A Partnership Network and Website Hub for New England Sustainability

NESS2 (the New England Sustainability Strategy) and HICUB (high country urban biodiversity)
project groups met with interested stakeholders involved in regional sustainability initiatives to

1. Review and refine how NESS as a partnership network could operate as a governance
model for regional sustainability and, flag issues that needed to be addressed

2. Decide whether it’s useful to collaborate around building a website hub or portal and
if so the design principles and first steps for promoting and enhancing New England
sustainability.

1. A Partnership Network as a Governance Model for Promoting - Enhancing New

England Sustainability

The group felt NESS could best promote, inform, enhance and support New England
sustainability by being a

 hub for a self-organising network of regional communities, enterprises &

stakeholders around sustainability initiatives to promote, inform, enhance and support
each others initiatives
 dialogue learning space on regional sustainability issues – initiatives, potential
partnerships
 brand not another organisational entity (NES as a brand whose trademark is held as a
commons agreement with a solicitor on behalf of the NES network group)
 developing a regional sustainability charter that outline its shared principles, vision
and scope
 convening an annual dialogue of its partnering regional communities and stakeholders
o to review, renew and refine its New England Sustainability Scorecard,
o reflect on progress and new strategic initiatives.
 has a capability based executive and a secretariat
 develops a website to effect the above

The New England Sustainability network would be the collective thinking of communities and
stakeholders abut strategies and initiatives for sustainability.

NES network would not implement sustainability initiatives like its partner groups but only
perform the above network roles. Initiatives like Farming the Sun and Youth Lead would need to
be re-configured like every other self-organising community, agency and stakeholders’ initiatives
around sustainability.

Issues to be addressed include: whether NES have a formal membership, levels of membership
including sponsoring stakeholders to support its work.

2. Decide whether its useful to collaborate around building a website hub or portal and if
so the design principles and first steps

The group felt ‘New England Sustainability’ was a suitable brand for communication and
education around sustainability, that there was a need for an external presence and that a
collaborative website hub could help promote a New England Identity.

Facilitator Micheal O’Loughlin October 20th Starfish Enterprises for Ellen Tom, Liz. Liz, Dave Iain,
2.1 Agreed Actions around the New England Sustainability website hub:

Phase 1:

1. HICUB and NESS2 and other interested stakeholders, develop a shallow regional
sustainability portal (an animated brochure design) with web-links to the critical sustainability
related parts of stakeholders’ websites. This network will be branded as ‘New England
Sustainability’ using the NESS logo.

2. promote this site and the network by producing a hard copy postcards and stickers. Further
the developers investigate incorporate monitor and evaluation elements in the site and research
through talking with users to see what types of information and links they want.

3. Design principles for the hub site included easily navigable, flexible enough with easy tools for
new groups to join in the network, dynamic, able to show the evolution of the network and
progress towards deepening New England Sustainability and have funded driver/s to promote
and support the site (especially in schools)

4. Design elements considered important included

# Top banner categories – linking stakeholders sites

1. stakeholders – categorized into agreed regional strategic focus areas and scorecard such
as renewable energy, environmental biodiversity regeneration etc.
2. key stakeholders at the table as suggested say SL Guide, NEON, HICUB etc
3. a dynamic Features Section on new happenings updated and changed monthly eg wind
turbine study etc.

# reciprocal web link arrangements with explanatory short text tag lines explaining what say
NEON is etc to allow browsers to explore and discover other areas of interest across the
network and about the New England region.

# 2 tag line boxes that allow visitors to nominate a site for inclusion in the network and seek
comments on whether they found the information they wanted and then what they want to
know.

# a directory of sustainable products / tradespeople, short summaries of network developments,

meetings and archived reports.

# the Sustainability Scorecard including the facility for Green Frog Dreaming Discovery rangers
and School Sustainability initiatives story reports to be included in addition to the quantitative
and qualitative indicators of sustainability progress.

# feature beautiful photo images be used on the hub site to tell the story of New England
sustainability and that these be updated – slide shows archived?? And indicate where we are, what
areas and communities, we include

# that there be an active element in the site to invite, enlist visitors about volunteering, doing
environmental regeneration etc.

The initial target market is the stakeholders’ own networks, schools and visitors from outside
New England interested in sustainability.

Phase 2:

Would need to revisit, refine the site according to research on visitors, traffic flows, whether
visitors and stakeholders are getting the information they need, who is the market and the
evolving target audience and more effective ways to reach them.

Facilitator Micheal O’Loughlin October 20th Starfish Enterprises for Ellen Tom, Liz. Liz, Dave Iain,