Tag Archives: commons

In the neighbourhood

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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.

My take on the GLAM-wiki recommendations

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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.

All quiet on the GLAM-wiki front

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Two months on from the groundbreaking GLAM-wiki conference, where cultural workers and wikipedians met to consider mutual benefits of a partnership (I blogged about it here), I have been gathering some thoughts on the recommendations – and will post them soon. Strangely, very few people have publicly commented, notable exceptions being GerardM (a Dutch wikipedian), Liam himself, and (briefly) Mia Ridge, a London-based digital cultural worker. What’s with the silence?

Is there a good reason why no Australian cultural workers have commented publicly, or are you, like me, puzzled by the eerie quiet?

In my view, even cultural workers very pressed for time should be thinking about it, because that page of recommendations is an important work-in-progress. Why? Because everyone who works in a cultural institution is responsible in some way for enabling members of the public to access and engage with cultural heritage. I can’t think of a cultural institution whose mission is not to extend and enhance access to and engagement with cultural heritage. And from my perspective, the GLAM-wiki conference buzzed for the very reason that a partnership between the cultural and wiki sectors holds such promise.

If wikipedians and cultural workers could collaborate effectively, both sectors (and let’s face it, the public) would benefit immensely, as Liam suggested in the abstract for his presentation to Wikipedians about the GLAM-wiki conference:

[Wiki] projects have fantastic coverage – both breadth and depth – in popular culture but the same cannot be said for ‘high’ culture. [...] if we hope to produce ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ then we need to address this gap. Where this information resides is in the world’s museums, libraries, archives and galleries and we must begin to work with these institutions – for our mutual benefit.

In other words, the wiki community is hoping to get hold of significant knowledge that is currently hidden from popular view because it resides only in cultural institutions. And for cultural institutions, their collection material could gain the popularity of Wikipedia.

So how come – and despite the wiki community’s enthusiasm – the cultural community seems so lukewarm? As cultural workers we might see the obstacles; but we can still seek the goal.

Is it that staff of cultural institutions don’t see the potential? Could it be that we have popularity ‘issues’? Or as a collective, are we simply (still) anti-Wikipedia? I’m curious to learn what others think.