fresh + new(er)

ABC Innovation has launched their Sydney Sidetracks project.

This is a lovely experiment in developing a mobile heritage application which takes some of the archives of ABC TV and Radio and combines them with static imagery and research from the cultural heritage partners - Powerhouse Museum, State Library of NSW, National Film & Sound Archives, Museum of Contemporary Art, the City of Sydney Archives, and the Dictionary of Sydney.

ABC have sensibly hedged their bets so the diverse content is available as an interactive website with a simple map interface, and as a multi-platform mobile Java application.

Whilst the mobile application is not yet location-aware, it does provide a simulation of the potential experience that awaits in a future version. The phone version can be ‘sideloaded‘ to a huge range of different devices. Being out and about with the content changes your experience of it greatly but suffice to say, mobile is still in a very immature phase - with significant usability issues to be overcome. Partially to get around these, a whole lot of the ABC Archives content can be downloaded, separately, to your phone to be accessed as podcasts.

Importantly for the promotion of Sidetracks, ABC Radio 702 is engaged with the project and will be driving listeners to the website (and hopefully the mobile application) to explore.

I conducted a short interview with Sarah Barns, the producer and researcher behind the project, who worked with ABC innovation.

Q: Sidetracks (re)tells some great stories of our city. How did you choose which stories to tell?

Sarah Barns: I was pretty motivated in my selection by finding archival material that had been recorded on location. The original focus for my research was on ambient audio recordings, and embedding them in whatever ways possible (whether that’s mobile, ipod, hypertag, short-wave radio or whatever..!) to enable the listener to tune in to the sounds of another era while looking at a contemporary environment. Obviously there’s a lot of historical tours and commentary and podtours and the like coming out now, and my interest has been to try to decipher what can be made of actuality audio recordings for such purposes. While additional formats were later included in Sidetracks, I remained pretty focused on material that could be uncovered in a very site-specific way.

I also have quite an interest in ‘lost places’, whether demolished buildings or radically transformed environments, and using archives to excavate an area - an archeology of recorded action, rather than surviving artefact - which obviously becomes more potent the more a place has changed. So a lot of the stories are based on those two premises - ambience and disappearance.

I love this quote from Alec Morgan (Hunt Angels, et al) when he says

“It is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing that the cultural essence of Sydney lies embedded in its architecture. It’s structures, buildings and monuments. I find this method of interpreting the past, this reliance on concrete and real estate, a faulty and unsound foundation upon which to build an understanding of the forces that shape the distinctiveness of the city…I sense that there is another city lying undiscovered beneath these bloated, familiar carcasses and that cultural interpretation by architecture is too impoverished to satisfy a secret desire to connect to something of Sydney’s past that is more elusive, more sensual, than a pile of bricks and mortar.” Alec Morgan (2004)

It’s a quote that marks out the imaginative potentiality of the ‘invisible’ terrain.

Q: I like it that these stories traverse multiple content pools - the ABC, NFSA, SLNSW, PHM, DoS etc. How important is the cross-silo approach to the project? How has it been working with these partners? Have you been able to greatly enrich the stories as a result of these partnerships? And, are there any stories that could not have been told *without* additional content?

SB: The cross-silo, cross-institutional aspect has been very important as a background motivation - eventually I’d hope to see a more site-specific approach to the way archival collections can be accessed, enabling an interested user to navigate the range of resource available on a given location. All possible in the world of geo-tagging, etc. But it’s technology developments like geo-tagging that have motivated this interrogation of the archives: if geo-tagging is now possible, if mobile phones and ipods mean we can take material with us, have it beamed down to us depending on where we are etc - then what kinds of archival material is best suited for such purposes and what stories can be unearthed? This is a focus of my doctoral research called Jaywalking Sydney, and commenced with my research of the National Film and Sound Archives collection in March 2007.

Initially this project going to launch with ABC-only content, which could then be expanded to include other collections. Starting with the ABC’s collection influenced the selection of a number of the points of interest (POIs), which in turn led to questions about what else was a available on these very specific locations. If I’d started with the PHM collection, for example, there’d be a different set of stories, I think. Having said that I was really motivated by the PHM exhibition on Pyrmont and its wonderful anecdotes about the area as a “place of ferny gullies” and the working conditions of the quarries etc! But the Dictionary of Sydney, for example, they have a very different curatorial approach and so obviously the stories that feature there will be very different.

Q: Sidetracks is impressive for its depth - even in its very first iteration. The ABC Archives must hold many hidden gems. What were the difficulties faced in unearthing them? How have you dealt with IP issues?

SB:I’ll start by saying that the ABC Archives were an absolute pleasure to work in and with - in terms of the super-duper people, the systems they have in place, and of course the amazing content. Difficulties included some frustrations around loss of audio for early TV footage (as this stuff gets dubbed over, the original audio has been lost in some instances), some minor cataloguing anomalies and yes, some rights issues.

Working with rights issues for the web is one thing (and that’s big enough) but for mobile its still pretty prohibitive trying to tackle re-purposing existing ABC content on this platform, and as the cross-platform spread still being worked out at the research stage I obviously had to play it pretty safe. The Sydney Stadium for example - a whole slew of infamous gigs there, but I wasn’t able to include this footage. Documentaries were also difficult (due to production components for mobile) and so I mostly had to stay clear of these. For the moment . . .

Q: Sidetracks is also part of your PhD research. Tell me a little bit about the overall PhD.

SB:The overall PhD is basically looking at this intersection between the emergence of situated technologies like 3G mobile phones and geo-spatial technologies on the one hand, and the history of the city on the other. I’m keen to interrogate the claims of enthusiasts such as Adam Greenfield et al that mobile phones can ‘improve the public spaces of the city’ by exploring the layers of public participation, conflict and change that lie beneath the streets - to connect with a longer history of how ‘new’ media technologies have shaped the urban experience.

And so rather than pursuing the opportunities of mobile phones etc for the sake of the mobile phone industry (!) I guess I’m interested in what the added element of site-specificity might add to way people not only interact with each other, but also with places. I’m thinking here of mobile phones as homing devices to discover the history of a place - in this instance, Sydney. And with a title like ‘Jaywalking‘, well, that gives me a bit of licence to get a bit distracted with all kinds of other interesting topics as well . . .

Q: It seems that you’ve sensibly hedged your bets by offering multiplatform delivery. What are your expectations around the uptake of the mobile app over the web version?

SB:History is an unusual area for mobile content - it’s not so mass market or young. I guess there is an expectation that given the extra steps involved in actually getting the app to your phone, it will have lower uptake. The ideal scenario is that you are (probably a tourist) in a location or area and are offered the chance to access some of this material when you’re there. That’s ideal, but the ABC is not quite there yet in terms of distribution options.

The ABC has also deliberately stayed away from GPS at present due to some potential consumer issues around data charges, they are playing it safe there as they don’t want a user being told something is free and then being stung by a $100 data fee. Not good! But that extra precaution also means you can access the mobile content on your mobile phone anywhere - home or at some of the locations featured, for example - which I expect will also limit the experience a bit, in that fewer people may actually travel to the locations to listen or watch the material. It will be interesting to see what the reaction is from listeners.

Q: I’ve noticed that you are inviting UGC. How do you think that this is going to work? Are there any precursors to this sort of hyperlocal storytelling in Sydney?

SB:Not that I know of…But I’m sure they’re out there, perhaps not so focused specifically on archives. It would be great if this UGC component manages to unearth some gems - I’m struck at times at how little there is of some locations or events available in the public sphere, given their prominence. It would be nice to build more freely available collections based on the principles of ‘public authoring’.

—

Sarah’s blog contains a number of detailed highlights of Sidetracks to get you started.

Go and dive in and check out Sydney Sidetracks.

We’ve also popped a little landing page on the Powerhouse site in case you want to look at the Powerhouse contributions. Many of the images used are from the Tyrrell Collection which you can grab from our contributions to the Commons on Flickr. I’ve created a set on Flickr that features these.

Tags: Geotagging & mapping  Mobile3 Comments

We’ve been experimenting with a few ways of showing up some of the amazing and often hidden details in some of the Tyrrell images we are putting up into the Commons.

Jean-Francois Lanzarone put this little test video together in an hour today. This one reveals the detail of ‘On the wallaby track’ that shows the high resolutions that we scan these glass plate negatives at.

View the original image in the Commons on Flickr. Or on the Powerhouse Museum’s own website.

We will be making a few more of these over the coming months an experimenting with a few different formats and styles. We’d love your feedback.

(cross posted from our Photo of the Day blog)

Tags: AV Related  Imaging  open content4 Comments

If you happen to live in Australia (or know someone who does), then you might be interested in the final episode of series 2 of Marcus Westbury’s Not Quite Art. This final episode is on ‘DIY museums’ and how cultural institutions are adapting to the digital environment. It screens on ABC TV on Tuesday night (october 28) at 10pm, and then is available for free download with the rest of the series and series 1 on the show website.

Marcus and I have known each other for nearly a decade now and his career to date has been about supporting and developing emerging Australian cultural work. He established the This Is Not Art annual festival, was the director of Next Wave in Melbourne, and is now working hard to convert Newcastle, 2 hours north of Sydney, from a former industrial town into a thriving creative space with flexible spaces for emerging artists of all persuasions.

What Marcus has done in the DIY Museums episode is look at how ‘memory institutions’ are dealing with the reality that they are no longer the sole arbiters of collective memory; nor are they necessarily well placed to collect the burgeoning diversity of contemporary culture and cultural expression. As one interviewee says “everything now is a niche, just the size of the niche differs” - and this poses enormous problems for those who job it is to collect. Fortunately, the same digital tools of production that are, in part driving this diversity, are also providing the means for others to collect and present - again, another challenge for established institutions.

Tags: Interactive Media  Social media1 Comment

I’ve had several emails, tweets and general interest in more information about our QR code experiment so here’s some more information.

Firstly, it has to be said that the experiment was sub-optimal. We made mistakes - but I think that making mistakes in order to learn from them is something Australians (and museums) need to get a lot more comfortable with doing. I’ve outlined several of them already - the QR code was printed too small for low resolution cameras, and the URL to visit wasn’t optimised for mobile web browsers, etc. But does this, alone, explain the usage rates? I think not.

Secondly, it also needs to be said the campaign had a total cost of zero. We did not engage an ‘interactive agency’ (which is where some of the interest in our experiment has come from). The QR code was self generated and the idea of the experiment was to see what the actual take up of QR codes might be if completely umprompted.

Thirdly, the ‘incentive’ for bothering to use the QR code - free passes etc - may not have been great enough, especially if scanning the code the first time didn’t work for you.

Remembering that the Sydney Design 08 programme which contained the QR code had a run of 40,000 copies and was distributed widely across Sydney the ‘conversion’ rate of the experiment needs to be calculated in light of that - not just counting those who visited the ’secret’ website after scanning the code.

Now it isn’t that simple of course - even someone with a QR capable phone with Sydney Design 08 programme in the hand needs is not necessarily going to bother scanning a code.

We are certainly going to do more experiments with QR codes - there is a lot of potential in them - and we are hoping that others will also make available the results of their trials. The sort of work the Tate is doing with their mobile/handheld wiki for the museum community is the kind of openness and knowledge sharing that needs to be more widespread.

Tags: Mobile2 Comments

I’ve been loving the data visualisations of the Japanese census done by Soma. The data source is the Statistics Bureau of Japan, and they’ve collected some very detailed behavioural data which has been made very navigable by Soma.

What’s Japan up to? Let’s find out with some graphs. Let’s get specific, too. How many women with part-time jobs are walking their dog at 3am? Yeah, we’ve got that.

Let’s jump right into this: Japan has the absolute best census in the history of my known world. Not only does it include normal things like age, sex, and the height of each of your pets, but it also legitimizes the gossipy question of What Are You Doing Right Now? Japan slapped a bunch of people with notebooks and a sacred Numbers Mission: keep a log of what you do during the day, in fifteen minute intervals. And those people did!

Now this sort of depth of data is unlikely to be gathered so effectively in any other country, but it does provide a glimpse into a future world of data transparency. It is a reminder, too, as Clay Shirky has been saying recently, that privacy for the most part only exists because of inconvenience - and that rapidly we are reaching a point where those barriers of inconvenience are disappearing. And, like we found with our collection database, once you shift the focus to improving the user experience, the Tokyo Tuesday visualisation makes browsing this rather arcane dataset incredibly engaging.

Play with Tokyo Tuesday. (via Information Aesthetics)

Tags: Interactive Media1 Comment

This is the second part of our interview with Bob Meade. (Read the first part)

Bob Meade has been one of our most prolific ‘friends’ on Flickr. He has done an enormous amount of tagging, added a great deal of additional research to our images, and was the man behind the discovery of the Mosman Bay Falls.

I am posting this with the permission of Bob, with the intention of helping other cultural institutions learn more about behaviour online, and to also begin to understand the opportunities that now exist to engage audiences around collections and other content. These stories, ultimately, are far more powerful and important qualitative research than raw usage figures.

I have made only minor edits to the transcript so bear with the conversational tone and flow.

If you find this useful and would like to cite it in research papers and the like, I would appreciate it if you would tell me about it in the comments or via email.

To read more about the Museum’s experience of the Commons on Flickr read our three month report.

Hobbies, identity, reputation, and etiquette

Paula: So, you’ve kind of answered a lot of questions for me, but the work that you do on the common, is very prolific, and you do a lot of research. So is that part of your background that you had in previous work?



Bob: Well, a man’s got to have a hobby and I like being enthusiastic about my hobbies, so I get satisfaction out of looking at something and I am inspired by the Earl Morris/Roger Fenton thing that I was talking about before.

I think there’s a lot of things in photographs that I now look at closely and enjoy looking at closely and analyzing details to try and discover something that may have been not realized was there or not officially noted or not noticed by other people. I find it exciting discovering something.



Seb: Have you become a bigger user of Flickr, the comments. Have you re-engaged with your own, putting your own images up on Flickr now?



Bob: Yes and yes. Part of the etiquette of Flickr seems to be that, if you want to be valued as a Flickrite, you should have something on there, of your own, that cannot be found anywhere else. So I’ve tried to put up just a few images that reflect some of my interests, mainly in military and naval history so that when I comment on some of the groups to do with those topics, people can come back and say, oh, yeah, this guy’s got an interest and also some potentially valuable images.



Because I’ve got a private collection of photographs that belonged to my father, relating to his World War II service, I’ve got access to some images that thus far I’ve seen nowhere else in Australia. That’s sort of tantalizing bit of value.

But also because I have the interest in blogging, part of the question is which place to choose to put content up to - put it on my blog or put it on Flickr?

Mainly, my feeling at the moment is just put it up on Flickr to grab a little bit of interest, but what I really would rather spend my time on is blogging on my own blog. 


Where to focus energies - blogs or Flickr?


Seb: Because you are a blogger, have you or would you review the material that the Museum puts up and others put up in your own blog to contextualize it, write about it, flesh it out in more detail?



Bob: Well, one of the things that I noticed on Matt Raymond’s Library of Congress blog was that they were very interested that someone went to the trouble to recreate a photo, from one of the World War II era sort of color transparencies. As soon as I saw the Tyrrell collection photos, particularly of things around Sydney, I immediately thought, hey, I could use this on my blog.



This would be great for a ‘Sydney Then and Now’. I could use a Tyrrell collection photo, take my own photo, and it’ll be something that’ll be interesting on my blogs. Some good content, and something that I would enjoy doing, going to particular spots saying, “how close can I get to the exact spot that this other photo was taken from?”



Then the Museum started the Tyrrell Today Group, and I thought, “OK, it’s a good idea. I won’t use that for my own blog” - because that seems to be sort of rude since you had your own idea, to do exactly the same thing.


If I put any effort into that (by taking contemporary photographs to match the old Tyrrell images) , I’d give it eventually to the Tyrrell Today Group rather than try and siphon off from your photo stream to my own blog.

It just seems sort of a bit rude, ungenerous.

So I haven’t used any of your images on my own blog in ‘then and now ‘photographs, because you’ve got your own thing going there. I think I prefer to contribute to that.

In terms of whatever I can add in terms of context or richness or specialized knowledge that I have or something else that I discover, I’m happy to just put it up in the comments area of your Tyrrell Today photo stream rather than in my own blog.



However, some of the other institutions that are putting things on Flickr, for example, the State Records Office of New South Wales, and they’ve got a lot of similar images. They don’t seem as sort of interested in creating their own sort of thing like your Tyrrell Today Flickr group. So I’m directly blogging off a couple of their images to do the same sort of ‘Sydney Then and Now’ type thing that the Tyrrell Today Group does – but with their images.


Other Australian institutions on Flickr

Seb: What about State Records’ photos? Do you comment in the State Records photo stream, or is the context placed in your blog when you reuse an image?



Bob: Mainly in my own blog. I put a little bit in the comment area, of their own photo stream, on Flickr, but mainly in my own blog. I’m also doing a full photo thing where I take the photo then, my own photo now take it from approximately the same position.



Seb: Has anyone from State Records contacted you through Flickr or through your blog to acknowledge your doing this or invite you to participate more further?



Bob: Yes and no. When I saw the images on State Records’ Flickr, they had the ‘Blog This’ functionality on Flickr activated, but they also had a note saying, if you want to use these images, you must have prior permission, blah, blah, blah. Contact us if you want to use it. There’s, obviously, a conflict there which ‘Blog this’ has sort of implied permission, that we’re saying, yeah, go blog this. Go and use it, but no, come and seek permission. [laughter]

It’s not very easy if every time I want to use something I have to seek permission. So what I did was I blogged an image.

I sent them a note saying that I wanted to use an image on my blog, but I noted this conflict there.

They wrote back saying, “Oh, yeah, we inadvertently left that functionality on there. We sort of didn’t realize that that was a default position. So we’ve now disabled that, but we’re happy for you to use anything you like off here on your blog, but just please give it the correct sort of attribution and link back to the Photo Investigator.” (Photo investigator is State Records NSW website’s own online photograph library.)

They just wanted the digital ID, which is the number in their system, but I also incorporated a link that goes straight back to that, which is slightly exceeding what they asked for.



Seb: How important is it that the Commons says ‘no known Copyright’, because those images, too, if they predate a certain date of publishing, are also in the public domain? You seem to want to play by the rules of the organization putting those images in?



Bob: Well for a lot of the images, it depends on how you define publish. A lot of the images from the, say, State Rail Archives were used on trains and trams just to like decorate and create a bit of visual interest. They can’t be certain whether it’s been published or not. A lot of those images, for example, in the State Rail Collection, were there for that purpose, but they can’t be certain if they were actually used.

So I just want to be nice with people . . . I was only the first person that ever asked them this question

I regard it as my heritage and everybody else who’s here. And also it should be available for research from overseas as well. So yeah, I think it’s my right to use it . . . But I also understand that there are financial constraints involved in the mere act of trying to release them. It costs money to do that.

 On the National Archives of Australia, they had the same situation where it said they had the “blog this” functionality, which they were sort of reasonable happy for people to do. But they also said if you want to use these images, you have to seek our permission.

It linked to an area on the National Archives of Australia website that sort of explained the Attorney General Department’s view of Crown copyright, etc. etc, and made you think that, “gee, they’d be unlikely to give permission”.

But I also knew from other research I had previously done utilizing things from the National Archives of Australia, they’re only too happy to give people permission to use things so long as it’s cited according to their citation convention.

So I blogged something straight off . . . I thought, if I blog something and it’s nice and they like it, I’m more likely to get permission. So I blogged something which was an image of Lionel Rose the boxer, and I associated it with some childhood memories I had of meeting Lionel Rose.

Then I sent the message saying, “Hey, I used your functionality”.

They then said, “Yep, we’re very happy for you to blog this. Blog anything you like. We’re happy with what you’ve done. Please just let us know so we can see the sort of how it’s being used.”



Tags: InterviewsNo Comments.

A little while ago I blogged about an experiment we were doing with QR codes.

In summary, we placed a QR code in the back of the Sydney Design 08 festival programme which gave access to a discount voucher for the festival and ensured free entry to the Museum during the event.

The big question is, did anyone use it?

Before I tell you let’s look at a couple of ‘problems’ with what we did. These were barriers to participation that we had underestimated.

Firstly, the QR code itself was printed at a size that required a ‘decent’ cameraphone to scan it effectively. A lot of people with iPhones found that the size of the code itself didn’t work well with the 2mp iPhone camera. This would, of course, have been alleviated had the code appeared large on all street posters as well - but would have required integration into the visual design of the posters too - so that it did not dominate the design. Anyone who has seen Telstra’s QR campaign will know that the code is the poster.

Second, the QR code itself linked to a URL that was not optimised for mobile. This was made more problematic because the iPhone (currently the only mobile with a decent web browser) couldn’t read the code properly. Viewing the linked site on Opera on a Nokia, for example, made for a lot of annoying scrolling to complete the form to get your free pass.

Third, the application to read QR codes is not prominently available on most phones. Even on my recent model Nokia it is, by default, buried under Applications / Office / Barcode Reader.

This third problem will resolve itself in time and over that time, too, as mobile data charges drop more sites will become optimised for mobile viewing resolving problem two. In fact, we did use a Wordpress plugin to ‘convert’ the Sydney Design site to be ‘mobile friendly’ as a test - but this really needs a manual touch.

So digging in to the stats we find -

144 views of the QR destination page
- 13 on Symbian devices, 3 on iPhone, rest of Windows versions or Safari versions
- 55 from Sydney and the rest interstate or overseas

33 successful form completions
26 successful ticket prints

Unfortunately we don’t have any figures on whether any of these 26 printouts were actually presented at the door of the Museum and redeemed.

Is this successful? For zero financial outlay this was always going to be a trial. We’ve learnt quite a lot about QR codes and their potential through doing this and we will certainly be experimenting more with them.

We know that there were several factors that meant we didn’t do this optimally, but we also know that QR code usage in Sydney is, understandably, low. We are probably still 3-5 years away from widespread public adoption and understanding - and beyond marketing we are still waiting for a ‘killer app’ to drive usage.

Tags: Mobile4 Comments

Nina Simon has done a great job of summing up the potential changes brought by the abundance model of digital to the museum sector.

The notion of ‘museums as platforms’ is not new - even if the technologies to make them such in the digital environment are.

One of the primary fears museum professionals (and all professionals) have about entering new relationships with audiences is the fear of losing control. For hundreds of years, we’ve owned the content and the message. While we may grudgingly acknowledge the fact that visitors create their own versions of the message around subsets of the content, we don’t consciously empower visitors to redistribute their own substandard, non-authoritative messages. So when people like me start advocating for the creation of tools and opportunities by which visitors can share their stories, reaggregate the artifacts, even rate and review each others’ creations, museum professionals of all stripes get concerned. If the museum isn’t in control, how can it thrive?

We have to change the framing of this conversation. There is a difference between control and expertise. In these conversations, people often say, “don’t expert voices matter?” and my emphatic response is YES. Content expertise matters. Content control shouldn’t.

Recently Henry Jenkins of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide fame has posted about similar issues in the university sector. Jenkins was interviewed by “Alexandre Cayla-Irigoyen Chef de pupitre - Societe Monde, about OpenCourseWare, Collective Intelligence, and the modern university”.

When we create more open platforms, we destroy old monopolies of information. That can be a brutal blow for those who gain their self worth from their role as the dispersers of that information. So, yes, when you open it up to students to submit materials, teachers feel threatened. There are some legitimate concerns here, having to do with the credentializing of information and the liabilities of the university. For most of us, credibility on the web is situational: we are not so much assessing content as we are assessing the reputations of the sources of that content. We tend to put our greatest trusts in the institutions we would trust for information in the physical world. So, many people who sought information from Universite de Montreal or MIT will make a general judgment about the reputation of the institution and then apply it to all content which gets circulated.

For me, a lot of this has to do with how we frame the materials — as a reference work (which meets certain criteria of reliability, which many faculty members would be hard pressed to meet) or as a space for investigation, deliberation, and discussion (where there are ongoing conversations about the value of different content being circulated). Most academic web resources represent the former; Wikipedia and YouTube would be better understood as the latter.

(snip)

A lot of bad work could tarnish the reputation of a university. How can it reconcile openness and the promotion of itself as a supplier of good knowledge?

It depends on what the university is trying to sanctify: is it seeking to guarantee the integrity of the product (in which case, every bit of content needs to be vetted) or the integrity of the process (in which case, the university is creating a space where people learn through vetting each other’s content.) Is the reputation of a university based on the fact that they gather together lots of people who know things or is it based on the fact that they create a context where the ongoing questioning of information takes place?

My personal take is that the digital strategies and representations of a museum and the physical museum itself can co-exist but be different. Whilst I am excited by the potential of a museum which “create[s] a context where the ongoing questioning of information takes place”, it would be foolish to assume that this doesn’t already happen amongst visitors - indeed the research shows it does - even if the museum doesn’t realise it. Can we do it actively, and better?

The digital museum needs to be able to make the most of an attention economy where information and content is in abundance. The physical museum, on the other hand, needs to be able to make the most of an experience economy where the opportunity to see/feel/smell/hear/touch ‘the real thing’ is incredibly scarce. It is likely that only together that optimum learning occurs.

I am making generalisations here but in their galleries art museums with their object-focus coupled with ‘acceptable subjectivity’ have the most opportunity from scarcity, and science centres without objects and veneer of ’scientific objectivity’, the least. Natural history and social history museums sit somewhere in between - depending on what their exhibition and research focus is. Unfortunately, though, scarcity thinking often carries over from the physical galleries to the web - in part this explains the reticence of many art museums to share collections in the digital space.

Platform approaches are the norm in the digital space. If a museum isn’t actively making their content available, then their audiences are taking it in any case (or finding it elsewhere). The platform is more often than not forums, blogs or Flickr. The museum is not even in the frame. I’d agree with Nina, Jim Spadaccini, and many others that ‘platforms’ actively guided by and engaged with, but not built by, museums are the way forward.

Platforms in this sense, build authority - or as I’ve said before, allow museums to ‘assert’ their authority. Absence is invisibility.

Paradoxically, it may turn out that a ‘platform approach’ online might in fact allow an even more ‘curator as auteur’ approach in the physical galleries.

Different, diverse and conflicting perspectives, remixing and mashups, collaborative creativity might be encouraged and enabled allowing audiences to engage deeply in their own ways with a fuller range of content in the online environment in order to allow a more controlled, directed, and stylistic vision in the galleries.

This might be a fruitful line of experimentation for museums with diverse, predominantly adult audiences, and large collection/object-based exhibitions. It could combine the best of both worlds - unique experiences of objects in the physical spaces, open collaboration and object-centred democracies where the tools support it in the digital space.

Tags: Conferences and event reports  open content2 Comments

The Sydney Observatory blog has been listed by Smart Company magazine as one of the ‘best 15 business blogs in Australia‘.

It is great, if a little odd, to see the Observatory - a non-profit - listed in amongst blogs that are overtly commercial in orientation.

I did a few calculations and worked out that in the last two years, Nick Lomb the Curator of Astronomy, one of the two main bloggers behind the Observatory blog has written 100,000 words in his blog posts. Now that’s the equivalent of an (Australian) PhD thesis!

If you’d like a glimpse behind the scenes, I interviewed Nick a little while back about the success of the blog and the amount of time it takes him to write all those words.

Tags: Museum bloggingNo Comments.

One of the most raved about and surprising sessions of the first day of Picnic08 was from Israeli conductor Itay Talgam.

Here is an interview done at Picnic08 with him in which he talks about how the way a conductor works provides a useful framework for considering the future of collaborative work and creativity. Talgam runs a ‘maestro program’ where he applies this framework to business.

The “Maestro programs” were founded on the belief that, in the orchestra as in the work place, music has the power to create community and reinforce shared values. Music embodies knowledge and innovation, individual effort and collective achievement, and offers a work-environment that is full of opportunities for excellence and self-actualization – same as any successful business.

Link:

Tags: Conceptual  Picnic08No Comments.

Our annual Powerhouse Foundation appeal is finishing up for another year and so if you are a regular reader of Fresh & New(er) or have found the things that I write about here useful, then please consider making a donation to the Powerhouse Foundation.

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The Powerhouse Foundation exists to grow the Museum’s collection - not to fund everyday activities.

The Powerhouse Foundation was established in September 2004 for the purpose of enhancing the Museum’s ability to make strategic acquisitions that will enrich the legacy we pass on to future generations. The Foundation seeks to raise a $5 million endowment over the next four years.

Thank you for your support!

Tags: Fundraising and philanthropyNo Comments.

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’.

Here is the final set of notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness).

Closing off my time at Picnic were visits to a couple of parallel sessions. One of the things I was keen to check out was part of the day long ‘Surprising Africa’ programme. This event featured speakers from Africa talking about what most in the ‘West’ would describe as ‘remarkable innovations’. The point, in part being that Western media portrays Africa as an exotic, dangerous, sometimes, lawless, and difficult place - whilst the reality is quite different. Thus what seems ‘remarkable’ is often only because of our collective ignorance.

The day was in part organised by Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices who has done a great job of summarising. Likewise Erik Hursman’s presentation and notes is essential reading/viewing. As Erik says - if it works in Africa it will work anywhere - and I think one possible future for the mobile Internet is already visible in Africa.

Over in the main auditorium there was a fantastic double presentation from two of the leading lights of data visualisation - Ben Cerveny from Stamen and Jose-Luis de Vicente from Media Lab Prado in Madrid. In fact I think that these two presentations were the highlight of the main hall. Cerveny’s presentation, ‘The Alchemy of Understanding’, was a lovely poetic piece - data visualisation as “the transformation of data into understanding”, “synaesthesia of the world” with the “CPU as the philosopher’s stone”. He spoke of how in designing Diggswarm - a visualisation of how stories rise and fall within Digg - it was essential to create a set of rules to make the visualisation meaningful. As he put it, visualisation requires the generating of a “physics of each dataspace”. I especially liked his final comments that we are now in “an age of meta exploration”.

Jose-Luis de Vicente zipped through a wealth of material. For him and his work at Media Lab Prado the aim is to make use of as many public available datasets as possible. He demonstrated The Atlas of Electromagnetic Space, a project that shows the official uses of the spectrum alongside the activist and artistic interventions in these spaces.

He spoke of the ‘quantified self’ which is also emerging as projects as divergent as Last.fm and Nike’s iPod linkup and the recently popular Bedpost make it possible for individuals and communities to record more data than ever about their own activities. Whilst some of these already allow simple visualisations, or at least data export (see LastGraph from Aerocode for beautiful visualisations of Last.fm profile data), there is a lack of high quality interactive works. Then he showed Mail Garden, another collaborative project to emerge from the Media Lab Prado, which is visualisation of email patterns in one’s own mailbox. Lovely.

Casastristes is a public database of empty housing across Spain and is also features a number of nice interactive infographics showing the changes in housing affordability and building rates across Spain. Casastristes exemplifies the need to move from ‘just’ visualisation to social action.

Here he showed Cascade on Wheels, a project that scraped traffic data from the Madrid government website and presented it as an interactive map of traffic density in the city. In Cascade on Wheels, busy streets appear as ‘walls’ of traffic that can be seen to prevent or disrupt social activities and reveal patterns of discontinuity between areas of the city.

Nuage Vert uses projections onto industrial smokestacks to reveal the pollution levels generated by industrial plants; and AEG’s Noise Awareness reveals data about noise in the city in the city itself.

Running out of time, Vincente concluded by asking what sort of new efficiencies could be gained if the data held by city-owned bicycle scheme Bicing might offer up if the data about which cycle bays were empty, which were not, and the rate of exchange and use were made public? For one, it would be immediately possible to find out where the nearest city bike was - without needing to chance it to the next station. Of course, the city has contracted out the service to a private provider and the data has become locked up, reducing efficiencies and ultimately public good.

The final session of Picnic08 for me was on augmented reality. With a room full of marketers looking for the edge in ‘interactive marketing’ I was pleased that the Nokia presenter David Murphy, focussed on other possibilities for augmented reality. He opened with a series of slides showing the advance of augmented reality technologies from huge backpack computers and headsets to what we have now - a mobile phone with built in camera, GPS, compass and accelerometer. Basically the clunky prototypes made by computer science researchers only 5 years ago have been rapidly superseded by mobile phones. He demonstrated a number of new applications coming from the Nokia Labs which make the AR of Engin on Android look positively old school.

And that was the end of my Picnic. I hope you have enjoyed reading these notes.

Tags: Interactive Media  Mobile  Picnic081 Comment

Just a few days after the Picnic08 discussions of ‘openness’ comes a very timely report from the OCLC on cross-sector collaboration between libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) titled Beyond the Silos of the LAMs. Diane Zorich, Günter Waibel and Ricky Erway are the authors of the report.

The report is the result of a series of workshops with particular institutions. The notion of a ‘collaboration continuum’ is particularly useful - “As LAMs move from left to right on this continuum, the collaborative endeavor becomes more complex, the investment of effort becomes more significant, and the risks increase accordingly. However, the rewards also become greater, moving from singular, “one-off” projects to programs that can transform the services and functions of an organization.” (pg 11).

The report is bursting with usefulness. In discussing the reposnse to a changing network environment;

LAMs are increasingly aware that they are not primary Web destinations and that most users are directed to resources through search engines or through portals specific to their areas of interest. They also see that much of the social interaction they hope will take place on their sites now occurs in community networking spaces such as Flickr and Facebook.

While some LAMs are trying to ameliorate this situation by putting their content where the users are (for example, by adding links to Wikipedia pages or placing images on Flickr), these efforts are exploratory and have not yet altered the fundamental strategy for collection access or the primacy of the campus Web site. The discussion exposed an underlying tension between the vision of seamless collections access and community engagement on local Web sites, and the shift in online user behavior where access and engagement now occur at a broader network level. (pg 15).

Or looking at the reasons why institutions find collaboration difficult;

Unfortunately, incentive and reward structures for collaborations are largely absent in most institutions. More strikingly, existing incentive structures often position LAMs so they compete with one another in ways that discourage collaboration. For example, when performance plans use metrics that focus on the success of individual departmental efforts and activities, departments will naturally promote their own activities to the exclusion of all others. One of the workshop participants succinctly summed up this conundrum as follows:

“We have spoken long about cross-institutional collaboration. The reality has been though…that we are measured against each other and then you do take naturally a possessive attitude.”

…

The absence of incentive structures for collaboration inadvertently fosters competitive behavior in other areas as well. For example, the proprietary sense of ownership of collections and databases that exists among some LAMs is perpetuated in an environment where collaboration is not promoted through an incentive system. (pg23)

This is an incredibly important report at this juncture where technological options, global funding uncertainties, and changing audience expectations, are beginning to align to force our hands with respect to institutional collaboration, effective cross search and resource discovery.

Now, having read the report, if you are a GLAM with a design collection, come and add it to D*Hub, the Powerhouse Museum’s hub for design - as the t-shirt would say, “ask me how”. Or, if you’d like to propose something collaborative with the Powerhouse Museum collection then make contact.

Tags: Digitisation2 Comments

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’.

Here is another set of notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness).

Day Three was full of clashes and I was out at Westergasfabriek terribly early in the morning - even before the free (sponsored) barista coffee opened. But getting in early meant securing a table and laptop power outlet to catch some of The Internet of Things workshop.

The notion of the ‘Internet of Things’ was best summed up by Rafi Haladjian from Violet who are best known for their Nabaztag, the Internet enabled rabbit. He described how technologies always become pervasive starting out as highly expensive and shared by many (clock tower), to then being shared by a few (expensive private clock), before becoming personal (pocket watch), commodified and generic (the disposable digital watch), and then making the leap to becoming pervasive (even your microwave oven and TV now has a clock). The Internet is in the ‘personal’ stage with the mobile web and the iPhone - where the Internet is available pretty much everywhere in the highly developed world. The big shift will come when every device that has a microchip in it is also connected ambiently to the Internet - so rather than having special devices to access the Internet, all our devices connect to the Internet and to each other. At this stage the Internet is not a ’separate place’ as in the 80s/90s conceptions of ‘cyberspace’, but is fully integrated into everyday life and you no longer go out of your way to ‘connect’ - you just are.

We are already seeing examples of this.

Oliver Christ from SAP talked about some of the megatrends affecting the developed world. The ageing society that we are going to find ourselves in means that healthcare will no longer ’scale’. Pervasive technologies will become essential to keep citizens out of institutional healthcare for as long as possible by allowing connectivity to health care professionals all the time, ambiently. Need to change your medication? Your pill dispenser will already have downloaded the next prescription from your health consultant and sent back your bio data to them. This is also going to be driven by an increasing service economy - moving form selling products to solutions (Christ gave the nice example of moving away from selling drills to selling ‘holes’ which is typified by SaaS but is not just limited to the technology sector).

We are also seeing the possibilities of pervasive computing with car to car communication in some new models of car. Here cars communicate silently with each other to alert drivers of hazards up ahead, using data sourced from cars already ahead of you. Not only this, because your car is silently communicating with others on the road without your intervention, better decisions about speed, tyre pressure etc can be ‘assisted’.

There are already examples of ‘pay as you live’ insurance schemes which offer significantly discounted premiums and policies if you allow yourself to be tracked and thus assessed as to exactly how you behave rather than the current inaccurate ‘modelling’ applied at the moment. Norwich Union in the UK offers a policy which uses your car’s GPS data to calculate your risk level (and hence premiums) based on when, where, how fast, and how frequently you actually drive.

All this is becoming possible because the ‘data input’ and ‘data collection’ of pervasive computing no longer need to have the enormous costs associated with them of previous times.

Joe Polastre from Sentilla spoke of how “the internet is lonely” and wants more devices connected to it. Looking at the car industry he showed how already car manufacturers are providing the capacity for your car to email its vital signs back to you periodically to tell you how healthy it is, and how this lets you track fuel efficiency and on road costs more effectively. Polastre used the example of WalMart’s detailed energy auditing to show how pervasive monitoring was able to make enormous reductions in energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and expenditure. For example by being able to identify the particular section of the store that was using the most energy (the lighting section) and make adjustments to operations (replacing all the bulbs in the sample lights with energy efficient bulbs) they were able to save $6m per annum. Likewise the simple act of painting their store roofs white in some states, WalMart saved $30m per annum.

All this relies on pervasive low cost measurement systems. Polastre then went on to discuss the enormous energy reductions able to be made in the industrial processing sector - copper and aluminium production etc - because of better monitoring equipment.

The final part of the Internet of Things demonstrated a number of RFID devices that are coming on to the market - Tikitags, the Mirror - and others. The Mirror is the latest from Violet/Nabaztag which is an RFID reader. It comes with a set of Ztamps which you can attach to anything at all to connect them to the Internet and build a suite of customisable interactions. With them and the Mirror you could have your umbrella tell you the weather forecast for example. This was very nifty and showed the massive drop in the cost of RFID technologies.

Nokia is soon releasing a new phone which will have ‘near-field communication’ capacity built in, giving another way to interact with the growing ‘Internet of things’.

Tags: Interactive Media  Mobile  Picnic08No Comments.

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’.

Here are some more notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness) which were taken during the Open Museum sessions on Day Two. (More notes on the rest of Picnic still to follow)

Following Jelmer Boomsma, a representative of Hyves talked about the collaboration with Musuemnacht and what Hyves stood to gain from the project. I had to pop out for an interview for most of the presentation so I don’t have any notes of particular import for the session.

However following Hyves, Dick van Dijk from the Waag Society, an organisation that operates a little like a new media incubator, gave a demonstration of some mobile, location-aware projects they have been working on. Interestingly the projects have been less about the technology and more about ensuring that the broadest possible groups of people engage with the content. Titled “Connecting: People, Stories, Places”, these projects reminded me a lot of the ‘digital storytelling’ movement - ordinary peoples’ stories made more powerful through their own voice, and through making connections with others. The location-aware aspect of this work fell mainly into the ‘city tour’ model of mobile heritage but where walkers were taken on a particular personal journey - the digital story.

The day concluded with an insider’s perspective of the ‘Slash/Slash generation’ (mainly young people who are, for example, dj/fashion designer/artist/permaculturist - coincidentally this is applies to almost everyone I know!). Nalden, one of the Museumnacht community, and now one of the most prominent young bloggers in the Netherlands, talked about his motivations and actions online and how in his view of the online world, heritage content competes for attention with music, fashion and entertainment. This was an good way to end the day even if I could see others in the audience finding Nalden’s youthful enthusiasm a bit hard to take - because it clearly demonstrated the need for museums to open up simply to maintain relevance over coming generations.

All in all the Open Museums part of Picnic was one of the most successful ‘Picnic Specials’ along with Surprising Africa. The attendance was solid and the ideas discussed traversed the different interpretations and permutations of ‘openness’ - from reaching out to non-traditional museum audiences, to inter-institutional data sharing and co-creative visitor interactions.

Tags: Picnic08  open contentNo Comments.

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’.

Here is the next set of notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness) which were taken during the Open Museum sessions on Day Two. (More notes on the rest of Picnic still to follow)

Following my presentation, Fiona Romeo from the National Maritime Museum in London spoke. Fiona began by reminding us that often by themselves museums (outside of the art museum world) often hold incredibly banal and mundane objects whose significance is only apparent when placed into a particular context. This poses enormous challenges for museums in a digital environment that offers the user/visitor the opportunity to actively decontextulise objects (especially when browsing collection databases etc).

Fiona then detailed her recent work mapping some of the NMM collections to draw out the stories associated with objects - something that works incredibly well when the objects collected pertain to navigation and voyages of discovery.

For the NMM, the opportunities for collaboration lie in working with ‘data artisans’ outside of the sector to reveal new stories and ways of seeing our data. To this end she discussed the NMM’s work with Stamen in visualising the language of memorials - a quite poetic and revealing presentation of otherwise rather dull data; and also some of the object licensing to game developers Six To Start who make alternate reality games (and for whom some of the NMM’s maps and objects were a fantastic and uptapped resource).

Fiona emphasised that we under estimate the worth of our own data - we should ‘love our data’. It is rich and interesting even if we see it as incomplete - and by connecting with such ‘data artisans’ in the commercial and creative sector, we may begin to see for ourselves, new opportunities.

Paul Keller from Kennisland talked about ‘museums, fans and Copyright’, arguing that one of the things that is currently paralysing museums in taking advantage of the new collaborative opportunities of digital is this perception that ‘new business models of unimaginable wealth’ are just around the corner. Of course this is totally unrealistic - the bags of money don’t exist - and as a result we get a situation of ‘rights stagnation’ where the museums digital assets are locked up.

Of course, fans are already bypassing museums to take advantage of digital. Paul gave the example of Bittorrent communities whose collective collections of Dutch documentary films are more complete, more accessible, and of a higher quality that those preserved (and inaccessible online) by the Dutch National Film archives. The official film archives are paralysed by ‘getting permission’ while those who want access now just bypass them completely.

Stepping back from the obvious IP issues here, Paul gave another example of an amazing searchable video archive made by two Germans. 0xdb uses the data from video torrents along with their subtitles (sometimes fansubbed) to create a wonderful full text search of around 6000 movies. Whilst downloading is not allowed the metadata and rich content is astounding.

Jelmer Boomsma from n8 gave an excellent run down of the collaborative audience development strategies of the Amsterdam Museum Night. The Museumnacht is a good example of making museums more accessible to wider audiences and Boomsma’s presentation looked at how, in just 3 years they have transformed their strategies to make the Museumnacht reach even wider audiences and build strong participatory cultures around them.

In 2005 Museumnacht was seemingly successful. 26,000 visitors across all the museums in the one night, and a 94% ‘very satisfied’ audience. But there was one problem, the average age of attendee was 37 years old. Now n8 new that young people were interested in museums and culture, just that the event wasn’t appearing on their radars, so rather than take shortcuts and underestimate the intelligence of the audience (a dance party in every museum, or free beer etc), they focussed on redefining what the Museumnacht event was and who it was for.

Over 2006 and 2007 the print campaign began to be supplemented with an extensive and diverse online campaign where they gave the audience the tools to become ‘an ambassador’ for the event itself. They instituted competitions to design the campaign materials, design a Museumnacht t-short, as well as ways to build your own programme for the night and then share it with your friends and even make your own audiotour.

They worked with Hyves, the largest social networking site in the Netherlands (well outranking Facebook and MySpace), and trialled a customised banner advert. This failed and despite 160,000 page impressions it only generated 80 click throughs! So instead they worked with Hyves to set up a Hyves Group to enable 2 way communication, perks and discounts and importantly the tools to share with other Hyves users. In 2006 2% of their traffic came through Hyves, and in 2007 this was up to 8% and capturing 20% of visitors aged 16-24.

Now the new Museumnacht site is incorporating an Opensocial-style set of logins whereby many of the social networking and sharing functions will be available to any network user and also remove the requirement of a separate Museumnacht website login.

Tags: Copyright/OCL  Picnic08  open content1 Comment

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’.

Here is the second set of notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness) which were taken during the Open Museum sessions on Day Two. (More notes on the rest of Picnic still to follow)

Open Museum was billed as “a one-day marathon focussing on the idea of an ‘open museum’, a public institution that engages with its environment. Inspired by the great Stedelijk director Willem Sandberg, the Open Museum symposium looks at how museums in the 21st century can learn from media, and how media can learn from museums”. Organised by n8 who run the annual Museumnacht (Museum Night) in Amsterdam, this was an action packed 6 hours of presentations, which, because it was nestled in amongst the rest of Picnic, drew a very diverse and interested crowd. As a result the Dutch newspapers, the local blogging community and others have covered it in good detail.

The sessions kicked off with Michiel van Iersel from MuseumLab taking a run through the history of museums arguing that museums have always had to adapt to changing times and that, on the whole, these changes over the centuries have transformed museums for the better (at least from our current viewpoint) into more transparent, open-to-all institutions that are even opening sub-galleries in airport lounges (see the Rjiksmuseum at Schipol Airport). Michiel’s introduction placed a necessary historical backdrop behind the day’s proceedings - ensuring that we didn’t get too caught up in the emperor’s new clothes.

I followed Michiel with a rapid fire look at the potentials of an ‘open, collaborative museum’ online. In this I argued that in the digital environment, museums that do not take advantage of the opportunities to connect with other institutions (at the global level) and their publics (at the hyperlocal level) are not only missing out on many opportunities, they are at risk of being leapfrogged in relevance by other institutions or even informal organisations. Online, a singular collection of objects is now rather meaningless and the digital space opens the necessity to connect collections internationally. By the same token, online social media offers the opportunity to connect with and engage with local communities in ways previously only theorised about in the scholarship of the ‘new museum’.

Openness is a way for museums to be seen to be ‘creating new value’ from the old - and to assert their relevance in stimulating new creativity, economic and cultural production. Museums can collaborate with the community to improve findability through tagging of various kinds; and make discoveries, create communities of interest around their collections and in so doing improve their research and collection data.

With each other and other sorts of knowledge providers, museum openness can create richer value for researchers, scholars and even general browsers by connecting collections and research with broader context and richer resources elsewhere - moving from being a singular ‘destination’ to simply a high value node in a knowledge network/web (I equated this to the function of a reference librarian).

Finally I posed the absolute necessity for openness for museums to make the most of location-centric possibilities. Without openness none of the problems of location-centric data will be solved, nor will their promise be reached. In the location-centric space, a single collection is meaningless and is a missed opportunity - only a multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary approach will get anywhere near delivering the necessary user experience to make this meaningful. Think of the current situation much like a tourist map that only shows one chain of hotels on it . . .

I concluded with a series of questions aimed at framing the rest of the day -

1. do audiences really want openness? do we expect to much of them? (early adopter tech communities are far from representative of our audiences)
2. where are the new models of rights and IP needed to sustain openness (I posited CC Plus as one option)
3. how do we build new forms of reputation and trust? (especially within museum with scientific research staff whose reputations rely upon currently closed academic research forms)
4. how do we sustainably support the social needs of communities? (I pose that we should look to the existing structures we use to support offline volunteers etc)
5. how do we transform business models in the sector to encourage institutional collaboration?
6. how do we encourage collaboration between our online and our gallery spaces?

Tags: Geotagging & mapping  Interactive Media  Picnic08  open contentNo Comments.

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’, or as my presentation was called “Sorry we’re open: the open, collaborative museum“.

Set in the reclaimed grey zone of Westergasfabriek, Picnic08 was quite a remarkable thing to behold. On arrival the place looked more like a rave than a conference - in fact the venue is used for huge parties as well. There were fake sheep stationed around the place, the opening ceremony featured a donkey loaded with a video camera, laptop and wifi leading a brass marching band. On day two I was greeted by people dressed up as poodles and crawling around on fours. And, the picnic’ theme extended through to the ‘discussion’ sessions having the speakers seated at a picnic bench on stage.

Here is the first set of notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness). More to follow.

Charles Leadbeater opened the event with a brief introduction to the opportunities of ‘collaboration’ now made possible. Much in the vein of his We-Think book, he sees great potential in a change he feels we are only in the first decade of. As he says, “there are another 50 years to run . . . we’re only 10 years in”. Using the metaphor of pebbles and boulders on a beach, Leadbetter sees the mass creative production of YouTube as millions of people placing pebbles on a beach that previously only supported the boulders of mass media. For this collaborative creativity to have maximum effect it needs to be understood that “diversity drives this sort of creativity”.

Could we imagine learning, politics and media that was “with you” rather than “at you”? How do we get to the “with”?

Clay Shirky’s keynote problematised Leadbeater’s high level optimism.

Managing communities around social objects is hard. These are design problems that plague everything from Flickr to old style forums. If the computer is a box then lots of ‘features’ and complexity matters, but if the computer becomes a communicative/social device then simplicity matters because ’synchronisation between the mental models of the users’ matter more (communication intent is foregrounded).

Linus’ law - “Many eyes make all bugs shallow”. The best example of this is Pluto on Wikipedia. Wikipedia gets better because it is arguemntative. There is no ‘hive mind’ here. What happens is a very small groups cares much more than everyone else. What Wikipedia does in this instance is allow broad participation rather than apply traditional managerialism that, in the name of efficiency, drops off 80% of the users who only minimally participate (80/20 rule), keeping only those who ‘most participate’. But now in the digital space there is no need to optimise like this and lose so many but instead allow a lot to contribute a little.

But then there is “the Gallileo problem” - the semi locked article. Essentially this is the manifestation of a 500 year old flamewar involving the Catholic Church. This indicates that it is probably necessary to stop thinking about ‘users’ in the generic and start to consider users an inevitable unequal and unequally motivated. This then allows systems to build in defense mechanism to allow the head users to fight off the tail users when necessary - much like governance in a democracy.

Shirky then moved on to discuss the unequal participation and unequal motivations behind Aaron Koblin’s Ten Thousand Cents. This is a collective art work created by 10,000 ‘workers’ on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Ten Thousand Cents from Ten Thousand Cents on Vimeo.

Now just who were these 10,000 ‘turkers’ who co-created this art? Koblin’s own research showed that turkers’ return rates and time spent ‘working on creating the tiles of the art varied greatly. Chinese turkers comprised 90% return visits, 24 mins; Egypt 97% return 32 mins; whilst turkers from the USA were only 17% return visits and spent far less time, 3 mins, ‘turking’.

This revealed enormous different global motivations for participation. 10,000 cents, 10,000 ‘turkers’ meant that the distribution of labour was global and what 1 US cent ‘meant’ varied greatly. This spontaneous division of labour, voluntary, but different motivations. Spontaneous division of motivation - some are doing it for love and other are definitely doing it for money.

This makes planning and predictability are incredibly hard to forecast. In these social collaborative spaces you cannot ‘recruit’, only ‘invite’ - and it is this that makes it incredibly difficult to handle - especially for large established organisations.

Shirky then closed by posing the questions as to “why is almost all online collective action about ’stopping’ things”? Perhaps we need a new governmental license model like GPL - rather than the heavy ‘incorporation’ model - which makes ‘group collaboration’ legal and thus able to get things like bank accounts etc. He then showed some inital attmepts to get towards this through virtual companies (Vermont), Community Interest Companies (UK), MeetUp (USA).

Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working at Intel gave an interesting talk titled ‘Secrets and Lies’. This explored the challenges of identity, reputation and trust online (and offline).

Bell explained that lies are at the basis of everyday life. They come in many varieties and even the strictest religious codes don’t blanket ban all variants. For children lies can be play, boundary testing, working through rules and identity. For adults and lies can be a conscious prevention of ‘reality’.

Secret knowledge is essential rituals. And in many cultures always something is held back. But now we have taken our lying online and we now are forced to openly operate between a cultural practice (lying is everyday) and a cultural ideal (lying is bad).

With the changing online environment we also find new ‘technologies of lying’ emerging. Tracking services are defeated by new alibi services, cellphone tracking is defeated by the phones being left in a drawer at work. The problem is is that whilst people know how to lie but our devices don’t know how to.

Data trails, location aware, satellite navigation don’t know how to lie when you need them to. Governments, regulators, companies, researchers can, potentially ‘know all’ and this is not optimal. For example all our devices know I was at Picnic all the time. THe RFID in the conference pass tracked me, uniquely, through the space and captured all my interactions.

So technology needs to bring back the imprecision, blurring of truth that we as a society need to function. What are the implications, then for e-government? Reputation indices? where does secrecy fit?

(part two of my notes will be posted soon)

Tags: Interactive Media  Picnic081 Comment

Bob Meade has been one of our most prolific ‘friends’ on Flickr. He has done an enormous amount of tagging, added a great deal of additional research to our images, and was the man behind the discovery of the Mosman Bay Falls.

Paula Bray (the Museum’s Image Services Manager) and I conducted a long face to face interview with Bob who very generously agreed to speak to us about his background and motivations.

It was an incredibly revealing interview that demonstrates the power of museums and cultural institutions opening up their collections to ‘amateur’ researchers and enthusiasts. It also explores the Flickr and the Commons experience from the perspective of a user - the motivations that drive participation, frustrations and expectations - as well as touching on Flickr etiquette and Copyright.

I am posting this with the permission of Bob, with the intention of helping other cultural institutions learn more about behaviour online, and to also begin to understand the opportunities that now exist to engage audiences around collections and other content. These stories, ultimately, are far more powerful and important qualitative research than raw usage figures.

I have made only minor edits to the transcript so bear with the conversational tone and flow.

If you find this useful and would like to cite it in research papers and the like, I would appreciate it if you would tell me about it in the comments or via email.

To read more about the Museum’s experience of the Commons on Flickr read our three month report.

Here is the first part.

Further parts will follow.

On blogging, photography, and discovering the Commons.

Bob: One day, my wife, told me that she’d been to a Hill & Knowlton Breakfast Bytes presentation, at which Frank Arrigo had spoken. Frank Arrigo works for Microsoft. He used to work in Australia. Now, he works in Seattle. He’s a very keen blogger and one of his jobs was to be a Microsoft evangelist.


My wife was very excited telling me about blogging. She came home and told me something, “You know Bob, look this up.” I looked up Frank Arrigo’s blog, and thought it was very interesting, what he did was a mixture of things to do with his work; things to do with IT, also, things to do with his family; a mixture of his personal views on things; a mixture of what his children were doing.


I thought, yeah, this blogging is interesting. I need to know what it’s about. I thought the best way to understand it was to do it. I wanted to start a blog, and I thought about what I could blog about.

Because the conventional wisdom is that, a blog should have a theme. I thought I’d blog about my life as a stay-at-home dad, and also to document my son growing up.



Even now, just looking back a few years, I like to look back at some of the things I wrote about when he was a one-year-old, or a two-year-old. Now, he’s four-and-a-half.


Being a blogger led me to interest in reading other people’s blogs. One day, I was reading a blog post by Jason Kottke, who, as we know is a well regarded blogger who writes about design and ideas.



Kottke mentioned that Errol Morris, a documentary filmmaker, had a blog at The New York Times. On it Morris was talking about a photograph by Roger Fenton, in the Crimean War, and having a discussion about these two, almost identical, images taken by Roger Fenton in 1853, or thereabouts.

One had cannonballs on the road. One had cannonballs off the road.

I don’t know if you are familiar with both these photographs. Apparently it was like pretty famous, because that was sort of one of the first cases of documenting war in photography.

One image appears to be more dramatic because the cannonballs are on the road, and one image is less dramatic because the cannonballs are sort of spread about kerb side in the gutter of the road.

Morris read a book by Susan Sontag, where she referred to this picture and referred to a guy, who is an expert in the history of photography who said that the photograph with the balls on the road was taken after the one without the balls on the road.


The balls must have been put there by Fenton’s assistants to create more drama in the photograph. And Morris, thought, “That’s interesting; I wonder if that’s true?” And then he started researching it, got the two images then thought, “you ought to know, maybe this photograph came first.” So then he talked to other experts in the history of Fenton’s photography, who said, “Yeah, we don’t agree with that guy. We think that the photograph, without the cannonballs on the road, was the second photograph, because it was known that cannonballs were harvested and recycled.

And then this like caught fire on his blog in The New York Times. He had people from all over the world analyzing it, looking at the angle of the shadows on the cannonballs, counting the cannonballs, which is very hard to do.



A huge debate over which photograph came first ensued, and that got me to thinking, that there can be a lot behind the surface of a photograph and also close analysis of a photograph can reveal information that’s not apparent at first glance.

And also, taking into account the historical factors that are known at the time can reveal something about the photograph.

For example, the idea that cannonballs were harvested. Yes, maybe that means yes, the ones with “balls off” as it was called, came second.

He also drew into the mix, a lot of historical documentation, letters of Fenton that were written at the time to his wife, memoirs of Fenton’s assistants, all those sorts of things. And, ultimately, Morris went to these places near Sebastopol, finding the exact same place and sort of did a bit further analysis about what he thought had happened.

I found it very fascinating, and the contributions of people who were not designated experts made to these sorts of discussions. The comments were really extremely valuable, which Morris, himself acknowledged.

That idea in my head lay dormant for awhile.

Another blog that I read is the Library of Congress blog by Matt Raymond, who is nominally the PR director of communications (for the Library of Congress) and he blogs about different things.

Earlier this year, he blogged about the Library of Congress putting images up on Flickr. I didn’t really pay much attention to it, at first, because the pictures that he chose to illustrate it with on his blog, revolved mainly about baseball, so I thought it was going to be mainly all about baseball.



But then, he blogged again later, maybe it might have been a few weeks later, where he talked about the fantastic response that they had had and the rich information that they had derived from the community, adding details, tagging, all that different sorts of things.

And I thought, “I don’t really understand what he is talking about”, because I don’t really understand about the value that people were adding by tagging.

So I went back and had a look at Flickr.

I had started a Flickr account in 2005 and uploaded maybe four or five pictures of my son, just so I could understand a little bit how Flickr worked. I had never touched it again.


However when I was looking for at the Library of Congress photographs and seeing how people were like contributing information, I saw something. I can’t remember exactly what it was but I thought, hey, I know something about this. I think I might put that in there. So then I had to work out, how you put a comment on, and sort of go back and try and remember the password to my Flickr account and things like that.

So then I started out, doing it on the Library of Congress Flickr photostream.

I thought, “maybe, I know a bit about some of the things here”, but they’re, of course, USA-centric in the main. Although in the Bain collections, the Library of Congress has got that, there’s a lot of historical figures who were prominent in, early 20th century, late 19th century also appear there.

I thought it would be interesting if something like this was happening in Australia. Then lo and behold, the Powerhouse Museum started putting up the Tyrrell collection of photographs. So I started commenting there too.

Now I still have a look occasionally at the Library of Congress photographs, but now that there’s the Powerhouse Museum, the Library of Congress doesn’t hold as much interest for me.

On the Powerhouse and cultural institutions


Seb: Were you a regular visitor to the Powerhouse?



Bob: An occasional visitor. I’ve been here, once in the last five years before my recent visit with my son. So then I’ve been here maybe twice, three times, maybe four times in the last 20 years.



Seb: So the Powerhouse wasn’t top of mind.



Bob: No.



Paula: What about using the Powerhouse website? Have you searched our collection online?



Bob: Only once before, in the middle of last year.

Bonhams and Goodmans Auctioneers were auctioning off a piece of memorabilia belonging to Sir Isaac Isaacs, who was first of all, one of the fathers of the Constitution of Australia. He then went on to become an Attorney-General, a High Court judge, and ultimately Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, and then Governor-General of Australia.

The memorabilia was a medal that had been presented to him at the time of Federation. It was up for auction.

I was vaguely interested in how much it would be worth and thinking it might be a good investment. So I started researching about those particular types of medals and it so happened that the Powerhouse Museum has several of almost identical medals in its collection.

I started searching online for the medal, and that led me to the Powerhouse Museum’s online collection. There’s a lot of photographs up of various medals like that and I was using the zoom function to zoom i