A Local Host Handbook
A Ward needs a Local Host
The Local Host brings the Ward to a neighborhood and looks after its life there.
The Ward handles the machinery; the Local Host looks after the place.
IHosting
Most of a Ward runs without intervention.
Residents speak for themselves. Guardians look after their Places. Couriers choose their work.
The Local Host steps in when something needs judgment: a disputed claim, a report, a local source that needs correcting, or a question the system cannot settle on its own.
IIWhat a Ward shows you
A Ward gives its Local Host a view of the neighborhood that is difficult to get anywhere else.
The place itself is already known: its streets, buildings, trees, businesses, institutions and public spaces.
As people use the Ward, another picture develops—when the neighborhood is active, who it serves, where people gather, and how those patterns change through the day, week and year.
What a Local Host can know
A Local Host can see patterns in aggregate: Residents and regulars alongside visitors; daytime activity against evening activity; local commerce, events and other neighborhood rhythms.
That information is about the place, not a dossier on the people who make it.
When place is the primary object, people do not have to become data merely to make the place useful.
Anonymous participation remains anonymous. Private messages remain private. Information collected for a particular purpose does not become general-purpose Local Host data.
IIIKeeping it in good order
A Ward should become more accurate as people live with it.
Public records provide some of what a Ward knows. Guardians and neighbors provide more.
Businesses close. Hours change. Trees come down. Records can be wrong.
Guardians look after their own Places. The Local Host looks after the larger picture, helps resolve disputed claims, and keeps the Ward’s shared information in good order.
Moderation
The Local Host moderates the Ward. That means responding to reports and, when necessary, removing content, limiting someone’s ability to participate, or removing them from the Ward.
The system can help. Serious or repeated reports can temporarily pause activity and gather what happened for review. But the decision belongs to the Local Host.
A report is not proof of wrongdoing, and a temporary pause is not a verdict.
The Local Host wields the banhammer.
IVThe arrangement
The Local Host’s share
Hosting a Ward can create a continuing source of revenue for the organization that looks after it.
When commerce runs through the Ward, the business keeps nearly all of what it sells. A small share supports the system, and it is divided evenly between The Ward and the Local Host.
Customer charges cover the transaction and platform costs associated with the purchase. Delivery charges go principally to the neighbor doing the carrying.
Commerce and delivery are not switched on in every Ward; a Local Host decides whether the neighborhood wants them.
Money should stay as close as possible to the people and places doing the work.
The Local Host benefits when neighborhood commerce succeeds, without needing to sell advertising or access to the people who use it.
Local partners
A Local Host can bring more than a neighborhood to the Ward.
Banks and payment providers, transportation systems, local institutions, cultural organizations and other partners can supply infrastructure or services that make a particular Ward more useful.
The system stays the same. The relationships around it can belong to the place.
What The Ward handles
A Local Host should not have to become a software company, payment processor, privacy engineer or emergency-response system.
The Ward maintains the common technology and establishes the boundaries that apply everywhere. Partners handle the regulated functions entrusted to them. The Local Host handles the local judgments that genuinely belong to the neighborhood.
The Local Host’s place
Hosting is stewardship, not ownership.
The Local Host looks after the common ground between the people who use a Ward—and every map starts with a conversation about the place, what it needs, and how we can work together to do right by it.
The Ward provides the place. The Local Host keeps it in good order.
