First, a little background is in order!

Background

LocalWiki is an open, distributed, global project to collect, share and open the world’s local knowledge. It is run and supported by a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, LocalWiki.  The non-profit hosts localwiki.org, takes the lead on developing the technical infrastructure behind the project, and keeps everything running smoothly. The non-profit also helps promote the concept of LocalWiki to new communities and contributors, supports communities where they can to help them flourish, advocates for the rights of LocalWiki editors to contribute thoughtfully and openly, builds partnerships with other organizations working on similar issues, develops project documentation and guidelines, and raises money. The nonprofit's primary goal is to enable communities to best collaborate to create knowledge about the places where they live.

What the LocalWiki non-profit does NOT do

• We do not monitor or delete content unless required to do so by law. (similar to the Wikimedia Foundation).  (*explain exceptions) Since every entry is editable, you are welcome to modify content on your own. You can learn more about the protections that are offered under the DMCA to LocalWiki as an online service provider and host of content created by third-parties on the LocalWiki Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) Policy entry.
• We do not arbitrate disputes. If you are in an edit war, please contact the local admin for the region where you're having the dispute. Additionally, please consult the community guidelines to see what is acceptable and not acceptable content to share on LocalWiki.
• We never make official LocalWiki edits except for internal documentation (such as this page). LocalWiki staff sometimes edit content under their own names (unless they forget to login!). Their edits are not "official LocalWiki edits" and you shouldn't try to appeal to them to get LocalWiki to remove content (because the organization doesn't do this).

How are decisions made / how is content policy set within a LocalWiki region?

Within a LocalWiki region, content about a specific community may not be exclusively edited by the members of that community, but if there are disagreements, the perspectives and priorities of the people who live in that community and work on the project should take precedence over the perspectives of folks outside the community.

Why is this?  Because we believe that, in order for LocalWiki to best reflect -- and be most useful to members of a given community -- it must be maintained and written by members of that community itself.

Every LocalWiki region has one or more local administrators, who work to do administrative-type things, particularly when there's an edit war.

What do volunteer local administrators do?

Check that out here.

How are these decisions made?

These have mostly been developed by LocalWiki staff with input from the global LocalWiki community. We're still figuring out exactly what this is all going to look like and we anticipate constant tweaking and evolution of these guidelines. There are very few other grassroots, global-scale, distributed, collaborative, open knowledge projects, so we are taking all the lessons that we can from the way that others have done it and trying to solve the problems that we have in our community in order to be as true as possible to the spirit of openness, transparency, and collaborative production in order to ensure that everyone who has a stake in the future of the project feels as if their perspective was included in what we do moving forward.