Crossroads roadmap

Because users are going to be a big part of how this site develops, we want to lay out what our plan is for the site and what we want to accomplish. Feedback here is encouraged; we think that the plan needs to adapt to the community's needs, and not vice versa.

Mission

Crossroads is a tool for sharing personal experience and opinions about travel, destinations, and travel services.

The personal information on Crossroads will complement the objective, consensus information on World66 and Wikitravel.

Strategy

There are five key services that will support our mission.

• blogs and travel stories – writing free text about one's own travel experiences or opinions

• photo galleries – sharing images from travel

• discussion forums – discussions, questions, debates

• reviews and ratings – focused opinions about particular places, attractions, or services, either in free text (reviews) or numerical (ratings)

• social networking and personal profiles – associating and describing yourself, your friends, your family, your trips

There may be more features that we support in the future (like video hosting and group trip planning), but these seem to work right now.

Design principles

• To get basic functionality into the hands of travellers fast, we're basing Crossroads on the Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/) platform. This lets us leapfrog the basics and concentrate on the features that really matter to travellers.

• People should be able to tag what they write and upload with geographical info – both lat/long and geographical names (London, Vermont)

• People should be able to set private/public settings on everything they write and upload, including adding a Creative Commons license to it. We'll try to encourage people to use licenses compatible with World66 and Wikitravel guides to encourage re-use.

• Using Wikitravel, World66 and Crossroads should be an integrated experience. Logins should be integrated, and you should be able to link back and forth between the sites automatically.

• Many (most?) travellers already have a blog, or a photo-gallery, or use other kinds of Web services. We don't want to replace those other services; we'd rather aggregate them in a way that brings a person's whole “travel persona” together in one place. We'll also make “default” services available to fill in the gaps for people who have a blog but no photo sharing (say) or vice versa.

Schedule Phase I – Private Alpha (Fall 2006)

Our initial alpha release gets four of our five services covered, in a basic form. It's available only to a limited group of people – experienced users of Wikitravel and World66. The goal of this release is to share our ideas and goals with WT and W66 users as we're developing, get their feedback and integrate that into the development and planning. The original users will be invited, and at some point during this phase those users will get a limited number of invitations to invite friends, family, etc. The site will require a login to read and edit content. The features available during this time:

• blogs

• photo galleries

• discussion forums

• profiles and social networking

During this phase we'll be developing and rolling out features one-by-one that will be part of the public beta.

Phase II – Public Beta (Winter 2006-7)

Our second phase will have the essential travel-oriented features for the site. In part this will have to do with adding reviews and ratings. Also, along with the traveller-oriented navigation (Evan's blog, Michele's review, Giorgio's photos), we'll introduce some geographical navigation, so you can see all the photos, blog entries, reviews, and discussions about Aspen, Colorado or the Taj Mahal. We'll try to synchronize the data about places (cities, regions, countries) and attractions (museums, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs) between Wikitravel, World66, and Crossroads, so that they stay up-to-date on all sites. The site will be open for general use to the public.

The features we'll have available at this time will be:

• geo-tagging: associating each blog entry, photo, forum post, etc. with a place or attraction. Sane defaults (for example, where you are right now, or where you wrote your last blog entry about) will apply.

• geographical navigation. Each place will have a page, with listings of related blogs, photos, etc.

• reviews. People can write free-text reviews of a place, a hotel, a restaurant, bar, museum, etc.

• ratings. People can give ratings (1-5, probably) for places and attractions, possible along multiple axes (like, good service at a restaurant but bad food).

During this period we'll be working on integration between Crossroads and Wikitravel and World66, doing bug fixes and feature requests based on user experience, and hopefully scaling for growth.

Phase III – Crossroads 1.0 (Winter 2006-7)

At this point we should have a stable, mature site that we're willing to call our public release. Our main work during this time will be organizing the relationship between Wikitravel, World66 and Crossroads.

Phase IV – The Future (2007 and beyond)

Based on our experience with the public launch of the site, we'll try to develop new features that continue to help users share and find info about themselves and the places they go.

• maps. We want to support a map-based browsing interface.

• where-I've-been maps. Based on the maps on World66, we want to expand to show maps for individual trips; cities, regions, and districts; length of time in each place; annotations with text and images.

• top 10 lists. Top 10 museums in Europe, Top 10 country music bars in Atlanta, Top 10 dive sites in Fiji.

• itineraries. Wikitravel already has consensus itineraries; this would be for personal itineraries, “Evan's suggested itinerary for a day in Montreal.”

• video hosting. Host video for travel stories.