Village Greens

What is Village Greens?

The environmental movement is at a critical yet opportune time – crises like climate change and the need for energy independence have brought about major interest in green living. Village Greens, “Your Green Feed,” is a new environmental news network that is largely user-generated and edited, and will address this interest with a trial location stretching from the Silicon Valley to the East Bay and San Francisco.

The Bay Area, arguably the nation’s center of environmental activity, and certainly its hub of information innovation, is surprisingly absent of an environmental news source for the web 2.0-era. It is an ideal starting place for VG, which will be the “one-stop shop” for anyone who wants to find anything from a local sustainable place to eat, to local environment-focused activities and events, organizations, classifieds, or the latest local legislation being debated.

VG will also fill a major gap in the media landscape by featuring its online video channel, “Village Greens TV” – a professional, compelling and active source for people to find environmental stories about local innovation, from green design in San Francisco to green-tech in Silicon Valley.

VG will retain oversight in the trial period, working to put together a local user base. But its core team of video, and technology experts, envision that VG’s community will branch out organically into a system of user-clusters across the country. VGTV will open up its programming to approved videos from its user-base, and after this trial period in the San Francisco Bay Area, VG will increase the scope of its user-generated news and information feeds to include the entire U.S in a locally distributed network.

How will Village Greens improve the way news and information is delivered to geographic communities?

Village Greens will make it easy to find local environmental news, blogs, videos, events, and classifieds, through its “Green Feeds.” Each community’s Green Feed, a local zip-code-based portal, will be a user-generated list of posts in the form of text, pictures and video. As new posts are published on the Green Feed, they will sync with tools like customized categorization tabs, a sortable calendar, and a geo-coded map at the top of each page. The Green Feed will also allow users to add corrective information, for a more thorough, informative, and up-to-date media-cluster around an original post. In addition, VGTV, the geo-coded and tag-sortable video channel, will give users a way to share and watch local green video.

How is Village Greens innovative?

Right now there is no online green network that provides searchable local portals for individuals and groups who want to watch, learn about, and add to their own environmental communities. Environmental interest will continue to grow, and VGTV, ripe for viral play across the Internet, will offer a first-of-its-kind, local, geo-coded, and tag-sortable video channel. In much of the current media world, “one-to-many” architecture still rules, but VG’s will adopt the “many-to-many” model, allowing anyone to contribute and edit posts, or upload video. VG and VGTV will combine to drive the aggregation of local environmental bloggers, organizations, and news, through RSS and direct membership, and get support in these local markets.