Hi Mark, [CCing to list for possible discussion generation] On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 05:25:33PM +0100, M.B.Gaved wrote: The Oxford Guide is a city guide to Oxford that anyone can edit and update, which hopefully gives it a more unbiased and refreshing look at Oxford than all the many commercialised guides full of adverts and no opinions. This does make it less complete but if you help contribute you can make it better and more comprehensive! Ideally all and sundry, from residents of Oxford to visitors at all levels of technical familiarity, but at the moment most of our users I suspect are the more technically oriented. It's difficult to know how much use casual web surfers make of our guide, because although we do have lots of Google juice and are high hits for lots of places in Oxford, we don't get any feedback from most of these users. Partly already answered in question 1 I suppose. The main thing is that an Open Guide is freely editable and reusable which gives people the power to do cool things with the content and reuse it in ways we haven't considered before. The fact that we store structed metadata also has a large role to play in this - people use our RDF feeds as sources for other bits and pieces. This is where OpenGuide wins over generic wikis. Of course, lots of this isn't just down to the OpenGuides software itself, but the fact that in general permissive Creative Commons licences are used. Aside from that, the fact that an Open Guide generally has no commercial bias is appealing. It means that it is much more likely that reviews and comments relating to an establishment are unbiased, although you do get the occasional blatant self-promotion with faked-up reviews -- these generally get moved off to one side by regular users/editors along with semi-sarcastic comments to the effect that it's probably self-promotion. Yes, we have rules on the scope of the guide to stop it being filled with "off-topic" material that would belong better in a more general resource, and we have guides to formatting names and so on that ensure a consistent feel. Ultimately though we don't treat them as wholly prescriptive and the emphasis is on contributing content, so we don't mind that much if people get something wrong - the editors and admins of the guide are there to tidy up stylistic points. The same goes for admin - the handful of people who help me deal with page deletions and so on apply their own judgement. I think the Oxford Guide was the first Open Guide to run with real data and started out (for maybe a few hours) just being a pub guide before we realised it should be more generic. At this time Kate Pugh was writing OpenGuides in order to replace the generic Grubstreet wiki for London. For a while I was just a user but I now maintain the software, coordinating releases, doing bug triage, and bits of development with the smallish team of active developers. Originally we wanted to replicate an old pub guide that had been maintained as static pages on the University's web space and which had disappeared. This collection has now been resurrected indepedently but having this initial collection meant that we had a good way to kick-start the guide into life and provide it with a purpose. Nowadays it is self-sufficient and has grown in to something much bigger than it started out, with with over 700 pages of content. The current goal is to become "comprehensive" in some sense. This may never happen, but it is always something to work towards, and in the meantime, the guide is useful. I guess when if I leave Oxford I'll play a smaller role but will probably still run it and do some of the admin bits. It certainly wasn't expected that it would grow as much as it did, so in a sense. Spam has been a major problem in the past 6 months; in particular spammers have been targetting a flaw in the codebase which allows HTML to be embedded in node names. Coupled with auto-creating index nodes, this allows spammers to create large number of nodes linking to spam. I've solved this crudely with a moderation script, but this is probably the major weakness in OpenGuides at the moment. Ivor has worked on a spam-filtering plugin for CGI::Wiki which we should be able to integrate to alleviate this problem. Not much active publicising at the moment really. I do like to drop in relevant references to the guide whenever I can (eg when I'm recommending a pub in a mailing list post :) and hopefully this increases local mindshare. There has been discussion about getting business cards printing and depositing them in venues, perhaps in a "this venue featured in ..." context, but this hasn't quite happened yet. I think the success of the project to date speaks for itself. It's grown slowly but surely and I think it will continue to do so. There are many many improvements to the software that will let it grow further and be more useful. The goal of engaging with the non-technical user (if it ever existed) is probably some way to being fulfilled; we probably need someone to concentrate on the user interface issues in the software/templates. I hope it goes on for a long time. It's three years old now and I don't see it going away any time soon. A fair amount of dedication is necessary to kickstart a guide. Be prepared to spend time populating the guide with initial entries, developing the local policies, visual appearance, introductory text, categorisation policies, and licensing; these are all needed to attract the casual contributor to the guide. Once the guide looks like a guide that can be worked on rather than a blank sheet of paper, encourage your tech-savvie local contacts to contribute. The technical aspects of running the site aren't really the important ones but taking responsibility for the quality of the content is. You need to be a moderator and editor to some extent. Subscribing to the RSS feed in your chosen feed reader is *highly* recommended. Spend a few minutes each day viewing every edit and making sure it's neat and complies with your local policies. Cheers, Dominic. -- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, M.B.Gaved wrote: It's a way to find out information on places, shops, pubs etc in the Cotswolds, which you are welcome to contribute to if you find something missing. Anticipated - anyone who lives in the cotswolds, or is planning to visit it, who knows something about the web Current - everyone in the office, and a surprising number of others. I should really set up some stats crunching! There have been ~20k page hits since we started. It provides un-biased information that people want, rather than whatever people happen to want to pay for. There are a few other guides covering the Cotswolds, but they tend to just focus on a few places, and are aimed at vistors rather than residents. The admin team is mostly myself, with the help of a few other people who I work with. We tend to decide things via offline disucssions, and for now that works. If we do grow, this will need to change! Rules wise, we have some guides on the site, and we do tweak entries if required. I used the Oxford guide for a bit (and still do). After chatting with a few people, it was decided that the Oxford guide probably shouldn't be stretched out to cover the Cotswolds, so I set up a new guide to cover it. Now, I maintain the cotswolds guide, contribute stuff to the oxford one, and also contribute some code. To have useful information for myself (and ideally also others) on the areas where I live and work. My current goals are to grow the coverage, and improvate the code. Until I stop working in the Cotswolds. Thankfully, we haven't had any vandalism yet. I don't know of any interesting uses yet, but we do tend to crop up in the first 1-3 google results on places we've reviewed. We've even been known to get that high just with an entry in the "planned reviews" page! We don't really. We've been known to tell people in passing. We're just letting people find it for know It's helped us find nice pubs, but that's about it. We need a bit more content, and then hopefully some more users. (We're kick-starting the guide by visiting a different pub every fortnight, and then adding an entry for it) As long as there is interest Come up with a plan for seeding it with content. Have a plan for how to visit a range of places to write up (a pub lunch club works well). Make sure people who promise you reviews really write them! Nick