Mission Statement and Overview Section:

Our goal this year and going in to the future is to develop a community-focused platform for archiving the civil rights movement in Milwaukee, both now and in the past. As a group we acknowledge that our role is not to tell people's story for them... it is to let them tell their own story. We want to create a dynamically developed archive such that the content and the direction of the archive is left in the community's hands.

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The online civil rights archive project is centered around two main facets: community outreach, and technical development. We are in the relatively unique position of being able to talk to individuals who have lived through most, if not all, of the historical events that we're trying to preserve. We want to and should be speaking with this individuals to preserve their thoughts and experiences. The civil rights movement, too, is still growing and changing in the modern days and we want to record events as they happen, accurately and without bias. Being completely nonbiased is almost impossible, so we want to meet with as many people as we can to get as many angles on history and current events as we can.

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The second part of the project revolves around creating the literal space for people to come and tell their story. We decided to build the website from scratch using open source libraries and frameworks, so that we were completely independent. We noticed as a group that a lot of work had been done by different groups separately, which motivated our decision to focus on creating a extensible repository where all this research could be unified.