Welcome to SustainableFocus.org!

Thanks for visiting SustainbleFocus.org – a community dedicated to visual communication about the environment. Our members share an interest in using visual media to promote science, conservation, and sustainability. We launched this site in January 2011, and our goal is to foster innovation and collaboration in our efforts to share nature with broader audiences.

If this is your first time here, take your time to explore the site; there’s a lot to see!

Articles: Every month, we ask a few experts to contribute short, original articles for our members to enjoy. The subject matter and format of these articles is as diverse as our membership; anything is fair game, from conceptual essays to technical tutorials! If you’re an expert on something, and you’d like to write an article for the community, let us know; we’re always looking for new article contributors.

Blogs: The SustainbleFocus.org blog is a community blog. Our staff posts on the blog, but so can every member of the community. Are you working on an exciting project? Let the rest of the community know what you’re up to! Even if you have your own personal blog, please cross-post your blog entries here. You can also comment on anyone’s blog entries, so every post is a fruitful discussion waiting to happen.

Forums: There are two kinds of forums here: Community Discussion forums and Sharing/Critique forums. Community Discussion forums are for discussing anything related to the mission of SustainbleFocus.org. We also provide special forums for introducing yourself and making professional connections. Are you a scientist or NGO in need of a digital media expert? Or a photographer looking for a new project? Check out these forums to find your match.

Sharing/Critique forums are for sharing your own work – photos, video, and web media – and getting constructive feedback from other members of the community. This is a great way to get input on your projects (from a diverse, talented group of peers), regardless of the stage of the project’s development.

Gallery: We provide an image gallery where you can upload your images to share with others – whether you just want to show off some images from a recent shoot or group-edit a collection of project images with your collaborators. Add keywords and captions to make your images searchable and useful to others.

Calendar: There are lots of great science, visual media, and sustainability events happening all the time, more than any one person can keep track of. So we’ve created a user-editable event Calendar, where members can add events related to the mission of SustainableFocus.org. The calendar is the perfect place to share events like photo and film festivals, professional meetings, and deadlines for grants and other funding opportunities.

Web Resources: We realize that SustainableFocus isn’t the only website about visual communication, science, or sustainability. Therefore, we do our best to provide an ever-growing, annotated collection of links to other websites of interest. This part of the site, like the calendar, is a “wiki” style, member-editable area, so please add your personal website to our resources, as well as other sites that you think will be of interest to others!

You can probably tell that we take the word “community” seriously. From the descriptions above, you can see that nearly every section of this site is member-editable. Apart from the articles that we solicit from experts, all of the content on SustainableFocus.org comes from you – our members. The site could get chaotic without some supervision, so we have a small, dedicated team of editors and moderators to keep things running smoothly.

…But we need your help to maintain the flow of fresh ideas, stimulating discussions, and beautiful images. The strength of this community is its diversity; we are writers, scientists, educators, photographers, filmmakers, and more. With all of these perspectives – and the experience that goes along with them – we think this community has a lot of potential to empower its members to communicate and engage with the public more effectively.

Thanks again for visiting SustainableFocus.org, and we hope to see you here again soon!

- The SustainableFocus.org Team (Neil Losin, Molly Mehling, Keith Snell, Nathan Dappen, Melissa Evanson, and Kari Post)