Idea Lab

LocalWiki Now Speaks Portuguese, German and Russian

by Philip Neustrom

While LocalWiki's roots are in the United States, we've seen increasing interest in starting projects all over the globe. One barrier, however, has been that our interface is entirely in English -- at least it was until now. Thanks to the hard work of Pedro Lima and Nuno Maltez in Portugal, LocalWiki is now completely internationalized and can be easily translated into any language! Pedro and Nuno have started a beautiful LocalWiki project for the city of Porto, Portugal: por.to. So far, they've been using their LocalWiki to collect information about the remarkable architecture around the city. Porto residents are...

• May 25, 2012
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LocalWiki Launches TriangleWiki

by Philip Neustrom

LocalWiki is incredibly excited to announce that our second focus community, the TriangleWiki, has just launched. Check it out! The TriangleWiki launches with over 1,000 pages -- more than three times the amount that the Davis Wiki had at its launch. Interestingly, the TriangleWiki wasn't spearheaded by college students like the Davis Wiki or the DentonWiki. The core group that's driven the build-out of the TriangleWiki met at City Camp Raleigh and is really far-reaching -- consisting of everyone from college students to City Council members. At more than 1,000 pages, it can be hard to get a quick...

• March 15, 2012
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Triangle Wiki Day a Win for Open Source in Raleigh

by Philip Neustrom

This post is a guest column by Jason Hibbets, chair of Raleigh's South West Citizen Advisory Council (SWCAC). A version of this post first appeared on southwestraleigh.com. Almost 50 people collaborated on Saturday at Red Hat headquarters, currently located on Centennial Campus in Raleigh, N.C., to participate in Triangle Wiki Day. The event was a soft launch of trianglewiki.org, an effort to document the Triangle region and increase collaboration and knowledge sharing across the area. The wiki uses open-source software LocalWiki as a content management platform that includes wiki pages, images and mapping. The day started off with a brief...

• March 2, 2012
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As TriangleWiki Gets Ready to Launch, LocalWiki Reflects on Its First Year

by Philip Neustrom

Hey friends! Whew! A lot has happened since our last PBS Idea Lab blog update! Our first focus community, DentonWiki, has been doing great, and several of our other focus communities are close to launching. Just recently, nearly 50 people came together in Raleigh, N.C., to join a massive in-person content-building sprint to build up the soon-to-be-launched TriangleWiki.org. Folks from all walks of life joined in -- two city council members and Raleigh's chief planning director even came by to help out. Read more about the event on our blog. And our new software has been rapidly adopted by communities...

• February 28, 2012
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LocalWiki Launches First Pilot, Announces Major Software Release

by Philip Neustrom

Hey friends! We've got two extremely exciting announcements for you. Our first focus community, serving Denton, Texas, has launched. And we're making the first major release of the new LocalWiki software today! The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned, living information repositories that will provide much-needed context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities. We were awarded a 2010 Knight News Challenge grant to create an entirely new sort of software to make our vision of massively collaborative local media a reality. Launching our first pilot The DentonWiki, serving the community of Denton, Texas,...

• December 1, 2011
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LocalWiki Builds Out Pilot Communities, Updates Software

by Philip Neustrom

Hey friends! It's time for another LocalWiki update! What's happened since our last update? Erg, a lot! Pilots The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned, living information repositories that will provide much-needed context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities. We've selected our very first few pilot communities. So far, we've been working with folks in Denton, Texas; Sydney; and San Francisco. Do you (or did you) live in or near Sydney, Denton, or San Francisco? Shoot us an email at contact@localwiki.org and we'll get you involved in the pilot buildout! Several more pilots...

• October 18, 2011
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LocalWiki Dips Into Maps, Search, Feeds

by Philip Neustrom

The weather is starting to heat up here in beautiful San Francisco, and so is our software development! Here's an update to give you a sense of what we've been up to for the past month -- and what's coming up. Software highlights We've worked tirelessly on our new software, and we're starting to see the benefits of all this work and planning. Our goal over the past month was to get the software to a state where our first pilot community could use it to start building out their project and give us feedback about what does and doesn't...

• May 10, 2011
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LocalWiki Codes, Talks, Searches for Pilot Community

by Philip Neustrom

Here's a summary of what we've been up to for the past month or so at LocalWiki: coding, coding, coding, coding, talking, coding, talking, talking, coding, coding, coding. Occasionally we take breaks for sleep and nutritional intake purposes. Want more detail? Read on! Code, code, code, code & milestone We've been hard at work on the software side of the project. In the past month, we've: begun serious work on our collaborative mapping system; made the basic functions of our page editor work better; and come up with a way to allow for plug-ins and dynamic content inside pages. We're...

• April 4, 2011
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The Challenge of Sustainability for Non-Profit Startups

by Philip Neustrom

I recently had a conversation with a friend who's just been accepted into the Y Combinator startup seed fund. His organization, as is typical of the Y Combinator program, was given a very modest sum of money (less than $20,000). In exchange for acceptance into the program, he and his co-founder quit their jobs and worked full-time on their startup for three months. While chatting with him about his efforts, I got to thinking about some differences between non-profit startups and for-profit startups. People talk a lot about the challenges of being a startup organization. They're typically talking about traditional,...

• January 14, 2011
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LocalWiki: Laying the Groundwork

by Philip Neustrom

A few of you have been wondering what we've been up to since our Kickstarter pledge drive ended, so we want to give you a quick update on our Knight-funded project, LocalWiki. For those of you who are more technically inclined, we hope to also provide an insight into these early stages of our process. To follow our updates in the future, please sign up with your email address at http://localwiki.org, follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/localwiki, or follow our blog directly. Or if you're a huge geek, join us on IRC in Freenode's #localwiki. Right now, we are ramping...

• January 6, 2011
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The Pros and Cons of Using Kickstarter to Fundraise

by Philip Neustrom

We recently ended our first big fundraising drive for the LocalWiki project and wanted to take a moment to step back and reflect. In particular, we'd like to talk about the funding platform we used, Kickstarter, and its advantages and disadvantages. While we already had a grant from the Knight Foundation to develop the LocalWiki software, we need to raise more money to go beyond just the software and help us do community outreach, coordination and education to ensure our project's success.What is Kickstarter?Kickstarter describes itself as "a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors." It works like...

• November 15, 2010
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LocalWiki to Create Collaborative, Community-Owned Local Media

by Philip Neustrom

So much of the unique knowledge and experiences we acquire through years of living in a community gets spread only by word of mouth, or worse it just stays "locked up" in our heads. But this is great stuff, valuable expert knowledge that can benefit everyone. After all, when it comes to the communities where we live, we are all experts! What if everyone could share and collaborate on what they know about their local community? What would local media look like if everyone in the community was creating it? The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned,...

• October 5, 2010
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