How will it get built?
The logic of my arguments means that this would surely be set up as a not for profit, possibly a co-op of some sort; one that has the task of building and running the platform. it needs to be a sophisticated organisation. It would probably have a Board with members of the HoPE Association organised in such as way as to protect its mission and objectives with a workers-cooperative at the operational level. A useful model may be the Wikimedia Foundation.
This is from the Wiki Foundation
“The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia and our other free knowledge projects. We want to make it easier for everyone to share what they know. To do this, we keep Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites fast, reliable, and available to all. We protect the values and policies that allow free knowledge to thrive. We build new features and tools to make it easy to read, edit, and share from the Wikimedia sites. Above all, we support the communities of volunteers around the world who edit, improve, and add knowledge across Wikimedia projects” Note: Wikimedia Foundation
So with a bit of adjustment we can get to something like this…
The HoPEdia Foundation is the non-profit that hosts HoPEdia and our other holistic political economy projects. We want to make it easier for everyone to share what they know about cooperation and collaboration in politics and sustainable business. To do this, we keep HoPEdia and sites fast, reliable, and available to all. We protect the values and policies that allow holistic political economy to develop and thrive. We build new features and tools to make it easy to read, edit, and share from the HoPEdia sites. Above all, we support the communities of volunteers around the world who edit, improve, and add knowledge across HoPEdia projects.
If a way can be found to add value perhaps there could be some monetisation, e.g. consulting with co-ops and social enterprises, helping other co-op start-ups, advising on business conversions to a co-op model, providing resources, service work based on the reuse of the common platform code base.
Source software provides a living to people based on services on top of the free code - perhaps that’s part of the answer - that would become the co-op's challenge, it does not all have to be solved at once.
So, volunteers with deep technical knowledge, and funders with deep pockets, please get in touch so that we can form storm and norm…