Mapping/documenting the network
Harry "Outlandish" Robbins PublicSeen by 425It would be good to know which agency does what, who has which skills/contacts/clients/etc.
There are a bunch of systems we could use - from a spreadsheet to a mindmap to a.... FACEBOOK FOR CO-OPS. Let's not do that last one. Unless it's just a way of storing/updating/displaying info about ourselves.
Would a wiki work? For real time stuff a etherpad is better than a Wiki as you don't get editing conflicts but for longer term things wiki's work well. We could setup and host a Mediawiki site if people are interested, it has a good WYSIWYG editor these days and we have a Parsoid server to provide this functionality.
I guess a wiki could work quite well, but I was thinking more along the lines of CKAN http://ckan.org/ but perhaps that would be overkill...
I wonder what ideas @timdavies1 and others at Open Data Services Co-op might have...
There was a embyronic p6data.coop project that the Co-op Party under Karin Christiansen sparked in mid-2015, and we had some conversations with folk at the Institute for Solidarity Economics at the end of last year about work they are doing on mapping the solidarity economy as a whole. There was some thinking there about how to harvest information from existing websites, perhaps encouraging use of some microformats. However, I'm not sure how much things have moved forward over this year.
Theoretically, using the web as the platform is the ideal - with everyone maintaining their own info locally, and then some aggregation of that. In practice, it's hard to implement.
However, a few parallel steps that could be taken in a comprehensive project using the web as the platform might be:
(1) Encourage everyone to get their records with Co-ops UK up to date - including at least website;
(2) Engage with Co-ops UK to see how their directory of co-ops could be expanded to capture some extra meta-data on services people provide;
(3) Think about the simple structured data it would be handy for each co-op to have on their own website about skills, contacts, clients etc.
(4) Develop tooling to aggregate this.
When we looked at scoping something out for the p6data.coop project, we thought this looked like at least a 6-month project with some full-time effort to properly make something happen.
In the absence of resource for that, I would look more at periodic updates of a shared resource. Google Spreadsheets (or open source alternatives) are probably the easiest way to rapidly crowdsource semi-structured data, and then to clean it up into structure data. The trick to a good information gathering activity like this is to create the incentives and pressure for contribution. Few directories survive as regularly updated resources kept up-to-date year round. They generally need a forcing function to encourage them to be populated, such as the production of a report, map, or edited directory with a launch deadline.
Alternatively - drop the idea of structure all together - just ask the questions in a Loomio thread here...
Be really nice to have all this info in nice linked open data... and I'm guessing there are a load of people in this network who have experience of doing exactly that kind of stuff...