“LocalWiki is a grassroots effort to collect, share and open the world’s local knowledge.†This is how the San Francisco based non-profit organisation defines its interesting initiative, and we absolutely wanted to cover it.
The idea consists on offering a platform that allows communities to collect and share local knowledge, all of this in a collaborative (crowdsourced) way. It all started with DavisWiki in 2004, a community-run wiki with contents about Davis town in California. Currently, LocalWiki counts worldwide with over 70 independent projects in 9 countries and in 7 languages.
As you can see in the following video, the tool is very easy to use and allows users to populate the knowledge database of their community in a quick and accurate way. Inserting text, links, pictures on pages and even on maps has never been so intuitive for a wiki platform and the revisioning system makes it really simple to discover what other users have modified.
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/32534830[/vimeo]
Would you like to start a LocalWiki for your community? You can contact the team and they will assist you on the process. The technology is released as Open Source, meaning that you can take the code, use it and adapt if you feel like doing it.
The current state of the development already offers lots of useful functionalities. However, and since the platform is continuously being improved, some remarkable things are still to come. We recommend you to read their blog to discover more about their future plans.
We believe LocalWiki represents the principles behind Knowledge Sharing and the Open Source philosophy at its best and consider it a great piece of software that brings community members to work together. Fully support it!
