On Wednesday, November 7th, a South Korea bound container ship hit the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge, leaking 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the San Francisco Bay. When it first occurred, the Coast Guard reported that it was only 140 gallons of fuel, and there was no immediate attempt to boom off the area of the spill. This hesitation has come at a great cost, as the oil leaked from the ship has made it to many nearby beaches. Wildlife and our ecosystem here around the San Francisco Bay are already greatly affected by the Coast Guard’s slow response to the crisis.

Number of birds received at Oiled Wildlife Care Network facilities: 94 live, 24 dead (last updated Friday Nov. 10th, 8pm)

By Thursday afternoon, oil had been sighted about 15 miles (24 kilometers) north of the city, and at least eight beaches in San Francisco and Marin County were closed. Now, in the aftermath, oil spill relief specialists are out cleaning the mess, while wildlife rescue organizations gather birds coated in oil to bring back to rehabilitation facilities.

Here is the Google map of the spill, that documents the areas affected and contains some photos taken of the damages.

If you live in San Francisco, there are ways you can get involved in the relief effort. You can visit either The Oiled Wildlife Care Network website or the Baykeeper website for updated information on how you can get involved. Currently, they are urging people not to try to clean up the mess without proper training, as oil fumes are extremely toxic.

If you see oiled wildlife: Don’t approach or pick it up, but call The Oiled Wildlife Care Network Hotline: (877) 823-6926 to report it.

If you are not in the San Francisco Bay Area but want to help out, you can donate to the relief effort via Baykeeper.

Although there will be legal action taken against the responsible parties for the spill and its mishandling once investigations are completed, and financial retribution will be sought, there will still be needs for long term rehabilitation of the area.

This is not going to go away overnight. The long term damage from a spill like this will be seen for many years to come.

Happy blog action day! I’ve created a special theme in honor of Blog Action Day. It’s called “ForTheBirds” and is environmentally responsible (much darker than my previous theme - less energy used by your monitor). As soon as I clean up the xhtml/css, I will be posting it up on Wordpress as a V2.3 compatible theme for public download. Look for it soon. Or, shoot me an email: lauren@anendlessarray.com. I’ll notify you as soon as it’s available to the public.

So, why am I focusing on birds? Isn’t the whole idea of Blog Action Day to write something epic about the environment as a whole? This is true, but I tend to look at the smaller picture to make my case about the larger one. Birds are awesome animals, and the perfect metaphor. Think about the canary in a coal mine - you send something more vulnerable down into a hole, and if it comes up dead, then you shouldn’t go down there. So while there might be other flora and fauna that are more vulnerable to global warming, birds already have that stigma of being the test subjects, thanks to 18th century minors. Read the rest of this entry »

As entire frameworks and bundled Web 2.0 applications are becoming abundant on the open source front, the assumption that only profit-earning businesses can have the luxury of functional application add-ons to their sites such as social networking features, blogs, and wikis is quickly dissolving. This article is geared toward providing some uses for these frameworks for nonprofit organizations and a few resources for free (or cheap) out of the box solutions that can be integrated or even become the backbone of a nonprofit site.

At Object Adjective, we’ve been working to develop such components for some of our nonprofit sector clients. And as awareness of the accessibility of web 2.0 application frameworks is becoming abundant, more non-profits are beginning to ask, is there something out there that could benefit my organization at an affordable rate? In most cases, the answer is yes. Both prepackaged frameworks and sites that host these featured services are readily available, and there are solutions to meet nonprofit initiatives, regardless of organization size.

Prepackaged frameworks can be easily installed by a web developer and can decrease costs enough to allow nonprofits to extend their sites to include new application functionalities and features without breaking the bank. Someone still has to install and customize these packages to accommodate the specific needs and objectives of the organization, and design the front end visual elements/UI, so it’s not a freebee, but development dollars are significantly cut down. Many medium to large size organizations stand to benefit greatly from putting some funding into extending their site: with an enhanced web presence, comes more recognition and more public involvement, and can be a great tool to grow a non-profit organization and increase donor awareness as well as program awareness. Read the rest of this entry »

Taking care of our environment is important no matter who you are - I should say duh, but the fact is, we can all improve in this department. As designers there are steps we can take toward achieving more sustainable practices that have less impact on our currently degrading ecological state.

In Essential Resources for a Changing Deisgn Industry (April 20, 2007) , Megan Prusynski writes:

“designers are in a unique position: we are communicators, capable of informing, educating, persuading, enlightening, facilitating, and of course, selling. We have the ability to incite action, change minds, and open eyes. I couldn’t think of a better group for leading the green revolution than the design community.”

I agree with Megan: we have a responsibility to not only take personal measures to preserve energy, but also we have the ability to change people’s minds. On the web, in print, and everywhere, communication design is exactly as the name suggests: design which communicates a message. We have a responsibility to the community to develop their awareness, if even subtly.

We don’t need to run around with signs and banners, just adapting our own practices and influencing others to do the same will go a long way. I’ve included a list of ways you and your design firm can make a difference both through your own practices and by influencing the practices of others. Read the rest of this entry »