coopy 0.1.3

Cooperatives are an effective way to meet the shared economic, social, and cultural needs of a community. In principle, different cooperatives (consumer, producer, financial, housing, health care, etc) with shared or reciprocal needs could benefit from further, higher-level cooperation amongst themselves. But in practice, many cooperatives are constantly struggling to manage their own organization on a tight budget, and simply don't have the resources to consider broader collaboration.

The goal of this project is to reduce the technical costs of discovery and informal collaboration among cooperatives.Our specific proposals are:

* Support for cooperative discovery

- We will define a format for cooperative directory information.

- We will provide tools to support directory maintenance, viewing, and regional searching, which operate with that format.

- We will produce a website using our tools, populated with directory information from an extensive (but by no means complete) public database, open to public input, and with easy access to machine-readable form of the directory (e.g. RSS feed). We do NOT request hosting for this website on sourceforge.

There are fragmented directories of particular classes of cooperatives scattered across the web, some excellent, most quite broken. We hope to provide incentives for the publication of cooperative information in a standard, open format, and make it easy for cooperatives with websites to aggregate regional information relevant to their members.