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The factors that contributed to successful implementation were:

The organizational aspects: creative problem solving skills, understanding of the
cooperative community across sectors, recruitment of people with skills and talents to
support effort, and interest and support from membership and board of Coop Life to
undertake survey and put those resources to use.

The technical aspects: having a seed database to start from so that the directory was
immediately useful, making the directory Google-friendly so that people can easily
"surf" to listings, and maintenance of clear separation between the two roles of back-
end coder and artistic Web designer--the system was built so that could happen; for
example, common-sense naming of database variables and templates made it easier
for the Web developer to re-design site.

The people: Paul and Jason have similar work-styles and knowledge of technology.

The project was constrained by limited resources, for example:

Cooperative Life has no paid staff that could support the project

There are no resources for a prominent launch of the site

Paul Fitzpatrick's volunteer time was limited, which led to several weeks of
downtime in February after the site's server was hacked

The directory uses a free mapping site provided by the government that is
unpredictable and sometimes slow

Having geographically scattered volunteers working on a collaborative project caused
some delays

The least successful aspect of the project was the attempt to make an announcements or
postings site. Unlike the directory, it had no data at the beginning. It needed more of a
kick-start, which it did not get, so it flopped--it has not been included in the publicly
released cooperative directory site.

Given the limited resources available from the organization, the project's (modified)
goals were well suited to the capacity of the organization. In fact, a virtue was made of
necessity--the wiki model was adopted in large part because the organization lacks paid
staff, but it is a positive feature of the directory. In addition, the database owned by the
Cooperative Development Institute, the sponsor of Cooperative Life, was an important
source of information that was essentially untapped. The directory makes maximal use of
that resource.

The project's goals seem to be well suited to the needs of participants. The goals were
adopted in response to a member survey where 85% of respondents approved the idea of
a cooperative directory (and 65% said that they would be willing to pay for it). In
addition, many in the grassroots economic movement are currently considering directory
projects that could be supported by Regina (for example, the newly-formed US
Federation of Workers Cooperatives has begun to compile a directory, the Grassroots
Economic Organizing newsletter is formulating a proposal for a directory, and one of the
major outcomes of the Boston Social Forum was a heightened level of interest in a
directory of alternative economic organizations). Perhaps the best indicator of the