Why It Exists
The Observation
Many of the things that shape a place are encountered separately.
A product may be experienced without understanding the people behind it. Knowledge may exist without the contributors who carry it. A region may be described without the practices that give it character. Everyday realities may become reduced to isolated facts, products, destinations, or stories.
The individual pieces remain visible.
The relationships between them often do not.
Over time, understanding becomes harder to build because the connections that give things meaning are no longer easy to see.
The Gap
This gap is not simply a lack of information.
Information is abundant.
What is often missing is context.
When people, knowledge, products, places, and practices become disconnected from one another, they become more difficult to understand.
Products become objects without stories.
Knowledge becomes information without lived experience.
Places become locations without relationships.
People become names without context.
What is lost is not visibility.
What is lost is understanding.
The more these realities become separated, the more difficult it becomes to see how they shape one another.
The Response
My Chakchouka was created as a response to this separation.
The institution exists to make relationships visible.
Rather than treating products, contributors, knowledge, and places as separate subjects, it seeks to connect them within a shared ecosystem.
A producer can lead to knowledge.
Knowledge can lead to a region.
A region can lead to a practice.
A practice can lead to a product.
And a product can lead back to the people behind it.
The goal is not to provide a single perspective on Tunisia.
It is to create a framework through which different realities can be explored, understood, and connected.
In this sense, My Chakchouka functions less as a destination and more as a network of relationships.
Where This Is Heading
The long-term direction of My Chakchouka is not defined by the number of products it contains or the number of pages it publishes.
It is defined by the quality and depth of the relationships it helps make visible.
As the institution grows, new contributors, knowledge resources, products, regions, materials, objects, and practices can become part of the ecosystem.
The ambition is not to represent everything.
It is to create a structure capable of connecting things that are too often encountered in isolation.
Those connections do not emerge automatically. They require choices about stewardship, representation, transparency, and responsibility.
For this reason, the institution's principles are not treated as assumptions. They are documented through its governance layer, where the systems and practices that shape My Chakchouka are made visible alongside the work itself.
Visitors who wish to understand how these ideas become practice can continue to the Governance section.