No open-source 'institution starter kit': formation templates are paywalled and fragmented

The working knowledge for founding UK parallel institutions (society model rules, CIO/CIC constitutions, community share offer documents, friendly society rulebooks, DAO wrapper precedents) is scattered across sponsoring bodies that charge for model rules, law-firm briefings, and volunteer wikis. The cheapest FCA society registration (£40) is conditional on buying a sponsoring body's model rules, a de facto toll on formation. Nothing equivalent to 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 would let the coming digital registries accept machine-readable constitutions.

A funded consortium (Co-operatives UK, Cwmpas, 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. Fundable philanthropically 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, but modest per-case value and no deadline keep it opportunistic rather than acute.