That's a good question (and good idea) that I hadn't really thought about past a collection of ZIMs. The one I built advertises it's own AP SSID that anyone can connect to and then access the ZIMs that are served via kiwix-serve on HTTP/80. That is, I wanted a single, low power, headless device that multiple people could use simultaneously via wifi and browser rather than a personal device.

I hadn't really thought about other helpful services past that. I mean, we've got a (wee) server so why not use it? I like the idea of OSM and their website is open source but has a lot of dependencies :

openstreetmap-website is a Ruby on Rails application that uses PostgreSQL as its database, and has a large number of dependencies for installation

A fully-functional openstreetmap-website installation depends on other services, including map tile servers and geocoding services, that are provided by other software. The default installation uses publicly-available services to help with development and testing.

I wonder how hard it would be to host everything it needs locally/offline... and what that would do to power consumption : )

Thanks for the idea - something to look into, for sure.