Museums and the Commons: Helping Makers Get Stuff Done

Museums and the Commons: Helping Makers Get Stuff Done

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  Museumsand theCommons:Helping MakersGetStuff Done<br />Michael EdsonDirector of Web and New Media StrategySmithsonian InstitutionDraft—12/16/2010<br />This article is in the public domain; credit: Michael Edson / Smithsonian Institution.<br />Note: This is an unedited draft for a short essay for Will Crow and Herminia Din's forthcoming book about museums and online collaborative learning. The book will be published by AAM Press in 2011. <br />Table of Contents<br /> TOC \o \" 1-1\" \h \z \u The Commons: Helping Makers Get Stuff Done PAGEREF _Toc284335621 \h 3<br />New Models PAGEREF _Toc284335622 \h 5<br />What is a commons? PAGEREF _Toc284335623 \h 6<br />The ingredients of a commons PAGEREF _Toc284335624 \h 6<br />Looking Forward PAGEREF _Toc284335625 \h 9<br />The Commons: Helping Makers Get Stuff Done<br />There's a certain energy around somebody who is making something, learning something, or solving a problem. There's an intensity of focus, a sense of urgency, a twinkle in the eye. We know on a deeply personal level and as a society that doing things matters—whether the thing being done is for practical or scholarly purposes, economic gain, altruism, for formal education or self-directed learning, or just for the pure joy of it. We accord special status to those whom President Barack Obama called \" The risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things…\" These makers are important—the future of our species might quite literally depend on their success, and with great pride we fill our museums with evidence of the things they've figured out and accomplished. <br />Museums are celebrations of human doing—but here we have a disconnect: while museums excel at celebrating things that makers have thought and done in the past, they can be surprisingly indifferent to the needs of people who want to get stuff done in the present and in the future.<br />There are nearly 18,000 museums in the USA and together they spend more than $20.7 billion every year to accomplish their work in society. That's a lot of cash! That's more than the annual gross domestic products of almost half the nations on earth. Museums have many of the raw ingredients that creators, innovators, problem solvers—makers—need. Museums have vast collections of rare and notable physical and intellectual property, they have people with expertise and know-how. They nurture curiosity and knowledge creation through research, publication, exhibition, and public programming. They hold positions of trust and respect in their communities and they're heralded as places that \" reflect creativity, history, culture, ideas, innovation, exploration, discovery, diversity, freedom of expression and the ideals of democracy.\" Wow! With all this, museums are in a great position to help people innovate and do new things!<br />But walk into any museum in the country and ask these three questions:<br />Can I get access to all your collections and resources? These are raw materials for creation and innovation
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  Are experts availableto help me understand key ideas and concepts?Experts are guides, connectors, and problem-solvers—whether they work for museums directly or are part of their broader networks
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  Can I incorporateyour collections and resources into new products, ideas, or creative works?Once I get raw materials and expertise, can I do new things with them?My sense is that the public expects the answers to these questions to be yes, many museum employees want the answers to be yes, and makers need the answers to be yes, but with some notable exceptions the answers to these questions is likely to be either a highly conditional yes or an outright no. <br />And many in the public have noticed. <br />The comments below are from over 1,200 public responses to the Smithsonian Commons Prototype, a website set up in 2010 to explore the implications of opening up access to Smithsonian resources, expertise, and communities. <br />One of my biggest gripes doing presentations for the public on archaeology, is the number of museums that do not have their collections online. Much is kept hidden away for researchers only. We can read journal articles on valuable exhibits and sometimes a few drawings are available, but anything else requires either a visit or an application to do scholarly research. This is not fair to the public, since they pay either directly or indirectly for the valuable items kept for a limited number of people. Further, many people cannot travel or will never travel to see some more distant institutions. I am hoping for the day when all museums small and large put their collections online, for the benefit of schools, colleges and the general public.(Excerpt from comment #406)<br />I would like to see larger images of artifacts… I'd like to see images of the over 90% of your collection that is neither digitally available now, or sitting in your archives. (Excerpt from comment #548)<br />Images, expert lecturers, animations, related stories/references--all these would be nice to have easy access to, instead of searching through the whole internet and trying to mine gems that way. (Excerpt from comment #87)<br />I love the fact that [in the Smithsonian Commons Prototype] you can cut and paste pictures for reports!!!! Copyright is such a headache for students. (Comment #163)<br />…one of the great qualities of the Web is the ability to share and access information around the world, and I commend the Smithsonian for its effort in getting its wealth of resources outside all of its walls. (Excerpt from comment #989)<br />Yes, please to APIs. A commons is fabulous, but much more fabulous when it exists outside a silo, and can be blended with other free and licensed resources available through a library. (Comment #22)<br />I want to explore all the resources the Smithsonian has. I'm a high school student interested in every science from astronomy to physical/forensic anthropology to biology to robotics. (Comment #222)<br />[I'd like to] download high-resolution images and photographs that I can use in my work. (Comment #50)<br />Most museums aren't focused on people like this. People like this, with practical digital requirements, didn't exist 20 years ago! Most museum management philosophies have been forged by the traditional responsibilities of caring for physical collections, academic research, and bricks-and-mortar visitation. Physical collections are unique and fragile; subject matter experts and other museum staff are busy and need to be protected from the unrelenting demands of the public; researchers are given access based on their scholarly credentials; intellectual property needs to be restricted to protect the interests of rights holders, to prevent erroneous interpretation, and to generate revenue. <br />And while we in the museum world are dealing with these issues the culture is moving on without us. <br />Tentative investments and weak governance for new media in museums, and difficulties recognizing emergent paradigms for collaboration, innovation, and knowledge sharing, have created an environment where museums' relevance, brand identity, and impact have been successfully challenged by unexpected online rivals. <br />And if the Internet has shown museums one thing, it is that if people can't get what they need from us, they'll go elsewhere. <br />New Models<br />We know from the last decade of watching emerging technologies wreak havoc on the 20th century's venerable institutions that technology opens up disruptive new ways of finding and re-using information and expertise. <br />Chris Anderson's The Long Tail (Hyperion 2006 and also online at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html) explains how productive online audiences form around niche content.
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  David Weinberger's Everythingis Miscellaneous (Times Books, 2007) explains the ways in which making information digital changes the way it can be organized, found and used.
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  Don Tapscott andAnthony Williams' Wikinomics (Penguin, 2006) describes new forms of collaboration and commercial enterprise and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (Hyperion, 2008) describes new forms of collective action.
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  Lawrence Lessig's TheFuture of Ideas (Random House, 2001) and James Boyle's The Public Domain (Yale University Press, 2008) describe the powerful relationship between innovation and the intellectual property commons in the digital age.
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  Tim O'Reilly's Whatis Web 2.0 describes a profoundly important set of new relationships between companies, data, and communities.
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  Joy's Law, that"no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else," summarizes the opportunities of networking and distributed knowledge creation and is a warning against organizational hubris.
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  John P. Kotter'sA Sense of Urgency (Harvard Business Press, 2008) details the rapid acceleration of change in culture and business (mostly caused by information technology) and the dire consequences of inaction. As these new modes of discovery, collaboration, and knowledge creation gain power, the Smithsonian Institution, like many organizations, is working hard to keep pace. In 2009 the Smithsonian developed its first ever Web and New Media Strategy to communicate the nature of these changes to staff, management, and stakeholders, and to tell a story about how new media can be a catalyst to innovation inside and outside the Institution. The broad vision, inspired by the real accomplishments of web and new media practitioners, represents a shift from thinking about museums primarily as physical venues for personal enrichment towards thinking about museums as significant contributors to broader efforts to achieve societal goals. To these ends, the centerpiece of the Smithsonian's Web and New Media Strategy is the idea of a commons—a new part of our digital presence designed to stimulate creativity, learning, and innovation through open access to Smithsonian resources, communities, and expertise. The commons concept imagines the Smithsonian as a helpful agent and partner to makers, doers, and learners. But what exactly is a commons and how do you build one? <br />What is a commons?<br />Abstractly, a commons is a set of resources maintained in the public sphere for the use and benefit of everyone. <br />Usually, a commons is created when a property owner decides that a given set of resources—grass for grazing sheep, forests for parkland, software code, or intellectual property—will be more valuable if freely shared than if restricted. <br />In the law, and in our understanding of the way the world works, we recognize that no idea stands alone, and that all innovation is built on the ideas and innovations of others. When creators, scientists, inventors, educators, artists, researchers, business people, entrepreneurs—when everyone has access to the raw materials of knowledge, innovation flourishes. <br />Conversely, unnecessarily restricted content is a barrier to innovation. This is the anti-commons, a thicket of difficulties. If you can’t find an idea, can’t understand its context, can’t leverage your social network (however you define it—perhaps it's just your immediate friends and colleagues) to share and add value to it, and if you can’t get legal permission to use, re-use, or make it into something new, then knowledge and innovation suffer. Unnecessarily restricted content is like a virus that spreads through the internet, making the intellectual property provenance of each generation of new ideas less and less clear.<br />I like to think of a commons as a kind of organized workshop where the raw materials of knowledge and innovation can be found and assembled into new things. This kind of workshop—a place where ideas and knowledge can flow freely and be put to use by industrious and creative people—is harmonious with the needs of makers and the stated missions of many museums, including the Smithsonian.<br />The ingredients of a commons<br />There is no design manual for how to create a commons, but from interviews with people involved in commons projects, the maker movement, and my own observations and study I've come to recognize 13 design attributes that, in combination, lead to positive outcomes for makers of all kinds. For the remainder of this article, think of a commons as a kind of fortifying soup that's made with various combinations of these 13 ingredients. <br />Note: I'm always looking for more examples—if you want to suggest one give me a shout!<br />1. Federated<br />A commons brings things together that would otherwise be separate. The Smithsonian Collections Search Center helps researchers by bringing together over 7 million object records from more than 23 Smithsonian collection information systems. http://collections.si.edu/search/about.jsp <br />2. FindableIt doesn't do much good to have a bunch of stuff in a commons if you can't find anything. The crowdsourced stock photo site iStockPhoto does a better job helping me find stuff than any museum, library, or archive site I know. Industrial supplier McMaster Carr is a standout as well. http://istockphoto.com and http://mcmastercarr.com <br />3. ShareableThe whole purpose of putting resources into a commons is so they can be shared and used. A commons is shareable by default. On the Brooklyn Museum Web site, sharing is built right into the platform. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/157722/Morris_Kantor. <br />4. ReusableIntellectual property policies in a commons are uniform and clearly stated so users know, in advance—without having to ask or beg—that they can incorporate resources from the commons into new works. On Flickr, the copyright and permissions are stated clearly, everywhere. http://flickr.com <br />5. Free“Free resources are crucial to innovation and creativity” says Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig. Free, Findable, and Shareable form a particularly powerful combination. The Internet Archive says on their home page that \" like a paper library, we provide free access…\" http://www.archive.org <br />6. Bulk DownloadSometimes makers need a lot of something, or all of something, to solve a problem. On the Powerhouse Museum's Web site, you can download their entire collection database with one click. http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/download.php <br />7. Machine ReadableSometimes a maker needs to be able to write a program to work with data—particularly when you've got a lot of it. The information in a commons needs to be understandable to computer programs—machine readable. Data.gov is designed to encourage digital mashups through machine readable formats. http://www.data.gov <br />8. High ResolutionA commons should make available, for free, the highest quality, highest resolution resources possible. On NASA's Web site, you can download photographs so big that you can see how individual grains of Martian soil were compressed by the wheels of the Mars Rover. The paltry images on most museum Web sites thwart the efforts of researchers and enthusiasts, and undermine our attempts to let the drama and meaning of our collections shine through.http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/panoramas/spirit/ <br />9. Collaboration without ControlBecause resources are free, high quality, and sharing and reuse are encouraged, new kinds of collaborative work can take place—are taking place—without needing to involve lawyers, contracts, and bureaucrats. <br />Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody, writes “we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organization …Getting the free and ready participation of a large, distributed group with a variety of skills has gone from impossible to simple.”<br />MIT Open Courseware has case studies of collaborations and partnerships that have come to fruition exactly because MIT did not attempt to assert control over the intellectual property in the Open Courseware collection. http://ocw.mit.edu and http://ocw.mit.edu/about/ocw-stories/triatno-yudo-harjoko/ <br />10. Network EffectsIn a commons designed with network effects in mind you get a virtuous cycle: the more the commons is used, the better it becomes, and the better it becomes, the more people will find and use it. Over 180,000 people have added map data to the OpenStreetMap project, and those contributions have created a powerful resource that can be used and re-used by anyone, for free. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ <br />11. The Public DomainThe public domain is important. Intellectual property in the public domain is not owned by anybody: it can be used by anyone for any purpose. James Boyle writes that the Public Domain is not “some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The public domain is the place where we quarry the building blocks of our culture.” <br />12. Designed to help real peopleSoftware developer and social media thought leader Kathy Sierra says that every user is a hero in their own epic journey. The job of the Smithsonian Commons is not to broadcast our accomplishments to a passive audience: it's to help real people succeed in their epic quests through life. (See the Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy at http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/The+Smithsonian+Commons+--+A+Place+to+Begin)<br />13. Trust<br />After thinking about the previous 12 items for a couple of months I've decided that there's a 13th, and that's trust. <br />Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly said \" the network economy is founded on technology, but can only be built on relationships. It starts with chips and ends with trust.\" <br />The Smithsonian is in the forever business. By putting something in the Smithsonian Commons—be it a cultural treasure, or a folk song, a fossil of a bug, a lecture, or a community—we'll be asking people to trust us. We're not going to scam you. We're not going to violate your privacy. We're going to be honest about what we do and don't know, we're going to be open to new ideas and points of view, we're going to help each other figure out the world, and these promises are good forever. Museums are among the few organizations in our culture that enter into those kinds of promises, and we take that responsibility very seriously. <br />Looking Forward<br />We are just starting the process of building the Smithsonian Commons. It's a complex endeavor and there will surely be a lot of unknowns and surprises down the road, but I am confident that the defining characteristics of the Smithsonian Commons vision will endure: the desire to help people get things done, on their own terms, with the freedom to use the Smithsonian's resources, communities, and expertise in any way that works. <br />This is a moment in history when ideas, discovery, and action really matter, and many museum professionals feel that museums, libraries, archives, research organizations - - all of our beloved public institutions need to muster their resources to help accomplish meaningful work in society. We need to make a difference in the world. The Smithsonian Institution's strategic plan states that we need \" to use our vast resources for the public good in the midst of unceasing demographic, technological, and social change…\" <br />Or, as Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold put it in his commentary about the Smithsonian Commons concept,<br />The Smithsonian is not just about the past, but about the present and the future. The Smithsonian is not just about what goes on inside the walls in Washington, D.C., but about the communications that flow through those walls to and from citizens. The Smithsonian is not just about experts teaching citizens, but also about citizens teaching — and discovering knowledge together with — each other. <br />***<br />