About CoBot
CoBot is a discovery tool for the regenerative economy. It searches a directory of thousands of organisations — cooperatives, community projects, Transition Towns, social enterprises and more — across hundreds of countries.
What makes it different is where the data comes from.
Decentralised data, not a central database
CoBot draws on data profiles enabled by the Murmurations protocol. Murmurations is an open protocol that lets organisations publish structured data about themselves in a decentralised way — no central authority controls the data, no single organisation decides who gets listed, and no one can gatekeep access.
Each organisation creates a small data profile (a JSON file) and hosts it wherever they choose — on their own website, on a shared server, or via the Murmurations tools. These profiles are then picked up by the Murmurations Index, which aggregates them without owning them.
Why this is better than any centralised directory
Centralised directories have a fundamental problem: someone has to maintain them. That means someone decides the categories, someone approves entries, someone keeps things up to date — and inevitably, things go stale, coverage is patchy, and the directory reflects the biases and capacity of whoever runs it.
The Murmurations approach turns this on its head:
- Organisations own their data. They create, update and control their own profiles. No one else can edit or remove them.
- Anyone can build on it. Because the data is open and decentralised, anyone can build tools like CoBot on top of it — different views, different filters, different purposes, all from the same shared data layer.
- It scales without gatekeepers. There is no approval process, no editorial bottleneck. If you publish a valid profile, you're in.
- It stays fresh. Because organisations maintain their own profiles, the data is more likely to be current than a directory maintained by a third party.
- It can't be captured. No single entity owns the network. The protocol is open, the data is distributed, and the index is a utility, not a product.
This is how directories should work — built from the ground up by the people and organisations they represent, not imposed from the top down.
Get involved
To learn more about the Murmurations protocol, visit murmurations.network.
To add your organisation to the network, head to Add data or go straight to the profile generator.
CoBot was developed by Oli S-B from The Open Co-op, get in touch if you'd like to help or have datasets to contribute.
We pay for the server and AI token costs from our own pocket so any and all contributions to keeping Murmurations and CoBot up and running are most appreciated.