Communities should own the things they depend on.
I’m Peter Shaw. I grew up on a farm at Dunneworthy near Ararat, played rugby at state level and then semi-professionally in England until a broken leg ended it, and spent fifteen years in banking. Since 2016 I’ve invested, kept playing touch, and put most of my time into building communities and arguing about how they should be run.
I founded Princes Park Touch, a Melbourne club of more than 760 members, and LocalHero, the platform it runs on. I’ve written for The Canberra Times and keep a gazetteer of Australian places. The conviction behind all of it: communities should own the things they depend on, and these days that includes their digital infrastructure.
Work
Princes Park Touch
Founder and President. Social touch football in Melbourne’s heart: more than 760 members and 500–600 players a season, run entirely on infrastructure the club owns. Proof that a volunteer organisation doesn’t need Facebook or WhatsApp to run itself.
LocalHero
Founder, 2016–. An open platform that lets community organisations own their website, members, data and AI tools instead of renting them from Big Tech.
Open source
Developer and contributor since 2009. 100 free plugins on WordPress.org with more than 10,000 active installs, contributions to WordPress core and BuddyPress, and everything LocalHero runs on published openly.
Australian Places
Local history. A long-running, freely available gazetteer of Australian places and their histories. It’s where LocalHero began: the original aim was to link local content to local people.
Selected writing
- Privacy is not impunity (2023). Communities need accountability, and need to own the platforms that allow it.
- The thin veil of civilisation (2000). Published in The Canberra Times. Social norms, not laws, hold a society together.
- Native apps are (mostly) a waste of time (2019). Why the open web beats the app store.
- Don’t break the web (2017). HTML first; JavaScript is for behaviour, not content.
- Alone in the wired world (2000). More connected, more cut off.
Get in touch · Follow on the Fediverse: @shawfactor.com