Cool things Open Durham Can Do:1: Roll Your Own (in homage to Durham's heritage)

I'm going to be doing a series of posts about Cool Things Open Durham Can Do; today's 'feature' is really a philosophy behind what I've created. Open Durham is just that - open to your piece of the story of Durham.

Most of my ideas for the site have come through my experience of writing Endangered Durham for 5 years. And one of the many things I quickly appreciated were the comments - often wonderful stories, additions, corrections, discussions that made/make the story of the places I've profiled really interesting.

Beyond that, people email me all of the time with memories or stories, and sometimes with photos, old news clippings, etc. And what became clear to me is that 1) the story of a community is far richer than any one historian/university/museum with a grant to go do a one-off project can capture, 2) people have amazing stories to share that aren't being written down, and 3) the web has evolved to a point where the tools to capture, organize, and interlink people's stories are available.

Let's call it curatorial crowdsourcing, if you will. Someone still needs to verify that people aren't writing about spam buildings or similar, but if folks can make the leap from sending the information to me to the act of creating or modifying a post about their house or a place they know about, we've got a true community history project.

So, a look at part of the Open Durham front page



You can sign in with Facebook, or create your own login to have the option to Create Content. Clicking on that button gives you options - which kind of content you want to create.



You can create buildings, businesses, or people. More on the new content types in "CTODCD 2: Yes, OD Cares about People Too," and "CTOCDC 3: Durham 360 degree Tour"

In this case, I want to add a new building to Open Durham. The Mayor's house.



There are two views for Buildings in Open Durham, Summary and Full. The Summary is an 'index card' that contains the essential particulars about a building. The Full Description is equivalent to an Endangered Durham blog post, and contains the whole history of the piece of land the building sits on. The Title is self-explanatory, the Summary is the short text that goes on the index card.



In the "Body" section, I can add text and photos to give the Full description of the Building - i.e. the story of the evolution of the building or buildings. I've added a picture and a tiny amount of text that someone could expand on later, above.

Below, I add the details about the house that will make it searchable and categorizable in the database and populate the index card. These include the address, Businesses or People associated with the building, neighborhood, uses, architect(s), builder(s), year built, modified, and demolished, and more.



When I'm done, I can save. It won't appear on the site immediately, pending approval by an administrator, who would take out my batcave reference.



And that's it! We've added the mayor's house to Open Durham. (Yes, this is all public information from the city's tax record website.)

I used the mayor's house partly to be a bit cheeky about this, but at the same time to make a small point about our 'current history,' which is happening now, and holds as much validity to a future generation as what I try to decipher about the 1920s. Granted, we've got incredible documentation about what is happening versus the 1920s, but the plethora of websites now related to Place are focused on what is where right now - with no integration with the past, and no particular outlook to archiving that information.

I'm most excited about this element of Open Durham, and I hope you are too - I look forward to seeing what you have to add!

You can check out the Open Durham Facebook page to get updates on the launch and upcoming Building Hunt.