Say hello to Open Durham

You'll notice a new item in the sidebar; Preservation North Carolina has graciously agreed to accept tax-deductible donations on behalf of Endangered Durham version 2.0 - which I'm more broadly calling Open Durham.

The vision is for a far more functional platform for the content of Endangered Durham - one with integrated mapping, rich categories for easy search and reference, short views for the quick info and longer views for the more extensive read. Organized like an archive with rich search functionality at the forefront.

But the vision - the Open Durham vision - goes beyond that. The most significant change is this - I'm giving Endangered Durham to you - Durham. If you register so I, or someone else, can confirm that you aren't spamming, you can contribute buildings and places to the new platform. You can create what I call 'tours' - which are articles that link a number of previously-written about buildings or places in a new format - i.e., "Movie Theaters of Durham." I'm very excited about the potential of these, and I hope that the open platform encourages neighborhoods to contribute far more residential structures than I could ever possibly publish myself on ED.

There will also be neighborhood pages, people pages and business pages, so there's an opportunity to write a bit more biography about various figures in Durham history and to give more of a summary view of neighborhoods.

Development is underway, and I've incurred about $3000 in costs so far on what is now a pre-alpha stage, but partly functional site. I expect those costs to continue to grow. So contribute if you can, and if you have skills but no cash to spare, I could presently use help with:

1) A single dedicated fundraising page at the opendurham.com domain to take the place of this - I'll host if someone is willing to donate the time to design something attractive. Or similar.

2) One of the largest obstacles in the transition is moving the existing Endangered Durham information to a new database structure. Ultimately, this should mean the end of people being unable to find the information they are looking for. But right now, there's a good bit of pain involved in translating some of the information. If you've got mad scripting skills or a willingness to help manually edit 1300 posts, you can help.

Also please note that PNC was unable to accept tax-deductible donations less than $100 for this because of the paperwork involved. I'll gladly accept anything from $1 on up, but $1-$99 will not be tax-deductible, and I need to figure out a good way to get it from you. Paypal? I'm open to suggestions.

Later goals, if the support allows it, include:

1) Digitization of 'paid' archvies - Library of Congress and State Historic Preservation Office Durham Historic Inventory.
2) Smartphone app(s)
3) More advanced mapping that allows you to select a series of historic overlay maps on any given post.
4) Oral/video histories

The longer term plan is that, once the platform has some stability, I'll give it away (as in free) to various historic non-profits/motivated-crazy individuals throughout North Carolina that want to use it to create their own historic archive for their towns - particularly for the smaller towns that don't already have something accessible online.

Thank you for your help!

Gary