besides just getting backups going of all the previous data troves that the subreddit have enumerated, I was wondering what the best resources are for databases of all local governments. currently, I’ve found these: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/max-mind/world-cities-database https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2020/econ/local/public-use-datasets.html
imho, there could be a much more unified global dataset of all publicly available IRL communities, feel free to sanity check this.
tl;dr is that it’s a sort of citizen’s distributed internet archive, with effectively the same ethos. and of course, data will readily drop off the internet (and remain privatized) if there are no informal enterprises that keep up the public work.
So just sort of “preserve the knowledge of mankind” sort of thing? Prevent society from having to re-invent the wheel? Sounds like an interesting challenge, best of luck with it.