unbekannter Gast

Why, who and how one should help#

The why is easy to answer. A geographic database with reliable information including aspects of culture, anecdotal stories and pictures with good descriptions is certainly something everyone will want to use once in a while.

The who depends much on whether you see yourself as occasional user - almost everyone will be. Or whether you see yourself as someone who can possibly contribute because of your knowledge of geography, culture, the photos you have taken at various times, trips or events you have participated in, folklore you have picked up, etc. We want to particularly encourage professor and teachers of "English as a foreign language": In this context, students will often have to write essays that you will correct and judge. Why not give students the task to write an essay about where or how they grew up, some special event they remember, some experience they have had... and if the quality is good you send the story to office@global-geography.org including name of student and your name as supervisor. You will be instantaneously world-famous :-) . And if you include the name of your institution maybe it will be so proud to send you as delegate to the first global geography convention :-)

The how has many sub-aspects, of which we will list a few.

(1) You may know a friend or colleague who would be interested to participate in the project and even join the GGC.

(2) You may want to read a bit about the country you live in or some other country you are familiar with and you may want to send comments, corrections, additions to office@global-geography.org. Note in particular that under Culture every country has a list of famous persons. These list are often very incomplete. Just send us "Add the name xxx with the URL yyy to the famous person list of country zzz". We will be happy to take care of all this for you. In the geography part of each country you find a list of important cities and other entities. Just send the information you want to add with a link to a site where the entity is explained or shown!

(3) You may have a small set of pictures (2 - 10) of some special place or event: Do send them to office@global-geography.org with a title and description and we will add them to the pictures of the country involved under contributed pictures as it has already happened e.g. with a set of pictures for France and Ireland.

(4) You may want to write a special story without or with some pictures, like on Swimming pigs or on How to hike in New Zealand or about Deep snow skiing in Canada or about the incredible city Shahara in Yemen.

(5) If the number of pictures is small, one way is to incorporate them into a world file and just send the file. Or you could just send a text file, pictures separately, and placeholders for pictures in the text like "Picture 1 here", "Picture 3457.jpg here" or such. Sending the picture separately is a good idea. No need to overdo resolution: Quite a few pictures of 1500 pixel converted into jpgs can be sent in one or more emails easily. Just make sure that pictures have solid descriptions. A picture does not need a description if it shows the same scene from different angles, but a description is a must for the first picture or when there is a complete change of scene. Please do not send attachments lager than 18 MByte. Larger sized collections we can uploaded in a variety of ways.

(6) If you have a treasure chest of pictures like say Gerhard Huber had them on the Philippines we should discuss how to deal with them by mail. Also, if you send pictures, let us know if they can be freely used or not, or if they can be used under some "Creative Common" license as is usual with pictures on Wikipedia. Note that you must not send us any pictures where you are not the holder of the rights to use them.

(7) In passing, we have also prepared sequences of pictures just on the basis of PPT presentations that were made available to us, as was the case with a part of Andalusia. Do not worry about embedding maps or such, we can do this for you.

(8) If you own the rights to suitable papers, brochures, or books or such and you have the material in electronic form (PDF preferred), we can convert them into nice looking "Web-Books" that one can browse through but not download, see e.g. web-books/imperialvienna001905iicm, and of course with English interface.

(9) So: Go ahead and help us and the world in a small or large way, maybe you can make statistics available to us so we can do something for your country that we did for Austria ... and I am sure you have many more ideas yourself.

(10) Let me finally point out that whenever you find an interesting URL of a Picture or a video-clip, please add it to the "Community contributions" that you find as button at the right bottom end of every page. How to do this is explained here under Community Contributions.