A museum of collective vitality

What are museums for?

One answer to this question comes toward the end of Orhan Pamuk’s epic novel, The Museum of Innocence, as the anti-hero Kemal visits thousands of museums in Europe, Asia and America. He’s planning to open his own house museum in tribute to Füsun, the forbidden love of his life – he’s been collecting objects he associates with her for years, from her cigarette butts to the ceramic dogs on her family’s television set. Pondering the purpose of collecting, he comes to the simple conclusion that museums are time compressed into space.

Looking at it from the direction of visitors rather than collectors… within the space of the museum we decompress the assembled material – expand it to witness something of the flow of time – what happened, how, and what it might mean. But is knowledge and understanding the end point?

In another take on their purpose of museums, New Curator describes museums as the city’s lymph nodes, immersed in its central nervous system, providing immunity against its ills. This model suggests a purpose beyond the (co)production of knowledge and understanding. Here, museums play a role in maintaining public health and happiness.

I’d like to reconceive of the National Museum of Australia in these terms. If a city museum can contribute to a city’s vitality, then a national museum can contribute to a nation’s. And now that we have a new director keen to take the museum into the future and willing to engage with contemporary issues, it is timely to reconsider its purpose. Could it be to promote our collective health in both social and environmental terms?

What would such a museum look like? It would certainly host celebrations – of admirable qualities of people and country. But it would also work to heal historical wounds, to tend to our collective psyche and our ecology. It would enlist visitors as active collaborators in witnessing, in recognising, in empathising, and provide means for us to respond in constructive ways. In this way, the National Museum would cultivate our collective vitality.

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Museum experience and participatory design

This is a paper I wrote for my digital design course.

Is it possible for museums to think about their space, or at least their digital space, in a whole-of-experience kind of way? It seems both uncommon and important. So that’s what I tried to do in this paper about digital museum experience design (PDF ~200kb). I’m especially interested in participatory design – where both the process and the resulting ‘opportunity space’ are participatory.

As is my wont, I drew a diagram for the essay. It illustrates the shift from presenting users with a finished product, to designing with their participation. It can be beneficial to involve museum visitors at every stage of the design process and indeed, beyond, as visitors can valuably contribute to meaning-making through their interactions in museum space.

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Generative iris fibres

I made the above in a collaborative project with Jonathan McCabe. If you check his Flickr stream you can probably tell that he’s an awesome coder with ideas-aplenty.

The project was to build a generative system to model something from nature. We chose the human iris, and in particular the radial fibres that in some people split and clump to form these circular openings.

In case you’ve never noticed these fibrous openings before, see the image on the right. It comes from a book on the Rayid model of iris interpretation (not the same thing as iridology).

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Ubicomp, (museum) space and the social order

What follows is a Master of Digital Design assignment – a ‘critical response’ to five papers on the topic of ‘Ubiquitous computing and urban informatics’. It includes (bonus!) references to a few other papers too.

Mark Weiser’s 1991 vision of technology blended invisibly into environments may not have quite materialised, but as Adam Greenfield points out, today’s phones, tablets and multitouch displays bear a close resemblance to his description of tabs, pads and boards. Ubicomp is spreading in many directions, from many sources. For example in Pachube, which serves out data streams about connected environments from people around the world, we can witness a growing wave of DIY ubicomp.

We can get a strong sense of technology’s wide and deep pervasion from Dan Hill’s account of the complex mesh of data flows in an imaginary-but-realistic city. Sensors, emittors and recorders are embedded in streets and buildings and carried by people doing business, passing by and hanging around. Data flows either with or without individual intent, and either functionally or dysfunctionally – in technical, personal and social terms.

Unlike the disembodied space of virtual worlds, ubiquitous computing works on, around and through human bodies; and in physical space, social relations are always at play. Ideally, we all have access (both read- and write-) to the data flows, as well as the ability to evade them. Ideally, we are also attentive to the affect of technology, and our interactions, on ourselves and the world around us. But real-world social space is messy. Anne Galloway warns that when technologies are invisible, so too are the power relations they replicate. The danger here is of our docile complicity in reproducing the dominant social order.

To mitigate against this risk, one of Greenfield’s ethical guidelines for UX in ubicomp settings is critical – ‘Be self-disclosing’. Seamlessness is rightly a feature, as Weiser imagined, but it must be optional, and reversible. And as with all new technologies, we must develop literacy about its use. We need to know that we have the right and the ability to ask the system to reveal itself – as well as its data.

Are there implications here for the digital design of museum space? For Foucault, museum space was heterotopia – ‘other space’ –  space that intervenes in ordinary space, and complicates our perceptions of it, illuminating and potentially contesting and inverting real-world social relations. To best serve visitors in their task of re-evaluating real-world social space, museum displays must not be seamless. They must ‘manifest their metatext’ (Lumley) precisely so that visitors can perceive the social relations implicit in both the product and process of their representation. Because of their particular role in representing ordinary space – because museum visitors are already immersed in a field of cultural technologies – the imperative for computational technology to be seamless might be greater here. If we can ignore the technology, do we gain a clearer view of social conditions? Or is it better to conceive of the technology as another layer of metatext, and therefore to render it visible?

Certainly, Weiser’s notion that ubicomp would be calm technology seems a better fit for museum spaces than the whizz-bang often associated with technology. It does not help museum visitors to be distracted by technology at the expense of their social engagement. So in museum building, exhibition and application design, that is something to note.

References:

Foucault, Michel. Of other spaces (PDF). Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 16(1), 1986: 22–7. (or here’s an HTML version)

Galloway, Anne. Resonances and everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city (PDF), 2003.

Greenfield, Adam. All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings. Boxes and Arrows, December 1, 2004.

Greenfield, Adam. Real life: Weiser FTW. Speedbird, April 16, 2010.

Haque, Usman. Pachube, patching the planet: Interview with Usman Haque. Interview by Tish Shute, January 28, 2009.

Hill, Dan. The street as platform, City of Sound, February 11, 2008.

Lumley, Robert. The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display. London: Routledge, 1988.

Weiser, Mark. The computer for the 21st century (PDF), Scientific American 256, no. 3, 1991: 66–75. Reprinted in IEEE Pervasive Computing, January 2002.

Not explicitly referred to (I only had 500 words!), but also informing my thinking here, were these two papers presented to the Innovative Ideas Forum at the National Library of Australia on 16 April 2010:

  • Bell, Genevieve. ‘U are happy life: Making sense of new technologies’.
  • Manson, Rob. ‘Collections are leaking into the real world’.
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In the neighbourhood

Applications are almost due for the Bold Ideas, Better Lives challenge.

I was thinking to submit an idea – something that came out of reading Steven Johnson’s book, Emergence. But I haven’t done enough research or had enough (as in, any!) feedback to know if it’s worthwhile. And I just realised that on top of writing a 1900-word intro to the idea, you’re meant to put in a 3-minute pitch. Then there’s the small issue that I’m not sure I’m keen to champion this idea to the point of implementation. I’d use it. I’d be happy if it worked! And I’d be more than willing to help make it manifest. But the idea of talking it up through the whole process of shortlisting and selection… Well, I’m probably just not that much of a champion. In that regard, anyway.

So instead, I offer the first 700 words of an idea to anyone who happens to read this, and hope for some (constructive) critical feedback, or at least some expressions of interest.

What is your idea? (100 words)

I’d like to strengthen communities by facilitating real-world interactions through an online hyper-local aggregator and hub. Enter The Neighbourhood – a platform for creating a directory, noticeboard and town square for residents, visitors, business-people and local government to exchange information and ideas about local conditions, events, opportunities and ideas. It would feed information about the weather, infrastructural and social issues, jobs, trade, community activities. It would invite and enable people to share goods, ideas, and media – in other words, to funnel relevant parts of our current activities for the benefit of the community around our physical home.

What is the social need or challenge your idea could address? (300 words)

City living can be isolating – especially in very car-oriented cities – and in many neighbourhoods people are almost unknown to each other, having very little contact. We have opportunities to share information, experiences, goods and ideas through workplaces, distributed networks of family and friends, and digital communities. But where we live is important; our local community is potentially a rich source of interaction. If we have a lost pet, or surplus home-grown zucchinis, if we are creating an art installation, or need a new footpath – in all these circumstances, a good outcome can depend on the quality of our local relationships. Our individual and communal wellbeing could be dramatically improved by a digital town square that facilitated real-world relationships. If we know each other better, we would be in a better position to take good care of each other – to look after our neighbours’ house, garden, or pets when we’re away; to look out for the neighbourhood children; to care for, listen to and learn from our old folk.

The Neighbourhood would build constructive real-world relationships – and thereby improve collective wellbeing – through a simple and useful aggregation of relevant information, and hub for activity both online and in physical space. As well as the community benefits, an actively engaged community would be advantageous for businesses and governments. For businesses, it would constitute a highly effective channel for communicating with residents, promoting local products and services, and tailoring them in accordance with feedback. As the dawn of Government 2.0 approaches, access to a hyper-local community network would also be highly beneficial for two-way communications – genuine dialogue – to identify priorities, refine policies and so on.

The Neighbourhood would cultivate goodwill and generate social capital.

What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place? (300 words)

This idea was inspired by Steven Johnson’s book Emergence. He looks at how swarms or networks operate in micro-organisms, insect colonies, human cities and the internet, and finds that at every scale – and in the absence of a master planner – local interactions suffice to bring about emergence – a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

I was thinking about this notion of emergence in relation to my own neighbourhood. I live on the main street in a suburb of Canberra, where although people do walk past, most traffic is motorised and, particularly on Friday nights, vandalism and ‘criminal damage’ are common. (I know this from experience but also because my street makes a regular appearance in the Neighbourhood Watch newsletter.) I don’t believe people are the problem here. I think our cities and lifestyles are serving us poorly, and we need a solution based on goodwill rather than fear. Surely, the more we interact locally, the better off as a community we’ll be.

Steven Johnson has in fact implemented a similar idea in Outside In – a platform for aggregating hyperlocal news, blogs and discussion. From my perspective, however, it is limited in that it’s not focused on the physical world except insofar as it uses location to organise the news feeds, and it’s not intended to facilitate interaction, only to supply information.

I’m actually surprised there isn’t yet a thing such as The Neighbourhood already. Aggregation; social media; cloud computing; we-think; and emergence – all these capacities enhance our potential to improve the way physical neighbourhoods operate. It seems we could all benefit by augmenting our physical communities with a digital overlay – by using our digital networks to enhance and empower our local communities. Such would be the point of The Neighbourhood.

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Happy Ada Lovelace Day

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

In planning this post, I had a strong urge to write about Ada Lovelace herself. Reading a chapter by Howard Rheingold, I marvelled at the clarity and potency of Ada’s vision for computer programming, in which ‘the mental and material [...] are brought into intimate connexion with each other’. Indeed, we unite this binary every time we use computers either to translate ideas into form, or to expand our consciousness of the world around us. Amazingly, Ada wrote that 100 years before computers existed.

Then I briefly thought to celebrate Evelyn Fox Keller – for figuring out that each cell of slime mould is an agent of its own aggregational destiny – ie, that there are no commanding cells directing all the others to form into a mass, moving entity; for unearthing the dispersed history of thinking about decentralised forms of authority, which has since coalesced into the field of emergence; and for her meta-work on feminist science, which is how I first encountered her.

But the achievements of both women have been well documented. I prefer to write about someone with a smaller digital footprint, even if it means traversing into more foreign technological terrain. So here is a brief tribute to an atmospheric scientist – a climatologist – whose contribution to science is mostly mysterious to me, but whose capacities for independent, steadfast investigation and analysis are unquestionably impressive.

My Mum reckons that my younger sister, Julie, was inspired to embark on a scientific career by our step-uncle, a paleontologist, when he gave her a piece of dinosaur egg from South Australia. She won the Australian National University Medal for her Honours degree in physics, and by age 30 she had a PhD in atmospheric gaseous exchange – you can read it here. I don’t grok its scientific significance, but I know that the research involved camping in a forest in Siberia, and building metal towers to climb in order to collect air samples. That’s quite an effort.

I also know that in her work for the federal Department of Parliamentary Services, she wrote a report, Climate change: The case for action, that dissolves any excuse the Australian government might have had for failing to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It says that the climate is changing; that most of the change is due to human influences; that the changes present serious risks; that those risks can be managed; and that the longer we delay, the more drastic our mitigation measures will need to be. It’s clear! (It’s just a pity that the problem here is not purely scientific – mostly, it’s cultural. People are apparently not yet ready to accept those mitigation measures.)

As well as being scientifically inclined (and successful), she is a rockclimber, adventurer, nature photographer, mother of two, animal lover (she has three Siberian huskies and two cats) and since last month, medical student. So, I celebrate Ada Lovelace Day by celebrating my multi-talented sister, Julie Styles.

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Coming out creative

With some hesitation – even trepidation – I have published some pages about me and some of the things I’ve made. Why the worry? Well, because I’m no extrovert. Plus, I’m in some kind of transition phase, so it’s even harder than it usually is to talk about who I am and what I do. Plus, I’m nervous. Change is a little bit scary. Thrilling but, mmm, scary.

I love drawing, and making things, and pootling about with software for making things that both look nice and mean something. But between a PhD, parenthood and full-time paid work, my energy for making things has wandered off to the sidelines. It is feeling neglected, and no doubt it has shrivelled a bit. I suppose I have prioritised being clever over being creative, for pragmatic reasons (although I read somewhere this week that the perceived value of creativity is on the rise). Actually, I think I have not ever really believed in my creativity. I think I thought I’m too introverted to be arty. I thought I was more your logical, left-brained type. But now I’m wondering why I can’t be that and creative. I want integration!

Now, I’ve quit my full-time job. Now, I am determined to give my professional endeavours more of a creative curve. I have lots of ideas – and I’m looking forward to exploring them. It feels good.

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What the federal government does – first steps

At Govhack a small team of folks started working on the idea of visualising all the activities of the (Australian) federal government, so that as citizens we are better positioned to identify where we’d like to intervene in government processes. This post documents the progress we made.

Our work focussed on a single data file from this National Archives set – agencies.xml, which lists all the Commonwealth Agencies ever to have existed (around 7000, with around 2000 extant), along with 212 functions that they perform.

Rob Manson did some invaluable work in converting the data into more usable forms – taking out the sizeable – but sometimes empty – NOTES field, and producing various json (and plain text) files that included different combinations of data.

Here is my tagcloud of functions of the Australian government made using ManyEyes:

Tagcloud of Australian government functions

It’s an interesting array but its meaningfulness is questionable. Text is sized according to its occurrence in the data, which could mean that multiple agencies are responsible for that function, or that it has been passed around a lot from agency to agency, or simply that it has been around since Federation or before (eg, telecommunications, taxation). A smaller font could also indicate a relatively new function (eg, criminology), or one subject to terminological shifts (eg, foreign policy has become international relations). Then there are perplexing aspects of the data, such as that quarantine started in 1832 but ended in 1993 even though it remains a preferred level-two term in AGIFT – under primary industries. Hm, there are plenty of issues here.

Officially (ie, according to the Functions Thesaurus) there are only 25 top-level functions – the rest are either sub-functions or non-preferred terms. But clearly there are discrepancies between the official terminology and the actual descriptive data. Ultimately, for this project to succeed as a public map, we will need to also enable people to use other, unofficial, vernacular, folksonomic terminology as well. Has anyone ever tried tagging terms? Tag tagging – hm, there’s a concept.

Another aspect of this project is that people might identify functions that the government should be performing but is apparently not.

Rob also produced some great images, focusing on a single function and showing the complex array of agencies that perform that function. For example, here are some of the current agencies doing SCIENCE – click for the full graphic:

Commonwealth Agencies doing SCIENCE

One lesson here is obvious: Commonwealth government is amazingly complex! See also the mess of agencies performing these other functions: INDIGENOUS | EMPLOYMENT | TRANSPORT | COMMUNITY.

Finally, Brenda Moon made significant progress on her path to use Processing to visualise the agencies and functions in a spectacular array based on NYTimes 365/360 by Jer Thorp – again, click to download the full PDF:

Detail of Commonwealth Agencies array

What now?

These are all first steps, but we had fun exploring, and we’ve raised many questions and issues. As well as how to show – and enable interaction with – the dynamic relationships between agencies and their functions, incorporating date ranges, locations, and vernacular terminology, there is no doubt much else to consider.

I’m thinking, for example, about how functions themselves could be structured so that the array is more visually readable. Would it work to plot or colour them according to two axes – whether the object of the function is individual or collective, tangible or intangible? (Eg, some more individual-oriented functions include health, employment and immigration, where communications, civic infrastructure and environment are more collective. Environment and civic infrastructure are also more tangible, along with primary industries, in comparison to governance, business support and regulation, and justice administration, each of which has fairly intangible processes and products.

I’m also wondering whether the agencies.xml file is more problematic than useful as a source of functions data. Other sources of similar information might work better. AGLS is a contender, although it has not been consistently implemented across government. Maybe the AAOs that I used to make this other tagcloud are a more reliable source. At least there the frequency/size of the term corresponds to the amount of legislation passed to manage it. Or perhaps we should look at this issue another way. For example, in talking to Gordon Grace, from AGIMO, it might be possible to obtain some bulk data on what people are searching for at australia.gov.au. Possibly, whatever data forms the foundation of the array of government activities, the rest will need to be crowdsourced.

One more point to note: once the initial interface was populated and making sense, it would be good to direct users to several destinations:

  • current online material about each activity
  • contact details for the Minister currently responsible
  • historical records

So, this project seems to be growing some legs ! and I’m looking forward to continuing the discussion with all interested parties.

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Going to the govhack fest

With some trepidation due to my lack of geek credentials, I have registered to attend Govhack. Keen to find out how I can contribute.

I’ve also added a project idea to the wiki, based on this idea. As a conceptual taster for how useful it might be to have a browseable overview of government activities (which you can control / explore and then use to find a pathway to web-based material that interests you) I made this Wordle tagcloud using the latest Administrative Arrangements Orders:

Tagcloud of Australian Government activitiesEven a static bundle of words gives you a sense of the range of activities the government is involved in.

Whether or not this idea takes off, I’m excited about being involved in this event. Hope to meet you there!

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My take on the GLAM-wiki recommendations

Following on from my last post wondering about the lack of public comment to date, here’s my take on the recommendations. Obviously, as well as being really long, this post is selective and partial – many items seem to me to be straightforward and correct, so I have not commented; others are better discussed by experts in that area. Some of my comments might indicate my ignorance on some issues; I’m happy to be corrected. We all have our ignorances – as I think is evident in some of the requests themselves. So it’s good to have the conversation, and to keep the momentum going.

A key point in the recommendations – and my response to them – is that the cultural sector needs to be educated in the ways of Wikimedia. This venture is just beginning!

1.1 Law requests to GLAM

The idea of proactively publishing the copyright status on each collection item’s description page makes perfect sense, but it is unlikely to be simple to implement. It might (or might not!) be straightforward to adjust the collection database to accommodate a new publicly-visible field, but populating that field for every item would take a lot of human resources, and in the case of government archives, often a single item (a paper file) might require various copyright statuses.

Of course people should be free to use public domain work! Do some cultural institutions really have an actual policy that requires users to ask permission to use public domain content? And do others really place ‘copyright-like restrictions’ on public domain content? Is that even legal? I can understand the Wikimedian view that it might be better to have no online access to public domain content if a donor agreement has prohibited third-party use – it is cause for frustration and potential conflict to have it there.

I’m all for using creative commons licensing where the work is wholly owned and controlled by the institution and/or free for educational use. As someone who has been responsible for responding to requests to reuse published material, I can attest that it is often very time-consuming to craft a response to a request that could be handled by an up-front license with a clear attribution statement. But I also know that this would be a significant change for cultural institutions and that without a ministerial directive, it won’t happen across the sector any time soon.

1.2 Law requests to Wikimedia

On the request to publish donor information as part of the attribution statement, isn’t it up to the license-creator to specify how the attribution should be made?

GLAM sector workers’ access to resources about Wikimedia and the free culture movement seems critical to the success of the collaborative venture. (Note, this request seems to belong more in the Education area?) Some elements that could usefully be incorporated into a toolkit, training package or FAQ are:

  • customised training in adding content to Wikimedia and creating and editing Wikipedia pages
  • a list of benefits of creative commons licensing over other forms of copyright control
  • an explanation of how non-commercial licensing is fraught, and the benefits – including business-wise – of allowing unrestricted use
  • strategy and tactics for negotiating with donors to achieve the best outcome for public access
  • demonstration of successful partnership projects eg German Federal Archives

2.1 Technology requests to GLAM

On the request to publish stable and clean URLs for collection items:

  • this is a really important request – anyone who uses collection material needs to be able to cite and link back to the original sources
  • the fact that this is a request by Wikimedians to the GLAM sector suggests to me that the GLAM sector didn’t really need to request that Wikimedians ‘take proactive care of the moral rights of content creators’
  • this is another recommendation that, for some cultural institutions, could be tricky to implement in the short term – which is not to diminish its status as a high priority request. One workaround for collection databases that don’t generate usable URLs (let alone pURLs) is to create a Zotero translator and publicise that as a way to generate links back to the item. And it may be that the solution to this problem emerges from an agreed standard for cultural collections, which in turn enables a more semantic identification of collections and items within them.

The idea of providing the general public with read-write access to a metadata repository is sensible. It would generate great community engagement, and it would enable bulk development of rich metadata, which could dramatically improve findability of the material and also enhance its meaning – I wrote a paper about that. But such a prospect would also be fairly freaky for many cultural workers, who tend to be concerned that it would jeopardise the integrity or authority of the collection. Such concerns are not difficult to overcome, and indeed successful models are now proliferating (think Powerhouse collection, Australian Newspapers project).

2.2 Technology requests to Wikimedia

Rather than (or as well as) creating ‘easy and extensible templates for citing institutional sources and data’, perhaps Wikimedia could help institutions to make their own template?

3.1 Education requests to GLAM

How good is the Wikimedian offer to do volunteer work on commission from cultural institutions? Are cultural workers thinking about this, even in a back-of-mind way? They should be!

Personally, I think it’s a good idea for on-staff experts to set up an account on Wikimedia so they can be consulted on specific topic areas. If I was an on-staff expert on a particular topic, I would do so. But I wonder how well-received this idea will be – would ‘Expert advisor to Wikimedia’ look good on your CV? Unless you are a high-level academic, in which case it would make you groovy, I suspect not.

3.2 Education requests to Wikimedia

To me, the idea that Wikimedians should highlight the importance of real-world interaction with cultural heritage is weird. Of course a digital copy of something will always lack something that the original, physical item has. But why should it be Wikimedians’ role to remind people of that? Should gallery hosts inform people of the advantages of an online digital copy? (Eg, access from anywhere, any time, sometimes in greater detail and with better light than you can see the real thing; access to items that are otherwise in storage and/or inaccessible in the real world.) This seems a prescriptive, condescending recommendation. Surely each cultural interface can speak for itself. The only way in which this requests makes good sense to me is if it is tied to the request to Wikimedia to improve consistency and comprehensive use of metadata (including physical location of the item). Provenance and context are absolutely critical to understanding cultural heritage. Note that Liam made a similar point in his Wikimania presentation in August.

‘Affirm the compatibility of interpretive debate within encyclopedic neutrality’ – cultural workers who feel this request is a necessary inclusion should read the Wikipedia policy on neutral point of view. My feeling is that the request is already well-met, and seems to work in practice. For example, the long and well-referenced page on evolution includes a paragraph about creationism, which in turn links to a page on creationism that includes sections on Christian and scientific critiques.

Don’t the requests to enable ‘expert contributions’ and external peer review clash with the spirit and process of Wikipedia?

Another request that seems unnecessary is to improve the visibility of the quality assessments of content. Here is a sample page that cites no sources:

Part of a Wikipedia page that cites no sources

To my mind, the orange bar and position at the beginning of the body content makes the message very prominent and clear.

4.1 Business requests to GLAM

These requests all seem reasonable and important and in the case of the request to make images of damaged items available for Wikimedians to digitally restore, generous.

4.2 Business requests to Wikimedia

These requests also seem reasonable, although many of the requests for information about business models could simply constitute items for the training package.

The final request, to generate positive media attention around collaboration projects, would seem to apply equally – or more – to the GLAM sector, which has more resources and a higher, more authoritative media profile than the wiki community.

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