Clay Shirky at Smithsonian 2.0

Below are my notes from watching the video of Clay Shirky at the Smithsonian 2.0 event on YouTube. I figure they might be useful to someone, though I'm sure I missed interesting points, and I didn't take notes on bits that sounded like his talk in London a little while later.

[I've been thinking generally about the Smithsonian 2.0 event, and realised that it doesn't matter that from the outside, the outcomes weren't groundbreaking – a lot of what they were saying seemed self-evident, or least what is generally seen as The Right Thing to do in cultural heritage tech circles – the process was the important part.

It's not so much what they're saying, it's the fact they're having the conversation. Their institution made room, literal as well as metaphoric, for the conversation, and they (presumably) invited people from all over their organisations to participate in those conversations. It's the importance of the visibility of the project, the big name guests, the resources invested – that's the groundbreaking part.]

Anyway, onto the talk.   There were some good soundbits – for ten years we had 'new media capabilities but old media messages'. In the days of super-distribution, 'the critical moment for media isn't production, it's distribution'.

[This next paragraph (or 16'50" – 19' in the video) is transcribed a bit more closely as I wanted to quote it in an article]
'Look at what Flickr's done. They've reversed the usual pattern of interest groups. Usually it's 'let's get everybody who cares about High Dynamic Range photography in a room, and then we'll share what we know'. Gather, then share. On Flickr, the pattern is 'share, then gather'. The artifact itself has created the surface to which the people adhere. It's created the environment for the conversation. Every artifact is a latent community. Which is to say, every artifact, in addition to being interesting to the people who come to look at it, or read it or watch it or what have you, has additional potential value in that all the people who are looking at it might also be interested in talking to each other. You can imagine a hub and spoke system, where the artifact is at the hub… the group that assembled here didn't have to know in advance they cared about High Dynamic Range photography, all they had to know about was that they liked that picture. If you think of the artifact as a hub, and there are spokes leading into it, which are the people who care about it, you can draw the line now going in both directions, it's not just that the artifact goes outwards and people can view it, people can talk back. Everybody sort of gets that hub and spoke model.  What's really astonishing is the lateral lines, the lines you can draw among the spokes, because there are many more of those lines to be drawn than there are [of] the hub and spoke. So if every artifact is a latent community, much of social value comes from having these kinds of convening platforms available for people to start sharing value in communities of practice.'

The enormous cost of professionally managed artefacts… Library of Congress project on preserving digital artefacts… metadata in cataloguing system not about managing ideas, about managing artefacts. (Ontologies) force organisations to be mind readers and fortune tellers.

What could go wrong? People take digital assets, repurpose them. It's already happened.  [So it's ok.]  So if repurposing already happens, how do we get value out of it?

Fear of being expected to control everything with your name on it; society has internalised idea that you're not.  [So it's really ok.]  As well as the kinds of uses you don't have to expect, you get the kinds of uses you don't have to feel responsible for.

If taking tax dollars, should do something for the public. When implement new forms of sharing, it also changes the way things happen in the institution. It would be easier for a curator to find something from one of the Smithsonian museums because of the Commons.

Question – if it's good, will they always come? Ans: no. Qu: how do you deal with that? Ans: the effect of failure on an institution is likelihood times cost. Spend more time discussing whether something is a good idea than would have spent just trying it (yes!). It's easy digitally to fail fast, cheaply, easy to learn from failure.

If you want to have something spread to the public, try it a few different ways. Don't make one perfect system then assume it will pass on to the public, be propagated. Have a few different ways of trying things. On average, the stuff that interests people propagates; you can't treat it as a distributed media buy. Have an economic structure where you can afford prizes cos haven't put all eggs in one basket.

Question – following up on tagging on Flickr – reactions to when moustaches were being tagged – people felt it degraded the value of the content.  Ans: aggregate value of tag is high, create cross-cutting collection. But it's always possible to find the banal stuff. Objection is not that people are saying these things, it's that "we have to hear it now". Previously separated spheres of expert and public discourse…

Question – how do you measure value – two different ways of measuring it, how do you bring them together?  Ans: so many different kinds of value, no institution can create them all, but they can host them. So, how much is this costing us and is there any reason to stop it from happening?  (But was the qu about digitisation and other things with up-front costs?)

If you think value is only things that you buy and manage and control… being a platform increases value for and the loyalty of the people who go there.

Get thee to a wiki – the great API challenge in action

Help us work on an informal, lightweight way of devising shared data, API standards for museum and cultural heritage organisations – museum-api.pbwiki.com is open for business.

You could provide examples of APIs you've used or produced, share your experience as a consumer of web services, tell us about your collections.

Commenting on other people's queries and content is an easy way to get started.  I'd particularly love to hear from curators and collections managers – we should be working together to enable greater access to collections.  If you check it out and none of it makes any sense – be brave and say so!  We should be able to explain what we're doing clearly, or we're not doing it right.

Some background: as announced on the nascent museumdev blog, the Science Museum is looking at releasing an API soon – it'll be project-specific to start with, but we're creating it with the intention of using that as an iterative testing and learning process to design an API for wider use. We could re-invent the wheel, but we'd rather make it easy for people to use what they've learnt using other APIs and other museum collections – the easiest way to do that is to work with other museums and developers. The Science Museum's initial public-facing collections API will be used for a 'mashup competition' based on object metadata from our 'cosmos and culture' gallery.

Speaking of museumdev, I started it as somewhere where I could ask questions, point people to discussions, a home for collections of links and stuff in development.  It's also got random technical bits like 'Tip of the Day: saving web.config as Unicode' because I figure I might as well share my mistakes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H learning experiences in the hope that someone, somewhere, benefits.

Clay Shirky on 'mass internet collaboration' at London's ICA

There are my rough notes from Clay Shirky's talk on 'mass internet collaboration' and the question and answer session afterwards at the ICA on February 4 – I haven't had time to tidy them, so they really are pretty much 'as is', though I have checked my note-taking against my digital voice recorder. I have cheekily highlighted bits I found particularly interesting. I asked a question about museums at the very end, just keep scrolling.

I've put some photos (mostly of slides) up on Flickr.

Introduction – it's a speculative talk, looking at recent events, lessons from the Obama campaign and his early government.

Technology is having profound effect on the social environment. The recession means fairly significant choices this year.

The five word summary of his book 'Here Comes Everybody': group action just got easier. Devices, tools and the applications built on them have provided an antidote to some of the hassle factor when organising groups of people to do something.

What happens when you lower the cost of socialising, whether for amusement or to achieve something?

First example – no pants day. The group Improv Everywhere provided a place and time where people would show up. There was no technology in the event. The event could only happen, make sense, have the effect it had, in the real world. And yet it's the kind of event that couldn't have happened in any other time. To coordinate something like this globally, could only work if event organisers had access to a medium that's global, ubiquitous and social.

'No pants day' only works if a lot of people show up, it has to be a social event. Network technology isn't just another slice of the pie, it's the medium. The technology makes it possible but is not embedded in event itself, just the coordinating mechanism. He's used an intentionally trivial example [to introduce] the 'third sector'.

It's tough to get people to do anything, and there are two mechanisms for doing it. If you ask, can you get more revenue than it costs to do it, then it's the private sector. Or is there significantly high social value? Then it's the state, public sector.

That dichotomy has been a 'universal truth'. But the triviality of something like no pants day means no social cause or revenue. So it falls into the 'social sector'. We now have such low cost abilities to get groups of people doing things together that question is not about profit or social value, but 'would it be fun or interesting?'. The logic of social sector is 'why not do it?'.

Pressure on traditional institutions is growing because presence of social sector means the previous monopoly on group action is being challenged.

New models of production are going to challenge… things considerably more important than whether people are wearing their pants on the subway.

Chris Avenir's study group example. It caused a clash between world views, metaphors – arguments about what Facebook is – is it like a newspaper, or an extension of real world social life. The problem with metaphor is that it flattens whatever is most important about the question being asked. It turns out that Facebook is like Facebook.

It's not a question which of our old behaviours do we layer over this possibility, how do we update academic culture to take account of this. The physical limit imposed by the space where real world study group took place prevented freeriders because they were easy to detect and kick out. 'Small groups defend themselves quite well against freeriders. Larger groups don't'. A network works because it's freerider-tolerant, not freerider-resistant. This is pedagogically problematic in a study group.

Two messages – one to students about progress through discourse, one to outside world saying you get a student filled with knowledge. Facebook caused those two messages to collapse. There's no easy solution to this.

The capability for large-scale geographically unbound learning is something academe can't integrate without changing dramatically, but it's also something they can't forgo. [I'd be interested to know what the UK's Open University feels about this.]

Power to engage is not with the academy, it's with the students. The change being brought to the institution isn't being brought by the people who run the institution, but by the members of the institutions acting as individuals.

Next example – Gnarly Kitty, a student in Bangkok with a personal blog which was suddenly swamped with attention during the Thai coup. "We're not used to seeing things that are in public but not for the public". Change in logic – why not publish it. When the Thai coup happened, the media didn't report it, so this blogger was the first person to get pictures of tanks in Bangkok out of Thailand. Her blog became conduit of news and images from in and outside Thailand. When she went back to talking about phones she'd like, commentators didn't like it. Her response – "This blog is my personal blog where I usually write things concerning my life and things I like. … I'll continue posting about the Coup whenever there are crucial updates that need attention but I will not make any political comment or turn the whole blog into a politic-centric one."

There's no way to square that kind of amateur motivation with what we're used to. Journalism is moving from a profession to an activity. The blogger committed an act of journalism, and it mattered on a global scale. There will be occasionally people like Gnarly Kitty who commit occasional acts of journalism. "Occasional times a billion is a lot".

The infrastructure where journalism operates has changed, not because of choices made by existing journalists, but the environment in which journalistic institutions has changed because of things like this.

Next example – the Obama campaign and win. It's has transformed not just what's possible, it's also changed people's sense of what's possible. In 2006 you could not have found a bookie in the States who would have taken your money on a bet for a black president. The mainstream media couldn't report Obama as a significant possibility because then they would be seen to be shilling for him. There was a sense of 'noble but doomed' in their reporting in 2006/07.

A few things happened to change this. Will-I-AM's video had 16 million views on YouTube by early 2007. "It made Obama seem possible". It shifted perception so people thought 'maybe that could happen'. Because in politics, perception is reality, so that change of making Obama seem possible had the circular effect of making Obama be possible.

The Obama campaign did not commission or vet the video. Will-I-Am did not need permission. Obama is "the first platform candidate". First to send a message to the public that said, this is my message and this is how it's conveyed. They gave implicit permission and the materials were all re-use and re-mix friendly. Sometimes the friendliness was quite explicit – Creative Commons licenced – sometimes it was just that you could see how to do it. It was easy to imagine how to make campaign media from it. Not easy to see how to do that for McCain, partly because his campaign was in terror of loss of control. The McCain campaign's idea of outreach was making copy and paste comments available. People who weren't political professionals were able to participate.

'Sing for change' video – a school teacher had kids sing a song she'd written. "It was a horror" to see people who weren't old enough to vote repeat words in unison that an adult had put into their mouth. Teacher clearly thought she was doing the right thing. The reaction was instant.

You can take down a URL but you can't take back a video that's out. Copies were annotated and remixed by Republican commentators (this was the height of remix in McCain's campaign).

But – no-one blamed Obama. There wasn't the implicit sense that 'if your name is on it, you must control it', if we don't like it it's your fault. Old media rules no longer applied to new media landscape. ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) meetup case. "If it's got our name on it, we have to police it as tightly as if it came from central office".

Those days have passed. The adoption of these tools by people repurposing… [?]

"You can't give up control without that control going somewhere." There's no real way to embrace these tools without embracing a kind of two-way responsibility to the people who make most passionate use of it.

MyBarackObama (myBO) – they didn't use Facebook because Facebook is too satisfying. They didn't want to create a satisfying experience because they wanted to drive their users to do hard work like hold meetings, go out and get votes.

Facebook groups [are practically] 'shout outs for ending world hunger'. It's not clear how the link between joining and the nominal effect is actually happening, but the act of joining is satisfying and means people don't actually take any further action. MyBO was utilitarian about putting people together, forming groups to do things.

When Obama reversed his position on a particular bill, the principal challenge to that behaviour came from MyBO. The ingenious trick was to make the act of joining the group against signing the bill be a vote for the message of the group. Obama was forced to make a public response – he took the flack for it but didn't change his support for the bill.

This holding to account of a politician by their own supporters was a watershed moment. There was a cynicism that this was propaganda, until people saw that his own supporters were willing to call him out in his own forum, and that the Obama people didn't shut it down or try to hide the response.

Will he govern like he campaigned? He ran his candidature as a platform, the user-generated media was significantly value, created useful feedback loops. Because he's engaging the passion of the supporters rather than a 'managerial relationship', he has to respond publicly when they're angry. How much of this is going to carry over into his administration?

change.gov was the site of the transition team
which asked, 'what should our administration be concentrating on?'. You could make a suggestion or vote on other people's suggestion. First issue to the top, and it stayed that way the whole time, was 'please legalise medical marijuana'.

That has been a real comeuppance [for Shirky]. Democratic legitimacy of participation over the internet, lowered barriers to political participation seemed to be a good thing. Yet when he sees this, in the context of economic crisis, wars, etc – how can they think the marijuana thing is what he wants the first day administration to focus on.

[I thought about this later – could some of this be because the mass of ordinary people don't feel capable of making or voting on suggestions for complicated specialist issues like the economy? Was there a long tail of more 'serious', nuanced suggestions focused on pressing economic, foreign policy, social and environmental issues? It'd be interesting to find out.]

Democracies don't just have votes because they allow the group to come to some kind of wisdom of crowds, they also have votes to legitimate the results of a decision. We want to rely on voting to legitimate the outcome, but when we see medical marijuana at the top of change.gov, we can't.

[It took me a while to get this – that votes on change.gov could be regarded as being as real as votes cast in the ballot box, or in a town hall meeting. Before this, I'd assumed everyone thought of internet votes as not being worth the paper they were printed on. Some of it's probably a cultural issue, having grown up with compulsory voting (well, you had to turn up, what you did with your paper before you put it in the box was up to you). Of course it's different in the UK and the US.]

Three options for dealing with this – 1) when we get broad national participation in digital plebiscites, it would be like directing democracy into the veins of the country. He's not willing to legitimate medical marijuana as the choice of the American people, it's clearly just another pressure group.

2) treat it as a PR exercise. But if you cherry pick what you take seriously, you haven't altered the political [landscape?].

3) figure out how to drag this kind of participation into the world of checks and balances. Isometric tension among competing interests. Can't currently say on the internet that are sure that everyone voted and that those votes around counted accurately, then can't yet integrate into democratic processes.

These tools don't gradually spread into a culture, they gradually spread under radar then are cemented in a time of crisis [?]. Some things (the kinds of surveillance) we relied on journalists for have been remanded to camera-phone carrying public.

2009 [will see] considerable integration, adoption, of these tools around the fact that people are groping for new models… and processes? Look back on a time when made decisions considerably more momentous [than medical marijuana?]

How do we open this up to new participation without opening up to dramatic system gaming or significant problems of delegitimisation?

The end!

Questions
Qu: what happens to organisations in this time of change? When you only have a choice of hiring old style command-and-control journalists but want to change.
Ans: depends on organisation. Laws on Obama's desk to sign are published online five days before they're signed, five long days with press hounding you if you're trying to sneak through a 'bridge to nowhere' bill. The risk is that Americans, not having much knowledge of government, won't know where to put the blame if they see a bill they don't like. Pressure should be put back onto Congress but risk is that Obama will be blamed for signing bills people don't like. Lesson is – there's no way to change institutions in a low stakes way.

We hope Obama goes the whole hog and adopts the 'fail fast, learn more' model rather than betting whole farm on single institutional change. Institutions are homeostatic. A lot of it is going to be about process rather than personality.

Qu: should we be setting up a series of codes of practice for deployment of social media in public spaces [good question].
Ans: Essentially yes. The question is, to what degree should lawyers be involved? He's been doing research on internet and generosity, the effect of culture on that. The Invisible College – an attempt in England to internalise scientific practice. 'This is how you write end results, share them, how the conversation should go'. They went after alchemists for failing to be informative when they were wrong, it was ok to be wrong but they wanted them to think about and share what went wrong. It wasn't a government thing but the benefit to England has been extraordinary. Today's event flyer said 'we encourage you to take pictures, etc', but if went to lawyer, got a series of waivers, processes, announcements, etc – would make less progress in slower time to smaller effect. Difference between institutions that encourage photo taking, blogging, etc, and those that don't, should start playing out.

Maybe we don't need to write down code of conduct, just make it a social norm at events with things like back of program. [But does that allow for negotiation of different needs? I have a friend who blogs semi-anonymously and photos at events would blow that for her. I just hate being photographed, and especially being photographed and tagged or otherwise identified – how does that work for me? I guess we're working it out on places like Facebook, where one tag-happy friend has gradually learnt that we'll all freeze her out when she approaches with her camera because no-one wants to spend the next morning un-tagging photos. But I can't un-tag a photo someone else has labelled on Flickr.]

Qu (Danny) – Reagan's war on drugs had significant effect in US, so why does medical marijuana delegitimate change.gov?
Ans – in terms of issue, the war on drugs was catastrophe, would like to see it solved. But in change.gov it's the difference between the number of people who are interested and the degree to which a small group of people is interested. The history of democracy is figuring out how to balance relatively small, well organised groups with interests of large, relatively disorganised groups. I don't trust that in a general poll that result would be in top ten of concerns of American public. The intensity of people who believe in that issue, doesn't translate into 'this is the thing that legitimates the administration spending its time on that issue'.

Digg is rife with system gaming, but it doesn't matter because it's a self-contained media outlet. The benefit of market is that if you don't like Digg you can switch to another service. We can't switch governments. The things we use to legitimate stuff like Digg isn't the same as legitimating an internet plebiscite.

We're at the point where majority of people in highly developed countries have internet, but that doesn't rise to level of serious voting.

Qu: three options on medical marijuana. Healthy communities seem to be comfortable with having 'thousand pound gorilla' moderation – why can't take a leaf out of that (book)?
Ans: the mechanism that works best on internet and open source communities is 'benevolent dictatorship'. Linus Torvalds, even Jimmy Wales. Benevolent dictatorship works in internet environment and not in real world because of the threat of both switching and forking. Switching – benevolent dictatorship is mediated cos if your population doesn't like what you're doing, they can up sticks and move to another project. Or they take entirely of your project and start a completely new version (forking). It's only happened a few times but all benevolent dictators are aware of it.

You can't switch or fork real estate. People who are dissatisfied can't easily move. The things that keep open source projects working can't be trivially ported into real world environment. So everybody who lives in geographic range lives in particular regime – it's a different set of problems. Do-ocracy model (do more, get more benefit than people who just talk about code). The last step is bigger gap than imagined.

Qu: kinds of new models coming out of current crisis? Revolutionary new business models, give us a clue what's next?
Ans: he tries not to use word revolutionary. Linus Torvalds and Jimmy Wales's first message to world about wikipedia and linux were incredibly modest. No claims about altering the world, just 'give it a try'. Claims to revolution are orthogonal, inversely proportional to the likelihood of revolution.

With that caveat, he's watching logic of peer-to-peer networking apply to other things where there's a high degree of centrality and resource that actually exists at the edges. In a recession, most important thing with that characteristic is money. Mutualisation in US, re-mutualisation in Britain.

Prosper.com – peer-to-peer lending. Suddenly have pool of people watching you to make sure doing right thing with whatever you borrowed the money for. People willing to go through that, emotional connection better guarantor than model of risk? But seen how other models of risk have played out. Body shutting that down have missed three huge things within their charter – the SEC is no good at detecting challenges within the status quo, but they're very good at detecting challenges to the status quo.

So to what degree will mutualisation happen? To what degree will the government get in or stay out of the way?

Qu: contrast between marijuana e.g. and myBO FISA bill issue?
Ans: this gets to concerns about change.gov. When campaigning, Obama was answerable to supporters. When president, he's answerable to everyone, including people who aren't part of his community. The FISA telecomms bill was an internal argument that doesn't have national ramifications. Once you govern, you have to govern everybody – that's when legitimation concerns kick in.

Qu: [me, sounding like a complete dork. I hate asking questions in public.] In a post-Smithsonian 2.0, post-Digital Britain world, what messages for holders of cultural content, (e.g. museums, television stations), how we can engage with third, social sector, and generally, what are our responsibilities?

An: it's funny, in US, museums are more privatised. So he thinks less in terms of language of responsibility and more in terms of language of opportunity. Smithsonian on Flickr Commons. They were excited and astonished to see that people were saying 'hey I really like this photo' but also 'this is a mailbox from 1840, here's a link to additional material'. The curation of material, not just appreciation, was broadened and deepened by that [outreach? ]. And yet, of the total holdings of SI, they've only got c6000 images out. This is in part because curatorial imperative is challenged by exactly this. As evidence that this is not worth doing, people point to 'oh, that's a nice picture' comments and say it's insipid, ridiculous. 'Go stand next to someone in a museum sometime!' It's not that people are saying these things, it's just you can (now) hear them, and you're desperate for earplugs because the curators have not had to hear them.

A little like the change.gov analogy – if nothing new were invented new tomorrow, we have all the technology [technological mechanisms] we need to treat holders of cultural content not as just repositories but as conveyers. Of conversation, additional curation, of re-use – the framework is all there. Legal, technological. If I was running one of these institutions, I'd spend more time worrying about the institutional change than the technological platform.

Saw something that might spread – room where group of designers were watching a webcam that showed a user trying to use a system. Meetup make someone who works in the design department watch someone trying to use their system *every day*. Can you imagine if Microsoft did that? 'You can't work here very long without encountering an actual user'. If I wanted to change an institution in the direction of thinking of yourselves as a convenor as well as a repository, I'd work on ways to get the encounter between the public and the professionals to happen. Not in a big conference, but just – for fifteen minutes you have to go to the gallery and you have to talk to somebody about what they just saw. Easy technically, hard institutionally. That institutional transformation is going to be the next big platform. [or ? that's coming]

And that was the end of questions.

At the time, I made a note of Need to Know's old slogan: They've stolen our revolution, we're stealing it back, but now I can't remember why.

BBC to put 200,000 paintings from the Public Catalogue Foundation online

This could be fantastic – I hope the BBC will work with the museum sector to complement the work they're already doing or planning to get their collections online.  From the Guardian, BBC to put nation's oil paintings online:

A partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation charity will see all the UK's publicly owned oil paintings – 80% of which are not on public display – placed on the internet by 2012.

The BBC said it wanted to establish a new section of its bbc.co.uk website, called Your Paintings, where users could view and find information on the UK's national collection.

The Public Catalogue Foundation, launched in 2003, is 30% of the way through cataloguing the UK's collection of oil paintings.

In addition the BBC said it was talking to the Arts Council about giving the public free online access to its archive for the first time, including its wide-ranging film collection dating back to the 1950s. 

[Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, said:] "Today we are not only reaffirming our commitment to arts, but we're announcing a series of measures that will put this relationship on an even stronger footing. Through innovative new partnerships, I believe the BBC can deliver big, bold arts programming that is accessible, distinctive and enjoyable."

I do wonder what Time Out's Tony Elliott would make of it.

'The strikethrough is the canonical symbol of the Web'

Below is a quote from Wired's Chris Anderson on museum, curatorial authority and the long tail, from a Washington Post report, 'Smithsonian Click-n-Drags Itself Forward' on Smithsonian 2.0 ('A Gathering to Re-Imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age').

The quote really covers two issues – making failures and mistakes in public and leaving them there, and training external volunteers and experts to curate parts of collections, because no one curator can be authoritative on everything in their remit: "in exchange for a slight diminution of the credentialed voice for a small number of things, you would get far more for a lot of things".

I suspect this is a false dichotomy – there's a place for both internal and external expertise. The Science Museum object wiki doesn't mean the rest of the collection catalogue and interpretation has no value or relevance. The challenge lies in presenting organisation and user-contributed content in the same interface – can those boundaries be removed? Is it wise to try? And what about taking external content back into the catalogue?

This isn't a new conversation for museum technologists, but it's a conversation I'd love to have with curators. I've never been sure how the technologists who get really excited by the possibilities of sharing content online in various ways can go about working with curators to find the best way of managing it so that the public, the collections and the curators benefit.

Anyway, onto Chris Anderson:

The discovery of the "long tail" principle has implications for museums because it means there is vast room at the bottom for everything. Which means, Anderson said, that curators need to get over themselves. Their influence will never be the same.

"The Web is messy, and in that messiness comes something new and interesting and really rich," he said. "The strikethrough is the canonical symbol of the Web. It says, 'We blew it, but we are leaving that mistake out there. We're not perfect, but we get better over time.' "

If you think that notion gives indigestion to an organization like the Smithsonian — full of people who have devoted much of their lifetimes to bringing near-perfect luster to some tiny pearl of truth — you would be correct.

The problem is, "the best curators of any given artifact do not work here, and you do not know them," Anderson told the Smithsonian thought leaders. "Not only that, but you can't find them. They can find you, but you can't find them. The only way to find them is to put stuff out there and let them reveal themselves as being an expert."

Take something like, oh, everything the Smithsonian's got on 1950s Cold War aircraft. Put it out there, Anderson suggested, and say, "If you know something about this, tell us." Focus on the those who sound like they have phenomenal expertise, and invest your time and effort into training these volunteers how to curate. "I'll bet that they would be thrilled, and that they would pay their own money to be given the privilege of seeing this stuff up close. It would be their responsibility to do a good job" in authenticating it and explaining it. "It would be the best free labor that you can imagine."

It didn't go down easily among the thought leaders, who have staked their lives' work on authoritativeness, on avoiding strikethroughs. What about the quality and strength of the knowledge we offer? asked one Smithsonian attendee.

You don't get it, Anderson suggested. "There aren't enough of you. Your skills cannot be invested in enough areas to give that quality."

It's like Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, Anderson said. Some Wikipedia entries certainly are not as perfectly polished as the Britannica. But "most of the things I'm interested in are not in the Britannica. In exchange for a slight diminution of the credentialed voice for a small number of things, you would get far more for a lot of things. Something is better than nothing." And right now at the Smithsonian, what you get, he said, is "great" or "nothing."

"Is it our job to be smart and be the best? Or is it our job to share knowledge?" Anderson asked.

What makes a good API? JISC want to know

Tony Hirst blogged about a JISC survey on good APIs, so if you're an API producer or consumer with a few minutes to spare then have your say on good APIs:

The aim of this survey is to identify best practice which should be adopted when making use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). The feedback will inform a report for JISC on best practices related to the development of and use of APIs in JISC's development activities and will be made freely available.

You might not be directly affected by JISC's funding decisions, but I think the entire cultural heritage sector could benefit from better information on the best practices for API creation and use. Early last year I heard a speaker say 'APIs are UIs for programmers' and the nicer the UI we get to work with, the easier our jobs are. Apart from anything else, the more good examples out there, the more creating an API for any digitisation project will become the norm.

Innovation crunch?

Slightly old (mid-December) news, but I've had deadlines/been on holidays: Google Shutters Its Science Data Service:

Google will shutter its highly-anticipated scientific data service in January without even officially launching the product, the company said in an e-mail to its beta testers.

Once nicknamed Palimpsests, but more recently going by the staid name, Google Research Datasets, the service was going to offer scientists a way to store the massive amounts of data generated in an increasing number of fields. About 30 datasets — mostly tests — had already been uploaded to the site.

The dream appears to have fallen prey to belt-tightening at Silicon Valley's most innovative company.

What do stories like this mean for innovation in 2009, as we lurch on in a state of financial panic/crisis? And as with layoffs at Flickr, there's possibly a salutary lesson for cultural heritage organisations investing resources with even the biggest companies – always make sure you've got backups and an exit strategy.

QR tags edging towards mainstream?

A London-based 'tech PR' blog post said this week:

When Kelly Brooks starts appearing in ads featuring QR codes you know that the 2D dot matrix bar code technology is close to a tipping point. Brooks features in a Pepsi campaign that has gone live this week and images of her clutching a QR code have featured in most of the tabloids.

Source: QR codes and the Kelly Brooks Pepsi campaign, hat tip for link: Heleana Quartey.

See also p8tch.com who says 'think of it as a TinyURL you can wear' and emmacott.com who say 'wear your profile'. There's even a Facebook 'add to friends' QR app and a Google Charts QR Code API.

It's interesting timing, as QR codes were discussed in a MCG thread on 'Putting web addresses on interpretation' that was in essence about linking from the offline physical world and online content.

While they're not mainstream enough to be a viable solution yet, we could be getting close to the tipping point where QR tags might become a viable way of bookmarking real world objects and locations. QR tags also provide a way of linking locations to online content without the requirements for a location-aware device.

Finding problems for QR tags to solve

QR tags (square or 2D barcodes that can hold up to 4,296 characters) are famously 'big in Japan'. Outside of Japan they've often seemed a solution in search of a problem, but we're getting closer to recognising the situations where they could be useful.

There's a great idea in this blog post, Video Print:

By placing something like a QR code in the margin text at the point you want the reader to watch the video, you can provide an easy way of grabbing the video URL, and let the reader use a device that's likely to be at hand to view the video with…

I would use this a lot myself – my laptop usually lives on my desk, but that's not where I tend to read print media, so in the past I've ripped URLs out of articles or taken a photo on my phone to remind myself to look at them later, but I never get around to it. But since I always have my phone with me I'd happily snap a QR code (the Nokia barcode software is usually hidden a few menus down, but it's worth digging out because it works incredibly well and makes a cool noise when it snaps onto a tag) and use the home wifi connection to view a video or an extended text online.

As a 'call to action' a QR tag may work better than a printed URL because it saves typing in a URL on a mobile keyboard.

QR tags would also work well as physical world hyperlinks, providing a visible sign that information about a particular location is available online or as a short piece of text encoded in the QR tag. They could work as well for a guerrilla campaign to make contested or forgotten histories visible again – stickers are easy to produce and can be replaced if they weather – as for official projects to take cultural heritage content outside the walls of the museum.

The Powerhouse Museum have also experimented with QR tags, creating special offer vouchers.

Here's the obligatory sample QR – if your phone has a barcode reader you should get the URL of this blog*:

qrcode

* which is totally not optimised for mobile reading as the main pages tend to be quite long but it works ok over wifi broadband.

[Update – I just came across this post about Barcode wikipedia that suggests: "People would be able to access the info by entering/scanning the barcode number. The kind of information that would be stored against the product would be things like reviews, manufacturing conditions, news stories about the product/manufacturer, farm subsidies paid to the manufacturer etc." I'm a bit (ok, a lot) of a hippie and check product labels before I buy – I love this idea because it's like a version of the ethical shopping guide small enough to fit inside my wap phone.]

[Update 2 – more discussion of a 'what are QR codes good for' ilk over at http://blog.paulwalk.net/2008/10/24/quite-resourceful/]

UKOLN's one-stop shop 'Cultural Heritage' site

I've been a bad blogger lately (though I do have some good excuses*), so make up for it here's an interesting new resource from UKOLN – their Cultural Heritage site provides a single point of access to 'a variety of resources on a range of issues of particular relevance to the cultural heritage sector'.

Topics currently include 'collection description, digital preservation, metadata, social networking services, supporting the user experience and Web 2.0'. Usefully, the site includes IntroBytes – short briefing documents aimed at supporting use of networked technologies and services in the cultural heritage sector and an Events listing. Most sections seem to have RSS feeds, so you can subscribe and get updates when new content or events are added.

* Excuses include: (offline) holidays, Virgin broadband being idiots, changing jobs (I moved from the Museum of London to an entirely front-end role at the Science Museum) and I've also just started a part-time MSc in Human-Centred Systems at City University's School of Informatics.