The KMi-developed Open Guide to Milton Keynes was presented at WikiSym 2006 in Odense, Denmark, by Mark Gaved, co-admin last week. Mark attended the conference to present a practitioner report on the wiki-based community guide, part of the Open Guides family. Mark and Tom Heath have been administering and developing the guide for the last year, and there is increasing interest in &#39wikis of locality&#39 – wikis to support locally based communities. With WikiSym asking for papers on novel wiki applications, Mark and Tom surveyed their fellow Open Guides administrators and with valuable help from Marc Eisenstadt put together an exploratory paper for this ACM SIGWEB sponsored event, co-located with ACM Hypertext 2006.

The conference was small but select, with the inventor of the Wiki, Ward Cunningham participating and providing a keynote speech, and a broad range of other wiki researchers and developers. Invited talks were by Angela Beesley ("How and Why Wikipedia Works"), Doug Engelbart and Eugene Eric Kim ("The Augmented Wiki"), Mark Bernstein ("Intimate Information") and Ward Cunningham ("Design Principles of Wikis").

Related Links:

• WikiSym 2006
• The Open Guide to Milton Keynes
• “Wikis of locality: insights from the Open Guides” – the submitted paper (PDF file)