The record belongs in public view
Keep useful local public information findable after the news cycle, meeting, campaign or controversy has moved on. Stable links, archives and durable civic relationships matter.
Founding network charter
Charter of
the Commons.
Local knowledge is public infrastructure. A Civic Commons exists to keep useful local public memory visible, connected and held in common.
The commons were never just land.
The name deliberately recalls an older tradition. The Charter of the Forest of 1217 protected customary rights to shared resources against enclosure by power. A Civic Commons applies that broad principle to local public knowledge: what people need in order to understand, remember and participate in the civic life of a place should not disappear behind unnecessary barriers or be enclosed by a single publisher, institution or platform.
This charter is not a licence to copy other people’s work. It is a commitment to keep provenance visible, point back to original sources, preserve public memory and build civic infrastructure that remains accountable to the place it serves.
Original sources remain canonical
Connect the record without replacing the people and organisations that created it. Attribute and link journalism, official records, community publications, research, notices and video. Provenance is part of the public record.
Connect, do not flatten
Show relationships between people, organisations, places, decisions, documents, stories, issues and time without erasing their differences or creating false equivalence.
Chronology before popularity
Civic memory is not an attention market. Do not organise public knowledge primarily by outrage, clicks, advertising value or opaque behavioural engagement.
Participation is reviewed
Invite corrections, evidence, context and local knowledge, but keep an accountable review boundary. Suggestions can propose civic knowledge; they must not silently rewrite the record.
Private people are not raw material
Minimise private data, separate it from public civic records, avoid behavioural advertising and do not require a closed-platform identity merely to read or participate.
Open doors, not walled gardens
Prefer ordinary public web links, RSS, portable feeds, durable URLs and interoperable formats. External platforms may connect to the Commons; they should not own its public memory.
Built locally
Each Commons belongs to its place. Local organisers choose the sources, boundaries, institutions, issues and presentation that make sense locally. Local knowledge requires local judgement.
A network, not a franchise
No locality needs permission from a central organisation to build civic infrastructure around these principles. The network exists to connect, document and learn from local Commons, not to own them.
Power should be legible
Make it easier to follow how decisions, institutions, ownership, responsibility and public consequences connect — without assuming bad faith and without allowing administrative fragmentation to defeat accountability.
Memory should outlast projects
Use exportable data, documented structures, resilient archives and clear stewardship so useful civic memory can survive campaigns, organisations, volunteers and software services.
The Commons can be forked, improved and challenged
Document how a local Commons works, expose its public rules and remain open to correction. Ealing is the first working example, not a template every place must copy exactly.
The compact promise
Remember civically. Connect the record. Keep sources visible.
Participate openly through accountable review. Stay locally rooted. Remain open through durable public links and portable formats. Resist enclosure by any one platform or institution.
Publish anywhere. Connect locally. Participate openly. Remember civically.