Founder · Platform owner · Community lead · AI tooling
LGBT History Project
A volunteer-edited national encyclopaedia of LGBTQ+ history, founded in 2011, archived at the British Library, and awarded a Prime Minister’s Points of Light Award.
The LGBT History Project is the UK’s largest community-led archive of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans history. I founded it in May 2011. It was archived at the British Library in October 2012, and in February 2019 I received a Prime Minister’s Points of Light Award from Rt Hon Theresa May MP in recognition of its contribution to the preservation of community memory.
The project is a volunteer-edited encyclopaedia: anyone from the community can contribute, and a network of volunteer editors governs the content. I am responsible for platform architecture, content strategy, and community governance—the infrastructure that allows volunteers to publish reliably and confidently at scale.
Over the last year I built a custom AI agent for legal review of new articles, enabling the editorial team to publish with greater speed and accuracy. The tool surfaces potential defamation, privacy, and copyright issues before publication, reducing the risk that comes with a growing volunteer base working without legal support.
The project now reaches well beyond the archive. Nearmark—a GPS-based LGBTQ+ heritage walking tour platform—is being built as part of the wider ecosystem, taking the archive into the physical world as a location-aware experience.
In the press
When AI crawlers from Meta and Alibaba hit the archive without rate-limiting, they consumed enough bandwidth to threaten the project’s hosting. Fast Company covered the incident—and the broader question of what large-scale AI data harvesting means for small, volunteer-run cultural institutions.
Community & Editorial
The project operates through a layered governance model designed for a volunteer base working without legal or institutional support.
A network of volunteer editors who govern content across the archive. The Editor’s Club sets standards, reviews disputed entries, and acts as the community’s institutional memory—giving a volunteer-edited encyclopaedia the consistency it would otherwise lack.
A published framework covering sourcing standards, notability criteria, neutrality, and the handling of living people. It gives editors a shared reference point and sets expectations for new contributors joining a project that covers politically sensitive and legally complex subject matter.
A custom Claude-powered agent that reviews new articles before publication, surfacing potential defamation, privacy, and copyright issues. With a growing volunteer base working without in-house legal counsel, the tool reduces publication risk and lets editors publish faster and with greater confidence.
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