We’ll start posting our organizing tactics, in a big, editable wiki form, as soon as our first pilot community hits the ground. We’ve got a lot of ideas — the big thing, for us, is making sure we have enough mental bandwidth for both the software and the organizing / education elements. So if our fundraising goal falls short we’ll just focus on 2-3 pilots rather than 10. Making sure these communities are successful — as a point of demonstration to the world — is the most important thing we can do.

As far as technical aspects, we’ll be writing the software on the Django framework. We’ll be focusing on fundraising until end of August, but once we get really started on the software we’ll send out information – mailing list, git URLs, etc – to folks who’ve expressed interest (on the form on http://localwiki.org or people we just know are interested from past discussions).

Mike visited Portland (the ancestral home of the wiki) a few months back, where a few of us (though I’m mostly just a fanboy) have been working on PortlandWiki. Seems like a lot of these efforts have sprung up and struggled to take root; I wonder what community organizing tactics these guys are imagining applying in the pilot projects they select. Less extensible, of course, but it seems to me that this is where Mike and Philip’s project really excelled.

Also, Philip made some noises about a Django-powered wiki when we spoke last summer. Do we know what framework or language they’re thinking about using?