Wiki Wednesday / Ann Arbor / Nov 2007 notes

Last night was Wiki Wednesday in Ann Arbor. We met at Rendezvous on South U.

In attendance: @matth @homelessdave @edwardvielmetti griff
Regrets: @bkerr @vaguery @samrose @tedernst

The main topic was Arborwiki, it's continuing care and feeding.

I gave some results of initial local search log analysis from the new features in Google Analytics, as a way to systematically surface pages that people are looking for that aren't there or that need love.

We talked about ways to source more photos for Arborwiki, with a call to the local Flickr community. Many pages don't have pictures on them that could. The Ann Arbor District Library has an image archive, but copyrights are murky and thus most of the photos are unusable. Most Flickr people are happy to grant rights to their photos for Arborwiki use if asked.

Griff talked about ideas for putting together a local community newspaper out of Ann Arbor Alive. We worked through some of the mechanics and logistics of this including trying to figure out a hosting platform - consensus was that Arborwiki has some of the data, but that this might be an ideal student Drupal design project.

There was some brainstorming about bicycle-mounted, bicycle-powered low power FM. Dave has bike power and a trailer suitable for towing a mobile station. FCC regs (unclear on exactly which) allow some amount of low power broadcasts as long as they are non-interfering; with an Internet head-end and a network of neighborhood retransmitters you could reasonably build community radio on the cheap.

Dave suggested an area of focus around expanding the number of biographies on the site. It would be reasonable, for instance, to have a bio page for every elected official, for every person that a street was named after, and for other people with some notability or notoriety. Less clear was the relationship between people's "user" pages and people's "bio" pages for folks who are contributors.

Matt talked about maps and mapping and plugins that manage that, which appear to be evolving well. Some ideal future neogeowiki world has an infrastructure that generates KML as a byproduct of user behavior for mapping and search.

NEEDS LINKS - DO THAT NEXT - POST NOW

Comments

[Murph]

Regrets - my n'hood ass'n had a special meeting to chat with the company that's trying to buy a building in our 'hood; otherwise I'd planned to come.

I've been thinking of a community newspaper since the time that IndyMedia Michigan dried up, and more since half of ArborUpdate's contributors are no longer in town. Certainly something that facilitates author / editor / publisher relationships (like Drupal) would be good.

I've been slowly working on Category:People lately (as have others, it appears), focusing on historical Ypsilantians; elections are good times to do current-politicians, but that's a timeliness project that requires remembering at certain times of year.

[Patti]

I had the headache from hell yesterday (it was a day of non-stop "Ms Smith!!!"'s all day yesterday...and today, for that matter), or else I would have gone, too. I would like to meet people face to face and prove I exist :)

FWIW, I'm a Flickr person, and I'd be happy to lend any pictures that I take.

Ed, and anyone else, what are the next steps that came out of the meeting? How can I help?