Yeah, we know. No great shakes these days. But we’re trying to fit this fabulous project in between our even more fabulous clients who are paying for our time. So you need to bear with us when we’re slow.
So - where are we so far? We had a kick off meeting last week before getting our holding page up, which is meant to explain a little about the project and what we’re trying to achieve. That means Flame Digital and all the other parties who are involved, of whom there are many: we need to be clear, this isn’t OUR (Flame Digital’s) project, it’s a collaboration between many people. And we’ll post pictures and details of all of them in the next few days. Promise. They’re much more interesting than us.
If you’ve visited the site, you probably know the script: we’re running an experiment to see if it’s possible to crowdsource an entire history of a city. Namely, of course, Manchester.
So what does this mean?
Ok - we have a mission statement (which is still being refined - thoughts welcome):
“To create the world’s richest, most open, self-sustaining history and knowledge resource about a city”
Bold, yes. Complete - no. Weigh in, please.
So what will it be?
- It will be personal
- Sometimes emotional
- Ideally it will all be geo-tagged
- And time-stamped
- It will cover as far back as anyone wants to remember or know
- And maybe the present (as it passes us by)
- It will be co-operative
- And it will be open (with some kind of API)
And what won’t it be?
- Broadly speaking, anything that anyone else can do better, including:
- Wikipedia (though we may aggregate their data)
- Flickr (though we may aggregate their photos)… and
- It won’t be commercial (though we’d like the history of businesses)
- It won’t be for profit (we promise, though we’ll alow people to re-use the content commercially - probably)
And that’s where we are so far. In the next week we’re hoping to define requirements a little more. And we’d like some thoughts on that.
Where we are at the moment is orienting the project around three main tasks for users (that means you):
- Creation - adding a simple piece of history to the archive
- Collation - working with others to collate a specific area of history about a specific subject
- Curation - helping to categorise and classify existing data which has been submitted
So over the next week we’ll try to discus this as a group - and of course if you want to join us just drop us a line and you’ll be welcome.
Hope that gives a little more insight for now - but all of the above is up for discussion. Please contribute and we’ll see where it goes…
