Portal:AboutUsPlan
AboutUs: Co-Elaborating the Web
- Dedicated to building a vibrant new community resource.
- Where organizations & their constituents come together to collaborate.
- AboutUs serves the community with technology & process innovations.
AboutUs, a wiki website launched in August 2006, is building a new kind of web resource – one that synthesizes commercial and general information using the collaborative authoring power of wiki technology and culture. AboutUs has begun the creative process by using a bot to seed wiki pages on websites – but the technology is only the beginning. AboutUs is building a resources based on community and shared values – The WikiWay. Because no single resource is as powerful as the one that can tap into the knowledge of every visitor, AboutUs is creating a vibrant community asset.
AboutUs would like to welcome anyone who is interested in the collaborative process to join us. We are available to help in a number of ways–from a series of tutorials to email & talk pages, to IRC and a toll free phone number, AboutUs staff is available to help when needed.
Along with providing unmatched customer service, AboutUs is able to provide the visitor with simple tools to break down the barriers to technological fluency. Once a visitor has edited a domain page or created a portal of information on a topic of interest, the visitor can work to have their efforts featured on the AboutUs homepage & blog. Being a featured wiki page is a great way to get exposure for the websites, people, communities and portals that the community cares about. Social Networking, business to business connections, and collaborative process are at the crux of the AboutUs mission.
The vision of AboutUs hinges on the power of collaboration and the unique capacity of wiki technology to capture the coming together of communities.
- Ray King is the company's CEO.
- Ward Cunningham is the company's CTO.
- Brandon CS Sanders is the company's chief architect.
- MarkDilley is a community lead.
- Ted Ernst is a Community Lead
- Julia Whelan is the Finance Manager
- John Stanton is a Wiki Developer
- Mohsen Gilani is the Lahore office manager.
- eNom & Name Intelligence are AboutUs partners.
AboutUs is fortunate to have a dynamic team of talented programmers & writers–all WikiWay enthusiasts & ambassadors working with the community to build the AboutUs resource.
AboutUs has an office in Portland, Oregon & Lahore, Pakistan.
- The AboutUs Developers include Jason, Arif, Stephen, and Athar who, along with manager Brandon, work tirelessly to improve the site's features and usability.
- The Content team at AboutUs includes John, Tak, Chris, Mehrunnisa, Asma, Saliha, Sanwal, Mubin, Arsalan, Ayesha and Jehansher who work to ensure that AboutUs is a high quality site that keeps the community coming back.
- The CommunityStaff include Asad, Kristina, Kasey, Obed, Mark, Ted and Saad
- The Operations Team includes Julia, John and Keith who insure the smooth operation of AboutUs.
At AboutUs we see ourselves as wiki ambassadors. Our values help make up a code of conduct for participation in building the site. Many of the values are similar to other wiki sites, but some are uniquely our own. Our values include assume good faith, transparency, self organization, promoting a do-ocracy, making constructive edits, using real names, building the commons, collaboration, and breaking down barriers to technological fluency.
"I think AboutUs.org is awesome, I've read so many of the pages, and I've seen the pages being created right before my eyes....there's no experience in the world like that."
posted by Robert Williams May 10, 2007
To view some examples of AboutUs pages and portals, check out:
The following graph using data from Google Analytics shows the growth of unique visitors since the inception of AboutUs in August 2006 through September, 2007. In September 2007 AboutUs surpassed 4.5 million Unique Visitors per month.
The growth of unique visitors since AboutUs launched has seen considerable growth.
(Graph from Google Analytics)
Our Commitment
Anyone can edit the AboutUs wiki. This is how AboutUs can tap into the knowledge of anyone who chooses to contribute. It could, however, leave AboutUs vulnerable to spam attacks. In order to protect the integrity of the resource and to engage with the editors, AboutUs patrols every edit made to its more than 4 million pages. In late January 2007 the edits per day broke the 1000 mark, we currently get between 2000 and 3000 edits per day. AboutUs is committed to patrolling each of those edits and personally welcoming every new editor who registers. Anonymous edits are welcome but AboutUs encourages community building. The first step in that community building is to welcome each new visitor.
The Appeal
(Map from Google Analytics)
AboutUs is a truly global site with cross cultural appeal. This appeal is achieved by the technology behind AboutUs that allows AboutUs pages to be seeded with basic information on websites.
Once visitors see their websites in a freely editable format, they often supplement the basic information, contributing content and learning how to edit wikis which leads to more edits by that visitor.
Licensing
AboutUs content is freely available for reuse under the following licenses:
GFDL 1.2, the license Wikipedia is released under.
Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
In simpler times villagers shared common grounds for grazing. Today we share a commons of culture and knowledge. Different parts of the commons are restricted in different ways. AboutUs is restricted only in ways that protect your freedoms to use and reuse the content you and other members of the AboutUs community create.
Please feel warmly welcomed to use content from www.AboutUs.org in your own creative works! We even allow our content to be used for commercial purposes. If you want, you can create an exact copy of AboutUs. Better yet, you can create an improved version of AboutUs. When you copy, distribute and/or transmit content from AboutUs you must do the following:
- Let others know where you got the content from (a link to http://www.AboutUs.org is fine for this purpose),
- License any modifications you make to the content under a license that preserves the same freedoms (e.g., GFDL 1.2 or CC By-SA).
For background information about CC By-SA see CreativeCommons.org and for background about GFLD 1.2 see GNU.org.
AboutUs is one of many wikis & directory sites currently emerging in the marketplace.
On May 8th, 2007 AdVolcano.com published the Top 57 Wikis By Rank.
There are sites with:
- Wiki Technology
- Creating: Directories
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- Creating: Wiki Farms, Wiki Hosting
- Domain Directories
- Local/City Search
- User-Powered Search
AboutUs is fluent in the concepts of the WikiWay and holds the value of collaboration highly.
It is through collaboration, rather than competition that AboutUs seeks to succeed.
Common concerns raised about AboutUs generally fall into three categories:
Some are not aware that whois data is publicly available and wish it to be removed.
- Our response is to remove the whois data as well as scrub the history upon request.
- Further, we protect email addresses from spammers by converting them into graphics.
Some are unfamiliar with fair use and the GNU License.
- Our response is to educate the visitor about fair use, the GNU License, the Creative Commons license and WikiWay values.
Some are concerned about the concept of a site that can be edited by anyone.
- Our response is to educate the visitor regarding the commitment AboutUs has of patrolling every edit.
- We inform the visitor how to watch a page and receive email alerts when that watched page has been edited.
- How to contact AboutUs.
- We introduce the concept of assume good faith and how it operates at AboutUs.
Wikis were created to promote collaborative authoring. They are deliberately simple and open in an effort to gain as much input from the community as possible.
Wiki background includes:
- The original wiki created by Ward Cunningham
- MeatballWiki–an offshoot created to discuss the benefits & potential of wikis
- Wikipedia–an example of community embracing the wiki concept
- WikiIndex and Wikitravel.org–other active wikis
- The WikiWay–a code of conduct for participating in the wiki world.
- Founded in 2005 by Ray King with the help of co-founding companies Name Intelligence and eNom.com.
- Offices
"A great idea put to simple execution!! Congrats!!! I like it."
posted by Sai Thota on Sep 6, 2006, 10:15 am
