Keynote for Open Digital Heritage, Almedalen Week, 2012

A symposium at theNational Heritage Board of Sweden

Visby, Sweden, July 4, 2012

Organized by the National Heritage Board,the National Library, and the National Archives of Sweden

http://oppnakulturarvet.se/

Michael Edson | @mpedsonDirector, Web and New Media Strategy

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

A video of this talk is at http://youtu.be/IVZE-B0C80k

Other slide shows on digital strategy available at http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm

Lego Beowulf and the Web of Hands and Hearts

Come, Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present… (video of the talk)

Making and the Commons (video of the talk)

Prototyping the Smithsonian Commons

Table of Contents

The 20th century broadcast model...............................................................................................................1

New rules of organizational physics............................................................................................................2

Doing hard things easily, at scale.................................................................................................................4

SpaceShipOne..........................................................................................................................................4

Trove.......................................................................................................................................................7

Zooniverse...............................................................................................................................................8

OpenStreetMap.......................................................................................................................................8

Ancestry.com...........................................................................................................................................9

Flickr........................................................................................................................................................9

It's about work.............................................................................................................................................9

Intellectual property policy is a platform...................................................................................................10

Questions and Answers.............................................................................................................................12

[Slide: A Washington D.C. Landscape by Rob Shenk. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcsj/5087028899 CC-Attribution License]

I work at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

It's the world's largest museum and research complex. It has 139 million physical collection objects, 28 museums and research centers. A zoo. 6,000 employees. More than 6,000 volunteers. 700 buildings. And our mission is the increase and diffusion of knowledge.

That's big stuff. It's a big job.

The 20th century broadcast model

But at the end of the day—or the beginning of the day, it's like any other organization. It's like any business or non-profit or school, or your heritage organizations here in Sweden. It's a group of people who have to figure out how to work together, and we've made certain assumptions about how we do that. And I don't know when we made these assumptions—nobody really remembers how or when we decided how we would work, but there is sort of a law of physics about how we do group work in these big organizations—in government and business and non-profits and mission-driven organizations…and the formula goes something like this.

[Slide: Resources go in, Outcomes come out]

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You put resources in one end: attention, real estate, stuff, money, trust, reputation. And then something happens inside that white box [see slide] and then out the other end come some beneficial outcomes—something that you're not supposed to be able to get any other way. Particularly in a mission-driven organization you're supposed to get something meaningful and audacious and valuable and precious out of the other end of that box.

And the way that we decided to do that in the 20th century—without ever really formally deciding—was to use the broadcast idiom. The broadcast idiom was great.

The broadcast idiom says that you get all the smart people, all the highly paid experts, and you put them in one place and they do all the things that need doing. And then they shoot those things down a one-way pipe to a passive and grateful audience.

[Slide: The broadcast model, we do, they consume]

All the great stuff in the 20th century happened that way. The broadcast idiom gave us automobiles, and the Hoover Dam, and the Smurfs—we got all the great stuff that our culture generated, through the broadcast idiom.

New rules of organizational physics

But there's a nagging doubt we've all had since we started typing "http://" that there was maybe some other way to do group work. And I think there are new laws of physics here. It's as if we are astronomers who have predicted, using the math and physics available to us, that a certain celestial object should be here, but we observe that it is over there. We need some new math, or some new constants like dark matter, to account for the differences between what is observed and what should be.

I think that new math, that dark matter, for our kinds of organizations, comes down to these three ideas.

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[Slide: Joy's Law, cognitive surplus, every user a hero…]

Joy's Law

Bill Joy was the co-founder of Sun Microsystems in the U.S., and he famously said "no matter what business you're in, most of the smartest people work for someone else."i

Try saying that at one of your next staff meetings.

It was a funny thing to say, but think about it for a minute. One of the Smithsonian's main interests is in making breakthroughs in biodiversity and climate change. There are 6,000 Smithsonian employees, only a small fraction of whom work directly on climate change or biodiversity issues. How many people are there on earth now? 7 billion? Where is most of the innovation, and the drive, and the knowledge, and the discovery going to happen---where is most of that work going to happen? Inside the walls of our institutions? Or everywhere else on the planet? That's what Joy's Law is all about. Joy's Law stands one of the tenets of organizations in the 20th century on its head.

Cognitive Surplus

The second idea is Cognitive Surplus. Cognitive Surplus is the title of a recent book by Clay Shirky, and in it Clay figures out that among the Internet connected, educated population of planet earth there are a trillion hours of free time every year that can be used to achieve some greater good.

A trillion hours.

Clay notes that in the United States over 200 billion of those hours are spent watching television.

There's a lot of time there that can be used, with a new way of organizing, to accomplish something.

Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail, told us at a conference at the Smithsonian, pick anything from your 139 million object collection and the odds are that the people who know the most about that object don't work for you, and you don't even know who they are. That's what Joy's Law is all about.

Every user a hero

The third law of physics I want to talk about is by Kathy Sierra, who is a thought leader in social media and new media. Kathy has observed that in the old days of the 20th century, an institution, a brand, a

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government would say "Trust me, trust us, because we are great." And she observes that now the formula is "Trust us, buy our product, follow us, because we help make you great."

Kathy Tweeted in 2009

"I am your user. I am supposed to be the protagonist. I am on a hero's journey. Your company should be a mentor or a helpful sidekick. Not an orc." ii

[Slide: Kathy Sierra, "I'm your user…"]

When you take these new ideas—they're not that new actually—and you start looking at how we do work…what happens inside that box we call the organization, it should cause you to step back a second and re-evaluate. Are we using the best tools to achieve meaningful outcomes in society? Maybe not.

Let me give you some examples.

Doing hard things easily, at scale

SpaceShipOne

This is the Smithsonian's collection information page for SpaceShipOne, the first privately financed rocked ship to take a person into orbit. It's a testimony to human ingenuity and verve and the Smithsonian owns the rocket ship—it hangs at the National Air and Space Museum a block from my office. You can go online, and if you're tenacious you can find this web page, and you can see a nice little photograph and some text and it's all very compact and happy and good.

But then you go to Wikipedia. And what do you get, right away?

Hyperlinks!

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[Slides: Left, SpaceShipOne on Smithsonian collections website, http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?id=A20050459000; Right, SpaceShipOne on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne]

How could we tell this story without hyperlinks? There are links to profiles of the people who built SpaceShipOne, the rocket science, the X Prize, the history of the project, photographs, photographs in high resolution…it goes on and on and on. This article has been translated, by Wikipedians, into 28 languages. 400 editors have worked on this page. Imagine coming into work one day and your Director says "we're going to put a new page on our website and 400 people are going to edit it." You would throw yourself out a window. But this kind of collaboration—this kind of group effort just happens. It just happens the way that planets orbit their stars. It happens because the physics of human interaction on the web—Joy's Law, Cognitive Surplus, and "every user a hero" and what happens when we type "http://...".

Or we go to Flickr.

[Slides: Left, SpaceShipOne search results on Flickr; Right, SS1landing.jpb, © Peter Vogel, on the Flickr website, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pvogel/110579166/in/set-72057594079211111 ]

Flickr is the free photo sharing website used by amateur and professional photographers all over the world. You type the name of the rocket ship, "SpaceShipOne", in the search engine, and you come up with 2,592 photographs of SpaceShipOne uploaded by users. No curator said "we need to have more photographs of SpaceShipOne this month." It just happens. Users—people—upload these photographs, they tag them with the name of the rocket ship, and there they are.

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And they are often magnificent photographs. They show SpaceShipOne at many phases of its construction and development, they show it flying, being tested, they show pictures of people's SpaceShipOne tattoos. It's amazing.

It's predictably amazing. Because of the number of photographers, the volume of photographs, and the culture of sharing on Flickr—and the infrastructure that makes that sharing easy and fun—you get reliably amazing results every time you go to Flickr. It's the same kind of reliability, of predictability, that was once only available through institutions with impressive names and buildings with marble columns. I mean, what kind of an institution is Flickr? Why do we trust it? "Flickr" isn't even a real word, it's not even spelled right! We trust it and rely on it because it works, over-and-over, every time.

This is more predictably amazing than what we can do with the broadcast method. Imagine trying to make Flickr with the broadcast method. How many interns would you have to hire to get this kind of scale and these kinds of outcomes?

And SpaceShipOne is a rocket ship. What do rocket ships do?

On YouTube, through a search for "SpaceShipOne", we learn that rocket ships fly!

[Slide: "Spaceshipone Flight" video on YouTube, http://youtu.be/FNXahIoXMw8]

Who knew?! We can make and share videos of them!

(When I was in high school, I knew exactly one person who possessed and regularly used a device that recorded moving pictures. Now, I bet that everyone in this room has, on their body, in their clothing, a high-resolution video recording device attached to a global information sharing network. Why would we not expect videography to be a part of organizational storytelling about the meaning and context of heritage objects?)

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[Slide: composite of Smithsonian, Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube web pages for SpaceShipOne]

So, which one of these places would you go to figure out the world? You can choose the broadcast page, and broadcast is still important. We're not going to crowdsource a nuclear power plant. We still need scholars and experts to go deep into the wilderness and come back with hard won wisdom, but broadcast is not the only tool we have, and in many cases it's not even the best tool.

And in many cases these new tools reveal new kinds of work that we didn't even know could be done.

Let me show you.

Trove

Trove. The National Library of Australia website, says at the top of their homepage "Find and get over 302,682,563 Australian and online resources: books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more."

[Slide: Trove website, http://trove.nla.gov.au/]

Over 302,000,000 resources. That's impressive. When I talked to the managers of Trove a year or two ago that number was around 100 million. They've tripled it, in a very short period of time.

And then this caught my eye—50,785 newspaper text corrections were made today.

Today! Could you get your staff to do 50,000 text corrections today?

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[And note that today, the day I'm finalizing this document, July 13, 2012, the Trove website reports that they've had 103,031 newspaper text corrections.]

I think that Trove has over 90,000 active volunteers who transcribe newspaper articles. They just do it because they like to do it. As soon as the library digitizes a copy of a historic newspaper page it gets put into a queue and it is transcribed, so it is searchable, by a volunteer. Do you know how many people manage that project? One person does it, part time. You can't get this level of participatory effort with broadcast. [to-do, double-check my notes for this number and provide citation.]

Zooniverse

Another example: Zooniverse

[Slide: Zooniverse home page, www.zooniverse.org/]

Zooniverse is a framework for getting citizens to participate in scientific research. It's like a crowdsourcing engine. Zooniverse has over 650,000 volunteers. Can you get that with a broadcast methodology? Absolutely not.

OpenStreetMap

[Slide: OpenStreetMap home page, http://www.openstreetmap.org/]

The OpenStreetMap website says "OpenStreetMap is a free worldwide map, created by people like you." And it's done without central coordination or control. If you know something about your

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neighborhood, and you're motivated, you have the ability to edit and create. What kind of scale do you get with this? OpenStreetMap's users have contributed 12 million edits and 1.8 billion map nodes. And the resulting maps are free to use and to incorporate into your own projects.

Ancestry.com

900,000 participants—in the old days you might have called them your "audience"—have created more than 26 million family trees containing over 2.6 billion profiles. They have uploaded and attached to their trees over 65 million photographs, scanned documents and written stories.iii

Flickr

iv

Flickr is an amazing website. There are over 9 billion photographs on Flickr. And it keeps growing. I just checked the Flickr website and it says that there were 3,492 images added to Flickr, by users, in the last minute. In my research I've noticed that it's often easier to find pictures of Smithsonian artifacts on Flickr, taken by our visitors in our museums and uploaded to Flickr, at higher resolution and with better metadata, than what I can find on our own websites.

It's about work

And this isn't just about getting and sharing resources. It's really about work. About doing hard work.

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I was trying to find out something about the Trundholm Sun Chariot, a very important Danish cultural artifact, and I found a very brief conversation about the Trundholm Sun Chariot on this online forum for Germanic Studies—the Skadi Forum. [http://forums.skadi.net/]

[Slide: the Skadi Forum, http://forums.skadi.net]

[Note: see Lego Beowulf and the Web of Hands and Hearts for more about open content in the context of Danish cultural heritage, http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/michael-edson-lego-beowulf-and-the-web-of-hands-and-hearts-for-the-danish-national-museum-awards ]

The Skadi Forum has 40,000 active participants discussing 300 topics with over 700,000 posts. With that level of participation, it is quite likely that any question I had about Germanic culture could be answered very quickly by someone with a high reputation and a high degree of accountability within this community.

Scale. This is scale. I think that we, in the cultural sector, have very small ambitions for scale. We're happy if we put up a beautiful museum exhibit that gets 10,000 people to come. What if we could get 10 million people to come? What if we get 100 million people to come? Those kinds of numbers are possible. And this kind of scale should redefine what we think should be coming out of the other end of that white box. What the outcomes could be if we started thinking differently about the toolset.

Intellectual property policy is a platform

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[Slide: Kolenboer / Coal merchant, from the Nationaal Archief, NL, on the Flickr Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief/3281460486/ ]

This guy is carrying coal.

When was the last time you saw someone carry coal?

When was the last time you saw one of your curators carrying coal to heat their office?

We decided, somehow, without ever really consciously making the decision, that we would not require curators to bring coal to the office every day to burn for heat. Did you see a memo about that? No. We made some assumptions in the 20th century about what we would provide our knowledge workers with so that they could be successful. We provide them with coal, electricity, heat, water, phones, computers, light—we take care of a lot of stuff so they don't have to worry about those things. This new stuff, this web stuff, this collaboration and crowdsourcing stuff is really just part of the platform of the 21st century workplace. This is what knowledge workers need to be successful now. And we can make this hard…we can make this transition from what we did 10 or 20 or 50 years ago to what we're clearly going to be doing as institutions 20 years from now…we can make the transition slow and painful and bureaucratic, or we can get out of the way. Because if we don't, this work is going to happen anyway, without us. We might as well be that helpful sidekick, not the orc.

[Slide: "No known copyright restrictions" statement from the Flickr Commons.]

The thing that lubricates so much of this new kind of working is intellectual property policy. These images in Flickr can become a platform, can become useful to people because these particular images are labeled with "no known copyright restrictions."

Copyright can be a great thing. Copyright is very complicated, when it's complicated—but when it's not, it's very very simple. Many of the items in heritage collections have, as my colleague Merete Sanderhoff from the National Gallery of Denmark says, "been in the public domain for centuries."v They have been available for citizens to reuse for any purpose whatsoever, without restrictions, for centuries. We need to let go of these resources a little bit. The free flow of resources is the oil that lubricates the machinery of progress.

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James Boyle, author of The Public Domain, Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, writes"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."vi

It's foundational.

Note, also, that this type of intellectual property represents an enormous economic force: The Computer & Communications Industry Association estimates that public domain, fair use, and other forms of non-copyright content contributed $4.7 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2007, and industries that benefit from this type of intellectual property employ 1 in six workers in the U.S. vii

[Slide: James Boyle, "The public domain…"]

The neat thing about this is that you, the people in this room—you get to decide. You get to decide how this works out. You get to decide how this new platform gets built and what it becomes. You can do it fairly quickly and it won't cost a lot of money…but no one else is going to figure this out for you. No one else can do it—can make the decisions that set the wheels in motion.

I think when we look back 100 years from now, the decisions we make around changing from the broadcast model to other models, the decisions we make around intellectual property, collaboration…who we think of as the active participants and who we think of as the beneficiaries of the work "we" do…these are the decisions that are going to be remembered. These are the decisions that will allow us to build the next thing.

Thank you.

* * * * * * * * * *

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Questions and Answers

[Photo by Lars Lundqvist, 2012-07-04, http://www.flickr.com/photos/arkland_swe/7507931952/ ]

Gunilla Kindstrand (moderator): Michael, a short question: how would you like to describe the role of the curators in this new media landscape? Here we have a lot of curators.

ME: That's a great question.

We did some testing with the public about what this new platform might look like at the Smithsonian. We did this testing through a public-facing wiki with full transparency, very quickly, and we received over 1,200 comments from the public. Over 70,000 words of commentary.

We heard very clearly from the public that they wanted our expertise. They wanted to know that something belonged to the Smithsonian—that was an important part of the narrative, and they wanted our help in deciding…in helping them find and see patterns and important ideas…but they didn't just want that. They also wanted the stuff. They wanted the stuff because they had, in their minds, something important to do. Some work to do. What we give them isn't an end product, it is a start—raw materials. There's so much being written about how curation is more important now with the richness of information we have available to us, but it's not the only thing we, as institutions, have to offer.

Curators need this too. They need this new platform to do their own work. We did a survey a few years ago of Smithsonian employees who share and use digital images as part of their daily work. 600 employees responded to this survey, and they reported that it can be more difficult to share resources within our own organization than it is to get resources from other institutions. Curators need a free flow of information, need this collaboration, to get their jobs done.

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i Joy's Law is frequently referenced in business and strategy contexts without academic source attribution. A suitable primary reference seems to be Lakhani KR, Panetta JA, "The Principles of Distributed Innovation," 2007, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1021034.ii From Twitter user KathySierra, November 5, 2009iii Sourced from research on the Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy Wiki: "Sites that Tick, Websites that Get 1 Million Hours of Community Effort", http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/websites+that+get+1+million+hours+of+effort, accessed 2012-07-13, and "Ancestry.com Reaches Two Million Subscriber Mark", Ancestry.com, http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press-releases/2012/07/ancestry.com-reaches-two-million-subscriber-mark-/?o_iid=51477&o_lid=51477&o_sch=Web+Property , accessed 2012-07-13iv

v Quotation is from Merete Sanderhoff's presentation to Smithsonian Institution digital managers, May 11, 2012. See slides at http://www.slideshare.net/MereteSanderhoff/the-hows-and-whys-of-sharing-at-smk-11052012 vi Boyle, James, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2008, p. 40. vii See "Fair Use in the U.S. Economy. Computer and Communications Industry Association (pdf), April 27, 2010.