Dear fellow OG admins, developers, interested parties...

a while back me and Tom Heath (Milton Keynes Open Guides admins) emailed you to ask for some help with a quick survey, to help put together a paper for WikiSym 2006 http://wikisym.org/ws2006/

Well - the good news - our paper has been accepted! program here: http://ws2006.wikisym.org/space/Symposium+Program

So big thanks to everybody who helped us. The reviewers' comments were all pretty positive, they've asked us to provide a little more data and detail (e.g. we mentioned spam but didn't provide any figures) and we're currently responding to these comments and working on the camera-ready version. But the reviewers certainly seem interested!

all the best

Mark and Tom

p.s. here's the abstract of the paper:

Title: Wikis of Locality - Insights from the Open Guides

"In this paper we describe an emerging form of wikis - wikis of locality – that support physical rather than virtual communities. We draw on our experience as administrators of the Open Guide to Milton Keynes, one of the Open Guides family of community developed local information guides built using wiki software, and present observations of the potential value and unique characteristics of wikis of locality from a practitioner’s perspective. Preliminary findings from a current survey of other Open Guide administrators are presented to highlight types of usage, issues and potential areas for future research."

Mark Gaved Knowledge Media Institute The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes, UK MK7 6AA

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/mark

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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.

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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.

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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)?

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We'd like to gather together people's 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.

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Cheers! look forward to hearing from you...