Davis, California, is a quiet town, and about a third of its nearly 65,000 residents are students at the local UC Davis. Each year, a quarter of the student population leaves the town, and a significant portion of information leaves with them.
A realization struck Philip Neustrom and his friend Mike Ivanov, both software engineers—once they left, the information they gained about the community would be lost to newcomers.
“We wanted to keep that around, and we saw that by trying to fulfill that need of keeping the information around that there’s this larger need to document the community and keep all the information about the community in one spot,” Neustrom said.
Their vision, although unclear at first, would become a technology that rivals Facebook on a local scale and blows even Wikipedia out of the water in terms of user collaboration.
“We were supposed to be doing this research project in math, but we didn’t really spend much time on that, and instead, started this ‘DavisWiki,’” Ivanov said.
Seeing what they were creating, UC Davis wanted to sponsor the project early on. “They saw the value and wanted to, but we really want to keep it independent from commercial interests, or even school interests,” Ivanov said.
“They would have imposed all kinds of rules that we don’t want to be held to,” he said.
DavisWiki started small. It uses the same open source technology at the heart of Wikipedia that allows users to edit content on Web pages.
Neustrom and a few friends began by adding a few bits of information about things they thought were interesting. “…And all of the sudden it just started to snowball as people started to add bits here and there,” Neustrom said. “Now it has information about basically everything.”
At first, users were a bit immature. There were plenty of posts about random things. Some also used it to post rude or defamatory comments. Then users began to document things about the community, and as interest spread, data began to flow in. Its use started with kids at the college, but soon spread throughout Davis.
More users meant more possibilities of use. People now use it as a repository of information on every part of the community. Users add data about everything from local politicians, to lost pets, to the history and ownership of the local restaurants.
“It really opened our eyes,” Ivanov said.
The website’s usage is also almost unheard of. “In Davis about one in seven people will contribute back to the wiki in the course of a year, according to our statistics. Just about everyone will use it in about the course of a month,” Ivanov said.
“It’s really kind of unprecedented, and we haven’t really seen the same type of success anywhere else.”
A shift also took place among the users, and people began to take ownership over DavisWiki, updating it and removing spam and vandalism.
“They may never meet in real life, but they know that this is another person in Davis, and it really creates a sense of community online,” Ivanov said. “When you go on this website really feel like you’re getting connected to your local community. You have things on there that are unique to Davis.”
Seeing what they created, Ivanov and Neustrom decided that this was something they wanted to spread to the world.
Continued on the next page...
LocalWiki
The two dubbed the project to duplicate what was done with DavisWiki in other cities “LocalWiki.”
A project of such magnitude wouldn’t be possible without funding, however, so they turned to the Web.
They opened a donation project on Kickstarter, a website that allows users to donate to various projects or causes. They reached a goal of $25,000, which Neustrom noted came mostly from people in Davis.
They also found a grant contest through the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit journalism organization, and decided to apply. The foundation decided to award them a $350,000 grant.
The money is enough for them to create new software and start up between five to seven pilot communities, which Ivanov and Neustrom are currently searching for.
“In Davis, where we got started, it worked amazingly well. This is incredible to us. But it might work even better somewhere else, or it might not work as well in a large city,” Ivanov said. “So we’re looking at a variety of different cities and different locations, different demographics, and there might even be some in different parts of the world.”
He added that they’re currently looking for groups or individuals who would be up for the task of helping start a LocalWiki in their communities.
According to the Knight Foundation grant, they’ll need to get the software finished by September 2011, and they plan to launch the first pilot community around the same time.
“On a technical level, it’s going to be far superior to what we did with DavisWiki in our spare time,” Ivanov said.
They plan to make it easier for users to edit content, and they plan to include some new features such as mapping. Ivanov noted though, that as the project grows, the main thing they want to ensure is that each wiki reflects its own community.
“We’d like every community to not just copy what we did on DavisWiki, but to really find what makes their community unique and to express that,” Ivanov said.
“We really want it to be owned by the community, and for every member of the community to feel like they have a stake in it,” he said.
Another key point will be to ensure that the local community shapes the LocalWiki content. They want to keep it free to use and free from commercial interests.
According to Ivanov, the reason for this is that he and Neustrom want to ensure that the information on LocalWiki is real and not something that is influenced by who is giving the website money.
He said on some websites, for example, when a positive rating for a restaurant is shown right next to an ad for it, “It creates this disillusionment of a conflict of interest that we really want to avoid...I feel that some things are a public source, and it’s not okay to tweak them and try to profit from them as much as you can,”
Ivanov added that as the project grows, his hope is that it will become a new type of online medium “where anyone can contribute their knowledge on their local community and be able to connect with their local community when they go online, which is not happening right now.”
A realization struck Philip Neustrom and his friend Mike Ivanov, both software engineers—once they left, the information they gained about the community would be lost to newcomers.
“We wanted to keep that around, and we saw that by trying to fulfill that need of keeping the information around that there’s this larger need to document the community and keep all the information about the community in one spot,” Neustrom said.
Their vision, although unclear at first, would become a technology that rivals Facebook on a local scale and blows even Wikipedia out of the water in terms of user collaboration.
“We were supposed to be doing this research project in math, but we didn’t really spend much time on that, and instead, started this ‘DavisWiki,’” Ivanov said.
Seeing what they were creating, UC Davis wanted to sponsor the project early on. “They saw the value and wanted to, but we really want to keep it independent from commercial interests, or even school interests,” Ivanov said.
“They would have imposed all kinds of rules that we don’t want to be held to,” he said.
DavisWiki started small. It uses the same open source technology at the heart of Wikipedia that allows users to edit content on Web pages.
Neustrom and a few friends began by adding a few bits of information about things they thought were interesting. “…And all of the sudden it just started to snowball as people started to add bits here and there,” Neustrom said. “Now it has information about basically everything.”
At first, users were a bit immature. There were plenty of posts about random things. Some also used it to post rude or defamatory comments. Then users began to document things about the community, and as interest spread, data began to flow in. Its use started with kids at the college, but soon spread throughout Davis.
More users meant more possibilities of use. People now use it as a repository of information on every part of the community. Users add data about everything from local politicians, to lost pets, to the history and ownership of the local restaurants.
“It really opened our eyes,” Ivanov said.
The website’s usage is also almost unheard of. “In Davis about one in seven people will contribute back to the wiki in the course of a year, according to our statistics. Just about everyone will use it in about the course of a month,” Ivanov said.
“It’s really kind of unprecedented, and we haven’t really seen the same type of success anywhere else.”
A shift also took place among the users, and people began to take ownership over DavisWiki, updating it and removing spam and vandalism.
“They may never meet in real life, but they know that this is another person in Davis, and it really creates a sense of community online,” Ivanov said. “When you go on this website really feel like you’re getting connected to your local community. You have things on there that are unique to Davis.”
Seeing what they created, Ivanov and Neustrom decided that this was something they wanted to spread to the world.
Continued on the next page...
LocalWiki
The two dubbed the project to duplicate what was done with DavisWiki in other cities “LocalWiki.”
A project of such magnitude wouldn’t be possible without funding, however, so they turned to the Web.
They opened a donation project on Kickstarter, a website that allows users to donate to various projects or causes. They reached a goal of $25,000, which Neustrom noted came mostly from people in Davis.
They also found a grant contest through the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit journalism organization, and decided to apply. The foundation decided to award them a $350,000 grant.
The money is enough for them to create new software and start up between five to seven pilot communities, which Ivanov and Neustrom are currently searching for.
“In Davis, where we got started, it worked amazingly well. This is incredible to us. But it might work even better somewhere else, or it might not work as well in a large city,” Ivanov said. “So we’re looking at a variety of different cities and different locations, different demographics, and there might even be some in different parts of the world.”
He added that they’re currently looking for groups or individuals who would be up for the task of helping start a LocalWiki in their communities.
According to the Knight Foundation grant, they’ll need to get the software finished by September 2011, and they plan to launch the first pilot community around the same time.
“On a technical level, it’s going to be far superior to what we did with DavisWiki in our spare time,” Ivanov said.
They plan to make it easier for users to edit content, and they plan to include some new features such as mapping. Ivanov noted though, that as the project grows, the main thing they want to ensure is that each wiki reflects its own community.
“We’d like every community to not just copy what we did on DavisWiki, but to really find what makes their community unique and to express that,” Ivanov said.
“We really want it to be owned by the community, and for every member of the community to feel like they have a stake in it,” he said.
Another key point will be to ensure that the local community shapes the LocalWiki content. They want to keep it free to use and free from commercial interests.
According to Ivanov, the reason for this is that he and Neustrom want to ensure that the information on LocalWiki is real and not something that is influenced by who is giving the website money.
He said on some websites, for example, when a positive rating for a restaurant is shown right next to an ad for it, “It creates this disillusionment of a conflict of interest that we really want to avoid...I feel that some things are a public source, and it’s not okay to tweak them and try to profit from them as much as you can,”
Ivanov added that as the project grows, his hope is that it will become a new type of online medium “where anyone can contribute their knowledge on their local community and be able to connect with their local community when they go online, which is not happening right now.”
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