The Your Development website needs your involvement

The Your Development website intends to be exactly that…yours. It aims to be an active site, relying on the interactivity between interested users to make it much more than a static portal for sustainable development information.

Your Development is an initiative of the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA) in partnership with CSIRO, and created with advice from state government departments and industry.

Your Development aims to encourage people who have involvement, experience and first-hand knowledge of creating sustainable developments across Australia to share what they know. So, whether you are a government planner, designer, commercial developer, researcher or consultant, here’s your chance to be part of the online community of Your Development members.

When launched in September, the website will feature dozens of fact sheets written by experts, covering the field of sustainable development and planning. But the site is not simply about presenting facts and figures, it’s about bringing people from industry and research together in the interests of creating sustainable urban neighbourhoods.

All users are encouraged to become members of the site. Members will be able to:
• Comment on each fact sheet or case study. Do you agree with what the author says? What’s your experience of the topic?
• Add relevant links to eventually build a fantastic online resource for sustainable development information. With your input the website will evolve into a library of links across the web.
• Rate the published information; and
• Make suggestions for any new information you’d like to see on Your Development.

The site’s design also allows for quick and easy searches across nine topics – Site Ecology, Place Making & Social Sustainability, Estate Design, Access & Transport, Materials & Recycling, Water Management, Energy Management, Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation, and Sustainability Management. Each topic has a bright visual icon and every fact sheet is tagged with one or more relevant icons. Want to just see all the articles relating to water management? Then click on the blue water-drop icon and the appropriate stories and case studies are served up for your viewing. Tags allow users to personalise their favourite pages and searches.

A regular news feed will also collate the international and local news relating to sustainable development and design.

Many of the fact sheets are interspersed with colour plans, graphs, example photographs and more. Case studies are a quick way for you to find information about real developments, mostly Australian, which have sustainable aspects you can draw upon. As a member, you’re encouraged to add your own brief case studies, which can highlight any commercial examples of sustainable development.

An extra benefit of being a member of Your Development is the ability to publish your personal profile, including your contact details, specialty and company.

There’s no doubt there’s a lot of information about sustainable building, planning, development and design on the internet. Your Development brings the most current, well-researched Australian cases together. The involvement and commentary by members, like you, will make the site even more useful. The more it is used, the more indispensable the website will become.

Membership is free, open to all and instant once you have a log-in.

The full functions of Your Development will be launched in September. It is currently being edited by the Australian Green Development Forum, an independent advocacy body dedicated to accelerating sustainable development. Before September, get a taste for what’s to come at www.yourdevelopment.org and sign up to receive the site’s newsletter.