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").