LocalWiki

LocalWiki grew out of DavisWiki (2004), where founders Philip Neustrom and Mike Ivanov built an openly editable encyclopedia of one California college town — and watched it become core infrastructure, with roughly one in seven residents contributing (the full story is on this shelf). A Knight Foundation grant generalized the software; at its 2015 peak the hosted platform served 300+ communities and ~400,000 monthly readers, all content under Creative Commons Attribution.

Honest status: the sites are online, but development has been largely dormant for years — the code (GPLv2, Python/Django) is old, and the nonprofit's energy has dispersed. It sits on this shelf anyway, for two reasons. First, the model — *every* local thing deserves a page a neighbor can edit: the history, the third places, the characters, the how-things-work — has never been beaten. Second, it's a graveyard-adjacent lesson in what actually made Davis work: not features, but resident habit and a decade of care.

Neighborhood remix: don't necessarily run the old software — rebuild the idea at block scale. A 'living field guide' to one neighborhood: every porch, mural, tree, elder, and unwritten rule gets a page neighbors can edit from their phones, licensed openly so it outlives any one steward.

Details

• maker: LocalWiki (nonprofit, born from DavisWiki)
• hosted: localwiki.org (maintenance mode)
• license: GPL-2.0 (backend); content CC BY
• repo url: https://github.com/localwiki/localwiki-backend-server
• remix idea: A block-scale living field guide: every place and unwritten rule gets an editable page.
• status note: Sites online; development largely dormant — a proven model awaiting its next builder.
• practice kind: tool