CoPr: Core Practice

This document is an overview of CoPr (Core Practice, pronounced "copper") and of the Institute of Core Practice.

Help for online users

"Best practice is a substitute for knowledge" Krag Brotby

Simple: a checklist of the minimum things every business needs to do, and how to do them with the least fuss: the copper answer not the gold one.

Free: contributed by the public, and returned to the public for free. It is distributed online at this website, or you can download it as a book. Really. No strings, no spam, no catch.

We think we are doing something revolutionary here.  is this the first open-source, user-contributed business information?

Open source and similar concepts are well established in other areas (political transparency, freeware, journalism, encyclopaedia...) but has anyone done this with business information in general or process guidance in particular (small business or otherwise)?

Wikipedia has information in it that is useful to a business, but it is not business-focused.  It is aimed at the "man-in-the-street" or rather the "person-on-the-browser" (POTB).  A small business owner is little removed from a POTB but Wikipedia is too wide-ranging to qualify as "business information".

Welcome to people from the media.

This site is not officially "live" yet: we are testing and gathering support.   While not embargoed, we would appreciate you letting us know before mentioning us: please contact press@corepractice.org

The formal definition of Core Practice is:

The strategic decision to minimise cost in a discipline of the enterprise by implementing practices sufficient to (a) meet obligations and (b) to make processes work to a standard sufficient that risk (to the organisation and to people in its care) is reduced to some acceptable level

Interest is invited from people who would like to help found the formal organisation of the Institute of Core Practice.  Initial membership of the committee will be by invitation, in interim roles until the first AGM permits elections.

It will be a busy first year.  There is much we have done:

We already have the technical aspects well advanced: theoretical framework, website, hosting.

The content is about 20% done.

The first draft of the governance model for the IoCP should be posted by the time you read this.

We are considering launching CoPr to the public at this event.  Anyone who wants to help at the conference let us know.   We are not sure what that entails yet.

to tidy up and debug the cascading style sheets we use for printing CoPr content (and to a lesser extent look at the css for the website that seems to be working pretty well except for some Firefox quirks)

Experience with PHP and/or Drupal useful.

Wanted: people to help contribute (and review) content of CoPr for Small Business.

You can see how much work we have to do here

and exactly which ones need doing here

We need people with experience in small business:

• marketing
• sales
• finance
• management
• operations
• law

...you name it.

Good written communication skills prefered.

Time commitment can be whatever you like, but expect a minimum of 4-6 hours a week for several weeks.

Wanted: somebody to improve on Rob's amateur efforts in designing this website's layout and navigation, including some or all of:

• the clutter - looks too busy
• making it intuitive for non-technical people just looking for free CoPr

Preferably someone with experience in Drupal as we don't plan on changing CMS