What does it look like?

What it physically looks like is a design matter for the builders, but I can describe its characteristics.

It needs to be massive - an Open Source, Community Contributed Knowledge Base of all the alternatives that are known to be out there and working

To borrow some retail jargon – it’s the one-stop-shop for the alternative political economy that will eventually replace our current stunted form of representational democracy and our current irresponsible form of capitalism

It needs to collect all examples of the emerging alternative, to have entries for all co-operators and collaborators, to have links to their sites. It needs to have descriptions of their their ideas and experiences, and allow thenm to be shared. it needs to show that practicalities of their organisations and what they learned as they developed. 

It should be as ambitious as possible; a cross between Wikipedia, Facebook, Brokering and Kickstarter but different to all of them Note: Rediscover the Idealism of Technology

  • HoPEdia is not about the sum of human knowledge (as Wikipedia is). It is a subset of human knowledge that also contains stories and lived experience – but like wiki it allows anyone to register to make entries and make or edit entries 
  • HoPEdia is not about social media networking of individuals (as Facebook is) it is a network of small, shallow hierarchy, groups and like social media it enables practitioners to get in touch with each other
  • HoPEdia is not about crowd funding (as Kickstarter is) but it could help co-operate start up’s. The Hive, part of The Coop already provides a service here, but it might have a start-up role
  • HoPEdia is not a job bidding site (like TaskRabbit is) but it could provide an exchange for lodging requests for help and there is no reason why services (that is labour) should be free
  • HoPEdia should have some characteristics of the killer app; a killer app is one that starts small and by its usefulness takes off with exponential growth (killing the old process along the way)  
  • HoPEdia would not start as a supplier of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) but it might move into that space when its resource base has built up sufficiently