information is ubiquitous. In many organizations, the entry-level clerk with a desktop in the office may have better intelligence than the Chief Executive Officer. Information is still powerful, but it has been effectively distributed throughout the office. The problems now are not access to information. The real challenge today is in filtering the flows of data that overwhelm us each day.

IISD Reporting Services provides an important new and emerging role in the information marketplace. The “Knowledge Broker” is the trusted intermediary who sifts through large amounts of data, synthesizing this mass of information into neutral, authoritative bits that can be used by decision-makers. This transformation of data into knowledge requires the intelligent organization of material in a way that it can be communicated and retrieved, based on where it fits in the larger political context or policy milieu in which it exists.

In 1994, IISD Reporting Services went online with our website www.iisd.ca. This was back in the early, early days of the World Wide Web, when the launch of a new website was announced on an email list of web pioneers, who eagerly explored each website when it came online. In fact, it was such a new medium that we thought that a website should have a name, like a book. So, we called our website “Linkages” since it provided a place where we could actually begin to link our publication, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, and online data (mostly FTP sites back in those days) by the use of hyperlinks. We also thought that we could show, through this site, how issues such as forest policy and climate change might be linked.

In the following years, we pioneered the use of many new technologies. We were the first to use Adobe’s new Portable Document Format (PDF) for distribution of our reports in fully-formatted version (1995), digital photos (1996) and streaming audio from meetings (1996). We even tested a new system for streaming video from the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1997.

Although we have always been involved in a form of Knowledge Management, we began to offer these services formally in 2006 when we launched the MEA Bulletin. In cooperation with UNEP, we established an internal system of “Issue Cluster Experts” (who we now refer to as “Thematic Experts”) to gather information from the MEA Secretariats on a weekly basis. These eight ENB team members would visit websites, exchange emails and speak with Secretariat members, pulling together information on the activities of the Secretariats. This information would then be organized, categorized and uploaded to our Linkages website and then published in our fortnightly newsletter. The archives of the MEA Bulletin can be found at http://www.iisd.ca/email/mea-l.htm

Most recently, we have offered our Knowledge Management services to assist the UN in tracking international activities on climate change, in cooperation with the Chief Executives Board (CEB) Secretariat. Following on the UN Secretary-General’s request that program activities on climate change should be coordinated across the UN system by the CEB and its subsidiary body, the High Level Committee on Programs (HLCP), IISD began building a knowledgebase that organizes international activities related to climate change by asking the question, “What ACTOR did which ACTION in which ISSUE AREA and to which BUILDING BLOCK does it refer?” Our database was launched in May 2008 and currently describes 1300 separate activities in the knowledgebase. After seed funding from the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office, this project is now wholly supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC.) The CLIMATE-L knowledgebase is publically accessible and can be found at http://www.climate-l.org

As the mass of information on environment and sustainable development policy expands and the demands by policy-makers for more and more knowledge services increase, we expect that this will be an area of growth for us in the coming years. We are currently in discussions with UNIDO regarding possible assistance to UN-ENERGY and with FAO in their role as Secretariat for UN-WATER, tracking international activities on renewable and sustainable energy and water, respectively. The key to good knowledge management is the establishment of excellent tracking systems using individuals who understand the political and scientific context in which they are working and who can both synthesize the information they gather and also categorize it for later retrieval in a content management system. Most importantly, knowledge cannot be just available; it must also be accessible and the community of intended beneficiaries made aware of its existence by building epistemic communities (email lists, web sites and social networks) and pushing the knowledge out so that it can be used in policy-making.

In all of these areas, IISD Reporting Services has distinguished itself as a leader in this field, vertically integrating our services through all levels. We have the writers and access at international meetings to collect information. We synthesize it so that it can be used by decision-makers. Then we disseminate it through our extensive lists reaching more than 75,000 email addresses and through our website accessed by tens of millions of readers each year.

And all of this is done from a one-room office in Manhattan. Next issue, I’ll discuss the management of knowledge workers in a virtual organization, resulting in low overhead costs and the ability to scale-up and scale down on a daily and weekly basis.

“Your Meeting” Bulletin

Director’s Cut - Friday, 20 March 2009

Originally published as part of a series of articles appearing in our publication Linkages Update at http://www.iisd.ca/whats_new/directors_cut125.html

“Your Meeting” Bulletin
By Kimo Goree, Director of IISD Reporting Services (IISD RS) - [email protected]

At almost half of the meetings where IISD RS provides conference reporting services, we do not publish the Earth Negotiations Bulletin. Instead, we are hired by the conference organizers to write and distribute the meeting report, which we call “Your Meeting Bulletin,” using our pool of ENB writers.

This week, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin team has been making a big splash in Istanbul, where we have been contracted by the Government of Turkey to provide conference reporting services from the Fifth World Water Forum. Our team of ten writers, editors and local team support at the conference venue are working in a twenty-four hour production cycle with translators and editors in Bangkok, Montréal and Philadelphia. The daily reports that we are providing for the Water Forum Secretariat are similar to the coverage we provided to the Government of Japan in 2003 and to the Government of Mexico in 2006 at the Third and Fourth World Water Forums, respectively, and are part of our growing “for-hire” conference reporting service.

During the first few years of publishing the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, we received requests from governments and intergovernmental organizations to attend and report from their meetings. Impressed by the quality of the ENB and amazed by our ability to distribute reports to tens of thousands of readers around the world by email and from our WWW site, Linkages, they also wanted these same ENBservices for their own meetings, conferences, workshops and symposia.

However, our donors were supporting us to publish the Earth Negotiations Bulletin from MEA negotiations and were not prepared to fund our reporting from country-led initiatives, regional meetings and workshops organized by governments, NGOs and UN organizations. So, we offered the meeting organizers our services at a price that covered our costs, and provided our new “clients” with ENB-like reports and the use of our extensive networks for their distribution.

Because of the different funding mechanism, we could not publish them as “ENB” reports. Initially, we called this series of conference reports Sustainable Developments. However, most meeting organizers wanted to have their meeting’s name in the title, so six years ago we began calling the series Your Meeting Bulletin (YMB). So, this week we are publishing the World Water Forum Bulletin from Istanbul for the Government of Turkey, and last month we published the Pew Whales Commission Bulletin for the Pew Charitable Trusts at the meeting of the Pew Commission on Whale Conservation in the 21st Century in Portugal.

In the last three years, our clients have included the Governments of Austria, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, France, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, the United States, Suriname, Indonesia and Turkey. Also, we have been contracted by the World Bank, UNIDO, the World Trade Organization, UNEP, the UNFCCC Secretariat, FAO, the UNECE and many others. In total, we are providing our reporting services from between twenty-five and thirty meetings per year, in addition to our usual Earth Negotiations Bulletin schedule of between thirty and thirty-five meetings.

Our clients know that, in addition to receiving a report within 48 hours of the close of the meeting that is identical in quality to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, we also will distribute this report to our estimated 75,000 readers by email and tens of thousands more through our website. Since all of the ENB reports are indexed by Google News, searches for information on the meeting or meeting topic often lead readers directly to our reports. Our high quality digital images contribute to providing a permanent online record of the event.

For us at IISD Reporting Services, these client services not only make effective use of our extensive information distribution network but they also provide additional work for our team of consultants. In the last decade, we have seen that many of our writers remain on our roster for longer periods since we can provide more work from more meetings. The longer our writers work for IISD Reporting Services, the more experienced they are in writing reports from the meetings we cover.

We encourage our clients to contact us for price quotes well in advance of the meeting, since we plan our schedule of events months ahead. Our writers bid to participate in our writing teams for meetings biannually each June and December, so we like for meeting organizers to finish contracting with us by these dates so that our consultants can bid for their meeting together with our planned ENBschedule. For clients who plan to hire IISD Reporting Services, we require at least four weeks between the receipt of the signed contract and the meeting start date.

Depending on the size and length of the conference, we usually provide quotes for various levels of reporting services. The options include either writing daily issues and a summary, or a summary only, plus possible digital coverage (on-line photos and captions.) We also can provide same-day translations in French, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese. Of course, all of the daily reports are photocopied and distributed to the participants and all of our reports, both daily and summary issues, are sent out to our email lists reaching readers around the world.

In the past several years, our “for-hire” reporting services have grown dramatically and we have now hired two of our team members to assist us in drafting proposals to clients and managing the contracting process. If you are planning an event and would like a price quote for services, please contact Leonie Gordon ([email protected]) or Robynne Boyd ([email protected]) For a complete list of meetings we have been hired to cover, please visit http://www.iisd.ca/sd/

Keeping the Resources Flowing

Director’s Cut - Friday, 6 March 2009

Originally published as part of a series of articles appearing in our publication Linkages Update at http://www.iisd.ca/whats_new/directors_cut124.html

Keeping the Resources Flowing
By Kimo Goree, Director of IISD Reporting Services (IISD RS) - [email protected]

In the early years of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, from 1992 through about 1995, one of our biggest challenges was finding the funding to attend and report from meetings. Although IISD had “acquired” us in 1993, their early attempts to secure a “timely and predictable flow of resources” were not particularly successful. So, in July 1993, I left my job as the Director of a small Brazilian NGO in the Western Amazon and moved to Winnipeg, Canada, where IISD is headquartered, to take up the newly created position of Managing Director for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin,with the responsibility of fundraising for our fledgling publication.
Our early funding, for coverage of individual meetings, came from several US-based foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the McArthur Foundation, and from several governments. However, the funding model that we were using, going to individual donors for individual meetings, had high transactional costs and the pipeline for delivery of funds was so slow that we were always waiting until the last minute to confirm our participation at events. As a result, during those first years, it was IISD that invested considerable resources in the growing Bulletin as we ran deficits but continued to publish. Without a doubt, we would not have survived our first five years without the financial assistance of IISD and the personal attention of then IISD President, Art Hanson.

By 1996, as we expanded our coverage to include the early mega-conferences in Cairo, Copenhagen, Beijing and Istanbul, as well as the Commission on Sustainable Development, the Convention to Combat Desertification, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, we changed our funding model completely. We began to circulate to governments an annual proposal that included our work program for the entire year. Rather than getting funding for individual meetings, we asked our donors, now strictly governments, to commit to support our entire program of work, as well as the cost of gathering the additional content on our new website. This “program proposal” rather than “project proposal” approach helped us avoid the problem we were facing where funding from certain government ministry funding was linked only to one meeting or one multilateral environmental agreement (MEA), leaving some processes like Desertification or the Commission on Sustainable Development without funding for our reporting services. We chose to focus exclusively on fundraising from governments, since they were most interested in promoting transparency and greater awareness of the MEAs we follow and we were not competing with NGOs for limited private foundation money.

This model has proven very effective, as our budgets have grown each year, as has our pool of donors. We established two categories of donors: our Sustaining Donors who agree to support our work at the highest level (now €100K or more per year) on a continuing basis, and our General Supporters who provide resources at a lower level (at least €35K per year.) Our donor list for the Earth Negotiations Bulletinnow includes:

ENB Funding in 2008

Government Ministries and Agencies

The Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Sustaining Donor
Canada’s International Development Agency (CIDA) – Sustaining Donor
The United States Department of State’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs and the United States Agency for International Development – Sustaining Donor
The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development – Sustaining Donor
The European Community (DG-ENV) – Sustaining Donor
Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Sustaining Donor
Germany’s Ministry for Development Cooperation (BMZ) and the German Ministry of Nature Management, Forests and Nuclear Safety (BMU) – Sustaining Donor
Italian Ministry for the Environment and Territory General Directorate for Nature Protection – Sustaining Donor
Switzerland’s Agency for Environment, Forests and Landscape
Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Environment
Austria’s Ministry of Environment
The Government of Australia
Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Finland’s Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Japan’s Ministry of Environment (through the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies - IGES) and Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (through the Global Industrial and Social Progress Research Institute – GISPRI)
The Government of New Zealand
Conservation Division, Forestry Bureau, Council of Agriculture, Taiwan (through S.W.A.N. International)
International Organization of the Francophone (for publishing in French)
Spain’s Ministry of Environment (for publishing in Spanish)

Intergovernmental Organizations and Specialized Agencies of the United Nations

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

Green – OECD Donors to ENB
Red – OECD Non-Donors to ENB

IISD Reporting Services is currently in the middle of our fundraising drive for 2009. Due to the increased number of weeks for climate change negotiations this year, we are attempting to raise additional funds during an economic downturn when trends in government funding for these issues is heading the other direction. We are hoping to bring in some new donors, such as the Republic of Korea, Portugal and Belgium, and to try to restore funding from France in order to make up the shortfall. More information on fundraising for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin can be found here, and our complete 2009 funding proposal is located here.

Big Buddha Hill Afternoon Climb

Second ride of the day, this time with Markus and Pui driving SAG. Actually it ended up being more of an "earn those beers" ride, up and up to the top of the hill overlooking the city of Chiang Mai and then to a small beer garden outside of town. Not much more than a 1000 foot climb, but in a pretty short distance. Markus had some trouble in his 23 tooth gear and I even felt my new knee tweaking a bit while up out of the saddle in the 27 on the back. But, after an hour of riding, it was "Up a Hill, Down a Beer" and off to a dinner of home cooked Thai food. Best part about riding in Thailand is "having" to consume several thousand extra calories per day of Thai food for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

 

United Nations Climate Change Conference Opens in Bali

On Saturday, 1 December, after stops in Frankfurt, Dubai and Bangkok, I landed in Bali for a two-week stay during the United Nations Climate Change Conference. There are seventeen of us on the ground, with another seven people around the planet providing translations (Tunis, Tokyo and Buenos Aires), editing (Buenos Aires and New York), desktop publishing (New York), operations management (New Jersey) and accounting (Winnipeg.) We'll be producing one website, one blog, a daily 2000-word report on the negotiations in English, French, Spanish and Japanese, a daily four-six page report in English and on the web on the side events, plus special coverage of two events over this coming weekend. Big production! Content is flying around the planet at various stages in the production, originating here in Nusa Dua, out for translation in Africa, South America and Asia, over to New York for final desktopping, then up to Winnipeg on the Canadian prairies for upload to our lists and website.

The first few days have been busy setting up our huge office, making sure everyone has arrived safely, getting accredited and our traditional team dinner.

But, this morning the meeting opened to overflow crowds.

Without a doubt, Australia stole the show today, announcing that the new government would ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Howard Bamsey, on the left, looks pretty giddy about the whole thing.

Still rushing a bit, getting our institutional blog off the ground today. Our online coverage is at http://www.iisd.ca/climate/cop13/ and the new blog should be at http://www.iisdrs.org

Although we haven't worked out the details, we will be providing content to several blogs, including Alexia Park's Votelink blog More on all this later, when we get ready to turn our new IISD Reporting Services blog "live" (our CNAME change for domain mapping is still working its way through the DNS servers.)

Influx of Intellectual Capital

Life has a huge impact on people-centered organizations. Writers leave to start families. They finish their Ph.D. dissertation and move on to more stable jobs. Some tire of the constant travel and cut back on their consulting work. Governments and UN agencies love to hire our team members, because they know that ENBers can write well, work well in small teams and come with their own networks of policy makers. Month after month, we lose, on average, one of the ENB Team to babies and other international organizations. This, combined with our annual growth, means we need always need to seek new talent.

Each year, near the end of August, we send out an announcement to all of our subscribers, welcoming the application for new writers on the ENB Team. From our email lists, the recruitment message is forwarded to other lists and people forward it on to those colleagues who they think might be good members of our group. Eventually, like any good piece of electronic information it finds its appropriate receipients and we are flooded with applications.

This year was no different from previous years and our call for new "brainiacs" (as one of our Logistics Coordinators, Nancy Williams, calls them) ended up on the Rhodes Scholar email list, who applied by the dozen. All together we had more than 150 applicants, most of whom all met our minimum qualifications that they have a Ph.D. or be in a Ph.D. program, or have an LL.M. in international environmental law, or five years negotiating experience, plus speak two UN languages fluently and have published academic works in the areas that we follow.

Companies value themselves by totalling up all the capital assets they own, like buildings, equipment and land. An enterprise like our organization, IISD Reporting Services, has only one kind of asset: the intellectual capital of the people on our team.  This last week, we trained a group of eleven new ENB writers and the organization received a massive influx of new intellectual capital.

From the back left, Anne Roemer-Mahler (UK - doing her Ph.D. at Oxford), Richard Sherman (South Africa - Manager of our African Regional Project and one of the trainers), Hal Kane (US - formerly at WorldWatch and now a consultant on sustainable development), Julia Yamineva (Russia - completing her Ph.D. at Cambridge), Chris Spence (New Zealand - Deputy Director of IISD Reporting Services and one of the trainers), Tomiola Akale (Nigeria, a lawyer with her LL.M. from Univ. College London, currently doing her Ph.D. at the University of Dundee), Douglas Bushey (US - completing his Ph.D. in energy resources at UC Berkeley), me. Kneeling, in the blue and white striped shirt, is Vicky Goodland, our project accountant. From the left bottom is Claudia ten Have Ph.D. (Germany and South Africa - has a Ph.D. in public administration and is currently doing post-doctoral work at the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies in Yokohama), Kate Neville (Canada - a Yalie doing her Ph.D. at UBC in political science), Marie-Annick Moreau (Canada - pursuing a Ph.D. in the Human Ecology Research Group at University College London, in the anthropology department), Claudio Chiarolla (Italy - recently with the UNU IAS in the Biodiplomacy Programme, now doing his Ph.D. at the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Institute at the University of London), Kelly Levin (US - doing her Ph.D. at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies), and Wangu Mwangi (Kenya - working at the UN University MERIT training program in the Netherlands.

For two and a half days,from 14-16 October, we held a training session in Montreal. These shots are from the big ENB Team dinner we held last Sunday night at the Goreé Restaurant (no relation.) We had 30 people for a great evening, with the new writers, trainers and members of the ENB team covering two meetings of the Convention on Biological Diversity being held in Montreal the week before and the week after.