Case study 004
Hundreds of sacred sites. Mapped, guided, heard.
LiveLive since July 2026, after two years of groundwork and a six-month build.
- Community
- 4,800+members, on every continent
- Coverage
- 347sacred sites mapped, with guides and audio, and growing
- Delivery
- 6 mobuild after two years of groundwork. Live July 2026
01Context
A global community with no home
Sacred Network began as two years of groundwork: research, site visits, recordings and a growing community of people who care about the world's sacred places and how they're treated.
What it lacked was a platform that could hold all of it, work in a field with no signal, and feel local to a member in Peru and a member in Orkney at the same time. For a project centred on care for the living planet, where it ran mattered too.
02What we built
Map, guide, audio, walk-through, community
An interactive map of hundreds of sites across dozens of countries. For each: a site guide that goes further than a plaque, downloadable audio so it works offline on a hillside, and a walk-through that takes you round the site in the order it was meant to be experienced.
Around that, the things that make it a network rather than an atlas: community, local groups and events, and membership and subscriptions that fund the work.
03How
Two years of material, structured by models, checked by people
The groundwork existed as notes, recordings and photographs. Multi-model pipelines did the structuring: transcribing and segmenting audio, drafting guides from research notes for editorial review, and geocoding and deduplicating sites. The community team kept the final word on everything a member reads or hears.
The platform runs on Edge: hosting, global content delivery and DNS on one network, so guides, imagery and audio are served from the edge location nearest each member, with no egress fees on media and a footprint up to 50% lower than centralised cloud.
04What changed
From a project to a place
Live in July 2026 after a six-month build. More than 4,800 members now have one home, and membership and subscriptions turned two years of unfunded groundwork into something that pays for its own future.
Before
Notes, recordings and photographs, and two years of unfunded groundwork.
Now
347sites mapped, 4,800+ membersOne place to find a site, prepare a visit, listen on the way and meet the people who'll be there.
05What's next
Guides that answer back
Next on the roadmap:
- 01On-site conversational guides that draw on the same research and answer a question where you're standing
- 02Member-contributed recordings, brought into the archive through the same review pipeline
- 03Seasonal and astronomical event layers on the map
Hosted and operated by Edge Expert Services.
In their words
Sacred Network on the work
Edge gives us infrastructure that reflects what Sacred Network stands for: distributed, conscious, and close to our community wherever they are in the world.
Sacred Network 004
Live- Client
- Sacred Network, sacrednetwork.org
- Sector
- Community & culture. Membership platform.
- Status
- Live, launched July 2026.
- Build
- Two years of groundwork, six-month build.
- Labs' role
- Report (not part of this engagement)
- Concept and spec
- Build
- Expert Services
- Now run by
- Edge Expert Services
- Stack
- Multi-model content pipelineInteractive mappingOffline audioEdge CDNEdge ComputeEdge DNS
- Related
- Sacred Network on Edge
More work
All seven buildsYears of work. One platform.
If you've built a body of knowledge and a community around it, and need the product that holds both, we'd like to hear about it.
Or write to labs@edge.network