DavisWiki Charges Into Media Future

The moments when my heart swells with pride for our community far outnumber the instances when I despair the opportunities lost to further improve our collective quality of life.  In the midst of this Great Recession, the last couple of years have been very good to Davis: our beloved Farmers’ Market is America’s Favorite (time to vote again!), we’re the new home of the U.S. Bicycle Hall of Fame, shoppers have more choices (and local government has more revenue) with the new Target and (finally!) a Trader Joe’s on the way, and a new, very high quality local grocery store in West Davis.

So, what’s the latest feather in our big hat?  What new event has me gushing rhapsodically about the Right & Relevant City of Davis, California?

The founders of the Davis Wiki have been awarded a $350,000 grant from The Knight Foundation in order to expand the use of local wiki’s with the creation of more user-friendly and feature rich software.

“Unless you read your local newspaper everyday for years, you don’t have the full picture of what’s going on in your community,” said Philip Neustrom, a DavisWiki founder and recipient of the grant with co-founder Mike Ivanov. “Our local wiki projects will represent cohesive institutional memory of the entire community, created and maintained by the people who live there.”

Since the advent of the internet, the exchange of information has existed in a lawless, rollicking space not unlike the Wild West. The venerable, tried and trusted card catalog libraries and local newspapers of record have been overwhelmed by upstart forces of surprising power: search engines, blogs, Facebook and Twitter dominate amongst thousands of other publicly available sources of information.

Davis Wiki Co-Founders Mike Ivanov and Philip Neustrom accept the Knight News Challenge award at MIT on June 16th, 2010. Photo courtesy of DavisWiki.org

While local newspapers like The Davis Enterprise struggle to find their place in this brave new world, the founders of DavisWiki.org have filled the local online void by offering the general public the ability to catalogue, comment, and report on every minute detail of their town.

What “began as a lighthearted experiment about putting neat information about our city online and sharing insider knowledge” by some UC Davis students has become our community’s most widely used online resource. It receives over 10,000 page views a day and was recently named as the world’s best local wiki.  I often cited the DavisWiki as a major reason why Google should name Davis the pilot project for the Google Fiber for Communities.

The good folks at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University have this to say,

The LocalWiki project, created by Davis Wiki founders Philip Neustrom and Mike Ivanov, will create the next generation of wiki software tailored to the needs of local communities.  The new software, to be tested in several “pilot” communities, will allow citizens a to easily collaborate on a common repository of local information, providing the context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities.

So, what will this new LocalWiki software do differently?  The focus will be on

• making it easier for the average computer user to edit and contribute
• news,
• integrated video,
• contextualized mapping technology and time lines,
• and a more robust search feature.

Once the software is created, it will be time to export this community resource to the new pilot communities.  For that venture, additional financial support is needed.  In closing, I offer you their heartfelt request verbatim,

But as we have seen with many other wiki projects, even the best software available doesn’t by itself lead to the results we have seen with Davis Wiki. What we still need to give the LocalWiki project the best chance of succeeding, and what we need your help with, is to be able to show communities how to turn a brand new, empty wiki site, into a sustained and growing information resource that solves real community needs and is used by thousands. This means paying a community outreach coordinator to be available to communicate with the people working on local wiki projects, holding online and in-person workshops about how to build content and encourage collaboration, and compiling a vast knowledge base of tips, techniques, and best practices that everyone can eventually use to replicate the success of the Davis Wiki. This also means we need your financial support to make all of this a reality.

If you enjoy using the Davis Wiki and want to support the future of community-owned, community-maintained, noncommercial local media in Davis and beyond, please contribute today.