A place to gather the world's village-making knowledge — each in its own language.
Maeul Archiveum is a knowledge platform that brings together the scattered knowledge and records of village-making, self-governance, the social-solidarity economy, ecological transition, and direct democracy. It does more than collect: it honours the practice-concepts each country and region has forged in its own language not as “translations” but as “equal coordinates,” placing them on a single frame for searching and comparison.
The name Archiveum fuses Archive, Museum, and Forum into one coined word. The Latin archīvum resonates with the Greek arkheîon (a village hall) — meaning we aim beyond a warehouse of records toward a village hall where people gather, speak, and build together.
Maeul Archiveum does three things at once.
It records. We gather documents, photographs, oral histories, and policy materials from the field of village-making and keep them as an archive. For grassroots activists and community groups whom authoritative international registries turn away for failing a “notability” threshold, this place keeps a seat.
It connects. Korea's ‘maeul-mandeulgi,’ Japan's ‘まちづくり,’ Taiwan's ‘社區營造,’ the vocabularies of Brazilian social movements — rather than ranking these different-language practices above and below one another, we set them side by side so they can be compared. No single language defines the meaning of another.
It shares. We open the gathered knowledge so anyone can search and compare it. We design registration itself to produce comparable data, so that recording becomes a map of knowledge.
If Maeul Archiveum is a library, MAAT is the classification of its shelves.
MAAT (Maeul Archiveum and Activism Thesaurus) is the multilingual thesaurus and ontology that forms the semantic backbone of Maeul Archiveum. Its work is to give scattered materials a consistent classificatory vocabulary, and to let each country's different practice-concepts be compared on one shared frame.
MAAT is not a plain term list. It places each country's practice-concepts on a grid woven from eight thematic axes and several facets (country, urban/rural, agent, type of power, and more), preserving as data the relationships between concepts, their intellectual lineages, and even disagreements. It separates the place that indexes concepts (the thesaurus) from the place that records people, organizations, and places (the authorities) — holding both the knowledge and those who made it.
Every design decision in Maeul Archiveum rests on the five principles below. They are our answer to the question: “How can the world's knowledge be gathered as equals, without hierarchy?”
① Mother tongue first. Each concept's name comes first in its own country's language. We never keep an English-only heading. The authority of meaning always lies with the native language.
② English as a bridge. English is only a bridge (a working language) linking different tongues — not a summit. An English name is an approximation that aids search and linking; it does not define the meaning of any country's concept.
③ Horizontal mapping (齊物). Concepts across countries are not subordinated above and below. Instead of pushing one under a “broader” concept, we link them side by side as equals. No language becomes the parent of another.
④ Urban–rural separation. When the same word means different things in the city and the countryside, we do not force them into one; we record the divergence as it is.
⑤ Preserving difference. Disagreement is not an error to erase but a diversity to record. We keep differing definitions together, and even register the ‘shadow words’ of negative contexts, so the light and dark of practice remain whole.
These principles aim at one thing — holding national specificity and international comparability at the same time. Success is measured not by “how many words we gathered” but by “whether we kept each one's uniqueness while still making them comparable.”
Maeul Archiveum is not a finished dictionary but a forum built together. Participation has several steps, and the easiest participation often leaves the most valuable material.
Privacy is a design default. We do not reveal the real names of living individuals without their consent, and we keep the boundary between public and private at the data level.
Maeul Archiveum is a platform cultivated together by the Maeul-Making National Network and the incorporated association Our Village (Woori Maeul). Just as Korean village-making did not spread from a single city but bloomed simultaneously in many places, each in its own language, Maeul Archiveum too is built by many hands.
Internationally, Maeul Archiveum is introduced as a GLAM (Gallery, Library, Archive, Museum) platform; but we add the Forum to it, seeking to hold the spirit of the village and the movement as well.
⚠ Under development — some content may not display correctly or translations may be inaccurate.