Entry in the category: Digital Communities
Title / Name of project: OpenGuides
Year of work was created:
Type of project: Social Software
Description of project:
OpenGuides is an effort to develop a system that facilitates the
building of community-created city guides. It addresses anyone living
in, interested in, visiting or otherwise encountering an urban area.
URL of the work: http://openguides.org/
Project Details
Objectives:
Based on the "wiki" principle of a site globally editable by all, the
OpenGuides software is a framework that allows its users to build a
content-rich collaborative work. It serves as a reference tool,
discussion space and general freeform whiteboard, where a community or
the public at large can document a geographic area - typically a city,
although the system puts no limitation on what it is used for.
The objective of OpenGuides is to allow any city to be documented,
whether in a qualitative or quantitative fashion.
Language and context:
The OpenGuides project aims to be suitable for almost any cultural or
geographic context, with its roots lying only in the shared experience
of urban living.
Project History: In
early 2002, Kake Pugh asked Earle Martin whether he knew of a London
wiki: "It would be good if there was [a wiki] for info about London; do
you know if anyone's done that? Things like which pubs serve food and
good beer, etc.; which is the best end of the platform to stand at to
get a seat...." Earle responded that he didn't, so he made one, and
both immediately started filling the thing with content. We called it
"Grubstreet", and its scope was all of London. However, after a while,
we determined that, whilst entirely functional, the existing range of
wiki engines did not have the features that would be necessary to
implement our ideas.
We agreed on a two-stage plan: firstly, to develop a wiki engine that
behaved the way we wanted it to, and was easily extensible; and
secondly, using that engine as a basis, to develop an environment
customised for the requirements of our idea of an editable city guide.
The first stage of the plan gave rise to "CGI::Wiki", an extensible
Perl toolkit for the development of wikis.
Once the initial phase of
development had been completed, we were able to take the new wiki
framework and start layering custom features appropriate to the task of
making city guides upon it. (After the initial work was done on the
second phase, development of the two actually tended to go hand in
hand, as a new feature in the specialised application would require a
modification to CGI::Wiki). The result was the OpenGuides software as
it exists today. "Grubstreet" was switched over to run on OpenGuides in
June 2003.
People:
The OpenGuides main development team is Kake Pugh (database design and
programming lead), Earle Martin (interface design and RDF modelling)
and Ivor Williams (search engine programming), with assistance, bug
fixes and suggestions from a number of others. All three are
London-based professional programmers with a shared interest in the
city they live in. Access to the project is completely open, and other
members of the development group - the developers' mailing list
currently has 25 members - come from a variety of backgrounds and
locations around the globe.
Much of the project is due to the interest and partipation of the users
of the software itself, especially of the Open Guide to London, the
needs of which (a city of London's size being an excellent testbed)
have largely driven the project's development.
Lessons learned:
Technical Information
Technological Basis:
OpenGuides is written entirely in Perl, and available in its entirety
from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (http://search.cpan.org/).
As such, it can be run on any system that can run Perl. Supported
database formats are PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite.
Solutions:
In the original stage of Grubstreet's existence, we had been using a
standard wiki engine (UseModWiki), and making do with extracting page
metadata by means of "scraper" mechanisms - namely, processes that
would read the raw page data and parse it to extract the metadata that
had been entered into it. This approach was fragile and of limited
viability, and served mainly as a "spike solution", whilst we thought
of a better approach, which gave rise to CGI::Wiki.
Portability and flexibility were two of CGI::Wiki's design goals, and
so the toolkit was built to be agnostic towards both data storage
(input) and rendering (output). Several types of popular database
software are supported at present for storage, and several types of
"formatter" modules have been written to allow data to be entered in
different formats (for example, with traditional wiki text markup) and
rendered appropriately upon output.
In addition to the traditional freeform text editing provided by a
wiki, OpenGuides supports structured metadata to increase the quality
of the contributed information, and allow it to be searched, browsed
and catalogued in a number of ways.
Implementations:
At the time of writing, there are several instances of city guides
running the OpenGuides software that we know of. The oldest and most
extensive is the Open Guide to London (http://london.openguides.org/),
which contains over 1,700 nodes describing places and things in London.
There are also Guides for a few other cities across the UK, a couple of
European cities, and two in the USA.
Users:
Everyone is a potential user of OpenGuides. It was designed to serve as
a reference tool for the general public in addition to acting as a
place for communities to document themselves for their own benefit - so
that everyone from the casual browser to the person searching for a
specific purpose would be able to find something of value. Our dream is
that an OpenGuides site could one day serve to bring together a
community and aid its social development.
License:
OpenGuides is free software, and licensed under the same terms as Perl
itself. Everyone who installs the software is free to choose a license,
or no license at all, for the material that's contributed to their
site.
As the software is hosted for download at the Comprehensive Perl
Archive Network, mirror copies of which span the globe, we have no way
of knowing how many copies have been downloaded.
Statement of Reasons:
We feel that OpenGuides deserves a prize because it embodies the spirit
of "Digital Communities" very well: being enabling without coercing and
allowing even the casual visitor to contribute information and become a
valued member of an OpenGuides community. The project is open, flexible
and forward-looking; and its aim is to connect and enable, draw
communities closer together and facilitate new ways of presenting their
qualities. The software itself is free software - "as in speech" - as
we aim to make it as open as possible, without any restrictive use
clauses.
Planned use of prize money:
Were we to win, we would probably use the prize money to fund one of
our team to spend some time working full-time on the OpenGuides
software, with particular regard to the visualisation of geospatial
data.
Role: Representative of the project
Salutation: Mr.
First name: Earle
Last name: Martin
Company / Institution:
Street: xxxxx
City: London
State:
Country: United Kingdom
Telephone: xxxxx
Fax:
E-mail: xxxxx
Role: Speaker of Project
Salutation: Ms.
First name: Kake
Last name: Pugh
Company / Institution:
Street: xxxxx
City: London
State:
Country: United Kingdom
Telephone: xxxxx
Fax:
E-mail: xxxxx
Your signature confirms that you agree
to the competition regulations in their entirety.
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Place, date signature
