OpenExplorer Guidebook
8 Steps to Starting Your Own Expedition
A wave of passionate amateur explorers are participating in each other’s expeditions across the globe. We can all be contributors to each other’s expeditions through OpenExplorer Online! Here’s how:
Step 1 — Create an Expedition
Step 2 — Populate Your Landing Page
Funny, insightful, factual, historical, it’s all good! Other explorers want to know about you and your mission.
As soon as your expedition has a short mission summary and a background post the OpenExplorer Team will approve your expedition and you’ll see it live on the home page.
Make your expedition sing, upload a video! The best videos are short, filmed simply, and tell us who you are and what you plan to do. Here’s a great example from the Dissemination Lab.
Step 3— Invite Collaborators
Friends, coworkers, family. Expedition collaborators are able to create posts on the expedition main page. Their profile photo will appear under the mission summary.
Step 4— Accept Invitations & Become a Collaborator
When you are invited to join an expedition, you will receive an email with a link to sign up.
Step 5— Crowdfund with WePay
Shout out every post, comment, video and update to show your followers your passion and contributions to exploration! With their support you may be able to extend the reach of your expedition to make even more discoveries.
WePay is a trusted 3rd party service like PayPal which routes funds to your favorite expeditions. To accept contributions you’ll need to link each expedition, individually, to your bank account. The majority of the funds go straight to you with 3% passing to WePay and 5% to OpenExplorer for overhead.
Step 6— Connect with Fellow Explorers
View explorer profiles, leave comments, and talk about collaborating.
Projects with similar methods, executed in difference parts of the world have local focus and global impact. Follow your fellow explorers and jump onboard early and often.
Step 7— Tips for Posts
For those just getting started with expedition logging, here are a few tips.
Share your own thoughts right here in the comments section.
— 1st and foremost, photos, photos, photos!
— Consider adding a metadata table to the beginning of each post. Other explorers are interested in the conditions you are working in, we are all human!
— Use @profile in the comments section and in posts to notify a user directly that you are communicating! You’ll receive an email notification when you’ve received a shout out.
Step 8— Reference your Expedition years into the future!
A great part about the digital field journal is the posterity. It’s a place to direct news channels, friends, and family who want to hear your story.
Each week OpenExplorer features explorers and expeditions around the world, and you could be next!
