Smithsonian 2.0

Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy v 1.0

We've just posted Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy, Version 1.0. The strategy talks about an updated digital experience, a new learning model that helps people with their "lifelong learning journeys," and the creation of a Smithsonian Commons—a new part of our digital presence dedicated to stimulating learning, creation, and innovation through open access to Smithsonian research, collections and communities.

This strategy was created through a fast and transparent process that included workshops, the Smithsonian 2.0 conference, Twitter, YouTube, and ongoing collaboration through the wiki. It's a work in progress, and we welcome your comments, questions, and input, via this blog or through any discussion tab on the strategy wiki site.

This strategy will feed into the Smithsonian’s comprehensive strategic plan, currently under development.

Evaluating Value

 
[Word Cloud of Survey Responses: "How would you describe this game to friends or family members?", http://www.wordle.net]

We have been running a module version of the "Ghosts of a Chance" Alternate Reality Game since December 2008. More than 900 children, teens, and adults have played. They look like they are having a good time, they tell us they are, and we certainly have a good time running the program. However, the biggest question I have been asked since starting this entire project, is how do we know that the game has value? It is not strictly educational, it does not fulfill any specific curricula, but it DOES get teenagers and children excited about being in an art museum. Isn't that enough? A seventeen-year-old told me that he had never visited the American Art Museum before, because he thought we "just had old portraits." He spent his free time at the Hirshhorn, instead. He didn't even really want to play the game, though I convinced him and his friend to give it a try. After almost two hours of "running around in circles" (which he saw as a good thing) he told me that he couldn't believe how awesome our collection was, and he would definitely be back again to see more. (Note to Hirshhorn: You're still his favorite!) On another occasion, a fifteen-year-old complained because the game had taken her "past the artworks far too quickly." She was conflicted because she wanted to look at the art more closely, but she also wanted to race her friends and finish first. We have been thinking about ways to solve this, and may create a scoring system based on how well the players complete the tasks, rather than how quickly. But what a great complaint to get! A teenager, wishing she could spend more time pondering the art! I was happy, yet I wanted more concrete data to support these wonderful anecdotes. At the end of June, we conducted a small survey to see if we could start to truly evaluate the game's value. You can see the results here. I think it's a great start and would love to hear what you think.

You & the Smithsonian's Web and New Media Strategy

This awesome call-to-action on YouTube was produced for us by npampalone and strangeredfilms, on their own initiative and their own dime, just because they thought it was a good idea. Humbling, that is. I submit that the Smithsonian's future greatness will be measured more by how we inspire our fans to go out and do creative things like this than by the things we choose to build ourselves inside the walls of the Institution.

A related highlighs reel mashes up man/woman/child-on-the-street video with the call-to-action (also by npampalone and strangeredfilms), a few of the video responses that have been submitted, and Jesse Dylan's Science Commons video, which I've added to drive-home some thoughts about the notion of a Smithsonian Commons. 

So submit your video to the Voice Your Vision group on YouTube and tell us what you think. We'll be uploading our vision to the strategy wiki in the coming weeks.

Brainstorming a Federal Alternate Reality Game

I’d like to invite Government Web practitioners (educators, marketers, and content developers, and leaders) to attend an informal workshop/brainstorming session to explore the idea of producing a Federal multi-agency Alternative Reality Game (ARG). The general idea of a multi-agency ARG would be to use game play as a way of engaging citizens in an exploration of democratic ideals. It would also be a way to discover new connections between Federal agencies, and new ways of connecting citizens to their government.  (Some background on ARGs is below.)

The workshop will be held Monday, June 22, from 1pm to 3pm, in offices near the National Air and Space Museum on the mall in Washington, D.C.

(RSVP info below)

Agenda:

• Overview of Alternate Reality Games, what they are, who plays them (you’ll be surprised), how they wor
• Drivers for a multi-agency ARG: why do it, and what might come of it
• Brainstorming over possible game scenarios, themes, outcomes, logistics, constraints
• Define next steps and action items

My co-hosts are:

• Chris Testa: Acting CIO an Director of Outreach Technology, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Georgina Goodlander: Manager, Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum
• John Maccabee: President, City Mystery

Some background about ARG’s

• Wikipedia article about ARGs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
• Paper about the Smithsonian’s recent “Ghosts of a Chance” ARG (Designed by John Maccabee and run by Georgina Goodlander at the American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center for American Art): http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/goodlander/goodlander.html
• Ghosts of a Chance home page: http://www.ghostsofachance.com/

If you’re interested in attending or have any questions please drop me a line: edsonm [at] si.edu.  I'll confirm attendees via email COB Friday, June 19th. Space is limited so act now!

Opposing viewpoints laid out at Smithsonian 2.0 Forum

Earlier this afternoon I attended the Smithsonian 2.0 Forum, a follow-up event to January's Smithsonian 2.0 Gathering. The Forum, webcast from the Smithsonian 2.0 website, presented three points of concern and opposing arguments for each point. The three points of contention: Access to Everything versus Controlled Content; Structure versus Freeedom; and Free Access versus Fee-based Access, where less contested than I expected. A couple comments stuck with me and are making me re-think my own opinion (which is that we can make our collections and our knowledge infinitely more accessible and sustain that access without being reckless in either our approach or our choices.)

First comment: knowledge is increasing at such a rapid pace that keeping web-delivered content up to date is an extremely challenging and expensive task, perhaps too much so. Wow, so true. We could try to address this reality by ourselves, or we could collaborate with other centers of expertise to do so. The former is very costly. Frankly, I think that knowledge is moving forward more and more rapidly specifically because the knowledge creators are collaborating more deeply and more often, using the Internet and 2.0 type technology. If the pace of knowledge development is driven by the collaboration and sharing of expertise via the Internet, should we be looking at a similar model to get the word out about the breakthroughs and new developments we are part of? Maybe others who find themselves in the same shoes?

Second comment: we (one of the museums) asked teachers what they wanted and they replied that what they really wanted was a space to meet up with other teachers, to collaborate with each other and find ways to incorporate the knowledge and content we had available on the web. This, I think, should be a core strategy. To create spaces where content-seekers can connect with our collections and with other content seekers. Where motivated individuals can work together to come up with innovative and effective ways to apply SI's content knowledge and expertise in ways we haven't thought of yet..

Both of these ideas are about "how." It seems that somewhere along the way, whether or not we use 2.0 tools to acquire and disseminate knowledge has been decided and that we are moving into the realm of "how" and "how much". Check out the webcast for yourself and comment back.

Moving beyond us vs. them

Recently one of our curators at NMAH came to me to discuss the aftermath of the Smithsonian 2.0 conference.  “You have an image problem,” he told me.  According to him, the buzz among his colleagues is that the conference was mostly a dump on curatorial authority, despite my protestations to the contrary.

Rethinking the role of credentialed expertise in a “crowdsourced” Web 2.0 world was certainly one of the subtexts of the weekend, and indeed of conversations in the larger online museum community.  And yes, some questioned the monopoly that credentialed experts have traditionally enjoyed over interpretation and allowed uses of our collections.  Dan Cohen and his crew over at the Center for History and New Media produced an excellent podcast on the subject as a follow-up to the conference that is well worth listening to for an informed outsider’s perspective on this topic.  On the podcast, Tom Scheinfeldt provides some useful historical context, reminding us that the question of who gets to interpret museum collections is as old as museums themselves, and periodically gets raised as museum practices change and evolve.

This is an area that really interests me.  I am convinced that as we continue to dialogue as a museum community, and collaboratively examine and experiment with new technologies to see how they might be of benefit, we will make progress toward solutions that threaten no one and benefit everyone.  Our NMAH blog is a good example of this.  When we started it last summer, it had a handful of advocates and contributors and many skeptics.  Now, it is really starting to blossom as more staff members come on board and use it to share their work and interact with the public.  Of course we hoped it would be an instant success, but in this instant-everything world, sometimes good old-fashioned persistence pays off (and Obama agrees with me on this...).

Speaking of sharing our work on the blog, I have started an effort to carry this very conversation to our blog readers and solicit their input on the role of the digital museum.  In response to an embedded survey about museums and trust, over 75% of our unscientific sample were of the opinion that museums would become even more important as trusted sources of online information (curators, take heart!).  Only 9% felt that museums’ role would diminish.  We will be using these responses to continue the conversation – please join us and follow along!

In addition, for anyone who will be at the AAM meeting in Philadelphia, I will be conducting an Idea Lounge discussion on the topic “Digitizing Museum Expertise.”  As museums continue to produce increasing amounts of digital data, how can we similarly expose our wealth of human talent by facilitating creative connections and/or collaborations between museum experts and online audiences?  Look for it on Sat., May 2 at 8 a.m.

Gorilla Marketing

This video—a marketing piece for the Grapes with Apes event at the National Zoo (tickets still available!)—brought to mind some advice we got from the experts invited to the Smithsonian 2.0 event in January.

They quipped that we could do more good distributing 100 video cameras to boots-on-the-ground staff than we could do with 100-times the money spent on consultants and systems. This is not to say that consultants and systems are unimportant, but the assembled digerati were amazed by the experts and collections they encountered here and were shocked that we weren't making more of each accessible.

The Grapes with Apes video was produced on a cheapo Cannon miniDV and iMovie by the Zoo's Rachel Meskin Jordan Watts. Rachel said "Just a little bit of creativity goes a long way."

Courage to go Open Content

Two recent stories may help give the Smithsonian courage to pursue an open-content strategy.

Item #1, MIT faculty votes for open publishing

Last week, MIT's faculty voted unanimously to mandate open access distribution of their scholarly articles. Other universities have open access policies within individual departments (Harvard, Stanford, and Boston University), but this is institution-wide. Their Office of the Provost will have authority and governance over the systems and business processes, in consultation with something called the Faculty Committee on the Library System. The policy allows faculty to opt-out on a publication-by-publication basis by submitting a request and justification to an as-yet defined review process.

MIT Faculty Chair Bish Sanyal is quoted as saying that the vote is "a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas."

MIT's Web site says that "MIT's policy is the first faculty-driven, university-wide initiative of its kind in the United States."

I think it's especially encouraging that the faculty chose to go this direction since they do so from a position of experience - -  the remarkable MIT Open Courseware project.

More from Open Access News, and a very thoughtful/informative story on MIT's site.

Item #2, U.S. Representative Mike Honda (D-San Jose) blogs on open content and crowdsourcing

Last week, U.S. Congressman Mike Honda (D-San Jose) wrote a guest article on the O'Reilly Radar Blog,

"How can Congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government? Instead of viewing the public as a customer for services, I believe that we should empower citizens to become our partners in shaping the future of our nation."

He continues,

"Websites like [stimuluswatch.org] only become possible when government data is re-purposed to enable public participation. Until more government databases become available, however, the full potential of web 2.0 technologies will remain unfulfilled. A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met."

Tomorrow's the day for the Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum

Back in January, I was treated to a preview of the Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life. Tomorrow, it opens its doors officially. The in-world ribbon-cutting ceremony and virtual building dedication happens at 1:30 p.m. with three of the Smithsonian Latino Center's Second Life islands, Smithsonian Latino Lobby, Smithsonian Latino Music, and Smithsonian Latino Expeditions, open to avatars. Normally the amount of our collections available to our visitors is constrained by physical space limitations, however this barrier is definitely being broken as many of the museums, research, and science centers find innovative ways to make so much more of our treasures accessible over the Web. The Latino Virtual Museum pulls together a number of different ideas from the Smithsonian 2.0 gathering, more access to collections and artifacts combined with online interaction for research and scholarship, exhibits, and immersive education activities.

I'm honored to pass along the Smithsonian Latino Center's invitation to join us in this adventure to explore Smithsonian world-class collections, superb scholarship, exciting programs and exhibitions through the lens of Second Life, a multi-user avatar based 3D (learning) virtual world environment.

Details are at http://latino.si.edu/education/LVM_Main.htm.

 

Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person

(open the animation in a bigger window)

I made this animation for the 2009 Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Webwise conference.

I was on a panel titled Online Communities and The Institution chaired by Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 with Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum and Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian of Congress for Library Services.

Nina wanted us to be provocative and I thought this might be the time and place to, as @ulotrichous (Eli Neiburger from Ann Arbor Public Library) said, defuse "traditional arguments against letting go of content." I was a little worried about the presentation. I thought that either I was being too harsh in caricaturing those who have reservations about online content, or that Webwise attendees were already past objections like "if we put content online nobody will come to our museum/library/archive."

Far from the case apparently.

Deanna said she thought the animation "was filmed inside the Library of Congress" and many many attendees told me that the script cut very close to home.

I'll cross-post this in alternate formats to slideshare and youtube, or you can follow this link to get to the .swf file for download and/or full screen viewing.