Park Community Guides capitalizes on the emergence of crowd sourcing as applied to the production of guidebooks for federal, state, and local parks. The crowd that we source is the park's community, primarily its visitors, but also its supporters and managers, including park rangers and visitor center staff. This community includes photographers, writers, naturalists, anthropologists, geologists, zooligists, and map makers -- both talented amateurs and professionals.

The process begins with a collaboration website where the park's community can go to submit their content, for example, a stunning picture of a waterfall or a writeup of where and when the park has the best fall foliage. As another example, a local geology student submits a writeup of the tectonic movement producing the park's basalt cliffs, in part for the publishing credit supporting her doctoral candidacy.

This collaboration website is not a free-for-all where anyone can post any content. It is a highly structured mockup of the guidebook with sections representing the final printed chapters. Each such section shows its layout and content requirements as web pages, with online forms that website visitors can use to submit content matched to the requirements.

The guidebook structure and content requirements are set at the start of the collaborative process by the project team consisting of park management, visitor center management, and/or park support associations. This project team also sets the content evaluation criteria, which typically begins with a pass/fail vote from the project team, followed by 1-to-5 star votes by website visitors. The final guidebook is collected from the content earning the most stars.

The next step is for the final content to be converted from the website pages to a print-ready PDF file, which is one of the functions of the online software managing the above collaboration process. The PDF file is then submitted to our print-on-demand vendor for paper publication. Once that is well received by park visitors, the same content can be reused to produce foreign language translations, an audiobook, and an e-book.

A bound, color, 30-page guidebook can be sold starting at a quantity of 1 for under $20 retail, including distribution margins -- and all that with zero origination costs.

Q1: Do content providers get paid?

They can be, typically as a fraction of profit sharing, but it isn't necessary. Many park visitors and supporters are happy to contribute content for just the attribution, that is, to see their name in print.

Q2: What is the role of Park Community Guides in all this?

We have developed extensive online software that automates the entire process, and we serve as project managers in terms of operations. For that, we retain 5% of the guidebook sales that we generate.