h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

OK what numbers do we have to aim for to be sustainable as a community?
What do we need to if we have to go the advertising route to keep us financially above water at the least, just hits, membership alone, ie lurkers sign up if you support us or activtely participate on one level or another

Hi Peanut - you've done great work here. Advertising goes on the number of hits whether they are signed in or not. I think that the figures that the BBC put in the public domain at the time of the MOT indicate that the vast majority of users never sign in.

My personal opinion is that we need to get more engaged users, and that includes posters and commentators, as well as new writers, and new people who can volunteer. If we're going to take h2g2 forward we'll need to attract new people.

I think the obvious option is to make it easier to take part, to attract the people who read to come and write, and communticate. To attract bloggers to come and write for h2g2 instead of blog. I have three active blogs, so this is my fault..

Sorry KB you did answer the hit question

Am I reading this right the priority is to get peeps 'over the gate' and sticking around as Happynerd puts it

I don't want to ask about financial stuff to much cos it sensitive and all but do we have a hit rate that advertisers may find appealing or is something we have to be thinking about in terms of increasing hit rates.

The television networks (U.S.) periodically have "sweeps weeks," when the ratings are done, so quite often they schedule special shows that desirable enough to attract a lot of extra viewers.

I wonder if we could schedule special attractions from time to time, calculated to get a lot of hits? There's always a chance that some of the hits will develop into new researchers who will stay. If some of our special attractions turn out to be duds, this is educational for us. We know what doesn't work, so we can concentrate on what does work.

Before we were bound and gagged and ed in a cloak of secrecy we were discussing here on h2g2 and in the Community Consortium Google Group ways of making money.

As I recall the ones that were mentioned were ads, subscriptions, donations and merchandise. The GBS also openly discusses ways of promoting content which aren't necessarily free, these being in book format and as a smartphone app.

GBS should be GBD

Bedtime for Ben, I think.

GBS works for me, as in George Bernard Shaw, inspiration for "My Fair Lady."



Bed, bed, I couldn't go to bed.
My head's too light to try to put it down.
Sleep, sleep, I couldn't sleep tonight,
Not for all the jewels in the crown.
I could have danced all night.....



H2G2, the musical......

There are two distict tasks WRT attracting people. Attracting readers, and attracting those who visit to read to sign up and contribute..
I think we would need a strategy for both.

I hate to sound like a broken record ... a broken record ... a broken record, but

Do you notice how NaNoWriMo expands every year? The answer is ... exponentially. For non-geeks that means one of those curves that aims for the ceiling. NaNoWriMo promotes on the internet and in schools. They grow like bacteria, and they get grants.

NaNoWriMo started with 21 participants.

NaMoWriMo's a good model, HN.

Whatever time is it in Ca?

Was anyone else aware of this?

http://www.cracked.com/forums/topic/27006/i-want-you-to-make-comedy-cracked

Of Cracked, or of the workshop thingy? Yes to the first, no to the second. Cracked.com does run various competitions each week, and I'd thought of pointing to one of them, but just didn't

I had some formailsed ideas for encouraging writing. I do think the collective nature of cometitions, including non competitive competitions such as NaNoWriMo, would be excellent. In the bloging world there are lots of memes which focus on wiring development, and these are always popular.

So:

Some researchers, even long term users of the site, have said that it is intimidating to contemplate putting forward an entry for review for the first time. This can only be more true for new users, particularly if we do put an added emphasis on improving the overall quality of entries.

Most big sites, computer games and so on have tutorials aimed at walking new users through the process of getting started, both in terms of overcoming technical issues and to provide more creative inspiration. These are often pitched at the most basic level, as well as aimed at stretching people to their full potential.

Therefore, a series of online tutorials would be helpful. These could cover:

Getting to grips with writing for a website. Currently, we use GuideML to add flourishes to entries. Although it is not a requirement that writers use this, it would be less work for the volunteers and more motivating for the writers themselves if they are able to make their entries visually attractive themselves. If we continue to use GuideML we would need a number of ‘Guides to GuideML’ to walk users through the process of processing it. Preferable to this would be to install a WYSIWYG editor. However, there would still be room for some basic instruction tutorials for users who are not at all familiar with writing on the web.


Writing guides. These could start with analysing model texts looking at aspects of information structure, paragraphing, use of sub headings, how to avoid repetition, use of linking words, and so on. These would also look at different types of writing and each genre’s salient features, as well as the difference between a ‘for and against’ piece and a straight opinion piece and so on.


There could be a number of tasks for users to perform, such as adding introductions/ conclusions to a given text; organising a set of ideas/ points into paragraphs; rewriting a text that had a high level of repetition and so on. These guides could be created to look at text creation in general, but also aimed at helping writers get to grips with the different genres covered by the (expanded) Unified Guide.

There could also be tutorials aimed at a more sophisticated writers, taking as models some of the entries that aim to transcend their genre and dissecting them, and providing tasks designed to stretch. There could also be regular writing prompts/ projects to give experienced users of the site ideas of what to write about. The common theme might also work to pique interest in reading and commenting on each others’ work.


As well as analysis, and small tasks, the guides would aim to take writers through the process of creating an entire entry, with tasks to stimulate research, the brainstorming process, the organisation of ideas and redrafting. The aim here, of course, would be for each writer to produce an entry suitable for inclusion in the Guide and have it reviewed in the usual forums.


At first, these tutorials could be simply ‘self access’, nobody would necessarily be looking at any of the work produced in, for example, the ‘task’ section. However, as the site expanded, interested (new) users could be encouraged to form ‘writing groups’ who work through the tasks together and compare answers/ texts. These groups could be mentored by (volunteer) writing advisers from the existing community.

We could expand that further, but that's enough for now I think.

We had folks wanting more dreaming earlier, didn't we? Let's assume that the time and effort involved in creating all this is somehow easy, and get down to the hard work of creating dreams...

I'm really intrigued by this idea, Sol. The web means people need to be literate now in ways that perhaps they didn't 20 years ago. And, hell, writing is fun!

I always felt that the BBC had a chance to contribute to the cultural life of the nation in a unique and amazing way when it created Get Writing. It could have been a sort of on-line UEA Creative Writing Course. I'm almost more angry about the closure of GW (and the way h2g2 was prevented from offering the members of GW a refuge) than I am about the disposal of h2g2. We were always the ugly step-child, but they created Get Writng, dammit!

Anyhoo....

I'm intrigued by the idea of offering a mix of work-through-it-alone tuturials and peer-group help. The peer-groups will become love-ins of course, but how bad a thing is that?

I think there is a separate track here you've mentioned but not explored, which is competitions and events. I think that those are even more engaging and even stickier than the tutuorials. The tutorials offer more help to the writers, but competitions are more fun....

Ben

Oh yes, I agree about the competitions and such. But I thought we'd agreed to have competitions and projects. Ummm. Do we need a brainsotrm of the sorts of things we mean?

I loved the stretcher. That had a lot of writing tasks, which were spendidly open with plenty for room for manoeuvr and creativity. Although still connected to the Guide. It was that sort of thing I had in mind for the writing propmts, except anyone could participate or not for each prompt. A bit like the talking points we have now, but for writing. I'd hope people partiipating would comment on each others' work, perhaps that could be a requirement ( up to a point, like seeking out five other entries, rather than expecting people to do them all) for being put forward for a vote on the best answer to this (week's? Biweek's? Month's? Depends on whether we are expecting full on entries or not) prompt. There could be special kudos to anyone who completed all the tasks within a given time period and such. That's failry Nanowrimno ish. The idea of fixed term effort.

That's a very internal competition though.

Oh and I never explored Get Writing. What can we pinch? How did they aim to get people writing?

Well, we need both. I see this as three separate issues

1) Nurturing the current community - without our existing community there'd be no point - in corporate-speak this is "change mangement" or "transformation management" - it's keeping people involved and on board even though the times they are a changing...

2) Publicising the site in a way that gets people to come here and make that first contact - post on an entry, submit something for an external competition, whatever it may be - this is "outreach"

3) Make it easy and rewarding to be involved in the activities on the site - this is "engagement" (or I think it is, I get a bit hazy with some of the jargon).

Incidently, a good external source to tap would be the English as a foreign language learners pool. Some kind of competition aimed at getting students to write about their home countries/ its culture and so on run though EFL schools around the world could be _very_ popular. I used to flirt with the idea of doing it with my students. The main problem was stabdard of english. But there are some really proficient students out there too.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/learning/getwritingni/

Though I like this one better:

http://www.getwriting.co.uk/

Dig around the Internet Archive:

http://waybackmachine.org/20030301000000*/http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20031016063833/http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting and other snapshots later on.