A new website for the Copim community | Copim

by Simon Bowie

We’re happy to launch our new website for the Copim community. Since the website was last redesigned at the start of 2022, Copim has continued to evolve and we felt that it was time for a completely renovated website which would reflect the new position of Copim and its associated projects.

Since the Open Book Futures project launched in May 2023, we’ve undertaken something of a brand redesign to reflect COPIM (the project) evolving into Copim (the community behind the COPIM and Open Book Futures projects). You can read Lucy Barnes’ blog post on this for more details but in short the idea of Copim expanded as our projects spun off charitable organisations, funding models, toolkits, resources and reports, and software platforms. We wanted our new website to reflect the expansiveness of the Copim community and how we’ve developed since the COPIM project into a network with a strong identity that, we hope, will persist longer than the lifetime of a particular project and has created (and will create) many different things together.

In discussions with the Open Book Futures project management group, we kept returning to the word ‘index’. We recognised that Copim has become an expansive community whose reach is perhaps unclear to people unfamiliar with our work, and we wanted to offer an index to the many and various things that Copim is and has achieved. In tandem, we opted to refresh and expand our PubPub site by moving more detailed information on who we are, our values and our governance there. Via the PubPub site, members of our community can easily create, edit, and share dynamic updates on their day-to-day and ongoing work. We conceptualised the new Copim site as a semi-static index presenting what the Copim community has done in different categories and making it easy for users to explore.