It is run by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR), a public body of municipal self governance of the Rhineland in West of North Rhine-Westphalia in Western Germany, under the auspices of the Bureau of Research and Documentation of the Rhineland (Amt für rheinische Landeskunde); and is the first of its kind - replacing interviews with individual speakers, or questionnaires, by an interactive web application quasi anonymously collecting scientific evidence about a contemporary language.
Submissions take several days to weeks, occasionally months, to be incorporated in the dictionary by the editors who read, filter, and process them.
The definition of Rhineland thereby includes the Lower Rhine region of Germany, the Ruhr Area, the Bergisches Land, the so-called Central Rhineland around the big cities Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, the more rural Eifel and Hunsrück regions, plus some small stripes alongside the borders.
It does have subregional variations itself, but these are less, and almost always ubiquitously comprehended, as opposed to the local languages, which are far more diverse, and most often largely mutually incomprehensible, when geographically somewhat distant.
Regiolect speakers very often are not aware that their spoken language, and its use, deviate quite a lot and to a large extent from Standard German.
Similarly, documenting a spoken language with currently only written evidence created by people who are not educated in this field, using an undocumented unstandardized writing system, is posing questions.
In its scientific work of the past, the linguistic section of the ALR, first under Dr. Fritz Langensiepen, later under Dr. Georg Cornelissen, originally mainly researched the local languages, which are collectively called "dialects" in Germany.
The Cooperative Dictionary is the first attempt to replace, or supplement, such scientific polls of a larger number of volunteers by an ongoing monitoring and surveillance of linguistic evidence.
Also reception of the publications of the linguistics section of the Amt für Rheinische Landeskunde on the web, and the growing number of Rhinelanders participating in polls sending their questionnaires by e-mail did lend themselves to support an online project.