EcoGuide

In the 1990s, when the Web was still in its infancy, “portal” directories were the entry points for most users to venture onto the Internet. People used portals such as Yahoo! and MSN to find a wealth of online services such as free email services, news, chat, stock quotes, local weather, and sports coverage. Before sophisticated search engines (Google didn’t exist yet) portals and directories were how the majority of new web users found content on the web — links to subject matter categorized by topic and interest and curated manually.

While the first portals presented general interest information and tried to catalog everything on the web, the second wave catered to niche interests. Directories began cropping up for things such as surfing, gaming (Zone.com), music (SonicNet), parenting (iVillage), etc.. The earliest that focused on environmental topics was EnviroLink, created in the early 1990s by Josh Knauer while he was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University.

Mark Bult saw through his experience at BAA that a key factor to getting people active in their own environment — whether it was a hike or a creek cleanup — was a local, regional focus on hands-on action opportunities. In early 1999 Mark devised of a portal for just the Bay Area, called EcoGuide, and pitched it to the combined boards of BAA and PCCF, which by then were exploring many cooperative initiatives.

The existing EcoCalendar.org functionality, which had been operational for a couple years already, was planned to be folded into the EcoGuide’s Calendar section.

Who was involved?

Leadership for the project came primarily from Mark and PCCF board member Andy Fenselau, with volunteer help from Walt Hays, Jen English, David Greene, Jonathan Graham, and Mike Ficher. Mark’s design and web development firm, Flux51, was contracted to architect and build the site prototype. Dennis Harvey’s NewPath Inc. was the backend developer (both Mark’s and Dennis’ companies rented office space at BAA’s 715 Colorado Ave building in 1998–1999).

Longtime BAA partners EnviroLink graciously hosted the early EcoGuide dev and beta sites.

Funding

$5,000 was sought from the Compton Foundation to develop the project blueprint (Phase I).

Hewlett-Packard (HP) offered up to $10,000 in hardware and software.

Ending

Due to BAA+PCCF merger priorities, the availability of the project’s main personnel became limited and the project was put on a back burner. During Acterra’s Strategic Planning process in the early 2000s, the EcoGuide was slated for closure.