Notes from 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC'

I've just spent two days in Leicester for the 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC' conference at the school of Museum Studies, part of the AHRC-funded iSay project focusing on Visitor-Generated Content (VGC) in heritage institutions. There will be lots of posts on the conference blog, so these are just some things that struck me or I've found useful concepts for thinking about my own museum practice.

I tweeted about the event as I headed to Leicester, and that started a conversation about the suitability of the term 'visitor-generated content' that continued through the event itself. I think it was Giasemi who said that one problem with 'visitor-generated content' is that the term puts the emphasis on content and that's not what it's about. Jeremy Ottevanger suggested 'inbound communications' as a possible replacement for VGC.

The first keynote was Angelina Russo, who reminded us of the importance of curiosity and of finding ways to make museum collections central to visitor engagement work. She questioned the value of some comments left on museum collections other than the engagement in the process of leaving the comment. Having spent too much time reviewing visitor comments, I have to agree that not all comments (particularly repetitive ones) have inherently valuable content or help enhance another visitor's experience – a subject that was debated during the conference. A conversation over twitter during the conference with Claire Ross helped me realise that designing interfaces that respect and value the experience of both the commenter and reading is one of the interesting challenges in digital participation.

She then used Bourdieu's ideas around 'restricted cultural production' to characterise the work of curators as producers who create cultural goods for other producers, governed by specific norms and sanctions, within relatively self-contained communities where their self-esteem depends on peers. However, this creates a tension between what curators think their role is and what museums need it to be in an age when museums are sites of large-scale cultural production for 'the public at large', driven by a quest for market share and profits. Visitor-generated content and the related issues of trust, authority, or digitisation highlight the tensions between these models of restricted or large-scale cultural production – we need to find 'a pathway through the sand'. Angelina suggested that a version of Bourdieu's 'gift economies', where products are created and given away in return for recognition might provide a solution, then asked what's required to make that shift within the museum. How can we link the drive for participation with the core work of museums and curatorial scholarship? She presented a model (which I haven't gone into here) for thinking about 'cultural communication', or communication which is collection-led; curiosity-driven; is scholarly; experiential; and offers multi-platform opportunities for active cultural participation, engagement and co-creation.

Carl Hogsden from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and University of Cambridge talked about the Reciprocal Research Network and moving beyond digital feedback to digital reciprocation. This project has been doing innovative work for a long time, so it was good to see it presented again.

Jenny Kidd from Cardiff University posed some useful questions in 'VGC and ethics – what we might learn from the media and journalism' – it's questionable how much VGC (or user-generated content, UGC) has actually changed journalism, despite the promise of increased civic engagement, diversity, more relevant news and a re-framing of the audience as active citizens rather than consumers. One interesting point was the impact of the 'Arab Spring' on UGC – content that couldn't be verified couldn't be shown by traditional media so protesters started including establishing shots and improving the quality of their recordings. This was also the first of several papers that referenced 'Whose cake is it anyway', a key text for conversations about visitor participation and museums and Jenny suggested that sometimes being seen to engage in participatory activity is currently possibly end goal in itself for a museum. She presented questions for further research and debate including: is the museum interested in quality of process or product of VGC and do creators feel the same? How does VGC fit in workflow models of museums?

Giasemi Vavoula's paper on 'The role of VGC in digital transformations in Museum Learning' (slides) was fascinating, particularly as it presented frameworks for audience engagement taken from learning theory that closely matched those I'd found from studies of citizen science and engagement in heritage and sport (e.g. cognitive engagement model – highest is theorising, then applying, relating, explaining, describing, note-taking, memorising… Good visitor experiences get most visitors to use the higher engagement level processes that the more focused visitors use spontaneously). I love learning from Learning people – in museum learning/visitor studies, social interaction facilitates learning; visitors negotiate the meanings of exhibits through conversation with their companions. Giasemi called for museums to weave VGC into the fabric of visitors social contexts; to scaffold and embed it into visiting experience; and to align with visitors and organisations' social agendas.

In 'A Tale of Two Workhouses' Peter Rogers and Juliet Sprake spoke of 'filling in the gaps rather than being recipients of one-way information flow', which tied in nicely with discussion around the role of curiosity in audience participation.

In the afternoon there was a Q&A session with Nina Simon (via skype). A number of the questions were about sustainability, designing for mixed contexts, and the final question was 'where next from here?'. Nina advised designing participatory experiences so that people can observe the activity and decide to take part when they're comfortable with it – this also works for designing things that work as spectator experiences for people who don't want to join in. Nina's response to a question about 'designing better questions' – 'find questions where you have genuine interest in what the visitor has to say about it' – resonated with wider discussion about meaningful visitor participation. Nina talked about the cumulative effect of participatory work on the museum itself, changing not only how the museum sees itself but how others see it – I wonder how many museums in the UK are engaging with visitor participation to the extent that it changes the museum itself? Nina also made the point that you tend to have either highly participatory process to make conventional product, or conventional process to make highly participatory product, and that not everything has to be wholly participatory from start to finish, which is useful for thinking how co-creative projects.

On Friday morning I gave a keynote on 'crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage'. My slides for 'Crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage' are now online. I partly wanted to problematise the power relationships in participatory projects – whose voice can affect change? – and to tease out different ways of thinking about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage as productive both in terms of the process (engaging in cultural heritage) and the product (the sheer number of items transcribed, corrected, etc). I've been going back to research on motivations for volunteering in cultural heritage, working on open source projects and reviewing discussions with participants in crowdsourcing projects, and I hope it'll help people design projects that meet those altruistic, extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Thinking about my paper in the context of the other presentations also got me thinking about the role of curiosity in audience engagement and encouraging people to start researching a subject (whether a ship's history, an individual or a general topic) more deeply. On a personal note, this paper was a good chance to reflect on the different types of audience engagement with museum collections or historic sources and on the inherent value of participation in cultural heritage projects that underpin my MSc and PhD research and my work in museums generally.

Areti Galani presented research she'd done with Rachel Clarke (Newcastle University), and asked 'how can accessible technology lead to inaccessible participation paradigms?'. I was really interested in the difference between quality of the visitor contributions in-gallery vs online (though of course 'quality' is a highly subjective term), a question that surfaced through the day. Areti's research might suggest that building in some delay in the process of contributing in-gallery could lead to better quality (i.e. more considered) contributions. The novelty of the technology used might also have an effect – 'pen-happy visitors' who used the technology for the sake of interacting with it but didn't know what to do after picked up the pen.

The paper from Jeremy Ottevanger (Imperial War Museums) on "Social Interpretation" as a catalyst for organisational change generated more discussion on possible reasons why online comments on museum sites tend to be more thoughtful than in-gallery comments, with one possible reason being that online commenters have deliberately sought out the content, so already have a deeper engagement with those specific items, rather than just coming across them while moving through the physical gallery. Jeremy talked about the need for the museum to find an internal workflow that was appropriately responsive to online comments – in my experience, this is one of the most difficult issues in planning for digital projects. Jeremy presented a useful categorisation of online contributions as personal (emotional, opinion, personal information, anecdotes, family history), requests and queries (object info, valuation, family history, digitisation and licencing, offering material, access, history, general/website), and informational (new information, corrections) and looked at which types of contribution were responded to by different departments. He finished with a vision of the IWM harnessing the enthusiasm and knowledge of their audiences to help serve the need of other audiences, of connecting people with expertise with people who have questions.

Jack Ashby talked about finding the right questions for the QRator project at the Grant Museum of Zoology – a turtle is a turtle, and there's not a lot of value in finding out what visitors might want to call it, but asking wider questions could be more useful. Like the wider Social Interpretation project, QRator always raises questions for me about whether museums should actively 'garden' visitor interactives, pruning out less relevant questions to create a better experience for other visitors.

Rolf Steier and Palmyre Pierroux discussed their findings on the role of the affordances of social media and visitor contributions in museums. Rosie Cardiff talked about the Tate's motivations for participatory projects with audiences, and audience motivations for participating in Tate's projects. She presented some considerations for organisations considering participatory projects: who is the audience? What motivations for visitor and for organisation? What platform will you use? How will the content be moderated? (Who will do it?) Where will it sit in relation to organisational space online or in-gallery? How long will it run for? What plans for archiving and maintaining content beyond lifetime of project? How will you measure success? How will you manage audience expectations about what's going to happen to their work? This last point was also picked up in discussions about audience expectations about how long museums will keep their contributions.

The final presentation was Ross Parry's keynote on 'The end of the beginning: Normativity in the postdigital museum. Based on new research into how six UK national (i.e. centrally funded, big, prestigious museums) have started to naturalise 'digital' into their overall museum vision, this paper gave me hope for the future. There's still a long way to go, but Ross articulated a vision of how some museums are integrating digital in the immediate future, and how it will integrated once the necessary stage of highlighting 'digital' in strategies, organisational structures and projects has given way to a more cohesive incorporation of 'digital' into the fabric of museums. It also makes sense in the context of discussions about digital strategies in museums over the past year (e.g. at the Museums Assocation and UK Museums on the Web (themes, my report) conferences).

I had to leave before the final session, so my report ends here, but I expect there'll be more reports on the project blog and I've saved an archive of isayevent_tweets_2013_02_01 (CSV).

I think the organisers, Giasemi Vavoula and Jenny Kidd, did a great job on the conference programme. The papers and audience were a well-balanced combination of academics and practioners – the academic papers gave me interesting frameworks to think with, and the case studies provided material to think about.

It's Backup Saturday!

Ironically (?), the original image is no longer available

If Backup Saturday is too casual, call it Digital Preservation Saturday. Whatever you call it, it's time to do some digital housekeeping.

This post is an attempt to reduce the number of sad status updates or requests for help I see when people have lost years of personal photos, contacts or calendars when their laptop or phone died or was stolen, or when people can't recover that vital document for their research or tax return… There's never a perfect time to do it, so just back up your files now. Phones and laptops are particularly easy to lose and are more likely to have precious photos or important documents, so start with them.

If you don't have an external hard drive order one online and in the meantime, burn to a CD or DVD or copy files to a USB stick.  There's no harm in having lots of copies (barring confusion over different versions of docs), so if you want to be really careful, swap external drives with a friend so you've each got an off-site copy of your most important files.  Use online services like Dropbox (my referral link, non-referral link) etc to keep files on your computer backup up online, but don't rely on them alone.  (The referral links give us each extra storage, which is nice.)

Backup email

Things change all the time so always check for more recent advice (this goes for everything on the page), but this article covers some good options for backing up Gmail (or try GMVault) and here's information on backing up Thunderbird, and try this if you're stuck on Outlook. I download an old Yahoo account to Thunderbird via POP mail, which might be the easiest way to deal with YMail and Hotmail.

While you're at it, back up your profile or preferences for your web browser – it's amazing how much information is stored in your browser history, bookmarks, etc. You can access saved passwords in Firefox and other browsers – obviously saving screenshots of the screen is a security risk but it can also help you remember older passwords if you're locked out of software.

Backup social media

'Turbulence' seems to be the IT trend for this decade (and maybe every decade), so it's a good idea to regularly back up whatever social media sites you rely on.  I haven't tried services like Backupify (more info) – if you've got experience with them, let me know in the comments.  Check back over your registration emails to remind yourself which services you've signed up for and use that as a checklist.

Services that backup tweets and other social media come and go (like Twapperkeeper and Twitoaster), so it's a good idea to not only choose services that let you easily export your archive, but also to put a monthly note in your calender to go in and actually run the export.  Saved copies of web pages might not work later, so a really low-tech solution is to copy all the text in a page and dump it into a text file or e.g Word document.  I use SearchHash to archive hashtags, but you have to get in quickly as the Twitter API often only provides access to the past few days' tweets.  You can also archive tweets via Google spreadsheets.

You can download your data from Facebook via the 'Download a copy of your Facebook data' on your settings page – it's not perfect, but again, it's better than nothing.  While Flickr is a good option for backing up images, you might also want to save the tags and comments that live on Flickr.  There are a number of tools for backing up Flickr, try these or these to start with.

Backup websites

Most blogs will let you export your posts, but the exported file isn't usually 'human-readable' until you've imported it into another blog, and there's always a chance that you'll lose some information.

An option that works well on all kinds of websites is HTTrack – I've used it for archiving sites and the results are good – it creates a locally-browseable static version of your site, preserving content and layouts.  This isn't the same as backing up your code or databases, but if you're at that point I assume you know how to backup these yourself. Bonus points if you've tested restoring from backups to check that the process actually works!

You can also add links to the Internet Archive (and while you're at it, why not make a donation?).

Backup devices

You can back up Apple products like iPods, iPhones, iPads with iTunes, but it doesn't hurt to download photos etc into other folders too – both MacOS and Windows have system apps that will download photos when you plug in the device – 'Image Capture' on my Mac and an Explorer window on my PC.

Nokia phones can be backed-up with Nokia PC Suite on Windows or iSync on MacOS (can be tricky). I've used SMS to Text on Android – it saved a file to my phone's disk, then I copied it over to my computer.

Backup other specialist software

Whatever you do, you probably use specialist software.  If you use reference management software, back it up!  Here are instructions for backing up EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero to get you started…

More digital housekeeping…

If you've made it this far, why not check that your anti-virus software is up-to-date, and run a deep scan?  If you haven't got anti-virus software, get some now – MoneySavingExpert has a useful guide to Free Antivirus Software. And speaking of money, if your bank doesn't keep all your bank statements online, or you're about to change chards, it's a good time to download your bank statements.

And if you've already done all that, why not offer to help a friend get their backup and anti-virus sorted?

Notes on 'User Generated Content' session, Open Culture Conference 2010

My notes from the 'user generated content' parallel track on first day of the Open Culture 2010 conference. The session started with brief presentations by panellists, then group discussions at various tables on questions suggested by the organisers. These notes are quite rough, and of course any mistakes are mine. I haven't had a chance to look for the speakers' slides yet so inevitably some bits are missing, and I can only report the discussion at the table I was at in the break-out session. I've also blogged my notes from the plenary session of the Open Culture 2010 conference.

User-generated content session, Open Culture, Europeana – the benefits and challenges of UGC.
Kevin Sumption, User-generated content, a MUST DO for cultural institutions
His background – originally a curator of computer sciences. One of first projects he worked on at Powerhouse was D*Hub which presented design collections from V&A, Brooklyn Museum and Powerhouse Museum – it was for curators but also for general public with an interest in design. Been the source of innovation. Editorial crowd-sourcing approach and social tagging, about 8 years ago.

Two years ago he moved to National Maritime Museum, Royal Observatory, Greenwich. One of the first things they did was get involved with Flickr Commons – get historic photographs into public domain, get people involved in tagging. c1000 records in there. General public have been able to identify some images as Adam Villiers images – specialists help provide attribution for the photographer. Only for tens of records of the 000s but was a good introduction to power of UGC.

Building hybrid exhibition experiences – astronomy photographer of the year – competition on Flickr with real world exhibition for the winners of the competition. 'Blog' with 2000 amateur astronomers, 50 posts a day. Through power of Flickr has become a significant competition and brand in two years.

Joined citizen science consortia. Galaxy Zoo. Brainchild of Oxford – getting public engaged with real science online. Solar Stormwatch c 3000 people analysing and using the data. Many people who get involved gave up science in high school… but people are getting re-engaged with science *and* making meaningful contributions.

Old Weather – helping solve real-world problems with crowdsourcing. Launched two months ago.
Passion for UGC is based around where projects can join very carefully considered consortia, bringing historical datasets with real scientific problems. Can bring large interested public to the project. Many of the public are reconnecting with historical subject matter or sciences.

Judith Bensa-Moortgat, Nationaal Archief, Netherlands, Images for the Future project
Photo collection of more than 1 million photos. Images for the future project aims to save audio-visual heritage through digitisation and conservation of 1.2 million photos.

Once digitised, they optimise by adding metadata and context. Have own documentalists who can add metadata, but it would take years to go through it all. So decided to try using online community to help enrich photo collections. Using existing platforms like Wikipedia, Flickr, Open Street map, they aim to retrieve contextual info generated by the communities.  They donated political portraits to Wikimedia Commons and within three weeks more than half had been linked to relevant articles.

Their experiences with Flickr Commons – they joined in 2008. Main goal was to see if community would enrich their photos with comments and tags. In two weeks, they had 400,000 page views for 400 photos, including peaks when on Dutch TV news. In six months, they had 800 photos with over 1 million views. In Oct 2010, they are averaging 100,000 page views a month; 3 million overall.

But what about comments etc? Divided them into categories of comments [with percentage of overall contributions]:

  • factual info about location, period, people 5%; 
  • link to other sources eg Wikipedia 5%; 
  • personal stories/memories (e.g. someone in image was recognised); 
  • moral discussions; 
  • aesthetical discussions; 
  • translations.

The first two are most important for them.
13,000 tags in many languages (unique tags or total?).
10% of the contributed UGC was useful for contextualisation; tags ensure accessibility [discoverability?] on the web; increased (international) visibility. [Obviously the figures will vary for different projects, depending on what the original intent of the project was]

The issues she'd like to discuss are – copyright, moderation, platforms, community.

Mette Bom, 1001 Stories about Denmark
Story of the day is one of the 1001 stories. It's a website about the history and culture of Denmark. The stories have themes, are connected to a timeline.  Started with 50 themes, 180 expert writers writing the 1001 stories, now it's up to the public to comment and write their own stories. Broad definition of what heritage is – from oldest settlement to the 'porn street' – they wanted to expand the definition of heritage.

Target audiences – tourists going to those places; local dedicated experts who have knowledge to contribute. Wanted to take Danish heritage out of museums.

They've created the main website, mobile apps, widget for other sites, web service.  Launched in May 2010.  20,000 monthly users. 147 new places added, 1500 pictures added.

Main challenges – how to keep users coming back? 85% new, 15% repeat visitors (ok as aimed at tourists but would like more comments). How to keep press interested and get media coverage? Had a good buzz at the start cos of the celebrities. How to define participation? Is it enough to just be a visitor?

Johan Oomen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Vrij Uni Amsterdam. Participatory Heritage: the case of the Waisda? video labelling game.
They're using game mechanisms to get people to help them catalogue content. [sounds familiar!]
'In the end, the crowd still rules'.
. Tagging is a good way to facilitate time-based annotation [i.e. tag what's on the screen at different times]

Goal of game is consensus between players. Best example in heritage is steve.museum; much of the thinking about using tagging as a game came from Games with a Purpose (gwap.com).  Basic rule – players score points when their tag exactly matches the tag entered by another within 10 seconds. Other scoring mechanisms.  Lots of channels with images continuously playing.

Linking it to twitter – shout out to friends to come join them playing.  Generating traffic – one of the main challenges. Altruistic message 'help the archive' 'improve access to collections' came out of research with users on messages that worked. Worked with existing communities.

Results, first six months – 44,362 pageviews. 340,000 tags to 604 items, 42,068 unique tags.
Matches – 42% of tags entered more than 2 times. Also looked at vocab (GTAA, Cornetto), 1/3 words were valid Dutch words, but only a few part of thesauruses.  Tags evaluated by documentalists. Documentary film 85% – tags were useful; for reality series (with less semantic density) tags less useful.

Now looking at how to present tags on the catalogue Powerhouse Museum style.  Experimenting with visualising terms, tag clouds when terms represented, also makes it easy to navigate within the video – would have been difficult to do with professional metadata.  Looking at 'tag gardening' – invite people to go back to their tags and click to confirm – e.g. show images with particular tags, get more points for doing it.

Future work – tag matching – synonyms and more specific terms – will get more points for more specific terms.

Panel overview by Costis Dallas, research fellow at Athena, assistant professor at Panteion University, Athens.
He wants to add a different dimension – user-generated content as it becomes an object for memory organisations. New body of resources emerging through these communication practices.
Also, we don't have a historiography anymore; memory resides in personal information devices.  Mashups, changes in information forms, complex composed information on social networks – these raise new problems for collecting – structural, legal, preservation in context, layered composition.  What do we need to do now in order to be able to make use of digital technologies in appropriate, meaningful ways in the future? New kinds of content, participatory curation are challenges for preservation.

Group discussion (breakout tables)
Discussion about how to attract users. [It wasn't defined whether it was how to attract specifically users who'll contribute content or just generally grow the audience and therefore grow the number of content creators within the usual proportions of levels of participation e.g. Nielsen, Forrester; I would also have liked to discussed how to encourage particular kinds of contributions, or to build architectures of participation that provided positive feedback to encourage deeper levels of participation.]

Discussion and conclusions included – go with the strengths of your collections e.g. if one particular audience or content-attracting theme emerges, go with it.  Norway has a national portal where people can add content. They held lots of workshops for possible content creators; made contact with specialist organisations [from which you can take the lesson that UGC doesn't happen in a vacuum, and that it helps to invest time and resources into enabling participants and soliciting content].  Recording living history.  Physical presence in gallery, at events, is important.  Go where audiences already are; use existing platforms.

Discussion about moderation included – once you have comments, how are they integrated back into collections and digital asset management systems?  What do you do about incorrect UGC displayed on a page?  Not an issue if you separate UGC from museum/authoritative content in the interface design.  In the discussion it turned out that Europeana doesn't have a definition of 'moderation'.  IMO, it should include community management, including acknowledging and thanking people for contributions (or rather, moderation is a subset of community management).  It also includes approving or reviewing and publishing content, dealing with corrections suggested by contributors, dealing with incorrect or offensive UGC, adding improved metadata back to collections repositories.

User-generated content and trust – British Library apparently has 'trusted communities' on their audio content – academic communities (by domain name?) and 'everyone else'.  Let other people report content to help weed out bad content.

Then we got onto a really interesting discussion of which country or culture's version of 'offensive' would be used in moderating content.  Having worked in the UK and the Netherlands, I know that what's considered a really rude swear word and what's common vocabulary is quite different in each country… but would there be any content left if you considered the lowest common standards for each country?  [Though thinking about it later, people manage to watch films and TV and popular music from other countries so I guess they can deal with different standards when it's in context.]  To take an extreme content example, a Nazi uniform as memorabilia is illegal in Germany (IIRC) but in the UK it's a fancy dress outfit for a member of the royal family.

Panel reporting back from various table discussions
Kevin's report – discussion varied but similar themes across the two tables. One – focus on the call to action, why should people participate, what's the motivation? How to encourage people to participate? Competitions suggested as one solution, media interest (especially sustained). Notion of core group who'll energise others. Small groups of highly motivated individuals and groups who can act as catalysts [how to recruit, reward, retain]. Use social media to help launch project.

1001 Danish Stories promotional video effectively showed how easy the process of contributing content was,  and that it doesn't have to to be perfect (the video includes celebrities working the camera [and also being a bit daggy, which I later realised was quite powerful – they weren't cool and aloof]).
Giving users something back – it's not a one-way process. Recognition is important. Immediacy too – if participating in a project, people want to see their contributions acknowledged quickly. Long approval processes lose people.
Removal of content – when different social, political backgrounds with different notions of censorship.

Mette's report – how to get users to contribute – answers mostly to take away the boundaries, give the users more credit than we otherwise tend to. We always think users will mess things up and experts will be embarrassed by user content but not the case. In 1001 they had experts correcting other experts. Trust users more, involve experts, ask users what they want. Show you appreciate users, have a dialouge, create community. Make it a part of life and environment of users. Find out who your users are.

Second group – how Europeana can use the content provided in all its forms. Could build web services to present content from different places, linking between different applications.
How to set up goals for user activity – didn't get a lot of answers but one possibility is to start and see how users contribute as you go along. [I also think you shouldn't be experimenting with UGC without some goal in mind – how else will you know if your experiment succeeded?  It also focusses your interaction and interface design and gives the user some parameters (much more useful than an intimidating blank page)].

Judith's report (including our table) – motivation and moderation in relation to Europeana – challenging as Europeana are not the owners of the material; also dealing with multilingual collections. Culturally-specific offensive comments. Definition and expectations of Europeana moderation. Resources need if Europeana does the moderation.
Incentives for moderation – improving data, idealism, helping with translations – people like to help translate.

Johan's report – rewards are important – place users in social charts or give them a feeling of contributing to larger thing; tap into existing community; translate physical world into digital analogue.
Institutional policy – need a clear strategy for e.g. how to integrate the knowledge into the catalogue. Provide training for staff on working with users and online tools. There's value in employing community managers to give people feedback when they leave content.
Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for annotations…
Doing the projects isn't only of benefit in enriching metadata but also for giving insight into users – discover audiences with particular interests.

Costis commenting – if Europeana only has thumbnails and metadata, is it a missed opportunity to get UGC on more detailed content?

Is Europeana highbrow compared to other platforms like Flickr, FB, so would people be afraid to contribute? [probably – there must be design patterns for encouraging participation from audiences on museum sites, but we're still figuring out what they are]
Business model for crowdsourcing – producing multilingual resources is perfect case for Europeana.

Open to the floor for questions… Importance of local communities, getting out there, using libraries to train people. Local newspapers, connecting to existing communities.