A Proposal: An M-Book for Cities

A few thoughts:

People don't move in and out of a city en-masse, so there are always old-timers who know the way around.

Two, even if you got a wiki version of this, most people would not read it. And it would be politicized -newcomers vs longtime residents.

Still, nice idea, I'd like it, I'd use it if I moved to a new city. But it'd be nice if the content had quality and some structure which one could expect from city to city.

Hope the post inspires someone to begin something like that.

There have been various forms of this in real life, ranging from move-in guides provided by local realtors, chambers of commerce, or an official city office. A decade or so back, the phone book offered much of this information -- emergency and local services, city and county agencies and such.

I see no reason why this needs to be a bound book, though there's no reason it couldn't be published. An online version, in the form of a Web page or ePub book (let's hear it for formats which allow for multiple publication formats), would probably be preferable.

Tie it into the local information / city services systems such as 511 or 311 would also be sensible.