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Show HN: LocalWiki

7 points by mivanov ↗ HN
My friend and I have been working on this open-source project for over a year, and we just launched our site and released our software:

http://localwiki.org

It's a way for local communities to share information, knowledge, and preserve local history. Inspired by a project we started in Davis, California, in 2004 called Davis Wiki (http://daviswiki.org), which today is the most used news and information source in Davis and by many metrics the world's largest and most participatory local wiki. By our estimates, half the local residents visit it in the course of a week, and 1 in 7 residents actually contributes.

The new LocalWiki software is based on the Django framework, is meant to be easy enough for non-technical people to use, and has stuff that is useful for local communities, like editable maps. The project is funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, which has in the past funded EveryBlock, DocumentCloud, and others.

Would love to hear what you all think.

5 comments

[ 15.5 ms ] story [ 26.9 ms ] thread
Egregore
Is it just an open source project or you plan to make money on it?
mivanov
We are a nonprofit, and this project is and will continue to be open-source. It has been a labor of love for many years, working on it in our spare time and paying for it out of our own pockets or through donations, but now thanks to the grant it's our job too, for the time being.
JoachimSchipper
The social proof needs to be higher on the page. I would have closed the page before I got to it, thinking "another bunch of nerds writing software that nobody is ever going to use" if it were not a "Show HN".

(I'm easily convinced that you can write decent wiki software, and I'm easily convinced that local wiki's can have some value. Getting people to actually use them is the hard part, and you actually have a decent story there.)

mivanov
Good point. At the moment it's mostly software focused, but the technical aspect is definitely not the hardest part of getting something like this started in a community, and a major goal of our project is to share our experience and help with the content and community building side. Thanks for the feedback, it's really helpful.