Open Source · CC0 · Transparent governance
The movement already exists.
In 2007, Paul Hawken catalogued 114,994 organizations across 243 countries building alternatives to the systems that don't work. The website disappeared in 2014 when the funding ran out.
This is the continuation -- built on public registry data from 61 countries, filtered to organizations that actually embody the framework, with the infrastructure problem taken seriously this time.
24.5K
Aligned organizations
~30
Languages in scoring pipeline
About this data. We started with three public registries -
IRS Exempt Organizations BMF,
UK Charity Commission, and
Wikidata - pulled in ~760K nonprofits, then ran a multi-pass alignment filter against framework keywords.
The 24,500 organizations shown here are what survived that filter: entries with real signal that they embody cooperatives, mutual aid, community land trusts, food sovereignty, participatory democracy, restorative justice, or the other framework mechanisms. The rejected 737K are not shown (they are things like country clubs, alumni associations, and corporate retirement trusts that happened to live in the same registries). Tier A entries are manually verified; Tier B/C come from automated scoring.
Full methodology →
Multilingual pipeline (April 2026). 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. Word-boundary matching prevents short non-English terms from false-matching inside English words. This improves
recall outside the US and UK;
precision still depends on downstream verification. Full term bank:
MULTILINGUAL-TERMS.md.
Explore
Global Directory Map
Filter by section · hover any dot for details · scroll to zoom · drag to pan
Directory
10 sections — 24,500 aligned organizations
Each section covers organizations from public registries and curated sources. Browse the full directory →
Healthcare
Open-source health IT, community health worker models, universal systems that demonstrably work
6,363 organizations
Education
Open courseware, democratic schooling, offline-first platforms, 300M+ Moodle users
5,677 organizations
Food Sovereignty
Agroecology, seed sovereignty, open food networks, CSA movements, 200M peasant farmers
2,949 organizations
Democratic Infrastructure
Verifiable voting, liquid democracy, sortition, participatory platforms, citizens' assemblies
2,886 organizations
Land & Housing
Community land trusts, Vienna social housing, stewardship over speculation
2,405 organizations
Ecological Restoration
Beyond-GDP governance, regenerative ecology, watershed stewardship, biodiversity recovery
2,342 organizations
Conflict Resolution
Restorative justice, transitional justice, community accountability. 41.5% recidivism reduction.
907 organizations
Cooperatives & Solidarity
Worker cooperatives, mutual aid networks, community wealth building, credit unions
660 organizations
Recreation & Arts
Basic income for artists, open cultural heritage, 90M+ freely licensed media files
269 organizations
Energy & Digital Commons
Community energy cooperatives, federated protocols, 900 US rural electric co-ops serving 42M
46 organizations
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.
Ecolibrium 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 61 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 Hawken saw in 2007. That's what this continues.
Read
All documents
Everything is public, CC0 or CC BY-SA. Read it, fork it, disagree with it in a pull request.
📄
README.md — Project Overview
What Ecolibrium is, how it relates to WiserEarth, the three-phase blueprint, and how to contribute.
📋
DIRECTORY.md — 400+ Curated Organizations
Global directory across all 12 sections. Tables with descriptions, regions, and links.
🔬
DEEP-DIVE.md — Framework & Evidence
Historical evidence, empirical data, failure modes, 13 open questions, Ostrom's 8 design principles.
⚖️
GOVERNANCE.md — How Decisions Get Made
Rough consensus and running code. No founder authority. How maintainers work.
💧
SUSTAINABILITY.md — Anti-WiserEarth Plan
How this project survives past its funding. Federated hosting, five hard constraints, wind-down procedure.
🌱
WISEREARTH.md — The Predecessor
Full history of wiser.org (2007–2014): what it built, the 381-node taxonomy, why it failed, recovered data.
🗂️
taxonomy.yaml — Recovered Taxonomy
WiserEarth's 381-node civil society taxonomy as CC0 YAML. 8 sections, 50+ subsections. GitHub →
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. Ecolibrium'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.
This belongs to everyone
The data is CC0. Fork it, extend it, add organizations, correct errors. Leadership is transparent and accountable - no personality cults, no inner circles. If you know something it doesn't, that's what pull requests are for.