Open source · CC0 · A working draft

A community is a kind of cloth.

Pull one thread and you can feel the others move.

Commonweave is an open directory of organizations already weaving healthier communities together. Cooperatives, mutual aid networks, community land trusts, community energy, open governance tools. The map shows 29,422 entries with geocoded coordinates across 102 countries, drawn from a wider candidate pool of 153,426 organisations.

Explore the map Browse the directory Source on GitHub Help audit the data
153,426
Candidates in directory
29,422
Mapped organizations
102
Countries on the map
~30
Languages in the pipeline
10
Framework sections
CC0
Fully open data
About this data. Commonweave pulls from 25+ public registries and thematic global networks: IRS Exempt Organizations BMF, UK Charity Commission, Australia ACNC, Brazil Mapa das OSCs, the ICA, RIPESS, Mutual Aid Hub, the Transition Network, and many more. The pipeline runs candidates through a multilingual alignment filter to keep only entries that actually embody one of the framework sections (cooperatives, mutual aid, community land trusts, food sovereignty, participatory democracy, restorative justice, and the rest). Right now 153,426 organisations have survived the filter; 29,422 of those have coordinates and appear on the map across 102 countries. Tier A is reserved for manually reviewed entries (currently empty — community auditing is open); Tier B is registry-backed; Tier C is inferred from keyword scoring and not yet reviewed. Full methodology →
Multilingual pipeline. The scoring bots now recognise alignment terms in roughly 30 languages: Spanish cooperativa, Portuguese economia solidária, Japanese 協同組合, Mandarin 合作社, Arabic تعاونية, Yoruba egbe ajose, Quechua ayni/minga, Amharic የኜቀት, plus Indigenous land-commons concepts like ejido, waqf, hima, gotong-royong, iriai-chi, usi civici. Researcher bots build search queries in every language spoken in a country, not just English. Full term bank: MULTILINGUAL-TERMS.md.
Data snapshot. Headline counts above are pulled at runtime from the published static export (last built 2026-04-28). The working database has since been recovered and re-verified; rebuilt totals are tracked in README.md. Treat these numbers as a public snapshot, not a real-time count.
§ 01 · Explore

Global directory map.

Filter by section. Hover any dot for details. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan. Default view hides Tier C (inferred) candidates; flip the switch in the map sidebar to include them.

Preview of the Commonweave directory map showing geocoded organizations across all populated continents
Explore the map → Browse directory
29,422 mapped · 102 countries · 153,426 candidates total · full directory Open interactive map →
§ 02 · Sections

Ten sections, mapped.

Counts are mapped organizations per section: the points you can click on the map. Each section also has off-map candidates pending geocoding. Browse the full directory →

Healthcare
Open-source health IT, community health worker models, universal systems that demonstrably work.
6,072 organizations
Education
Open courseware, democratic schooling, offline-first platforms, 300M+ Moodle users.
3,867 organizations
Food sovereignty
Agroecology, seed sovereignty, open food networks, CSA movements, 200M peasant farmers.
3,518 organizations
Democratic infrastructure
Verifiable voting, liquid democracy, sortition, participatory platforms, citizens' assemblies.
8,698 organizations
Land & housing
Community land trusts, Vienna social housing, stewardship over speculation.
2,642 organizations
Ecological restoration
Beyond-GDP governance, regenerative ecology, watershed stewardship, biodiversity recovery.
2,274 organizations
Conflict resolution
Restorative justice, transitional justice, community accountability. Significant recidivism reduction in studied programs.
885 organizations
Cooperatives & solidarity
Worker cooperatives, mutual aid networks, community wealth building, credit unions.
1,264 organizations
Recreation & arts
Basic income for artists, open cultural heritage, freely licensed media.
127 organizations
Energy & digital commons
Community energy cooperatives, federated protocols, 900 US rural electric co-ops serving 42M.
75 organizations
§ 03 · What this is

An engineering problem, not a manifesto.

Here is a thing that is true and that almost no one talks about clearly: the machines are going to do most of the work. Not eventually. Now, and accelerating. The interesting question isn't whether that happens. It's who benefits when it does.

Right now the answer is: whoever owns the machines. That's a design choice, not a law of nature. You could design it differently.

Commonweave is an attempt to think carefully about what "differently" actually means. What systems would need to exist, how you'd build them, what's already being built, and how you get from here to there without everything going badly wrong in the middle.

The directory indexes organizations from public registries across 174 countries: community land trusts, worker cooperatives, open-source health systems, participatory democracy tools, community energy grids. Filtered to entries that actually embody pieces of the answer. That's what Paul Hawken saw in 2007. That's what this continues.

§ 04 · Read

All documents.

Everything is public, CC0 or CC BY-SA. Read it, fork it, disagree with it in a pull request.

i.
README
What Commonweave is, how it relates to WiserEarth, the three-phase blueprint, and how to contribute.
ii.
A field guide to labor-for-housing cooperatives
How to stitch labor, land, and housing into one democratic pipeline. PDF.
iii.
How the directory gets built
A plain-language field guide to how Commonweave finds, scores, and publishes organizations. Editable HTML.
iv.
DIRECTORY
Curated organizations across all framework sections. Tables with descriptions, regions, and links.
v.
DEEP-DIVE
Historical evidence, empirical data, failure modes, open questions, Ostrom's eight design principles.
vi.
GOVERNANCE
Rough consensus and running code. No founder authority. How maintainers work.
vii.
SUSTAINABILITY
How this project survives past its funding. Federated hosting, five hard constraints, wind-down procedure.
viii.
WISEREARTH
Full history of wiser.org (2007 – 2014): what it built, the 381-node taxonomy, why it failed, recovered data.
ix.
taxonomy.yaml
WiserEarth's civil society taxonomy as CC0 YAML. 47 issue areas, 381 sub-issues.
On the shoulders of WiserEarth. From 2007 to 2014, wiser.org was the only place that tried to map the civil society commons at global scale: 114,994 NGOs in 243 countries, a 381-node taxonomy, women-led, ad-free, genuinely beautiful. It closed because it depended on one organization's philanthropy. The data is mostly gone. The structural lesson is documented in SUSTAINABILITY.md.
On the horizon: a trust-based internet. A directory is only half the problem. The other half is how aligned organisations federate, verify each other, and coordinate without routing every relationship through a central platform. The Open Co-op's PLANET project and the First Person Project (under Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust) are building verifiable-identity infrastructure that could let these organisations cooperate at scale without platform capture. Commonweave's next data-model change will add an attestations field so directory entries can eventually carry cryptographically-signed vouching from peers. Background: OPENCOOP-RESEARCH.md.