About Nomad Green

Mongolia always gives people the impression of running wild horses on huge steppe, warriors beyond challenge, and nomadic life by following water and grass. Actually, Mongolia has undergone dramatic change both on politics and economics for the past decade. People gradually abandon traditional nomadic life and turn to urban life and settled agriculture. New factories and new mining fields develop very quickly before the recent global financial crisis, which in return attracts more people to live and seek jobs in Ulaanbaatar, the Capital which is inhabited by more than 15 million people, 60% of its total population.

There are almost no similarities between Taiwan the small island country in Pacific ocean and Mongolia the second biggest inland country. However, the dust storm that originates from the ever expanding desert in Mongolia affects millions of Taiwanese during winter, and both are closest neighbors of Mainland China with certain shared history, experiences and memories. Nomad Green is a chance for Mongolians and Taiwanese to rediscover each other and cooperate on environmental issues via Internet that affect half of the globe.

It began In 2005, when Axiou Lin and a few other representatives of Taiwan Green Party visited Mongolia to attend a conference between the four Green parties/coalitions of Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia. At that time, Axiou met Mr. Boum and exchange many ideas about how to use information technology to develop awareness of citizens. Although Mongolian enjoys relatively more freedom of expression, the severe poverty problem stalls many from expressing and receiving. The introduction of Internet and mobile web is slowly changing the situation, but few people use it as a surveillance and advocacy tool, or know the potential of it.

Therefore, in January 2009, when Axiou Lin took the position of Mongolian and Tibetan Foundation's Executive Director, he started to look for resources and recruit Portnoy Zheng, one of the best-known citizen media practitioner and promoter in Taiwan, and Otgonsuren Jargal(Otgoo), a senior media editor and also a dedicated environmentalists in Mongolia into this team. And Nomad Green born after 4 months of plan preparation and budget application. The project got strong support from Mongolian and Tibetan Foundation, and then later it successfully become one of the 5 grantees of Rising Voices in 2009. The website 1.0 is up in late April, and in May 2009, Axiou and Portnoy went to Mongolia to meet with Boum and Otgoo and hosted four workshops in Ulaanbaatar.

And then it really started. We had workshops in July, August, September, and October. Not just in Ulaanbaatar, the core team visited Choibalsan, Dalanzadgad, Darkhan, Sainshand, Zamiin-Uud, Erdenet...and have workshops there. At the end of 2009, Nomad Green held a press conference and a speech contest for university students in response to UN's Copenhagen Climate Change meeting. We want to directly urged Mongolian government to pay more attention to global climate change and other pollution and man-made environmental tragedies.

Nomad Green won quite a few media attention both in Mongolia and in Taiwan. And thanks to Rising Voices, articles of Nomad Green can sometimes get featured on RV's website and reach more international audience.

Project Objectives: Nomad Green wishes to become the portal of Mongolian citizens who care about the environmental issues that the country is facing with.

Our goals are:

1. Building a database of Mongolia environmental issues and make it fully accessible on Internet, with the help of university students in Mongolia and Taiwan. We use multiple free online services and softwares like WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, SeeClickFix and Slideshare to construct our website.

2. Holding a series of Blog and new media training workshops. With the help of Rising Voices, MTF(Mongolian and Tibetan Foundation, Taiwan) , Green Coalition of Ulaanbaatar, and Mongolian Green Party, Nomad Green has trained more than 250 Mongolian citizen journalists in 2009. Our first round of workshops in 2010 will begin in Jube in Ulaanbaatar and another 4 towns in Mongolia.

3. Combining SeeClickFix map and blog posts. By combining SeeClickFix map function and our blog posts by citizen journalists, we can alert and emphasize the environmental concerns and problems from Mongolian citizens' perspective.

4. Encouraging more direct interaction between Mongolian citizens, NGOs, and government. Promote transparency and anti-corruption to public and private sectors in Mongolia.

5. Raise the priority of environmental protection locally while globalize Mongolian environmental issues.

6. Decrease project cost year by year while turning Nomad Green into a self-sustaining independent citizen media.

With Mongolian government signing minefield contracts with more and more foreign companies without strict requirement on reforestation, restoration and supervision, citizens are worrying about even severer corruption inside Mongolian young democracy and catastrophic pollution that can never be undone. Therefore, Nomad Green is trying hard to gain its muscle in 2010.

Team: Core Team of NomadGreen:

Portnoy Zheng, the project manager

Axiou Lin, the project organizer

Otgonsuren Jargal, the Chief Editor

Olzod Boum-Yalagch, the advisor

Gantsatsral, Mongolian language editor

Shinee, English language editor

Enkhuush, Chinese language editor

We haved trained more than 250 people through 16 workshops in 2009, about 80 contributors are actively writing and translating articles. We plan to train another 100 people in 2010 and sustain an active group of 120 writers and translators.

Most of the workshop participants are university students, NGO workers, environment activists, and professional journalist and media workers. Scientists and national park rangers are also one the authors' list. However, they all share the same goal belief that Mongolian could and should prosper without destroying this beautiful country and tradition.

Authors have taken part in Nomad Green's workshop once or twice or more, in order to fully understand the targets of this project, learn the basic techniques and knowledges of Web 2.0 and citizen media, understand the environmental threats that lie before each Mongolian citizens, and then they were recruited by the core team to register accounts and become regular authors. Besides face-to-face workshops, we also recruit new bloods online when someone find our work meaningful and interesting and contact us.

The content published on Nomad Green are licensed under CC-by, which means everyone can distribute any material by just citing the source.