Punjab has about twelve and a half thousand villages by the census count. If one person in each wrote down what their village knows about itself, the result would be the most complete regional record in South Asia.
Each account would take an afternoon: the gate, the memorial, the oldest building, the jathera, the pond, the well, three old people answering four questions, and the settlement report for the district read once.
The obstacles are not technical. Every Punjabi village has phones, most have someone who writes, and the archive material is online and free.
The obstacle is that nobody has asked, and that the people who could do it have not been told that what they know counts as history.
This site exists to be a place to put it. Whether it fills is not up to whoever builds it.
Fifteen thousand afternoons is what the whole thing costs.
The format matters more than the length. A fixed set of questions answered the same way in every village produces something that can be compared. Free text does not.
Photographs with the village name and the date attached are the single most useful contribution anybody can make, because they are evidence and they do not depend on a memory being right.
The people who hold this knowledge are old. The gap between what a village knows and what is written about it closes in one direction only.