[NOTES] Open Authority: A New Way to Talk to GLAMs | Wikimania 2014 | London
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Transcript of [NOTES] Open Authority: A New Way to Talk to GLAMs | Wikimania 2014 | London
Open Authority: A New Way to Talk to GLAMs Saturday, August 9, 2014
Hello. I’m Lori Byrd Phillips. And today I’m going to share a new, or more nuanced, way for you to talk to museum professionals as you pursue Wikipedia partnerships. I’m hoping that my research into open authority can be a useful tool for you to more confidently speak the language of GLAMs.
Feel free to tweet me @LoriLeeByrd.
Many of you probably know me as the former US GLAM Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation, and a founder of the GLAM-‐Wiki U.S. Consortium. I now work full time as the Digital Marketing Coordinator at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, the largest children’s museum in the world. The Children’s Museum is also where I served as the second-‐ever Wikipedian in Residence from 2010-‐2012.
That said, I’ll be talking a lot about museums, specifically. But that doesn’t mean that these things don’t also apply to libraries and archives. There may be some subtle differences, and I can help point you in the direction of those who can chat with you more about the other parts of “GLAM.” They’re all around you!
A few years ago, there was a buzz in the air over user-‐generated content and what this means for museums. And, on the user side, it was really excited buzz, but on the traditional museumist side there was much more resistance. At that time, museums were terrified of the idea of “the crowd”, fearing that curatorial authority would be sacrificed in the name of crowdsourced content. Now, slowly but surely, museums are beginning to embrace the crowd, with Wikipedia projects being one of the best examples. But there are still fears about what it all means for museum authority. So I became interested in figuring out: How can museums best integrate visitor contributions and still maintain their authority and established reputations as experts?
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The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
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I’m going to describe two established metaphors that led me to my answer. First, a metaphor from the museum world. In my museum studies graduate program, the 1971 article, “The Museum: A Temple or the Forum” was pounded into our heads so much that it essentially became its own meme. (This was actually our class t-‐shirt.) But this graphic is kind of misleading, because the author wasn’t saying that museums shouldn’t be temples. It was that museums should be both revered temples AND forums for dialogue. The two should be related but distinct. This was an important moment in museum theory, because it expanded on the idea of the museum as a keeper of objects, to also become a place where a community, the “crowd,” could come and share their ideas. And remember, this was 1971! I’ve learned that museums aren’t slow to come UP with the big ideas, but they can sometimes be slow to implement them.
My work with Wikipedia had already inspired me to think about where museums fit into the world of open, collaborative communities. And this led to the other half of my answer. It didn’t take me long to discover that the open-‐source movement had its OWN temple and forum metaphor, which some of you may have heard of-‐-‐ it’s called the Cathedral and the Bazaar. I really was shocked by how closely these metaphors fit together, at first glance. And I was glad when these lessons from the cathedral and the bazaar really could be applied to the temple and forum. Eric Raymond wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997-‐ & it compares the Cathedral -‐ which is top-‐down software development (like Microsoft), with the Bazaar (Linux), where everyone is free to adapt and improve open source software.
and
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As Wikipedians, you may already know Raymond’s most important point-‐ “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Or, The more people you have looking at a problem, the more quickly you’ll find a solution. While this may seem obvious to you all, this is still something that museum professionals need to better understand.
Raymond’s ideas led me to the conclusion that museums should go one step beyond the idea of the forum, and embrace the collaborative bazaar, instead. So that means that museums can be temples and bazaars! But since it takes a lot for me to explain what I mean by “temple and bazaar,” all the time, this phrase evolved to become “Open Authority.” I define Open Authority as: The coming together of museum expertise with community contributions, both online and on-‐site.
“Authority” is still important in all this, because museums should still maintain that level of respect as a “temple,” but in a way that makes sense for the world we now find ourselves in. Rob Stein, a leading museum technologist and enthusiast for open content, recently described the state of authority in museums, pointing out that museums should remain authoritative in their expertise, but avoid being authoritarian. They should move away from being an omniscient voice or final “truth.” Instead, museum professionals should be at the center of an open discussion with the public. Again, authoritative, not authoritarian. In reality, the increase in user-‐generated content has made the role of the museum’s authority even more important. There’s so MUCH information out there, that someone needs to sift through it all, and also take part in the conversation. Maintaining authority and being open do not have to be mutually exclusive. It’s not all or nothing. It’s not that the museum is necessarily always right, or that the crowd is always right. It’s that we can make it even better, together. This is open authority.
GIVEN ENOUGH EYEBALLS, ALL BUGS ARE SHALLOW.
Linus��Law — Eric S. Raymond
Museum
Community &
contributions
expertise
Temple & Bazaar
Open Authority !!
!!
Authoritarian Authoritative
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Open Authority is another way of talking about a broader paradigm shift in the cultural field, which GLAM professionals are already grappling with. By putting a name to it, they can become more comfortable with the idea, and be more prepared to consider how their work fits into this new community-‐focused trend. Partnerships with Wikipedia are just one way that museums are opening up to their communities. But there are many other ways that museums can embrace Wikipedia. To better illustrate the types of projects that encompass “open authority,” I came up with a spectrum.
The spectrum of Open Authority begins with more conservative approaches (often what museums are doing now) and leads to more progressive approaches. More conservative projects are...Contributory, where the public contributes data to a project designed by the organization. The spectrum then moves on to... Collaborative, where the public helps refine project design, with the project still led by an organization. At the far end of the spectrum is...Co-‐Creative, where the public can take part in all processes, and all parties design the project together. Generally the spectrum is moving from having less dialogue between the museum and the community, to having more dialogue and interaction.
Contributory projects are often what we consider crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing involves asks directed toward a shared goal that cannot be done automatically, and they usually have inherent rewards for participation. This can include projects that require Voting, Tagging, Identifying objects, Transcribing documents. Community Sourcing is a more nuanced, collaborative approach to crowdsourcing, and involves bigger asks made of a more committed, loyal community Community sourcing can include Memory Sharing, Community Blogging, Idea Generation and Dialogue, or Sharing Media
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Open Authority !"
Contributory Collaborative Co-Creative
Tagging Voting Identifying Transcribing
Community Sourcing Participatory Interpretation
Crowdsourcing
Memory Sharing Community Blogging Idea Generation / Dialogue Sharing Media
Reggio Emilia
A Spectrum of Open Authority
Open Authority !"
Contributory Collaborative Co-Creative
Tagging Voting Identifying Transcribing
Community Sourcing Participatory Interpretation
Crowdsourcing
Memory Sharing Community Blogging Idea Generation / Dialogue Sharing Media
Reggio Emilia
A Spectrum of Open Authority
And at the end of the spectrum is true participatory interpretation, or co-‐creation. The Reggio Emilia educational approach is the best model of co-‐creation in museums, but I won’t have time to talk about that today. There will be plenty of time later for that, if you come find me.
So where on the spectrum are GLAM partnerships? GLAM-‐Wiki projects are clearly an example of open authority, and not just online, but offline too. Because, whether it’s on a GLAM WikiProject page, or sitting side by side at an Edit-‐a-‐Thon, GLAM partnerships bring together the expertise within museums with amateur experts and enthusiasts in the Wikipedia community.
GLAM partnerships are really the quintessential example of “community sourcing.” Many have described Wikipedia as crowd-‐sourcing, but this drives me crazy. Because Wikipedia isn’t just crowdsourcing – it’s so much more! Crowdsourcing is just dropping in and out to contribute content to a project that’s been created by some outside entity. When museums work with Wikipedia, they’re working with a thriving community, made up of tens of thousands of active Wikipedia volunteers. We can help museums better understand what we are if we begin describing it as community sourcing instead of crowd sourcing. But why is Wikipedia not co-‐creation? That would be a great goal, but GLAM-‐Wiki partnerships aren’t fully there yet. Co-‐creation requires both the organization and the community to be a part of building a collaborative project from the beginning. For now, the Wikipedia community is the one that has a little too much authority and makes it difficult for new editors to lead in creating a new program. When cultural professionals begin to take an active role in developing GLAM projects alongside Wikipedians, we’ll be on the more co-‐creative end of the spectrum. As more cultural professionals become involved, this is happening more often. But it’s not yet the norm.
Wikipedia, in real life.
So much more than crowdsourcing.
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Wherever they land on the spectrum, many museums you may collaborate with are probably already embracing open authority, but they just don’t realize it. To help better visualize what makes a project “open authority,” here are some elements to be aware of. Open Authority projects include Access to Expertise as well as Community Participation. We’ve already talked about Open Authority being a combination of institutional expertise and community contributions. So these are the first two, basic elements.
Open Authority requires a Platform or a method for your community to engage with you. It could be an existing platform, like a Wikimedia project, of course. But it can also be a newly created platform, if not a GLAM project. The project also needs Content or a topic that motivates your community to participate. In GLAM projects, this content must be openly available for use, but in other projects this may not be the case. Open Authority always needs Shared Control and Dialogue. The museum should be a continued part of the conversation. In a GLAM project, Wikipedians and the GLAM professionals should have a shared sense of ownership over the project. There should be a focus on process, not product. Early on with crowdsourced projects, the focus was on the end result (like how many letters were transcribed), when the more valuable aspect is the community and the process behind that product. Finally, there should be Evidence of Collaboration. There needs to be some way of illustrating that the community played a key role. If in the end the museum alone takes credit, then that defeats the purpose of open authority.
We’ve come far over the past years in connecting with GLAMs, but for those who need to feel more comfortable with the idea of opening up to Wikipedia, I hope that open authority can help bridge that gap. Thank you!
! Access to expertise ! Community
participation ! A platform ! Content to engage with ! Shared control &
dialogue ! A focus on process, not
product ! Evidence of
collaboration
Elements of Open Authority
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Lest we forget…it all started at the British Museum.
Since the GLAM-Wiki initiative organized in 2010, great strides have been made in strengthening the relationship between Wikimedians and the cultural sector. In spite of this progress, being "open" in regards to access and community collaboration is still far from the norm in most GLAM institutions. When pursuing a partnership, it is increasingly important to be able to speak the language of the cultural sector, and understand the nuances of their needs and concerns. Within the cultural sector, developments in the realm of online access have dovetailed with the concept of co-creation, leading collaborative online communities and the open source movement to inspire a reexamination of authority within the museums, libraries, and archives.
"Open authority" is a term I established to describe the future of the cultural sector—the coming together of GLAM expertise with the insights and contributions of diverse audiences, both online and on-site. The open GLAM sees the visitor as a collaborator and active contributor in creating and interpreting content, and the curator as an engaged, expert facilitator. The Wikimedia community serves as inspiration for this model of open authority, which depends on dialogue from participants of all levels of expertise in order to create a more complete representation of a topic. The theory of open authority illustrates that an institution's traditional authority need not be swept away in the name of "crowdsourcing," but is instead even more valued. Authority can and should be combined with an open model of collaboration with the community, be they Wikipedians, a cultural group, or local visitors. Open authority will make the interpretation of our cultural heritage better, together. Wikipedia is one important facet of this broader paradigm shift.
In this presentation I will share tips for initiating and sustaining a partnership with a cultural organization within the context of the cultural sector's current notions of openness in regard to digital access and community co-creation. Understanding the elements of open authority is a useful step toward speaking the language of GLAMs, and more effectively reaching our goal to bridge the gap between Wikimedia and the cultural sector.
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Open_Authority:_A_New_Way_to_Talk_to_GLAMs