I mentioned the other day “a syndicated version of PledgeBank for someone’s large global warming campaign later in the year”. In the early hours of this morning, Global Cool soft launched.

The idea is that people can use the Global Cool website as a central place to manage reducing or offsetting their carbon emissions, and recording and competing for how much they have done so. There’ll be tools like carbon counters, systems to track when you change electricity company, and so on. PledgeBank comes into this as another set of actions Global Cool people can take, both making and signing pledges which reduce their CO2 footprint.

Global Cool Foundation UK, the new charity behind it, only got their funding recently, and so as Gavin explains have had to build the site in phenomenal time. We got login intergration with PledgeBank working in the early hours of this morning. It works, but there are some missing features, and it still needs lots of polishing. The integration is needed so later you can be credited for signing and doing a pledge on the main part of the Global Cool site.

The “microsites” file in the PledgeBank source code is even more complicated now, with authentication hooks. Basically, the PledgeBank part of Global Cool runs on a subdomain of their domain, being pledge.global-cool.com. This is so it can read the Global Cool cookies for authentication. The pledges themselves are in the same database, so they can be shared with the rest of the site later.

We can happily syndicate or theme PledgeBank in all sorts of ways for your site. We charge for this via our trading arm. Any profit (not really any yet!) going back into running the main PledgeBank service for free, and to run mySociety.