One thing I've been thinking about for an EDAP is the importance of colloborative research.  (I've started slowly working on a wiki page for ideas for structuring it.)

This article by Hassan Musam and Mark Tovey goes really deep into both social organisation and technological tools for collaboration:

Peak oil. Climate change. Air pollution and top soil depletion. Water shortages and intractable conflicts. Disease, poverty, hunger, terrorism, natural disasters, and anomie … the world is full of tough problems. What would a sustainable open infrastructure dedicated to finding solutions look like?

For many of the toughest problems, it will have to lower financial, disciplinary, and bureaucratic boundaries to make more use of non–specialists — interested citizens who are willing to share their knowledge, expertise, connections, and commitment to confront common challenges. This implies that the investment required per citizen to get involved must be relatively low, whether measured in money, time, or technical expertise. Our goal in this paper is to demonstrate how to start building an effective open system to support such sharing today.

Sound familiar? 

A long article I've only just got started into, but looking great.  My Energy Bulletin co-editor Bart says "An exciting online paper with enough ideas for a dozen books.  Highly recommended."  (Energy Bulletin serves as one of their positive examples of existing initiatives too :)  Perhaps some of the computer tools would be less necessary for a local EDAP, where face to face collaboration might be better in a lot of cases.  But a great deal there which seems very relevant.  

Check it out: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_7/masum/index.html