[OGDev] Re: Fwd: help with some questions? (WikiSym 2006)

[Tom Heath]

Hi folks.

A big thanks to all of you who've replied so far with answers to our
questions :) In the spirit of openness I thought I'd do the same and
answer our own questions on list. Mark and I co-coordinate the Open
Guide to Milton Keynes, but these are my own personal responses, to
which he may disagree ;)

Tom.


A. Your Open Guide
------------------

1. How would you describe the Open Guide you work on to somebody who
wanted to find
out about it?

It's a city guide to Milton Keynes that anyone can contribute to, by
adding entries or editing those written by other people.

2. Who is the anticipated audience for your Open Guide? Who are your
users right now?

Ideally anyone who lives in Milton Keynes, is visiting, thinking of
visiting/relocating, or just wants to find out a bit about the place.
A major target group is postgrad students at the Open University, who
fit most of the above criteria and can sometimes have a bit of a
culture shock when they arrive in this unique city. Right now it would
be hard to say who our end users (as in viewers) are. We get a
reasonable number of page requests a day, but of those that are real
people its difficult to ascertain the value people get from the guide
at this stage. In terms of contributing users, these are mostly people
at the OU who we've told about the guide, and latterly members of MK
Perl Mongers (who we found out about through OG, not vice versa!).

3. What do you see as the purpose of the open guides? (feel free to
get philosophical!) e.g. how is it different from other wikis/city
guides?

Partly as a comprehensive guide to "stuff" in the city. However, this
is fairly well covered by mkweb.co.uk in a factual kinda way. The
unique role of the OG in my view is to allow for (non-commercially
driven) opinions, reviews, and local knowledge that aren't enabled in
other MK city guides, or don't fit easily within e.g. a 5-star rating
system. The scope for talking about *anything* in the OG is one of its
strongest points; where else could you add entries describing
roundabouts? ;)

4. Are there rules and regulations users must follow? How about your
admin team (e.g. how do you make decisions)?

We have a wiki etiquette page, mainly ripped off from the OGLondon
(thankyou!). Aside from that we rely on people using common sense. If
they don't then we (the admin team) take some form of action (edit the
content, tidying things up, remove the page, whatever seems
appropriate). The admin team is Mark Gaved, Chris Schmidt providing
the hosting and tech wizardry, and me. We tend to each have specific
roles we've slotted into. So far we've taken unilateral decisions
where these have been fairly uncontentious; if they weren't we'd
probably just discuss it by email or F2F to find a resolution.


B. Your role in the Open Guide
------------------------------

1. How did you come to be involved in the Open Guide?- can you tell us
what you do?

I heard about the OGs via Mark Gaved, and then in more detail through
chatting to Jo Walsh, Saul Albert, and Paul Makepiece. The combination
of local focus, open and lightweight editing, and the output of
RDF/XML all appealled to me. Mark and I had been toying with the idea
of starting the MKOG but didn't have a handy debian box to run it on
(and didnt want to brave the install by any other means than apt-get
install); when Chris Schmidt offered hosting I jumped at the chance
and the guide was running in less than a day (thanks Chris!). I mostly
do a mixture of content admin and designy, vaguely technical things.
Obviously Chris looks after the hosting, but recently i've been
working on streamlining our guide from a usabilty point of view by
working on the templates and css. Content admin-wise i add stuff, tidy
up other stuff, remove weird entries, and try to ensure good
cross-linking is done within the guide (personal priority issue that
one ;)


2. What was your goal when your Open Guide (or your involvement in it)
started? What are the current goals?

Original Goals:

a) create a useful resource for accessing local knowledge about MK.
it's a new city and can be hard to assimilate.
b) make a contribution to the growth and community integrity of the city.
c) help new postgrad students arriving in MK
d) easily generate a load of rdf/xml for semantic web projects
e) get some review kinda content about MK online, for possible use in
my phd research

My current goals remain the same :)

3. How long do you see yourself being involved in your Guide?

As long as I live in MK, and maybe even beyond. i figure you don't
have to love somewhere to remove spam.

4. Have people used the Guide in any ways you didn't expect? (and has
'vandalism' been a problem?)

Yes. One contributor has added some pages about historical stuff,
which we didn't expect. There have also been a few entries promoting
one pizza company and slagging off another; part of our local pizza
wars. most interestingly there was also some bizarre but related
spammy stuff attacking Stelios of easypizza/easygroup.


C. Publicity and outreach
-------------------------

1. Do you publicise your Guide? How?

Kind of. So far we've only promoted it to people within the OU (and
MKPM), fairly informally. we've run a couple of little hands-on
session for early adopters. as we approach 500 entries we're thinking
about how to publicise it more widely (local newspapers perhaps), but
are keen to streamline the editing process for novice users before we
do so.

D. Future of the Guide
----------------------

1. How successful do you think the project is? Which goals have been
met? Which remain elusive?

Hmmm, hard to say. When we see regular entries from unknown
contributors i'll then feel we've been successful. Ditto when i hear
people mention the guides without me mentioning it first! As far as my
goal of giving something to the community is concerned, i've tried, so
that feels good, and will keep trying. as for the others, the guide
could still fail to reach tipping point, so they may remain elusive.

2. How long do you see the project going on for?

Hopefully indefinitely. At the moment it's a bit too dependent on
Mark, Chris and I being around to look after it, and any one of us
leaving would be a heavy blow to the guide. We need more
admins/contributors to make it sustainable long term.

3. If someone told you they were planning to start an Open Guide, what
advice would you give them?

I'm very much in agreement with other respondents. Go for it, but
understand it will take work; get a buddy; no get 10 buddies. work out
what you want your guide to be for (whats your niche?), and on that
basis decide your strategy for population of the guide (even if that's
"do it all myself cos i have the time/motivation").