About RiverwestNeighborhood.org
RiverwestNeighborhood.org is a community news hub and social network. It's for Riverwest's visitors, residents, businesses, landlords, prospective renters and homebuyers. Anyone with an interest in the Riverwest area is welcome to join and participate in sharing news, events, and ideas through this site, from Riverwesters to near-neighbors on Milwaukee's Northeast Side and others who visit in from all over the metro area.
To get started, you'll need to create an account so you can share news, post events, join forum discussions, and much else.
If you don't know where Riverwest is or what it is--or if you think you know--read "Where is Riverwest?" and "The View from RiverView." You can also dig into the unconventional neighborhood FAQ.
Riverwestneighborhood.org is also a civic experiment in "new media literacy" created and maintained by New Local Media, which is basically this one dude and any number of others who are helping in a variety of ways. (You can help too.)
The software used to run RiverwestNeighborhood.org is mostly Free and Open Source; most of it is licensed under a GNU General Public License.
Some of the most important things in the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for this site are described below in plain English, to help you know where you stand if you use this web space and contribute material to it:
- Your intellectual property rights: What you publish here is still yours; you are sharing your content, but you retain your rights over it. We will, however, publish your content under a very non-restrictive license unless you specify your own license. The license we use allows other people to republish your content as long as they give you (and us) credit, do not make changes to the content, and do not use it for commercial purposes.
- Privacy and the role of anonymity: Both are valued and allowed for reasonable purposes;
- Material from third parties: Just because you see something here doesn't mean it's endorsed.
A Few Rights Reserved
Unless otherwise noted, all written (text) content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License (US) and is free to be republished elsewhere by anyone, without them asking permission, for non-commercial purposes only (more on that below), and without altering the original integrity of the content in question. All rights are reserved on other content, and all rights revert to the original authors, where applicable. "Use" and "republication" does not refer to mere quotation of portions of an article, which of course is fine under Fair Use rules.
In short, written material from this website is free for the taking, if the following conditions are met:
- The republication medium is non-commercial (more on what this means below);
- The integrity of the original material is respected--no modification in any way (ask about abbreviated versions; if you find errors to correct, great--let us know);
- The source is referred to by the individual author's name (if applicable), the website name and URL (or a link); e.g. "Source: Joe Smith, Riverwest Neighborhood Network (www.riverwestneighborhood.org)." Reference to the source should not be done in any way that suggests that Riverwestneighborhood.org or the individual author endorses you or your use of the work in question.
- The license terms of this work are republished as well.
"Commercial Use" May Be Conditionally Approved:
As Mark Pilgrim has put it, unlike GNU/GPL, "the Creative Commons movement [has] created a brand that doesn’t really stand for anything except 'Big Copyright sucks,' and CC's "non-commercial use" condition is not at all well-defined or thought-out at this time.
So, if you want to republish articles you find here on your personal blog, website, or other free, publicly accessible medium where you have some kind of advertisements in place, just as we do here, that will probably be fine. Just contact the author or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know who you are, what you're doing, etc. We may find even more things to share.
As a special, ongoing exception to the non-commercial use part of this license, the Riverwest Currents, a commercial neighborhood newspaper, has been granted permission to use and republish material from this website. Riverwest Currents is not affiliated with this website.
Privacy and Anonymity
Being anonymous doesn't help you meet your neighbors or organize a block club, so upon registering an account, you are asked to provide your email address, full name and location information, mainly a street address. The purpose of this is to 1) indicate you have a real basis for being connected to the neighborhood/s this site is for, and 2) so that you can interact with other people here in a responsible and cooperative fashion.
The information you provide will not be given or sold to third parties.
Private residential addresses are public information and accessible from many sources, but if you wish to minimize that accessibility, then you may provide only the 100-block of your street address rather than the actual building number when you register an account. Apartment unit numbers are not required. If you choose not to specify your exact address, consider using an approximate address so you can still take use the networking and mapping features on this site that use individual address data.
No other information that might be regarded as being of a personal and private nature will be requested or collected on this website without your prior consent. There is currently no plan, reason or intention to collect further information from users, but in the event that it is ever collected, it will be on a voluntary basis and not communicated to third parties without your consent.
In the case of private, personal correspondence with other users of this website, do not disclose more information that you wish to disclose. In situations where, as frequently happens, a user is asking website administrators for assistance with crime, property, and/or city service problems, the administrators will exercise discretion in referring the user to the appropriate authorities and neighborhood groups (e.g. block clubs) and will not divulge private information without gaining the user's expressed permission.
Anonymous and pseudonymous writing is allowed for private crime reporting, where it may be requested (and will always be granted) when the purpose is self-protection. Pseudonymous opinion writing is a good, old tradition too, and if anyone ever asks to be allowed to follow it for some worthwhile writing they contribute here, they will probably be indulged. However, anonymity as a rule is not allowed for public writing, such as articles and forum posts. It is discouraged (yet allowed) to some extent on comments where they are open to the public.
See the full privacy policy and terms of use for more details about personal data protection.
External Websites
Many links contained in this website lead to external, third party websites, and some material from third party sites are syndicated here. Some advertisements on this site are likewise created and published via third-parties. While it is assumed this material will be reasonable, accurate, and inoffensive to most users, Riverwest Neighborhood Network has no control over material of this kind and takes no responsibility for it.
If you have questions or concerns about anything on this site, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
