Vision

Our vision is of a world where everyone can learn everything there is to know about their local community, to have that knowledge be collaboratively created by the people in that community, and for this body of local knowledge to be freely available to everyone.

Mission

In order to accomplish this goal, we are working on collecting, opening, and sharing local knowledge by providing everyone with the opportunity to participate in the project to collaboratively create knowledge about their communities.

Approaches

So far, we’ve found that in order to make this project work, it helps if we take a few approaches to working on the project:

  • LocalWiki is for sharing and documenting local knowledge - knowledge that’s all about the places where we live. “Local knowledge” is a term that’s open to interpretation and one that’s left up to communities to determine for themselves. We at the LocalWiki organization have found success when interpreting “local knowledge” very broadly, allowing for (and encouraging) multiple points of view, colloquial knowledge, knowledge that’s useful to a community, knowledge that’s about a community, including questions directly on wiki entries, and encouraging situated and personal perspectives. However, LocalWiki is not for information or knowledge that’s intentionally harmful or hateful, supportive of illegal activity, for the purposes of commercial promotion, that excludes and/or victimizes people, or that leads to the creation of exclusionary communities (online and off).

However, LocalWiki is not for the promotion of commercial projects. Promotional content severely weakens the quality of local knowledge on LocalWiki and is not welcome whatsoever.

  • Local communities solve the problems relating to working on the project in their area by collaborating with each other and figuring out what structures (if any) they need to support their collaboration. This also means that the LocalWiki organization will not act as an arbiter or “supreme court” in settling local disputes. Learn more about our approach to local control.
  • These problem-solving approaches are not fixed in stone. As situations change, we have to make changes to the way we approach the problem. So we do our best to learn from others who are working on similar problems, make it up as we go, solve problems as they appear, change course when necessary, set up structures if necessary, dissolve structures when they cease to be useful, and collaborate to figure out the future of the project.
  • Having an inclusive community where everyone feels like they belong is an ideological and practical commitment. We take inclusion seriously and collaborate to solve problems of exclusion.
  • It’s not helpful to disrupt the ability of people to collaborate to create and share local knowledge. In other words, we’re all responsible for ensuring that the site functions as intended, giving people the opportunity to work on the project unimpeded.

We’ve found that with these approaches, we can work together to make it possible for everyone to learn everything there is to know about their community, and to solve the problems relating to this project.

Current Institutions/Structures

Here are a few structures that we’ve created so far to build our project using these approaches:

  • We’ve built a non-profit organization called LocalWiki. The LocalWiki organization exists to support communities in the project to collaboratively create open, local knowledge commons. What this means in terms of specifics is constantly evolving based on changing needs and available resources, but the organization’s role, work, decisionmaking, strategy, and allocation of resources should always be in service of the LocalWiki mission.

  • Open and transparent project governance that allows all contributors to know about the work of the non-profit and to participate in shaping the future of the project.

  • Local moderators who are members of the communities that they act as moderators of. Their role is to ensure that the work of the project can continue in the community where they are moderator. To do this, moderators currently have x powers., etc., etc.

  • Open-source technical infrastructure that allows people to collaborate to create open, local knowledge.

  • [something about how we check in with ourselves to ensure that our structures, approaches, etc., are actually helpful towards accomplishing our goal...something about how we have a way to ensure that we remain flexible and able to change course when necessary to get to our vision...]

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