GUSSE launches at WUF3

Friday was the last day of the World Urban Forum in Vancouver. The conference vastly exceeded its expectations, pulling in over 11,000 delegates from around the world for 5 days discussing the topic of urban living and how cities can continue to adapt and cope with the increasing reality that the vast majority of people around the planet choose to live in cities.

Communicopia was part of a product launch for the GUSSE website and tool. GUSSE is the Global Urban Sustainability Solutions Exchange, and has been designed as an open source, Amazon.com like global search engine and knowledge community for professionals working on urban issues. The team creating it was quite large, we led the business requirements gathering, created the identity and logo, designed the website, and helped with the overall project management to ensure the project met its ambitious goals and launched on time for WUF3.

The site was positioned as one of Canada’s gifts to the world and was formally launched at UBC’s hospitality suite at the WUF. The GUSSE team used the buzz of the forum to generate new content for the site, get people tagging, searching, and using the tool to track solutions that are relevant to them.

This fall we start to raise more money to take the prototype global. It’s highly expiremental and we’ll see what kind of uptake it has, stay tuned or better yet visit the site itself and do some tagging. www.gusse.org.