About

Virtual Conferences
Via the Oncourse Wiki Planning Forum, our group members settled on a date and chat tool for our first gathering (video did not seem necessary), to be held in the Oncourse chat area. This tool gave us a lot of problems, so we moved all other conferences to Google Talk, since everyone had Gmail accounts. We simply set up a group chat, and were on our way. It was a bit tricky trying to find times that worked with everyone's schedule, but if one person could not make it, we made sure to copy the text of the conversation and send it to all group members. All in all, our conferences were very productive. We were able to collaborate with each other, and come up with interesting and helpful ideas, so that we would be able to work independently to contribute our own content to enhance the wiki. We also found it helpful to set time/deadlines, so that we were all on the same page with when things should be done. Enthusiasm, openness and cooperation were all key in these discussions, and the opportunity to chat in real-time allowed us the opportunity to contribute and make decisions a lot quicker than could have been done via e-mail or forum discussions. Below, you will find summaries of our conferences.


 * Wednesday, October 14th, 9:45 p.m., Oncourse Chat:** During this discussion, we figured out that we wanted to focus on unknown and/or unique restaurants in various towns throughout the state. The Oncourse chat area kept on kicking one or another of us off, and would repeat text that we had typed five minutes earlier. When we decided on our topic, we scheduled our next meeting to be held via Google Talk, something we thought would be more stable and reliable.
 * Sunday, October 18th, 9:45 p.m., Google Talk:** We updated each other on where we were with our individual pages, and asked other group members questions regarding things we each were having issues with. We threw out suggestions for things we thought would enhance the wiki, such as widgets and navigation ideas. Once those things were cleared up, we scheduled our next meeting for Wednesday, October 21 at 9:45 p.m. Our goal was to have our pages mostly done by this point.
 * Wednesday, October 21st, 9:45 p.m., Google Talk:** Our main goal with this conference was to figure out our Home and About pages. Ideas were brought up for the Home page, specifically comment and poll widgets - we thought this would be a great way to get feedback from visitors. Also, we decided on how to break up the workload on these two pages. We came to the consensus that two people would work on the Home page, and two on the About, but that all group members could have a say in editing these pages. We also discussed what we thought the page edits and expansions would be, for there was some confusion about these (whether or not we were to edit each others, or other group's pages). The next conference was scheduled for Sunday at 6 p.m., and all pages were to be done by this point.
 * Sunday, October 25th, 6 p.m., Google Talk:** We finalized some details with our home and about pages, and discussed how we wanted to add more to each of the main city pages (a picture, general info). Also brought up was how we need to connect all of the pages more - this will be worked on in the editing process.

How we came up with our topic
We figured out pretty quickly that we wanted to focus on things that were unique to specific towns in Indiana. One group member suggested the idea of small town heroes or local legends, but we couldn't really think of one. Many of the legends and people in the book //Weird Indiana//, by Mark Merimen, already appeared to have quite a bit of coverage. Then, another member suggested something with diners or drive-ins. We expanded on this idea, and opened it up to any little known, unique restaurants in Indiana. The idea of featuring Indiana (non-chain) restaurants made sense, for a lot of them either do not have websites, or have only small, older, uninformative sites. This was a good way for each of us to get out and explore cities or towns that we lived in or were familiar with, and to recommend restaurants we thought more people should know about.  **How our wiki makes a unique contribution to the web** While there may be information on the web about some of the eateries we researched, what makes our wiki unique is that it gathers together in one place information and recommendations from experts in each of the towns. We have a place on our home page for anyone to contribute more suggestions. Our wiki provides a community-centered and authored restaurant guide that can be constantly added to and updated.