A LocalWiki for Antarctica



Many months ago, we were approached about helping start up a LocalWiki project in the most unlikely of places... Antarctica!  The project, named Open Antarctica, would aim to initially document a region of roughly 2 miles surrounding the Palmer Station United States base on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Working with individuals in Antarctica and using hard-to-find NASA aerial imagery, we put together an absolutely beautiful map of Antarctica like never seen before. Check it out and read about how we made it happen!

Race for Reuse

As you could probably tell by now, we are huge believers in open-source software and reuse.  So we’re happy to tell you that we are teaming up with the non-profit Code for America, one of our closest partners in crime, to kick off the Race for Reuse challenge.



Part of the challenge is to get as many new LocalWiki instances started up as we can before election day, November 6th.  And then, to focus on the city and community to get as much engagement as possible by Thanksgiving.  Code for America will even help by kicking in a scrappy marketing budget if you get an instance up by November 6th -- and if you hit milestones for adoption, you'll get a year of free hosting and funds for a party in your city to celebrate.

Sound cool?  Get started!

LocalWiki API released

In June, folks in Raleigh held their annual CityCamp event. CityCamp is a sort of "civic hackathon" for Raleigh. During one part of the event people broke up into teams and came up with projects that used technology to help solve local, civic needs.



What did almost every project pitched at CityCamp have in common? "Almost every final CityCamp idea had incorporated a stream of content from Triangle Wiki," said CityCamp and TriangleWiki organizer Reid Serozi.

The recently released LocalWiki API makes it really easy for people to build applications and systems that push and pull information from a LocalWiki -- making LocalWiki a sort of API for the city itself. In fact, the API has already been integrated into a few applications.  Read more about it!

A spreading movement



In less than a year since its release, the LocalWiki platform has been installed over 750 times.  There are so many promising new projects that we redesigned the localwiki.org site to help highlight them!

We’ve also been working to help projects on legacy platforms -- projects like the amazing Santa Cruz Wiki project (with over 5500 pages!) and ArborWiki (over 11,00 pages and one of the oldest local wikis on the web!).  We’ll be working to help even bigger projects like RocWiki.org and DavisWiki.org next.



The Champaign-Urbana LocalWiki project, cuwiki.net, just passed 1,000 pages.  Congratulations!

xo-
Philip & Mike