Dear fellow OG admins, developers, interested parties
Mark Gaved and Tom Heath here, we look after the Milton Keynes Open Guide (kindly hosted and sysadmin'd by Christoper Schmidt) we're also PhD students at the Open University.
We're thinking of putting in a paper to WikiSym 2006 (http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006/) describing the Open Guides: discussing what people are doing, what we all hope to achieve, how Open Guides differ from other wikis or community information resources.
The Open Guides appeal to us as wikis that serve physically co-located communities. This intersects with our PhD research interests, and we'd like to promote Open Guides at the WikiSym conference.
We're posting to ask for your help putting this paper together: would you mind answering some questions about the Open Guide you're involved in (as an admin, a content 'editor', general helper etc)?
Wed like to gather together peoples thoughts and ideas and write them up with some general information about the Open Guides as the paper; we hope that by doing this we can increase awareness of the Open Guides amongst a worldwide academic audience.
We hope this sounds like both a worthwhile and interesting thing to take part in.
If you're interested please could you have a go at answering the questions below and mail your answers back to us.... also feel free to get in contact if you've got any other thoughts or comments.
Cheers! look forward to hearing from you...
Mark and 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?
2. Who is the anticipated audience for your Open Guide? Who are your users right now?
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?
4. Are there rules and regulations users must follow? How about your admin team (e.g. how do you make decisions)?
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?
2. What was your goal when your Open Guide (or your involvement in it) started? What are the current goals?
3. How long do you see yourself being involved in your Guide?
4. Have people used the Guide in any ways you didn't expect? (and has 'vandalism' been a problem?)
C. Publicity and outreach -------------------------
1. Do you publicise your Guide? How?
D. Future of the Guide ----------------------
1. How successful do you think the project is? Which goals have been met? Which remain elusive?
2. How long do you see the project going on for?
3. If someone told you they were planning to start an Open Guide, what advice would you give them?
thanks for helping us with this. We'll keep you posted as we progress...
please email your answers, thoughts, ideas to
Mark: m.b.gaved@open.ac.uk or Tom: tom.heath@gmail.com