Our Story As the president of a membership organisation I was frustrated by the software available to run it. There were plenty of products around — but I wanted something that worked intuitively, and most didn’t. Some commercial software was genuinely good, but the business model was the problem. It involved lock-in, and it meant the vendor effectively owned my members’ data. The alternative seemed obvious: build a better membership platform and base it on open principles. The amount of work involved was enormous. But building on WordPress meant building on the foundation that already powers a significant portion of the internet — a vast ecosystem of tools, developers, and community. That made it possible for one person to build something that would otherwise require a team. The result is LocalHero — a platform that community organisations can run on their own infrastructure, with their own data, under their own control. No vendor dependency. No surveillance business model. Just software that serves the people who use it. Peter Shaw, Founder — Melbourne, Australia