Ealing Civic Commons
Reference implementation

Open by default

Ealing implementation documents

Ealing is the first working Civic Commons. Its source census, architecture, partnership thinking, development history, governance rules and roadmap remain public as a reference implementation — not as rules every locality must copy.

Network guidance

The shared model now lives at civiccommons.co.uk. Start with the Charter, then use the practical field guide if you want to build a Commons somewhere else.

Charter of the Commons ↗The shared principles: local public memory, visible provenance, reviewed participation, local autonomy and a network that is not a franchise. Start a Civic Commons ↗A practical guide to defining a place, building a source register, preserving civic memory and publishing accountable local rules.

Learn from Ealing.

These pages document one live implementation. The Source Register is operational rather than aspirational, and the public-people policy records a practical data-minimisation rule for the growing civic graph. Reuse what helps; replace what does not fit your place.

Ealing RoadmapWhat is live, what comes next and how the reference implementation is evolving. Commons Chat: join & privacyHow to create an account, what is public, what account information stays private, how sign-in works and who operates the conversation service. Commons Chat architecture & interoperabilityHow the RSS.chat conversation layer binds to Civic Commons objects, how the server overlay is maintained, and how Micro.blog, Bluesky, Mastodon and other bridges fit around it. Source Register — v0.4The audited operational register: what is actually ingesting, what is only verified or a candidate, visible source-health expectations, and remaining civic/geographic gaps — with Perivale currently the clearest publishing gap. Ealing Culture integrationWhy Ealing Culture is treated as selective official civic context rather than a parallel “What’s on?” service, including event filtering, reference-only directories and geography semantics. Electoral history sourcesLEAP and electionresults.uk as reference layers for councillor/candidate history, plus the provenance and data-minimisation rules for using them. Public people entitiesWhen a named person should become a standalone Civic Commons profile — and when data minimisation means they should not. Technical Architecture — v0.1The original architecture, provenance rules, open outputs and development assumptions behind Ealing. Partner ProspectusHow partnership was framed for the Ealing implementation and what meaningful local success should look like. Open Social PhaseImplementation history showing how participation, following and reviewed contribution were added.