MetaBiography
August 15, 2012 8:00 PM Subscribe
Help me find a way to get others to tell stories about my long-deceased father online. I'm thinking a Wikipedia-type, open-source place where folks can go and log in (or not) and add their portions of the story of his life. I imagine childhood friends sharing vignettes from 5th grade, high school girlfriends, co-workers, people I don't have access to adding stories.
My family did that with an online wiki (I don't kow the software at all, sorry) but nobody really contributed anything. What worked instead was a directed request with a deadline.
In our case we wanted a book for Mother's Day, so we needed the stories to be submitted by mid-April, so we started in January... We divided up the tasks, so a few of us sent out the solicitation letters to extended friends/family via both email and snail mail; some sent reminders of the deadline a little later; some volunteered to collect/edit the stories; we all helped categorize them, decide on the fonts/colors/formatting; someone typed them into our desired format; another sibling took all that to Kinko's (it was actually online somewhere, again I don't know where) and put together the actual book. It turned out fantastic, and it's a wonderful keepsake. After the deadline, we submitted another request to make copies for everyone who wanted one.
So, regardless of which format/software you end up with, I recommend something with a deadline and a process in place to work it like Project Management to try to meet that deadline.
posted by CathyG at 7:37 AM on August 16, 2012
In our case we wanted a book for Mother's Day, so we needed the stories to be submitted by mid-April, so we started in January... We divided up the tasks, so a few of us sent out the solicitation letters to extended friends/family via both email and snail mail; some sent reminders of the deadline a little later; some volunteered to collect/edit the stories; we all helped categorize them, decide on the fonts/colors/formatting; someone typed them into our desired format; another sibling took all that to Kinko's (it was actually online somewhere, again I don't know where) and put together the actual book. It turned out fantastic, and it's a wonderful keepsake. After the deadline, we submitted another request to make copies for everyone who wanted one.
So, regardless of which format/software you end up with, I recommend something with a deadline and a process in place to work it like Project Management to try to meet that deadline.
posted by CathyG at 7:37 AM on August 16, 2012
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posted by hattifattener at 8:23 PM on August 15, 2012