The Open Plaques project is holding an open day workshop in London on September 25th, 2010. The free event will include presentations about the project and a practical session where the participants look at how the project can be developed and improved.

Open Plaque #1010 (Oxford)

About the project:

The community?based Open Plaques service started in 2009. The project documents, catalogues and promotes commemorative plaques, with an aim “to bring the people?powered history the plaques encapsulate to life – and to a larger audience – by making its website and database the definitive and most comprehensive resource about these historical markers.” On the Open Plaque website, users can search and browse the collection of plaques by person, place (map interface), or organisation. The plaques are described and in many cases photographed. The majority have also been geolocated, meaning it is possible to see them high-lighted on a map.

About the workshop:

The free Open Plaques Open Day event will be held at Centre for Creative Collaboration in London. It will consist of two main parts:  some short presentations about the project and illustrations of how the data have been used, followed by a practical workshop. In the practical workshop, participants will look at different aspects of the project and map out how it can be improved. The topics for the practical session include:

• Information Architecture and User Interface of the website, answering difficult questions like how exactly do you browse thousands of different plaques, and what’s the best interface for allowing people to contribute?
• Design of the website, thinking about an appropriate ‘look and feel’ and designing pages which allow for radically different amounts of content.
• Content, both in terms of identifying missing and incomplete data, and of working out ways to enrich the content so as to provide a context and understanding of the plaques.
• Development, tackling the technical side of things such as being able to manage more data, better, and supporting a wider range of users.

More information about the event, including details on how to register, can be found in the Open Plaques blog post.

Image credit: photo taken by Owen McKnight, licensed under Creative Commons.