Wiki

Naming

What do we actually call this thing? The current homepage tagline reads "society-owned civic layer." This page works through the question from first principles and recommends a phrase to lead with.

Two separate questions. The product name — Uitwijken.nl — is settled. In the June 1 conversation Michell confirmed he likes it once Roy explained the wordplay (wijk / uitwijken / changing scale), and the .com is registered. What is still open is only the descriptor: the short phrase that follows the name and answers "what is it?" Everything below is about that descriptor, not about renaming the product.

What it is, stripped down

Start with what survives if every UI choice is removed:

A shared index of local public life — events, plans, permits, questionnaires, services, initiatives.
Organized by two axes: location (house → street → buurt → city → country) and theme (health, safety, youth, public space, budgets, …).
Three participating roles: Bewoner, Overheid, Ondernemer — visible as distinct civic objects, not flattened into "posts".
Society-owned: not a government portal, not a company platform.
Aimed at moving digital coordination into physical community life, not at maximizing attention.

What it is not:

Not a feed (no timeline of posts).
Not a forum or group (no flat container).
Not a map app (the map is one lens, not the product).
Not a government portal (three roles, not one).
Not a social network in the personal-expression sense.

Candidate framings

Name	What it foregrounds	Risk
Civic layer	Sits between government and resident life; technical-sounding	Vague; engineer-jargon
Civic commons	Ownership thesis (shared, stewarded, non-extractive)	Slightly fuzzier on function
Civic coordination layer	What it does across roles and scales	Wordy
Civic operating system / OS	Ambition: a substrate for local life	Overclaims; sounds like a vendor product
Public square	Evocative, familiar	Overused; implies talk over coordination
Civic index	What it actually is: an index of local life by location and theme	Sounds passive, less inviting
Local civic platform	Accurate	Generic; collides with commercial "platform" baggage
Civic fabric / mesh	Suggests interconnection	Too abstract for a pitch

Recommendation

Lead with civic commons, keep civic layer as the technical framing.

Why civic commons:

Encodes the ownership thesis directly. The Ostrom/Lessig lineage of "commons" already means shared, stewarded, non-extractive — work that would otherwise take a paragraph to explain.
Avoids the baggage of "platform" (commercial), "feed" (timeline), "network" (graph), "OS" (overreaching vendor claim).
Sits naturally next to existing public-interest tech vocabulary (digital commons, knowledge commons, data commons).
Lines up with the Governance model: association, foundation, cooperative, or hybrid civic stewardship.

Why also keep civic layer:

"Layer" is honest about where the thing sits — between government infrastructure and resident life, not replacing either.
Useful inside the wiki and engineering conversations where ownership is already understood and function needs to be precise.

Suggested usage

Homepage / pitch: "Uitwijken.nl — a civic commons for Amsterdam."
One-sentence pitch: "A society-owned civic commons that uses location, themes, maps, open data, questionnaires, events, and civic roles to help people understand, shape, and participate in their real-world communities."
Wiki / docs: continue to call it a civic layer or location-and-theme civic operating layer when describing function and architecture.
Conversation with Amsterdam innovation: lead with civic commons (it answers their first question — who owns this?) and explain the layer mechanics afterwards.

Open questions