What are the hidden costs when you attend an event?

I think quite hard about how to make Museums Computer Groups events as inclusive as possible, from the diversity of the speakers on stage, to setting dates and times as early as possible to allow cheaper pre-booked travel, to keeping event costs down and more, but there's always more to learn.

I've been thinking about the 'shadow' or hidden costs accrued when people attend events. For me, it's the cost of getting to London (up to £50 if it's at short notice) and the time it takes (up to 3 hours each way if I'm unlucky). For others, accessibility requirements add to the cost of events, whether that's sign language translators, taxis to accessible train stations, or someone else's time as an aide. For parents or people with other caring responsibilities, childcare costs may add to the expense of attending an event. This in turn affects our ability to put together a broad range of speakers for an event. So –

Hello parents in the UK! I'm thinking about hidden costs for speakers turning up to an event. How much does a day's childcare cost you?
— Mia (@mia_out) June 15, 2014

I'm asking parents in the UK for a rough estimate of childcare costs for a day. You can share yours by tweeting @mia_out or share anonymously via this form if 140 characters won't allow you to mention things like your location, number and age of kids: What are the hidden costs when you attend an event?* The second question on the form is more general, so if your costs have nothing to do with parenting, go for it! I'll share the answers so that other event organisers have a sense of the costs too.

Here are some responses to get you started – with thanks to those who've already shared their costs:

@otfrom @mia_out @JeniT £12 / hr for 2. A full day is usually 100 plus. Quite difficult to justify often esp w/ travel.
— Yodit Stanton (@yoditstanton) June 15, 2014

about £40 a day in the West Midlands.
— Andrew Fray (@tenpn) June 15, 2014

@mia_out childcare is £3/hr for a 5 year old. Was 330/mth as a child for 5 hrs a day.
— Mick Brennan (@lightzenton) June 15, 2014

We're a volunteer Committee rather than professional events organisers, and there's a humbling amount to learn from people out there. What hidden costs have I missed? Are there factors apart from cost that we should consider? We've got a Call for Papers for November 7's UKMW14: Museums Beyond the Web open at the moment (until June 30, 2014) – is there any language on that CfP or our Guidance for Speakers we should look at?

Update – more responses below.

@mia_out assuming you can actually find a reliable (qualified?) babysitter for a whole day or two, then min. wage c£6 per hour at very least
— Internet Archaeology (@IntarchEditor) June 15, 2014

@mia_out nursery (under 5s) costs might be between £30-50 per day but of course they won't do weekends
— Internet Archaeology (@IntarchEditor) June 15, 2014

@mia_out day would cost us £90 or so, but not always poss; last conf my wife presented at I took leave and came along to look after babies.
— Jakob Whitfield (@thrustvector) June 15, 2014

@mia_out @otfrom Nurseries in East Dulwich vary, but since they're all oversubscribed 1500/month isn't outrageous.
— JulianBirch (@JulianBirch) June 15, 2014

@mia_out That's 8-6 including meals. Costs typically go down after age 2.But plenty of people can't find childcare at all and give up work.
— JulianBirch (@JulianBirch) June 15, 2014

@mia_out About £50 a day. We’re lucky in that our nursery will usually have space if we need an extra day.
— suzicatherine (@suzicatherine) June 15, 2014

The daily childcare costs (£40 pc,pd) are usually factored into a working day @mia_out The early drop off and/or late pick up can be tricky!
— Kathryn Eccles (@KathrynEccles) June 15, 2014

I'd been thinking of single-day events and the impact on speaker availability, but I was reminded of the impact of childcare and other responsibilities for people wanting to attend residential programmes or longer events (or day events that require an overnight stay to fit the travel in). For example:

@mia_out can't bring pets to conf., and dog walkers are not cheap #hiddencost
— Scott (@moltude) June 16, 2014

The ability to attend residential events for career or research fellowships is obviously going to have an impact on the types of people we see in leadership positions in later years, so thinking about things like childcare (which might be as simple as providing space for someone who already helps look after the family) now would make a positive difference later. On the positive side, many fellowships provide honorariums, which could help cover the hidden costs many of you have shared with me.

* I'm experimenting with typeform but already I'm concerned that their forms don't seem accessible – how are they for you?

Piloting a Participatory History Commons

I've been awarded a CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin for a project called 'Bridging collections with a participatory Commons: a pilot with World War One archives'. I've posted my proposal at the link above, and when I start in September I'll post about my progress here. CENDARI have now published the list of all 2014 Fellows and a neat summary of the programme: 'The CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowships are intended to support and stimulate historical research in the two pilot areas of medieval European culture and the First World War, by facilitating access to key archives, specialist knowledge and collections in CENDARI host institutions'.

As I said in my post, 'it's an ambitious project which requires tackling community building, user experience design, historical materials and programming, and I'll be drawing on the expertise of many people'. I'll post as I go – but first, I'd best get back to finishing up my PhD thesis!

In the meantime, here's a small collection of things I've written as I think through what a participatory commons is and how it might work: my poster and talk notes for Herrenhausen conference and my keynote for Sharing is Caring, 'Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons platform: a provocation about collaborating with users'.

How can we connect museum technologists with their history?

A quick post triggered by an article on the role of domain knowledge (knowledge of a field) in critical thinking, Deep in thought:

Domain knowledge is so important because of the way our memories work. When we think, we use both working memory and long-term memory. Working memory is the space where we take in new information from our environment; everything we are consciously thinking about is held there. Long-term memory is the store of knowledge that we can call up into working memory when we need it. Working memory is limited, whereas long-term memory is vast. Sometimes we look as if we are using working memory to reason, when actually we are using long-term memory to recall. Even incredibly complex tasks that seem as if they must involve working memory can depend largely on long-term memory.

When we are using working memory to progress through a new problem, the knowledge stored in long-term memory will make that process far more efficient and successful. … The more parts of the problem that we can automate and store in long-term memory, the more space we will have available in working memory to deal with the new parts of the problem.

A few years ago I defined a 'museum technologist' as 'someone who can appropriately apply a range of digital solutions to help meet the goals of a particular museum project', and deep domain knowledge clearly has a role to play in this (also in the kinds of critical thinking that will save technologists from being unthinking cheerleaders for the newest buzzword or geek toy).

There's a long history of hard-won wisdom, design patterns and knowledge (whether about ways not to tender for or specify software, reasons why proposed standards may or may not work, translating digital methods and timelines for departments raised on print, etc – I'm sure you all have examples) contained in the individual and collective memory of individual technologists and teams. Some of it is represented in museum technology mailing lists, blogs or conference proceedings, but the lessons learnt in the past aren't always easily discoverable by people encountering digital heritage issues for the first time. And then there's the issue of working out which knowledge relates to specific, outdated technologies and which still holds while not quashing the enthusiasm of new people with a curt 'we tried that before'…

Something in the juxtaposition of the 20th anniversary of BritPop and the annual wave of enthusiasm and discovery from the international Museums and the Web (#MW2014) conference prompted me to look at what the Museums Computer Group (MCG) and Museum Computer Network (MCN) lists were talking about in April five and ten years ago (i.e. in easily-accessible archives):

Five years ago in #musetech – open web, content distribution, virtualisation, wifi https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A1=ind0904&L=mcg&X=498A43516F310B2193 http://mcn.edu/pipermail/mcn-l/2009-April/date.html

Ten years ago in #musetech people were talking about knowledge organisation and video links with schools https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A1=ind04&L=mcg&F=&S=&X=498A43516F310B2193

Some of the conversations from that random sample are still highly relevant today, and more focused dives into various archives would probably find approaches and information that'd help people tackling current issues.

So how can we help people new to the sector find those previous conversations and get some of this long-term memory into their own working memory? Pointing people to search forms for the MCG and MCN lists is easy, some of the conference proceedings are a bit trickier (e.g. search within the museumsandtheweb.com) and there's no central list of museum technology blogs that I know of. Maybe people could nominate blog posts they think stand the test of time, mindful of the risk of it turning into a popularity/recency thing?

If you're new(ish) to digital heritage, how did you find your feet? Which sites or communities helped you, and how did you find them? Or if you have a new team member, how do you help them get up to speed with museum technology? Or looking further afield, which resources would you send to someone from academia or related heritage fields who wanted to learn about building heritage resources for or with specialists and the public?

Sharing is caring keynote 'Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons'

Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons platform: a provocation about collaborating with users

Mia Ridge, Open University Contact me: @mia_out or https://miaridge.com/

[I was invited to Copenhagen to talk about my research on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage at the 3rd international Sharing is Caring seminar on April 1. I'm sharing my notes in advance to make life easier for those awesome people following along in a second or third language, particularly since I'm delivering my talk via video.]

Today I'd like to present both a proposal for something called the 'Participatory Commons', and a provocation (or conversation starter): there's a paradox in our hopes for deeper audience engagement through crowdsourcing: projects that don't grow with their participants will lose them as they develop new skills and interests and move on. This talk presents some options for dealing with this paradox and suggests a Participatory Commons provides a way to take a sector-wide view of active engagement with heritage content and redefine our sense of what it means when everybody wins.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this – I'll be following the hashtag during the session and my contact details are above.

Before diving in, I wanted to reflect on some lessons from my work in museums on public engagement and participation.

My philosophy for crowdsourcing in cultural heritage (aka what I've learnt from making crowdsourcing games)

One thing I learnt over the past years: museums can be intimidating places. When we ask for help with things like tagging or describing our collections, people want to help but they worry about getting it wrong and looking stupid or about harming the museum.

The best technology in the world won't solve a single problem unless it's empathically designed and accompanied by social solutions. This isn't a talk about technology, it's a talk about people – what they want, what they're afraid of, how we can overcome all that to collaborate and work together.

Dora's Lost Data

So a few years ago I explored the potential of crowdsourcing games to make helping a museum less scary and more fun. In this game, 'Dora's Lost Data', players meet a junior curator who asks them to tag objects so they'll be findable in Google. Games aren't the answer to everything, but identifying barriers to participation is always important. You have to understand your audiences – their motivations for starting and continuing to participate; the fears, anxieties, uncertainties that prevent them participating. [My games were hacked together outside of work hours, more information is available at My MSc dissertation: crowdsourcing games for museums; if you'd like to see more polished metadata games check out Tiltfactor's http://www.metadatagames.org/#games]

Mutual wins – everybody's happy

My definition of crowdsourcing: cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects ask the public to undertake tasks that cannot be done automatically, in an environment where the activities, goals (or both) provide inherent rewards for participation, and where their participation contributes to a shared, significant goal or research area.

It helps to think of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage as a form of volunteering. Participation has to be rewarding for everyone involved. That sounds simple, but focusing on the audiences' needs can be difficult when there are so many organisational needs competing for priority and limited resources for polishing the user experience. Further, as many projects discover, participant needs change over time…

What is a Participatory Commons and why would we want one?

First, I have to introduce you to some people. These are composite stories (personas) based on my research…

Two archival historians, Simone and Andre. Simone travels to archives in her semester breaks to stock up on research material, taking photos of most documents 'in case they're useful later', transcribing key text from others. Andre is often at the next table, also looking for material for his research. The documents he collected for his last research project would be useful for Simone's current book but they've never met and he has no way of sharing that part of his 'personal research collection' with her. Currently, each of these highly skilled researchers take their cumulative knowledge away with them at the end of the day, leaving no trace of their work in the archive itself. Next…

Two people from a nearby village, Martha and Bob. They joined their local history society when they retired and moved to the village. They're helping find out what happened to children from the village school's class of 1898 in the lead-up to and during World War I. They are using census returns and other online documents to add records to a database the society's secretary set up in Excel. Meanwhile…

A family historian, Daniel. He has a classic 'shoebox archive' – a box containing his grandmother Sarah's letters and diary, describing her travels and everyday life at the turn of the century. He's transcribing them and wants to put them online to share with his extended family. One day he wants to make a map for his kids that shows all the places their great-grandmother lived and visited. Finally, there's…

Crowdsourcer Nisha.She has two young kids and works for a local authority. She enjoys playing games like Candy Crush on her mobile, and after the kids have gone to bed she transcribes ship logs on the Old Weather website while watching TV with her husband. She finds it relaxing, feels good about contributing to science and enjoys the glimpses of life at sea. Sites like Old Weather use 'microtasks' – tiny, easily accomplished tasks – and crowdsourcing to digitise large amounts of text.

Helping each other?

None of our friends above know it, but they're all looking at material from roughly the same time and place. Andre and Simone could help each other by sharing the documents they've collected over the years. Sarah's diaries include the names of many children from her village that would help Martha and Bob's project, and Nisha could help everyone if she transcribed sections of Sarah's diary.

Connecting everyone's efforts for the greater good: Participatory Commons

This image shows the two main aspects of the Participatory Commons: the different sources for content, and the activities that people can do with that content.

The Participatory Commons (image: Mia Ridge)

The Participatory Commons is a platform where content from different sources can be aggregated. Access to shared resources underlies the idea of the 'Commons', particularly material that is not currently suitable for sites like Europeana, like 'shoebox archives' and historians' personal record collections. So if the 'Commons' part refers to shared resources, how is it participatory?

The Participatory Commons interface supports a range of activities, from the types of tasks historians typically do, like assessing and contextualising documents, activities that specialists or the public can do like identifying particular people, places, events or things in sources, or typical crowdsourcing tasks like fulltext transcription or structured tagging.

By combining the energy of crowdsourcing with the knowledge historians create on a platform that can store or link to primary sources from museums, libraries and archives with 'shoebox archives', the Commons could help make our shared heritage more accessible to all. As a platform that makes material about ordinary people available alongside official archives and as an interface for enjoyable, meaningful participation in heritage work, the Commons could be a basis for 'open source history', redressing some of the absences in official archives while improving the quality of all records.

As a work in progress, this idea of the Participatory Heritage Commons has two roles: an academic thought experiment to frame my research, and as a provocation for GLAMs (galleries, museums, libraries, archives) to think outside their individual walls. As a vision for 'open source history', it's inspired by community archives, public history, participant digitisation and history from below… This combination of a large underlying repository and more intimate interfaces could be quite powerful. Capturing some of the knowledge generated when scholars access collections would benefit both archives and other researchers.

'Niche projects' can be built on a Participatory Commons

As a platform for crowdsourcing, the Participatory Commons provides efficiencies of scale in the backend work for verifying and validating contributions, managing user accounts, forums, etc. But that doesn't mean that each user would experience the same front-end interface.

Niche projects build on the Participatory Commons
(quick and dirty image: Mia Ridge)

My research so far suggests that tightly-focused projects are better able to motivate participants and create a sense of community. These 'niche' projects may be related to a particular location, period or topic, or to a particular type of material. The success of the New York Public Library's What's on the Menu project, designed around a collection of historic menus, and the British Library's GeoReferencer project, designed around their historic map collection, both demonstrate the value of defining projects around niche topics.

The best crowdsourcing projects use carefully designed interactions tailored to the specific content, audience and data requirements of a given project. These interactions are usually For example, the Zooniverse body of projects use much of the same underlying software but projects are designed around specific tasks on specific types of material, whether classifying simple galaxy types, plankton or animals on the Serengeti, or transcribing ship logs or military diaries.

The Participatory Commons is not only a collection of content, it also allows 'niche' projects to be layered on top, presenting more focused sets of content, and specialist interfaces designed around the content, audience and purpose.

Barriers

But there are still many barriers to consider, including copyright and technical issues and important cultural issues around authority, reliability, trust, academic credit and authorship. [There's more background on this at my earlier post on historians and the Participatory Commons and Early PhD findings: Exploring historians' resistance to crowdsourced resources.]

Now I want to set the idea of the Participatory Commons aside for a moment, and return to crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. I've been looking for factors in the success or otherwise of crowdsourcing projects, from grassroots, community-lead projects to big glamorous institutionally-lead sites.

I mentioned that Nisha found transcribing text relaxing. Like many people who start transcribing text, she found herself getting interested in the events, people and places mentioned in the text. Forums or other methods for participants to discuss their questions seem to help keep participants motivated, and they also provide somewhere for a spark of curiosity to grow (as in this forum post). We know that some people on crowdsourcing projects like Old Weather get interested in history, and even start their own research projects.

Crowdsourcing as gateway to further activity

You can see that happening on other crowdsourcing projects too. For example, Herbaria@Homeaims to document historical herbarium collections within museums based on photographs of specimen cards. So far participants have documented over 130,000 historic specimens. In the process, some participants also found themselves being interested in the people whose specimens they were documenting.

As a result, the project has expanded to include biographies of the original specimen collectors. It was able to accommodate this new interest through a project wiki, which has a combination of free text and structured data linking records between the transcribed specimen cards and individual biographies.

'Levels of Engagement' in citizen science

There's a consistent enough pattern in science crowdsourcing projects that there's a model from 'citizen science' that outlines different stages participants can move through, from undertaking simple tasks, joining in community discussion, through to 'working independently on self-identified research projects'.[1]

Is this 'mission accomplished'?

This is Nick Poole's word cloud based on 40 museum missionstatements. With words like 'enjoyment', 'access', 'learning' appearing in museum missions, doesn't this mean that turning transcribers into citizen historians while digitising and enhancing collections is a success? Well, yes, but…

Paths diverge; paradox ahead?

There's a tension between GLAM's desire to invite people to 'go deeper', to find their own research interests, to begin to become citizen historians; and the desire to ask people to help us with tasks set by GLAMs to help their work. Heritage organisations can try to channel that impulse to start research into questions about their own collections, but sometimes it feels like we're asking people to do our homework for us. The scaffolds put in place to help make tasks easier may start to feel like a constraint.

Who has agency?

If people move beyond simple tasks into more complex tasks that require a greater investment of time and learning, then issues of agency – participants' ability to make choices about what they're working on and why – start to become more important. Would Wikipedia have succeeded if it dictated what contributors had to write about? We shouldn't mistake volunteers for a workforce just because they can be impressively dedicated contributors.

Participatory project models

Turning again to citizen science – this time public participation in science research, we have a model for participatory projects according to the amount of control participants have over the design of the project itself – or to look at it another way, how much authority the organisation has ceded to the crowd. This model contains three categories: 'contributory', where the public contributes data to a project designed by the organisation; 'collaborative', where the public can help refine project design and analyse data in a project lead by the organisation; and 'co-creative', where the public can take part in all or nearly all processes, and all parties design the project together.[2]

As you can imagine, truly co-creative projects are rare. It seems cultural organisations find it hard to truly collaborate with members of the public; for many understandable reasons. The level of transparency required, and the investment of time for negotiating mutual interests, goals and capabilities increase as collaboration deepens. Institutional constraints and lack of time to engage in deep dialogue with participants make it difficult to find shared goals that work for all parties. It seems GLAMs sometimes try to take shortcuts and end up making decisions for the group, which means their 'co-creative' project is actually more just 'collaborative'.

New challenges

When participants start to out-grow the tasks that originally got them hooked, projects face a choice. Some projects are experimenting with setting challenges for participants. Here you see 'mysteries' set by the UK's Museum of Design in Plastics, and by San FranciscoPublic Library on History Pin. Finding the right match between the challenge set and the object can be difficult without some existing knowledge of the collection, and it can require a lot of on-going time to encourage participants. Putting the mystery under the nose of the person who has the knowledge or skills to solve it is another challenge that projects like this will have to tackle.

Working with existing communities of interest is a good start, but it also takes work to figure out where they hang out online (or in-person) and understand how they prefer to work. GLAMs sometimes fall into the trap of choosing the technology first, or trying something because it's trendy; it's better to start with the intersection between your content and the preferences of potential audiences.

But is it wishful thinking to hope that others will be interested in answering the questions GLAMs are asking?

A tension?

Should projects accept that some people will move on as they develop new interests, and concentrate on recruiting new participants to replace them? Do they try to find more interesting tasks or new responsibilities for participants, such as helping moderate discussions, or checking and validating other people's work? Or should they find ways for the project grow as participants' skill and knowledge increase? It's important to make these decisions mindfully as the default is otherwise to accept a level of turnover as participants move on.

To return to lessons from citizen science, possible areas for deeper involvement include choosing or defining questions for study, analysing or interpreting data and drawing conclusions, discussing results and asking new questions.[3]However, heritage organisations might have to accept that the questions people want to ask might not involve their collections, and that these citizen historians' new interests might not leave time for their previous crowdsourcing tasks.

Why is a critical mass of content in a Participatory Commons useful?

And now we return to the Participatory Commons and the question of why a critical mass of content would be useful.

Increasingly, the old divisions between museum, library and archive collections don't make sense. For most people, content is content, and they don't understand why a pamphlet about a village fete in 1898 would be described and accessed differently depending on whether it had ended up in a museum, library or archive catalogue.

Basing niche projects on a wider range of content creates opportunities for different types of tasks and levels of responsibility. Projects that provide a variety of tasks and roles can support a range of different levels and types of participant skills, availability, knowledge and experience.

A critical mass of material is also important for the discoverability of heritage content. Even the most sophisticated researcher turns to Google sometimes, and if your content doesn't come up in the first few results, many researchers will never know it exists. It's easy to say but less easy to make a reality: the easier it is to find your collections, the more likely it is that researchers will use them.

Commons as party?

More importantly, a critical mass of content in a Commons allows us to re-define 'winning'. If participation is narrowly defined as belonging to individual GLAMs, when a citizen historian moves onto a project that doesn't involve your collection then it can seem like you've lost a collaborator. But the people who developed a new research interest through a project at one museum might find they end up using records from the archive down the road, and transcribing or enhancing their records during their investigation. If all the institutions in the region shared their records on the Commons or let researchers take and share photos while using their collections, the researcher has a critical mass of content for their research and hopefully as a side-effect, their activities will improve links between collections. If the Commons allows GLAMs to take a sector-wide view then someone moving on to a different collection becomes a moment to celebrate, a form of graduation. In our wildest imagination, the Commons could be like a fabulous party where you never know what fabulous interesting people and things you'll discover…

To conclude – by designing platforms that allow people to collect and improve records as they work, we're helping everybody win.

Thank you! I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

[1]M. Jordan Raddick et al., 'Citizen Science: Status and Research Directions for the Coming Decade', in astro2010: The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, vol. 2010, 2009, http://www8.nationalacademies.org/astro2010/DetailFileDisplay.aspx?id=454.

[2]Rick Bonney et al., Public Participation in Scientific Research: Defining the Field and Assessing Its Potential for Informal Science Education. A CAISE Inquiry Group Report (Washington D.C.: Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), July 2009), http://caise.insci.org/uploads/docs/PPSR%20report%20FINAL.pdf.

[3]Bonney et al., Public Participation in Scientific Research: Defining the Field and Assessing Its Potential for Informal Science Education. A CAISE Inquiry Group Report.

Image credits in order of appearance: Glider, Library of Congress, Great hall, Library of Congress, Curzona Allport from Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, Hålanda Church, Västergötland, Sweden, Swedish National Heritage Board, Smithsonian Institution, Postmaster, General James A. Farley During National Air Mail Week, 1938, Powerhouse Museum, Canterbury Bankstown Rugby League Football Club's third annual Ball.

Early PhD findings: Exploring historians' resistance to crowdsourced resources

I wrote up some early findings from my PhD research for conferences back in 2012 when I was working on questions around 'but will historians really use resources created by unknown members of the public?'. People keep asking me for copies of my notes (and I've noticed people citing an online video version which isn't ideal) and since they might be useful and any comments would help me write-up the final thesis, I thought I'd be brave and post my notes.

A million caveats apply – these were early findings, my research questions and focus have changed and I've interviewed more historians and reviewed many more participative history projects since then; as a short paper I don't address methods etc; and obviously it's only a huge part of a tiny topic… (If you're interested in crowdsourcing, you might be interested in other writing related to scholarly crowdsourcing and collaboration from my PhD, or my edited volume on 'Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage'.) So, with those health warnings out of the way, here it is. I'd love to hear from you, whether with critiques, suggestions, or just stories about how it relates to your experience. And obviously, if you use this, please cite it!

Exploring historians' resistance to crowdsourced resources

Scholarly crowdsourcing may be seen as a solution to the backlog of historical material to be digitised, but will historians really use resources created by unknown members of the public?

The Transcribe Bentham project describes crowdsourcing as 'the harnessing of online activity to aid in large scale projects that require human cognition' (Terras, 2010a). 'Scholarly crowdsourcing' is a related concept that generally seems to involve the collaborative creation of resources through collection, digitisation or transcription. Crowdsourcing projects often divide up large tasks (like digitising an archive) into smaller, more manageable tasks (like transcribing a name, a line, or a page); this method has helped digitise vast numbers of primary sources.

My doctoral research was inspired by a vision of 'participant digitization', a form of scholarly crowdsourcing that seeks to capture the digital records and knowledge generated when researchers access primary materials in order to openly share and re-use them. Unlike many crowdsourcing projects which are designed for tasks performed specifically for the project, participant digitization harnesses the transcription, metadata creation, image capture and other activities already undertaken during research and aggregates them to create re-usable collections of resources.

Research questions and concepts

When Howe clarified his original definition, stating that the 'crucial prerequisite' in crowdsourcing is 'the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers', a 'perfect meritocracy' based not on external qualifications but on 'the quality of the work itself', he created a challenge for traditional academic models of authority and credibility (Howe 2006, 2008). Furthermore, how does anonymity or pseudonymity (defined here as often long-standing false names chosen by users of websites) complicate the process of assessing the provenance of information on sites open to contributions from non-academics? An academic might choose to disguise their identity to mask their research activities from competing peers, from a desire to conduct early exploratory work in private or simply because their preferred username was unavailable; but when contributors are not using their real names they cannot derive any authority from their personal or institutional identity. Finally, which technical, social and scholarly contexts would encourage researchers to share (for example) their snippets of transcription created from archival documents, and to use content transcribed by others? What barriers exist to participation in crowdsourcing or prevent the use of crowdsourced content?

Methods

I interviewed academic and family/local historians about how they evaluate, use, and contribute to crowdsourced and traditional resources to investigate how a resource based on 'meritocracy' disrupts current notions of scholarly authority, reliability, trust, and authorship. These interviews aimed to understand current research practices and probe more deeply into how participants assess different types of resources, their feelings about resources created by crowdsourcing, and to discover when and how they would share research data and findings.

I sought historians investigating the same country and time period in order to have a group of participants who faced common issues with the availability and types of primary sources from early modern England. I focused on academic and 'amateur' family or local historians because I was interested in exploring the differences between them to discover which behaviours and attitudes are common to most researchers and which are particular to academics and the pressures of academia.

I recruited participants through personal networks and social media, and conducted interviews in person or on Skype. At the time of writing, 17 participants have been interviewed for up to 2 hours each. It should be noted that these results are of a provisional nature and represent a snapshot of on-going research and analysis.

Early results

I soon discovered that citizen historians are perfect examples of Pro-Ams: 'knowledgeable, educated, committed, and networked' amateurs 'who work to professional standards' (Leadbeater and Miller, 2004; Terras, 2010b).

How do historians assess the quality of resources?

Participants often simply said they drew on their knowledge and experience when sniffing out unreliable documents or statements. When assessing secondary sources, their tacit knowledge of good research and publication practices was evident in common statements like '[I can tell from] it's the way it's written'. They also cited the presence and quality of footnotes, and the depth and accuracy of information as important factors. Transcribed sources introduced another layer of quality assessment – researchers might assess a resource by checking for transcription errors that are often copied from one database to another. Most researchers used multiple sources to verify and document facts found in online or offline sources.

When and how do historians share research data and findings?

It appears that between accessing original records and publishing information, there are several key stages where research data and findings might be shared. Stages include acquiring and transcribing records, producing visualisations like family trees and maps, publishing informal notes and publishing synthesised content or analysis; whether a researcher passes through all the stages depends on their motivation and audience. Information may change formats between stages, and since many claim not to share information that has not yet been sufficiently verified, some information would drop out before each stage. It also appears that in later stages of the research process the size of the potential audience increases and the level of trust required to share with them decreases.

For academics, there may be an additional, post-publication stage when resources are regarded as 'depleted' – once they have published what they need from them, they would be happy to share them. Family historians meanwhile see some value in sharing versions of family trees online, or in posting names of people they are researching to attract others looking for the same names.

Sharing is often negotiated through private channels and personal relationships. Methods of controlling sharing include showing people work in progress on a screen rather than sending it to them and using email in preference to sharing functionality supplied by websites – this targeted, localised sharing allows the researcher to retain a sense of control over early stage data, and so this is one key area where identity matters. Information is often shared progressively, and getting access to more information depends on your behaviour after the initial exchange – for example, crediting the provider in any further use of the data, or reciprocating with good data of your own.

When might historians resist sharing data?

Participants gave a range of reasons for their reluctance to share data. Being able to convey the context of creation and the qualities of the source materials is important for historians who may consider sharing their 'depleted' personal archives – not being able to provide this means they are unlikely to share. Being able to convey information about data reliability is also important. Some information about the reliability of a piece of information is implicitly encoded in its format (for example, in pencil in notebooks versus electronic records), hedging phrases in text, in the number of corroborating sources, or a value judgement about those sources. If it is difficult to convey levels of 'certainty' about reliability when sharing data, it is less likely that people will share it – participants felt a sense of responsibility about not publishing (even informally) information that hasn't been fully verified. This was particularly strong in academics. Some participants confessed to sneaking forbidden photos of archival documents they ran out of time to transcribe in the archive; unsurprisingly it is unlikely they would share those images.

Overall, if historians do not feel they would get information of equal value back in exchange, they seem less likely to share. Professional researchers do not want to give away intellectual property, and feel sharing data online is risky because the protocols of citation and fair use are presently uncertain. Finally, researchers did not always see a point in sharing their data. Family history content was seen as too specific and personal to have value for others; academics may realise the value of their data within their own tightly-defined circles but not realise that their records may have information for other biographical researchers (i.e. people searching by name) or other forms of history.

Which concerns are particular to academic historians?

Reputational risk is an issue for some academics who might otherwise share data. One researcher said: 'we are wary of others trawling through our research looking for errors or inconsistencies. […] Obviously we were trying to get things right, but if we have made mistakes we don't want to have them used against us. In some ways, the less you make available the better!'. Scholarly territoriality can be an issue – if there is another academic working on the same resources, their attitude may affect how much others share. It is also unclear how academic historians would be credited for their work if it was performed under a pseudonym that does not match the name they use in academia.

What may cause crowdsourced resources to be under-used?

In this research, 'amateur' and academic historians shared many of the same concerns for authority, reliability, and trust. The main reported cause of under-use (for all resources) is not providing access to original documents as well as transcriptions. Researchers will use almost any information as pointers or leads to further sources, but they will not publish findings based on that data unless the original documents are available or the source has been peer-reviewed. Checking the transcriptions against the original is seen as 'good practice', part of a sense of responsibility 'to the world's knowledge'.

Overall, the identity of the data creator is less important than expected – for digitised versions of primary sources, reliability is not vested in the identity of the digitiser but in the source itself. Content found on online sites is tested against a set of finely-tuned ideas about the normal range of documents rather than the authority of the digitiser.

Cite as:

Ridge, Mia. “Early PhD Findings: Exploring Historians’ Resistance to Crowdsourced Resources.” Open Objects, March 19, 2014. https://www.openobjects.org.uk/2014/03/early-phd-findings-exploring-historians-resistance-to-crowdsourced-resources/.

References

Howe, J. (undated). Crowdsourcing: A Definition http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com

Howe, J. (2006). Crowdsourcing: A Definition. http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html

Howe, J. (2008). Join the crowd: Why do multinationals use amateurs to solve scientific and technical problems? The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/join-the-crowd-why-do-multinationals-use-amateurs-to-solve-scientific-and-technical-problems-915658.html

Leadbeater, C., and Miller, P. (2004). The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society. Demos, London, 2004. http://www.demos.co.uk/files/proamrevolutionfinal.pdf

Terras, M. (2010a) Crowdsourcing cultural heritage: UCL's Transcribe Bentham project. Presented at: Seeing Is Believing: New Technologies For Cultural Heritage. International Society for Knowledge Organization, UCL (University College London). http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/20157/

Terras, M. (2010b). “Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation via Amateur Digitization.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25, no. 4 (October 14, 2010): 425–438. http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/llc/fqq019

'Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations' at VALA2014

I've just spent a week in Melbourne (my home town, awww) for VALA2014. VALA is about 'libraries, technology and the future' and the conference theme for 2014 was 'streaming with possibilities'. Kim Tairi's briefing (as Chair of the VALA2014 Conference Programme Committee) included the phrases 'stories that will ignite, challenge and excite our audience' and 'don’t be afraid to be controversial or push the boundaries', which was a brilliant challenge and turned out to be a great introduction to the ethos of the conference.

Image by Con Wiebrands 萬事如意 @flexnib

My keynote was on 'Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations'. From my abstract: Should museums, libraries and archives be places for looking at old stuff other people have made, or could they also be places where new creations are inspired and made? If making – writing, designing, building – is the deepest level of engagement with heritage and culture, how can memory institutions avoid the comforting but deadly trap of broadcasting at the public and instead create spaces for curating, creating or conversing with them? Somehow that meant a romp through banana pianos, the link between knitting and historic newspapers, why I like coding, the value of tinkering, secret shoppers and the fact that everyone is a maker of some sort (or was in the past).

Update: videos of the keynotes are now available online! I haven't watched any cos I don't have the Silverlight. I'd recommend them all, but I'm particularly looking forward to re-watching Gene Tan and Matt Finch's keynotes.

I'm sharing my slides below, but Slideshare seems to have stopped including the speaker notes so they're best viewed in conjunction with either of the two blog posts about my keynote that appeared with impressive speed or the tweets from my session. I've storified the tweets at Tweets from keynote 'Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations' at VALA14 – the audience did a fantastic job of summarising my speech, adding their own questions and comments, and sharing links to the sites and projects I mentioned. Yay, librarians! The two posts are Deborah '@deborahfitchett' Fitchett's Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations and Richard '@penanghill' Hayward's Mia Ridge on the Maker Movement (on an unrelated-but-home town note, Richard was my boss many, many years ago!).

Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations from Mia

Huge thanks to the organisers for the invitation to speak, to the conference staff for making everything run so smoothly, to the other keynotes for their inspiration and to the attendees for being such good sports.

2013 in review: crowdsourcing, digital history, visualisation, and lots and lots of words

A quick and incomplete summary of my 2013 for those days when I wonder where the year went… My PhD was my main priority throughout the year, but the slow increase in word count across my thesis is probably only of interest to me and my supervisors (except where I've turned down invitations to concentrate on my PhD). Various other projects have spanned the years: my edited volume on 'Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage', working as a consultant on the 'Let's Get Real' project with Culture24, and I've continued to work with the Open University Digital Humanities Steering Group, ACH and to chair the Museums Computer Group.

In January (and April/June) I taught all-day workshops on 'Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research' and 'Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions' for the British Library's Digital Scholarship Training Programme.

In February I was invited to give a keynote on 'Crowd-sourcing as participation' at iSay: Visitor-Generated Content in Heritage Institutions in Leicester (my event notes). This was an opportunity to think through the impact of the 'close reading' people do while transcribing text or describing images, crowdsourcing as a form of deeper engagement with cultural heritage, and the potential for 'citizen history' this creates (also finally bringing together my museum work and my PhD research). This later became an article for Curator journal, From Tagging to Theorizing: Deepening Engagement with Cultural Heritage through Crowdsourcing (proof copy available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/39117). I also ran a workshop on 'Data visualisation for humanities researchers' with Dr. Elton Barker (one of my PhD supervisors) for the CHASE 'Going Digital' doctoral training programme.

In March I was in the US for THATCamp Feminisms in Claremont, California (my notes), to do a workshop on Data visualisation as a gateway to programming and I gave a paper on 'New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women's History on Wikipedia' at the Women's History in the Digital World' conference at Bryn Mawr, Philadelphia (posted as 'New challenges in digital history: sharing women's history on Wikipedia – my draft talk notes'). I also wrote an article for Museum Identity magazine, Where next for open cultural data in museums?.

In April I gave a paper, 'A thousand readers are wanted, and confidently asked for': public participation as engagement in the arts and humanities, on my PhD research at Digital Impacts: Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities (see also my notes from the event), and a keynote on 'A Brief History of Open Cultural Data' at GLAM-WIKI 2013.

In May I gave an online seminar on crowdsourcing (with a focus on how it might be used in teaching undergraduates wider skills) for the NITLE Shared Academics series. I gave a short paper on 'Digital participation and public engagement' at the London Museums Group's 'Museums and Social Media' at Tate Britain on May 24, and was in Belfast for the Museums Computer Group's Spring meeting, 'Engaging Visitors Through Play' then whipped across to Venice for a quick keynote on 'Participatory Practices: Inclusion, Dialogue and Trust' (with Helen Weinstein) for the We Curate kick-off seminar at the start of June.

In June the Collections Trust and MCG organised a Museum Informatics event in York and we organised a 'Failure Swapshop' the evening before. I also went to Zooniverse's ZooCon (my notes on the citizen science talks) and to Canterbury Cathedral Archives for a CHASE event on 'Opening up the archives: Digitization and user communities'.

In July I chaired a session on Digital Transformations at the Open Culture 2013 conference in London on July 2, gave an invited lightning talk at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School 2013, ran a half-day workshop on 'Designing successful digital humanities crowdsourcing projects' at the Digital Humanities 2013 conference in Nebraska, and had an amazing time making what turned out to be Serendip-o-matic at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University's One Week, One Tool in Fairfax, Virginia (my posts on the process), with a museumy road trip via Amtrak and Greyhound to Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburg inbetween the two events.

In August I tidied up some talk notes for publication as 'Tips for digital participation, engagement and crowdsourcing in museums' on the London Museums Group blog.

October saw the publication of my Curator article and Creating Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives through Design with Don Lafreniere and Scott Nesbit for the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, based on our work at the Summer 2012 NEH Advanced Institute on Spatial Narrative and Deep Maps: Explorations in the Spatial Humanities. (I also saw my family in Australia and finally went to MONA).

In November I presented on 'Messy understandings in code' at Speaking in Code at UVA's Scholars' Lab, Charlottesville, Virginia, gave a half-day workshop on 'Data Visualizations as an Introduction to Computational Thinking' at the University of Manchester and spoke at the Digital Humanities at Manchester conference the next day. Then it was down to London for the MCG's annual conference, Museums on the Web 2013 at Tate Modern. Later than month I gave a talk on 'Sustaining Collaboration from Afar' at Sustainable History: Ensuring today's digital history survives.

In December I went to Hannover, Germany for the Herrenhausen Conference: "(Digital) Humanities Revisited – Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age" where I presented on 'Creating a Digital History Commons through crowdsourcing and participant digitisation' (my lightning talk notes and poster are probably the best representation of how my PhD research on public engagement through crowdsourcing and historians' contributions to scholarly resources through participant digitisation are coming together). In final days of 2013, I went back to my old museum metadata games, and updated them to include images from the British Library and took a first pass at making them responsive for mobile and tablet devices.

Has Christmas changed how your audience sees your site?

Hands up if someone you know gave or received a mobile phone or tablet over the holidays? And how long was it before they snuck away to quietly checked their favourite social networks or the sales with their new device? Some people will end up on a cultural heritage site. Sometimes it's because they now have a device to hand to look up random questions that arise while they're watching Downton Abbey or they're looking for entertainment for future commutes; others might try booking tickets for a show from their kitchen or keeping the kids quiet with a few games.

What will they see when they hit your site? Will the games and interactives have disappeared for Apple devices without Flash, will they struggle to fill in forms on your non-responsive site – or will they be welcomed to a site optimised for their device?

Of course the short answer is, yes, Christmas (and the past few years) have changed how audiences see your website. This post is a guide to using Google Analytics to put numbers against that statement and working out where you need to improve the experience for visitors on mobiles and tablets, but if you don't have access to Google Analytics then just assume lots of visitors are on mobile and make sure your site will work for them. There's no substitute for trying to perform typical visitor tasks with real devices, but emulators for iPads, tablets, TVs, mobiles, responsive design, etc can help you get started. And if you're promoting content on social media and don't have a mobile/tablet ready site, then you're effectively inviting people over then slamming the door in their face, so just fix your site already.

If you do have access to Google Analytics, here are some tips for assessing the impact of all that gift-giving and working out the velocity of change in mobile and tablet visits on your site to understand what you're facing in the coming year (and getting to grips with Analytics while you're at it). Understanding how quickly your audience is changing and what people are doing on your site will a) help you decide which key tasks and sections to test with actual devices, PageSpeed Insights etc, and b) prioritise technical changes in the immediate future.

This assumes you know the basics of using Google Analytics – if you need a refresher, try the guides to Google Analytics Healthcheck and Google Analytics Segments I wrote for the Audience Agency's Audience Finder (though some of the screens have changed since then).

View mobile and tablet visits with built-in Google Analytics Segments and custom date ranges

The simplest way to assess how much of your website traffic is from mobile or tablet devices is to navigate to the Audiences/Mobile/Overview report, then click on the dates on the top right-hand corner and set the left-hand date to a year or two in the past and the right-hand date to now. You'll probably see a gradual increase in total visits over time, and some information underneath that about the total numbers of visits from 'desktop', 'mobile' and 'tablet' devices.

For a more useful breakdown of the number of desktop, mobile and tablet devices over time on other reports – whether Content reports like popular, Landing and Exit pages, location ('geo') or how people got to your site (aka 'acquisition') – you need to apply some Segments. To open the Segments option box, click the small down arrow next to 'All visits', as in the screenshot.

This will open a screen (below) showing a range of built-in segments. For now, click 'Mobile Traffic' and 'Tablet Traffic' to add them to the selected Segments list. Click 'Apply' and view the breakdown of visits by device over time. Hover over the lines for more detail. You can change reports and the segments will stay selected until you unselect them. (For later: explore other built-in segments, and learn how to make your own to answer questions that matter to your organisation.)

Tips: viewing stats by week rather than by day can help any patterns stand out more clearly. If you get a lot of traffic overall, you'll be able to see the difference in mobile/tablet visits more clearly if you take out the 'All Visits' segment.

Using the built-in date range fields to compare change over time

One of the key pieces of work I did for the Culture24 Let's Get Real project involved calculating the 'velocity' of change in mobile visits for a range of museums and arts organisations (see Section 8, 'Understanding mobile behaviours' in the project report). If you want to get a sense of how quickly your audience is changing (e.g. to make a case for resources), you can compare two date ranges.

First, click the date range on the top right-hand corner to open the custom date options. Enter a date range that covers a period before and after the holidays, then tick 'Compare to: Previous Period' and add the same dates for an earlier year there. Tip: copying and pasting then changing the dates is quicker than navigating to them via the left-hand side calendar.

The screenshot below shows the results on the Behaviour Overview report, including key indicators like the increase in time-on-site on tablets and the overall increase in visits from mobiles and tablets. As you can see, both mobile and tablet traffic is higher in the past week. This may even out as people head back to work, but the only way you'll know is by looking at your own stats.

Tips: if there are odd spikes or gaps in your stats, you might want to pick your dates around them (or add an explanatory annotation). If you have the data, try comparing the same time of year over e.g. 2011/12 to see the difference a couple of years have made. If you want to dive into the numbers to understand the devices more, the 'Browser & OS' report is useful, or explore the 'Primary Dimensions' on the 'Devices' report.

Learn Analytics by answering questions specific to your site

Working with participants in the Let's Get Real project reminded me that having a specific question to answer is a good way to find your way through the mass of options in Google Analytics, so for bonus points, pick one or two of these to answer:

What traffic was there to your website on Christmas Day?
How did they get there and what were they looking at?
What kinds of transactions or interactions have people attempted on your site in the last six weeks?
Where do you lose people? Does it vary by device or is another factor more important?
On which pages or site sections do tablet visitors spend the most time? What about mobile visitors?
Was the increase in device usage larger this holiday or in previous years?
And following a comment from the Guardian's Tom Grinsted, how do visit demographics differ on weekends/weekdays? What about morning/daytime/evening visits?

Some museums have been blogging about their own investigations into mobile and tablet visits to their sites: for example, Graham Davies, National Museum Wales, wrote The steady march of the mobile device; the V&A's Andrew Lewis wrote Making visitor information easier for mobile phone users.

Why we need to save the material experience of software objects

Conversations at last month's Sustainable History: Ensuring today's digital history survives event [my slides] (and at the pub afterwards) touched on saving the data underlying websites as a potential solution for archiving them. This is definitely better than nothing, but as a human-computer interaction researcher and advocate for material culture in historical research, I don't think it's enough.

Just as people rue the loss of the information and experiential data conveyed by the material form of objects when they're converted to digital representations – size, paper and print/production quality, marks from wear through use and manufacture, access to its affordances, to name a few – future researchers will rue the information lost if we don't regard digital interfaces and user experiences as vital information about the material form of digital content and record them alongside the data they present.

Can you accurately describe the difference between using MySpace and Facebook in their various incarnations? There's no perfect way to record the experience of using Facebook in December 2013 so it could be compared with the experience of using MySpace in 2005, but usability techniques like screen-recording software linked to eyetracking or think-aloud tests would help preserve some of the tacit knowledge and context users bring to sites alongside the look-and-feel, algorithms and treatments of data the sites present to us. It's not a perfect solution, but a recording of the interactions and designs from both sites for common tasks like finding and adding a friend would tell future researchers infinitely more about changes to social media sites over eight years than simple screenshots or static webpages. But in this case we're still missing the notifications on other people's screens, the emails and algorithmic categorisations that fan out from simple interactions like these…

Even if you don't care about history, anyone studying software – whether websites, mobile apps, digital archives, instrument panels or procedural instructions embedded in hardware – still needs solid methods for capturing the dynamic and subjective experience of using digital technologies. As Lev Manovich says in The Algorithms of Our Lives, when we use software we're "engaging with the dynamic outputs of computation; studying software culture requires us to "record and analyze interactive experiences, following individual users as they navigate a website or play a video game … to watch visitors of an interactive installation as they explore the possibilities defined by the designer—possibilities that become actual events only when the visitors act on them".

The Internet Archive does a great job, but in researching the last twenty years of internet history I'm constantly hitting the limits of their ability to capture dynamic content, let alone the nuance of interfaces. The paradox is that as more of our experiences are mediated through online spaces and the software contained within small boxy devices, we risk leaving fewer traces of our experiences than past generations.

Collaboration, constraints and cloning and 'the open museum': notes from UKMW13

MCG's UK Museums on the Web 2013: 'Power to the people' was held at Tate Modern on November 15, 2013. These are very selected notes but you can find out more about the sessions and see most slides on the MCG's site. UKMW13 began with a welcome from me (zzz) and from Tate's John Stack (hoorah!) then an announcement from our sponsors, Axiell Adlib and CALM, that CALM, Mimsy and AdLib are merging to create 'next generation' collections system – the old school collections management geek in me is really curious to see what that means for museums, libraries and archives and their data.

Our first keynote, Hannah Freeman, presented on the Guardian's work to reach and engage new audiences. This work is underpinned by editor Alan Rusbridger's vision for 'open journalism':

'journalism which is fully knitted into the web of information that exists in the world today. It links to it; sifts and filters it; collaborates with it and generally uses the ability of anyone to publish and share material to give a better account of the world'.

At a casual glance the most visible aspect may be comments on pages, but the Guardian is aiming for collaborations between the reader and the newsroom – if you haven't seen Guardian Witness, go check it out. (I suspect the Witness WWI assignment will do better than many heritage crowdsourcing efforts.) I know some museums are aiming to be of the web, not just on the web, but this ambition is usually limited to making their content of the web, while a commitment to open journalism suggests that the very core practices of journalism are open to being shaped by the public.

The Guardian is actively looking for ways to involve the audience; Freeman prompts editors and authors to look at interesting comments, but 'following as well as leading is a challenge for journalists'. She said that 'publication can be the beginning, not the end of the process' and that taking part in the conversation generated is now part of the deal when writing for the Guardian (possibly not all sections, and possibly staff journalists rather than freelancers?). From a reader's point of view, this is brilliant, but it raises questions about how that extra time is accounted for. Translating this into the museum sector and assuming that extra resources aren't going to appear, if you ask curators to blog or tweet, what other work do you want them to give up?

Hannah Freeman, Guardian Community coordinator for culture at UKMW13. Photo: Andrew Lewis

Our closing keynote, the Science Gallery's Michael John Gorman was equally impressive. Dublin's Science Gallery has many constraints – a small space, no permanent collection, very little government funding, but he seems to be one of those people who sees interesting problems to solve where other people see barriers. The Science Gallery acts as funnel for ideas, from an open call for shows to some people working on their ideas as a 'brains trust' with the gallery and eventually a few ideas making it through the funnel and onto the gallery floor to incubate and get feedback from the public. Their projects have a sense of 'real science' about them – some have an afterlife in publications or further projects, some might go horribly wrong or just not work. I can't wait until their gallery opens in London so I can check out some of their shows and see how they translate real scientific questions into interesting participatory experiences. Thinking back over the day, organisations like the Science Gallery might be the museum world's version of open journalism: the Science Gallery's 'funnel' is one way of putting the principles of the 'open museum' into practice (I've copied the Guardian's 10 principles of open journalism below for reference).

Michael John Gorman, The Ablative Museum

Possible principles for 'the open museum'?

While the theme of the day was the power of participation, I've found myself reflecting more on the organisational challenges this creates. Below are the Guardian's 10 principles of open journalism. As many of the presentations at UKMW13 proved, museums are already doing some of these, but which others could be adapted to help museums deal with the challenges they face now and in the future?

It encourages participation. It invites and/or allows a response
It is not an inert, "us" or "them", form of publishing
It encourages others to initiate debate, publish material or make suggestions. We can follow, as well as lead. We can involve others in the pre-publication processes
It helps form communities of joint interest around subjects, issues or individuals
It is open to the web and is part of it. It links to, and collaborates with, other material (including services) on the web
It aggregates and/or curates the work of others
It recognizes that journalists are not the only voices of authority, expertise and interest
It aspires to achieve, and reflect, diversity as well as promoting shared values
It recognizes that publishing can be the beginning of the journalistic process rather than the end
It is transparent and open to challenge – including correction, clarification and addition

The open museum isn't necessarily tied to technology, though the affordances of digital platforms are clearly related, but perhaps its association with technology is one reason senior managers are reluctant to engage fully with digital methods?

A related question that arose from Hannah's talk – are museums now in the media business, like it or not? And if our audiences expect museums to be media providers, how do we manage those expectations? (For an alternative model, read David Weinberger's Library as Platform.)

Emerging themes from UKMW13

I've already posted my opening notes for Museums on the Web 2013: 'Power to the people' but I want to go back to two questions I was poking around there: 'how can technologists share our knowledge and experience with others?', and 'why isn't the innovation we know happens in museum technology reflected in reports like last week's 'Digital Culture: How arts and cultural organisations in England use technology'? (Or, indeed, in the genre of patronising articles and blog posts hectoring museums for not using technology.) This seems more relevant than I thought it would be in 2013. Last year I was wondering how to define the membership of the Museums Computer Group when everyone in museums was a bit computer-y, but maybe broad digital literacy and comfort with technology-lead changes in museum practice is further off than I thought. (See also Rachel Coldicutt's 'I Say “Digital!”, You Say “Culture!”'). How do we bridge the gap? Is it just a matter of helping every museum go through the conversations necessary to create a digital strategy and come out the other side? And whose job is it to help museum staff learn how to manage public engagement, ecommerce, procurement, hiring when the digital world changes so quickly?

Another big theme was a reminder of how much is possible when you have technical expertise on hand to translate all the brilliant ideas museums have into prototypes or full products. At one point I jokingly tweeted that the museum and heritage sector would make huge leaps if we could just clone Jim O'Donnell (or the BBC's R&D staff). Perhaps part of the 'museums are digitally innovative'/'museums suck at digital' paradox is that technologists can see the potential of projects and assume that a new standard has been set, but it takes a lot more time and work to get them integrated into mainstream museum practice. Part of this may be because museums struggle to hire and keep really good developers, and don't give their developers the time or headspace to play and innovate. (Probably one reason I like hackdays – it's rare to get time to try new things when there is more worthy work than there is developer/technologist time – being inspired at conferences only goes so far when you can't find a bit of server space and a free day to try something out.) This has also been a theme at the first day at MCN2013, from what I've seen on twitter/webcasts from afar, so it's not only about the budget cuts in the UK. The Digital Culture report suggests that it may also be because senior management in museums don't know how to value 'digital experimentation'?

Other, more positive, themes emerged to link various presentations during the day. Community engagement can be hugely rewarding, but it takes resources – mostly staff time – to provide a conduit between the public and the organisation. It also takes a new mindset for content creators, whether journalists, educators or curators to follow the crowds' lead, but it can be rewarding, whether it's getting help identifying images from 'armchair archaeologists', working with online music communities to save their memories before they're lost to living memory or representing residents experiences of their city. Both presenters and the audience were quick to raise questions about the ethics of participatory projects and the wider implications of content/item collecting projects and citizen history.

Constraints, scaffolding, the right-sized question or perfectly themed niche collection – whatever you call it, giving people boundaries when asking for contributions is effective. Meaningful participation is valued, and valuable.

Open content enables good things to happen. Digital platforms are great at connecting people, but in-person meetups and conversations are still special.

Finally, one way or another the audience will shape your projects to their own ends, and the audience proved it that day by taking to twitter to continue playing Curate-a-Fact between tea breaks.

We should have a proper archive of all the #UKMW13 tweets at some point, but in the meantime, here's a quick storify fo r MCG's Museums on the Web 2013: Power to the people. Oh, and thank you, thank you, thank you to all the wonderful people who helped the day come together.