Congratulations and good luck with Open Guide Bruxelles/Belgium, Dimitri! Multiple languages is fine by me.... as you say, English is a tourist language but it depends on who the guide is for. I think in many cases the Open Guides are for local citizens of a place rather than tourists, so maybe local languages are more appropriate. I think this is one big reason why Open Guides are different from WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page). Certainly in our Milton Keynes Open Guide (http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page) we have many entries that are only interesting for local residents, such as schools, car mechanics, etc. I think http://brussels.openguides.org is a good address. Would it be a problem to open up new addresses if other cities started having a lot of entries? kind regards Mark -----Original Message----- From: openguides-dev-bounces(a)lists.openguides.org on behalf of Dimitri Pasquazzo Sent: Mon 7/2/2007 7:29 PM To: openguides-dev(a)lists.openguides.org Subject: [OGDev] OpenGuides Belgium Hi ! First of all, Congratulation to all members of the openguides project. It is really a great project and I feel proud to run the Belgium one. As maintener of the Brussels platform, I am wondering to expand to others cities such as Liège, Brugges, ect.. As Belgium in size looks like New York... Does anyone feel unconfortable with this ? But I was wondering witch languages should I focus on. In Belgium, we have 2 languages but english should be the best compromise for touristics reasons. But I will agree to keep words in the two nationnal languages because even the city name are different (Liège - Lutich or Mons - Bergen). Does anyone feel unconfortable with this ? Cheers, Dimitri Pasquazzo http://www.justbiit.com/cgi-bin/openguides/ ps: should we agree on http://brussels.openguides.org ? SKYPE as Grammoux MSN as dpasquazzo(a)hotmail.com Linkedin as dimitri.linkedin(a)justbiit.com eBay http://members.ebay.fr/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=dpasquazzo Jabber as dpasquazzo(a)jabber.org http://www.justbiit.com -- OpenGuides-Dev mailing list - OpenGuides-Dev(a)lists.openguides.org http://lists.openguides.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openguides-dev

On Mon 02 Jul 2007, Dimitri Pasquazzo <dimitri(a)justbiit.com> wrote: Hi Dimitri! Great to see the birth of a Belgian guide. Unless you spend a great deal of time in these other cities, it might be best to start out by concentrating on one area, i.e. Brussels, and get some good and consistent coverage there. What we've found is that unless a guide has a dedicated team of contributors, it's very likely that the guide will just fall into disuse. Are you working on the project on your own, or do you have other people willing to contribute as well? Once you're more established, though, expansion of the guide to other cities might work out well. The Vienna people might have some useful input on this. I think the plan there was to have content in both German and English, on the same page, so German speakers and English speakers can both contribute. (Actually, this gives a way for people to contribute to a guide even if they know very little about a city, as long as they know both languages of a guide - making sure that information is translated back and forth.) I have no objection to that. I think it's Dom that needs to sort out DNS things? Kake