This is a social enterprise designed to sell website design and IT services, and with the profit support community education and other organisations which create much needed public value. The concept is simple, I make you a damn good website, and the money goes to good causes.

The income generated will go to projects which mitigate the costs to the natural world and to Ragged University and other community projects. As a social enterprise it will be run transparently and aim to will pay tax. The payment of tax is central to the creation of public value, and it is the single most powerful means of redistributing wealth across the UK so that everyone gains the benefits of health care, infrastructure and support services regardless of their background.

The considerations which come from running a business must include what cost has come from the natural world. These costs are being consciously internalised, rather than externalised as many businesses commonly do. In short, the pricing includes the energy used to run the computers, the minerals extracted to create the computers, and the damage done to the environment in achieving the outcomes will be written into the financial costs of the services.

We are exploring how to do this effectively. When so much energy has been used, a relative amount of carbon dioxide has been produced and put into the atmosphere. Rather than taking a free lunch on the environment and future generations, the plan is to build energy efficient websites and preserve biodiversity in relation to the natural resources used. Your help on how we can calculate and balance the costs is welcomed, as thinking sustainably is something which must be worked out in each and every context.

The Ragged University project is inspired by the histories of the Ragged Schools, where communities banded together in Victorian times to share their knowledge and skills. This happened in the Victorian times and was so successful that it never disappeared; this is how the primary school education system which exists today came about. Ragged University is about reanimating this tradition in context with higher education and valuing the knowledge people and communities hold.

It runs primarily in Edinburgh and Manchester and started in 2010. The bureaucracies which come with applying for formal funding have become so onerous and costly, that building a social enterprise seems a simpler and less constrained way of funding community activities. The way that projects, academics and almost any public enterprise is funded these days is problematic for a great number of organisations which are rooted in the community context. The opportunity costs are too great for many to bother as heavy paperwork takes people away from doing the activity itself; also much funding comes with stipulations which change the nature of the community activity.

The solution is Social Server a social enterprise ensuring a robust contribution to social, cultural, environmental and economic forms of public value which is desperately needed. I hope that you will explore this website to learn more about the costs involved in creating your own. Have a look at the products which are on offer and consider buying web development services on a combined basis of quality of goods and ethos of creating public value