[Wolves] Birmingham OpenGuide

[Barbie]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 06:07:49PM +0000, Andy Wootton wrote:
>
> I'm a great believer in this type of community project and this one 
> seems to be on a sound 'open' footing. The last 2 I became interested in 
> were swallowed up by giants: upcoming.org(!) by Yahoo and MySpace (for 
> music) by Murdoch's News Corporation.

I know the guys who created this and the chance of it getting bought up
by a corporate is virtually zero. The 3 creators are members of
London.pm and have been working hard to create open communities for
years now. 

> Shouldn't our Birmingham be in openguides.org.uk though?

The OpenGuides idea is global. Although many of the sites are based in
the UK there are sites elsewhere in the world. The dev team, who own the
domain, want to keep the idea of a global community.

> The people of 
> Alabama could get very confused by The Bull Ring.

The folks from Alabama are often confused :) We even have one on the
Birmingham Perl Mongers list! He knows we're in the UK, but decided to
stay subscribed. Anyway Birmingham UK is the first and original ;)

> The openguides.org.uk 
> domain isn't even registered.

As I mentioned above, they want to create a global community. If there
are two cities/towns that share the same name, that want to have an
openguides site, then may be that will be an option for the future, but
there hasn't been a clash as yet.

> Birmingham isn't mentioned on the UK index 
> page yet. Shouldn't the "release early, release often" principle apply here?

I only sent Earle the press release yesterday so it might be a day or
two before he gets the chance to update the page. But it will be there
soon :)

Hope you get the chance to contribute to the content. We're a bit light
in most areas, so we could do with a bit of help :)

Cheers,
Barbie.