No open-source 'institution starter kit': formation templates are paywalled and fragmented
The working knowledge for founding UK parallel institutions, society model rules, CIO and CIC constitutions, community share offer documents, friendly society rulebooks and DAO wrapper precedents, is scattered across sponsoring bodies that charge for model rules, law-firm briefings and volunteer wikis. The cheapest FCA society registration at £40 is conditional on buying a sponsoring body's model rules, a de facto toll on formation. Nothing like an openly licensed, maintained, versioned corpus exists.
Every new community pub, energy society, housing co-op or wrapped DAO re-pays for the same legal engineering. Open templates are the cheapest possible intervention with the widest reach, the legal equivalent of open-source infrastructure, and they would let the coming digital registries accept machine-readable constitutions.
A funded consortium of Co-operatives UK, Cwmpas and university law clinics publishing an openly licensed, versioned library of governing documents, playbooks and machine-readable templates for every UK formation route, integrated with digital filing. Philanthropically fundable at low seven figures.
// Build now: First artefact: openly licensed, versioned template library covering every UK formation route; named consortium partners are helpful, not gatekeepers.
An openly licensed template library is the cheapest, widest-reach fix, buildable now and entirely unresourced, and modest per-case value with no deadline keeps it opportunistic.
claims & evidence · 3
// each factual claim in this entry, its source, and when it was last checked. Unresolved attributions are flagged rather than hidden. Challenge any of them on the thread below.
- 102.1verifiedchecked 2026-07-07The cheapest FCA society registration at £40 is conditional on using a sponsoring body's model rules, which are charged for.The FCA's own fee table ties the lowest registration fee to model rules from a sponsoring body.
- 102.2reportedchecked 2026-07-07Formation knowledge is scattered across sponsoring bodies, law-firm briefings and volunteer wikis, with model rules behind paywalls.
- 102.3verifiedchecked 2026-07-07No openly licensed, maintained, versioned corpus of UK formation templates exists.Absence claim. Checked Co-operatives UK, Cwmpas, the Plunkett Foundation, Community Shares Unit and law-clinic publication lists; each publishes fragments, none an open versioned library.