By David Poulson

I’ve been involved in launching another social media community that is relevant to the environment. It’s not journalism – at least not in a traditional sense. But it certainly has implications for environmental reporting.

That’s one of the advantages of working here at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. It offers the freedom to experiment in ways that lead to, integrate with or enhance other information projects. I hope we’ll learn something from this venture that we can use to bolster the effectiveness of Echo. In fact, I hope they feed off of each other.

This new project is called the MichEEN – Michigan’s Energy Efficiency Network. The acronym derives in part from a desire to avoid the obvious candidate – MEEN. That may be a tighter set of initials, but it sounds just too harsh.

MichEEN is also a nod toward harnessing the new machinery – MichEENery? – of digital information sharing and collaborative reporting. Check the site out at MichEEN.org.

Even more so than Great Lakes Echo, this new project attempts to improve knowledge and awareness by encouraging a community of users to share what they know. The focus is energy efficiency and production – subjects you can’t beat for their fundamental nature. They cut across job creation, business costs, a thriving economy, national security, a clean environment.

Anyone can contribute, although the target includes municipalities, schools, non-profit agencies, state agencies and other organizations. The idea is to leverage larger action by more equitably distributing the expertise of existing organizations.

There are other important differences with what we’re doing at Echo. For one thing, the MichEEN is a project of Michigan’s Department of Energy Labor and Economic Growth and of the Public Service Commission. That’s interesting for at least two reasons.

The first is that it’s a pretty innovative approach to delivering state government services. Building a tool that helps people collaborate and share information is quite a departure from the traditional government model of delivering services from the top down.

But who better in a democracy to participate in government than the governed? And done right, it’s cheap. You can’t beat that in an era of strapped public resources.

The second is that there is a certain irony and a definite challenge for government to build a grassroots community. Maybe the attempt is an oxymoron.

The middle ground? I think government can create a fertile field for the grassroots to take hold. But it can’t have a heavy hand. We’ve got some ideas, but we’re not exactly sure what this thing is going to look like when it grows up.

We’re throwing out suggestions and priming the information pump. But we figure that it will be the community this effort fosters that will tell us what it wants to look like and how it will operate.

One of the challenges is figuring out how to get diverse people to talk to each other for fresh perspective but at the same time help them better interact with their own groups. Things are set up now so that the broad energy community can interact on MichEEN blogs and forums. At the same time certain neighborhoods of that community – groups – can set up more targeted blogs and forums. These can be public to encourage participation or private to encourage collaboration on what may not yet be ready for public consumption.

It’s an interesting balance to encourage diverse interactions without diluting them. We want energy-savvy librarians to be able to tell sewage treatment plant operators what they know about efficient lighting. Where else do librarians and sewage treatment plant operators get to collaborate?

At the same time, we recognize that librarians aren’t going to have a whole lot to say about energy efficient sludge disposal methods. So sometimes it’s good to get the energy-savvy sewage treatment plant operators into their own “room” with their counterparts who need that kind of help.

What’s all this have to do with environmental journalism?

Well, every community is a potential audience. Already we’re posting links to energy stories produced by Echo and others in a way that can foster further information exchange on the MichEEN.

But perhaps even more interesting is that every community needs a good journalist. This one could become a rich source of story ideas. Here at Echo, we’re looking forward to working the MichEEN beat.

Upending the Basin is an occasional column written by Echo Editor David Poulson, the associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.