The Data Commons Project

The Data Commons Project is a collaborative effort between a diverse array of organizations in the U.S. and Canada who share a mission of building and supporting the development of a democratic and cooperative economy. Our goal is to collectively develop an accurate, comprehensive, public database of cooperative & solidarity-based economic initiatives in North America. We are working to achieve this goal through two interrelated tasks:

1) Creating a shared "data commons" between multiple organizations, built from existing models of open information-sharing, and involving a merger of separate organizational databases into a commonly-shared data pool.

2) Launching a free, public web-interface to this data commons, as a tool that can be used by many organizations and individuals working for a cooperative economy. With such an interface, users will be able to run searches by initiative name, geographical location, type of initiative or business, and product/service, as well as to add and update directory listings themselves (thus being a "self-editing directory").

Data Commons Project Blog

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