Our Why

Placewelive started from a period of reflection. I kept asking myself a few simple questions:

• How often do we meaningfully contribute to our communities?
• How often do we participate in shaping the places we live in, outside of formal systems?
• How often do we feel that our individual actions create real, visible impact?

I'm not particularly interested in politics, yet I still wanted a way to contribute, collaborate, and be useful to the community around me. I realized there isn't a simple, open platform that allows individuals to surface ideas, discuss local problems, and work together around a place in a flexible way.

What inspired me was the way large-scale collaboration works in open-source software: many independent individuals contribute voluntarily, ideas are discussed openly, effort is visible, and progress emerges without a centralized authority. That model has proven to work extremely well for software, but it hasn't been meaningfully applied to real-world community problems and opportunities.

Placewelive is an attempt to explore that model at a community level. It starts from a very simple idea: a place-based forum where people can ask questions, share ideas, and discuss what matters locally.

A key difference from traditional neighborhood platforms is that Placewelive is not locked to a single registered location. People can change their location or radius to explore, participate in, and contribute to different communities—whether they live there, are moving there, or are just visiting.

Long term, the goal is to enable deeper collaboration around community problems and opportunities, but I believe this kind of system must begin with simplicity. Placewelive intentionally starts as a minimal forum, allowing real conversations to surface first, before evolving further.