After the success of the exhibition “6 Billion Others” in Paris, another project by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, developed with the support of BNP Paribas, is growing increasingly popular.

Welcome to Goodplanet.info, a web portal created in parallel with the association goodplanet.org whose slogan is “understanding the environment and its challenges”. The aims of the project were ambitious from the outset: to provide exhaustive, analytic and encyclopaedic content, giving an equal opportunity to voice an opinion to experts and environmental analysts, as well as to defenders or critics, on the same issues. Above all, its goal is to provide everyone with the key facts to understanding the challenges related to the environment so that, in the words of Olivier Blond, project head at Goodplanet and former journalist for French magazine Courier International: “everyone can make up their own minds about the issues.”

The Site in Figures
The site has 2,000 pages to help in understanding the environment, 70 fact sheets developed with specialists, 206 expert analyses covering the principal sustainable development issues and country statistics with directly comparable relevant indicators, as well as teaching modules like key statistics, illustrated with photos taken by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. In short, all the tools necessary for understanding the environmental state of play in every country in the world.
The project has been to a long collaboration between a number of people at BNP Paribas and Goodplanet, who have shared both their advice and their expertise. For my part, it was an opportunity to conduct a complete audit of French and English environmental websites. The long-term work together with these people has been as enriching as the issues that have been raised throughout the two or three years’ duration of the project.

What about Interactivity?
A journalist asked a very pertinent question at the press conference for the site launch (see images on the Goodplanet blog): “what about interactivity on the site?” as compared to Wikipedia, for example, which excels in knowledge collaboration. The first steps have already been taken: a facebook group now exists for the most committed users to interact with each other, as does a netvibes portal (www.netvibes.com/goodplanet: see the note by Steeve Bois of Goodplanet on this subject) for those who want to stay informed wherever they are. With social media now omnipresent on the Internet, the positioning of the portal is very simple: the project will evolve with time and with the people who use it.
Nothing is easier these days than to create a social network or a forum about the environment, these tools are wasted if they do not match the community’s actual communication needs. Over the next few months, we will be evaluating the most effective forms of interaction, such as collaborative articles, social networking space and recommendations, so that the site will evolve in as flexible, agile and educational a way as possible.
Technical Aspects
Thanks to Accenture, our technical partner, the site runs on EzPublish, a well-known open-source content management system. The customisation required to integrate this platform with the project structure was quite complex, made more so by the project’s multilingual requirements. The flash tools use libraries such as Ilog Elixir for mapping and Papervision for managing the 3D interactive globes. The challenges were significant, given the sheer number of the elements we wanted to highlight! For a number of other modules, the Goodplanet team used several on-line web services that are easy to share with other users.