Wikivoyage:Tourism Bureau Expedition

The Tourism Bureau Expedition is a Wikivoyage Expedition to explore how Wikivoyage can cooperate with visitor bureaus.

Rationale
A collaborative agreement to cooperate by improving Wikivoyage guides and highlighting the unique attractions in a destination between Wikivoyage and tourism bureaus could prove to mutually benefical by inviting tourism bureaus to participate in the Wikivoyage community by helping develop Wikivoyage guides for the respective region the bureau belongs to. In turn Wikivoyage provides a zero-cost distribution system for tourism bureaus to provide correct and up-to-date information to the entire world.

The Tourism Bureau Expedition will help to create well-informed tourist information professionals who are respectful of our goals and culture and can become productive members of our community.

Goals

 * To identify and list information and materials needed in Wikivoyage guides.
 * To determine for each project what we can offer and what we can use.
 * To approach tourism bureaus and communicate with them.
 * To execute cooperation plans.

Current collaborations
Wikivoyage users are currently in collaboration discussions with the tourism bureaus of the following destinations:

Nominate another location for our pilot scheme.

To discuss collaboration initiatives with the above destinations and for status updates, see /collaboration.

Practices for tourism bureaus
These are some proposed ideas for tourism professionals; maybe they can be incorporated into a Project:Welcome, tourism professionals.


 * Plan ahead
 * Introduce the site at a staff meeting
 * Have all staff members sign in as users, so you can track their contributions and encourage participation
 * Have staff members organized in a group in some way (How can we do this? A Group: namespace?)
 * Concentrate on stuff we need for Wikivoyage (see Project:Help wanted)
 * Factor communication, collaboration and community into your plans and ask for help with training staff to use and edit Wikivoyage
 * Read our policies and guidelines

Practices for Wikivoyage users
Some things we may want to do to help out students:


 * Treat staff members of tourism bureaus with the same respect we'd give to any new contributors
 * Encourage tourism professionals to use best practices; point them to the appropriate pages
 * Create spaces for tourism professional/Wikivoyage community interaction (How? Where?)

You can find a very basic email template here.