The big issue in this room – what is definition of crowdsourcing?

What’s the lowest common denominator for these types of products – is it the sharing of data – making it public? Is it opening a challenge up to the public?

E.g. is Feral Dogs really a crowdsourced project as instigator gave robot dogs to small groups of kids in workshops rather than to “the crowd”?

Crowd sources projects have central mechanism that instigates and aggregrates.

Size is probably a factor.

Allowing amateurs to do what experts normally do. Crowd sourcing is also about crowd to share in the interpretation and analysis.

True crowdsourcing has people commenting, correcting other people and moving up in rankings. Kate – looking at outcomes across citizen science projects – Audubon – just wants your data, to Univ Delaware project where local citizens work with local scientist and do true science.

Some are about collecting from the public and others are about making public date more useful for the public (Trees Near You app)

Have to give people a structure, make it easy, like Exquisite Clock.

Boundary between participatory design and crowd sourcing – crowd sourcing ones seem to have a destination – solving a problem, creating something collaboratively. Participatory design is more about having an experience rather than collaborating on an outcome. There’s a goal as well as a purpose, transparency, joint ownership,

It’s a powerful tool that allows us to do things together that we’re unable to do individually.

Amanda mentions new york’s 311 initiative – collecting the data on what people have called about – uses the phone not computer; NYC wants to parse the data. The opposite is the rapid iteration that is possible with crowdsourced research like BigApps competition.

Unfortunately due to an unforeseen emergency, we will have to cancel our session Museums and Drupal: A Survey of the Field (mcn2010.pbworks.com/Museums-and-Drupal). While it is regrettable that we will not be able to discuss this topic with you all at the Unconference, we would eventually like to share our findings from the survey we conducted in preparation for MCN this year. We will send out our findings to the MCN List Serv however, please feel free to contact Kate Regan via email (kate@mediatrope.com) to request a copy as well.

contribute skills and expertise

• Expert Labs: www.expertlabs.org
• Extraordinaries/Sparked: www.sparked.com
• We’ve Got Time To Help: www.wevegottimetohelp.org

collectively re-use

• Feral Robot Dogs: www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots/

be a citizen scientist

• New York State Dept of Environmental Conservation: www.dec.ny.gov/animals/1155.html
• Innocentive: Boston Museum of Science project: gw.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9719645

transform public data into useful tools

• NYC Big Apps 2.0: www.nycbigapps.com
• Trees Near You: www.treesnearyou.com
• Health 2.0 Developer Challenge: www.health2challenge.org

collect data

• NoiseTube: www.noisetube.net
• Mobile Millennium: traffic.berkeley.edu

contribute to our understandings of history

• Library of Congress Veterans History Project: loc.gov/vets/
• OutHistory: www.outhistory.org/wiki/Main_Page
• New York Times: Documenting the Decade: www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/2009-decade.html#/intro

make art

• Exquisite Clock: www.exquisiteclock.org/clock/index.php?live=1&tag=random
• The Johnny Cash Project: www.thejohnnycashproject.com/#
• Harley Burland Scapes: www.decordova.org/art/exhibitions/current/scapes.html

I’m sorry, but the discussion about the Getty’s Cultural Objects Name Authority originally scheduled for Friday at 3:30 has to be canceled because one of the key participants is unavailable due to a family emergency. We’re sorry not to be able to have this conversation at MCN, but we will plan to do it some time in the near future, possibly at MW in Philadelphia next spring.

For those of you looking for an interesting THATCamp session to attend instead, please think about coming to the “Museum Visualization” session on Friday at 1:30 led by Richard Urban and Piotr Adamczyk. They’ll be picking up the way-too-short discussion started in our infoviz conference session today, and taking the discussion in lots of new directions, including the review of easily available tools. We’ll also have a chance to hear in detail from Richard, who was unable to present his own materials in today’s session because a cyclone kept him in Atlanta overnight, delaying his arrival at the conference.

I’m not a museum professional at all, but I’m a pretty heavy Twitter user, and I follow a good many museum people on Twitter. I was interested, a few weeks back, in “Ask a Curator” day, (un)organized in pure Clay Shirky fashion by the hashtag #askacurator.

What I’d like to do is sit down with some smart folks and some laptops in a room and see what we can do with that data. Visualizations? Analyses? Other? The dataset can be downloaded from twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/askacurator (though you need a Twitter account to get it).

I’d especially love to invite people who know more about data analysis than I do: I mostly do all my analysis with Excel, but surely there are better tools.

Hi all! We’re counting down till tomorrow, and you may be thinking, like @twittorician, “Less than a month [a day] until my first unconference. I have no idea whether that leaves me enough time to unprepare.” Rest assured, there’s always time to unprepare. One of the great features of an unconference is its spontaneity.

Still, here’s a little preparation, in the form of some Ground Rules:
* Have fun.
* Be productive.
* Keep it collegial and participatory.

Other than that, all you have to do is show up with an open mind. If you can make it to the introductory session at 10:30am tomorrow (Thursday) in the Sheraton room Capitol A/B, that’d be ideal: during that session, we’ll come up with some ideas for what to do during the 11 session slots that remain unscheduled. If you can’t make the introductory session, you should still feel free to drop in on any session you like and to register for this site, which will allow you to post to the blog.

Finally, we’d like to congratulate our good friend Ben Brumfield on a new addition to his family. Childbirth! Now that’s fun, productive, and participatory.

To meet the needs of 21^st Century Learners and to remain viable as an educational resource into the future, the Minnesota Historical Society has been conducting research and testing to develop a mobile application that could be used with large groups of children on school field trips. We would like to share our preliminary findings from teacher, parent/chaperone and child focus groups conducted throughout Minnesota and exhibit testing at the Minnesota History Center using mobile tools with school-aged children.  Here are a few of the questions we’ve started to explore during our research:

• What challenges are teachers struggling with in educating 21^st Century Learners? What challenges do parents face? Students?
• How do teachers use field trips? What do they value most about field trips? How do field trips relate to classroom learning?
• What do parent chaperones value about field trips? How do they apply field trip experiences to family learning experiences?
• What do students value about field trips? What do they like and not like about field trips?
• Can mobile technology maximize learning on field trips by responding to 21^st Century Learner preferences?
• Can mobile technology facilitate deeper learning for schoolchildren through free choice and personalization?
• Can mobile technology connect the field trip to the classroom and the home in a meaningful way?
• How can a mobile experience facilitate a meaningful social interaction among peers and parent chaperones?
• Can a mobile activity be implemented on a large scale for schoolchildren on field trips?
• How can a mobile activity work with an interactive physical environment, not against it?
• What mobile activities yield the richest experiences in a museum environment?
• Is it worth investing in mobile technology to keep museums relevant for the new generation of 21^st Century Learners, or are there other less expensive tools and techniques we should be investigating that are equally or more effective?
• Do teachers, kids, or parents really want to use mobile technology on a field trip?

We’d like to get your feedback on these and other questions, and we’d love to hear about similar work that is occurring at other institutions. Please join us for a lively conversation and help us learn from each other.

Wendy Jones and Jennifer Sly

Join us for a very informal discussion of the Getty’s forthcoming vocabulary, CONA–the Cultural Objects Name Authority. The Getty team is still at work at developing the vocabulary’s standards and planning its implementation; we hope that they’ll agree to formally present the project to our community at next year’s conference in Atlanta. Meanwhile, we thought that it might be useful for museum professionals to gather to consider the implications of a resource that will create authority records for unique works held in museum collections. We’ll consider the potential uses of the resource in museum practice, think through the concerns that the contributor community might have about the practical aspects making records available, and try to capture questions for the CONA team that represent the museum community’s thoughts. Some of you may have attended the introductory webinar this spring (sponsored by AAM, Gallery Systems, and the Getty Trust). The Q&As for that webinar are available (www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/cona_webinarQA_may2010.pdf) along with a general introduction to the project (www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/cona_intro.pdf). The CONA team has also recently released the vocabulary’s preliminary editorial manuals (www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/editorial_guidelines.html#cona). All of these are useful–but by no means compulsory–background reading for what we hope will be an interesting unconference discussion.

Susan Chun and Cathryn Goodwin

As our online collections grow larger, understanding the forest for the trees becomes increasingly difficult. Online search engines like Google represent an increasing source for website traffic, providing targeted search results to user queries. Many museum websites offer only a tantalizing glimpse at the rich resources that make your museum’s collection unique.

This unconference session explores the opportunities of using lightweight visualization techniques to provide a different view of your museum’s collection information that can be used to inform in-house metadata projects, provide users with an overview of your collection’s depth and breadth.

Information visualization technology has been developing rapidly over the last few years. Much of it has been inspired by the rapid accumulation of data in science and commerce. Many visualization projects are very expensive long term projects that develop a novel way of representing a unique dataset. The resulting visualizations are indeed spectacular and can be powerful tools for analysis, for inspiring new insights and for teaching and explaining findings. However in parallel to this ‘Cadillac’ infoviz, we have recently seen the growth of a more modest, low cost but surprisingly robust and powerful ‘Model T’ infoviz. By exploiting online tools and cloud computing (including Many Eyes and Google docs and maps), it is possible to put together visualization in minutes and at practically no cost – once you know the tricks and the quirks of the system. Naturally there is less flexibility than in the bespoke systems built from scratch, but we have found that often these visualizations are ‘good enough’ for particular purposes. Their speed of development makes it feasible to design many different visualizations for many different needs, rather than trying to design a single very expensive visualization that has to be all things to all people in order to justify its expense.

This unconference session will extend the conversation begun during the

Information Visualization and Museum Practice session and provide an open opportunity for delegates to discuss the problems that information visualization might solve at their institution.

To get the conversation started,  we might explore the following questions:
How can information visualization help visitors to the collection:

• What is this collection ‘about’? What is this subcollection about?
• What is this collection mostly about?
• Where have most of our items come from?
• That looks odd! Interesting – I think I need to look at that more closely

How can information visualization help stakeholders/staff:

• That looks odd! I think that must be an error in our metadata.
• That looks odd! I think there may be a consistent pattern of errors in our metadata.
• That looks odd! Surely something is missing!
• We have some but limited resources to add some metadata – what should we do?
• How are our collections being used?
• What is as we expected?
• What have visitors done that is surprising?
• What have visitors not done much of that is surprising?

Facilitators will provide case studies from the development of “collections dashboards” for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Opening History aggregation and theSpurlock Museum, along with related international projects. Panelists will outline how participants can extract flexible metadata for use in rapid prototyping visualization tools and services that they can use to get started on their own museum visualizations.

Session Info

• Type: Unconference
• Keywords: visualization, metadata,
• Relevance: This unconference session addresses both back-of the house needs to understand institutional data and front-of-the-house needs to make information about our collections transparent.

The value of Rapid Imaging is becoming readily apparent and more commonplace
in institutional settings, as a result the nature and methodology of Rapid
Imaging is evolving, driven by the needs of the user and available technology.
Sponsored by the Digital Media SIG as a follow-up to last year’s Rapid

Capture Digital Workflow panel: Speed the Plow, the original presenters will

return to give a “one year later” report on their continuing Rapid Imaging Projects.

The presenters, emphasizing what has changed, been upgraded, expanded or has stayed the

same, will illustrate their workflow, show resulting images, discuss
equipment choices and production totals with step-by-step descriptions,
illustrations, and thought process behind the decisions made.  Following the
individual presentations there will be ample time for discussion and
questions to the panel.

Speakers:

Chris Edwards, Digital Studio Production Manager, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

John ffrench, Director, Visual Resources Department, Yale University

Alan Newman, Chief of the Division of Imaging & Visual Services, National Gallery of Art

Stanley Smith, Head of Imaging Services, The J. Paul Getty Museum

Are you an MCN member who works in a library or an archive? Would you like to see a Special Interest Group (SIG) specifically for librarians and archivists?

Many librarians and archivists are actively engaged in digital initiatives.
Our patrons/clients include both internal and external scholars – our strategies
and best practices both reflect and inform their needs.

This unconference session will help to gauge the interest in
developing a Library/Archives SIG where the issues and topics specific
to our community can be discussed and tips/tricks can be shared

Ever wanted to collect stories, reflections, images, or other digital items from your visitors through the web, but you did not quite know how to plan and launch a site? In this proposed session participants will discuss the steps required to build a friendly and easy-to-use digital archive that encourages public contributions. Sheila Brennan has considerable experience building digital archives and collecting sites, and will share her experience with the group and will encourage others to talk through the challenges they are facing at their own institutions as they try to launch online collecting sites. Other topics that may be discussed include vetting, privacy, content management systems, project outreach, and sustainability.

<10/27/10> Folks, I’ve created a public Google doc for notes and examples during our session. Please annotate, edit, et al before, during, and after our session:  docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1VgbzIp0qX7Md6ffP0bSOmbd1cPkoZWgLxOtQcm-oVUI&hl=en

Session Info
Type: Unconference session
Keywords: digital archive, collecting, tagging
Relevance: The session relates to the conference theme by demonstrating how museums can invite the public to create content and add to a museum’s digital collections. Creating an online collecting site provides another means for a museum to encourage participation from its broad range of publics. Outreach and publicity for these types of sites are as critical to their success as building the site itself, all of which will be covered in this proposed session. This session may interest museum technologists, outreach specialists, curators, and educators.

DC MapGuide (dcmapguide.com ) is a web-based map application under active development. It will feature custom maps, created with free, open source tools.

The site integrates open source content, collected via the OpenStreetMap project, including highly detailed maps of Arlington National Cemetery and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden. Map data is stored in a PostgreSQL database, with Mapnik used to render custom map tiles, and OpenLayers used to integrate interactive maps on the site.

The site draws descriptive information about these places from Wikipedia, and curates the content and “mashes it up” with the map data to provide a highly informative guide to places around Washington DC. The talk will include a brief overview of the tools and the process of creating and curating the content.

Session Info
Keywords: web, map, wiki, content
Relevance: people interested in mapping technology, wikipedia, or open content

Imagine a digital re-imagining of the traditional brick & mortar museum, where visitors could use their own mobile devices to become a part of the museum experience. Augmented Reality (AR) & Mobile Applications are an effective way to build user interest in museum collections and exhibits by engaging users and prompting their participation within an exhibit. With the advent of Social Media and Mobile devices, the current paradigm of museums pales in comparison to the next generation of museums to come.

Augmented Reality, like many early technologies, was only possible in controlled settings with specific hardware and software designed for that usage. Medical students have long been able to practice open heart surgeries on dummies wearing AR goggles where visuals are mapped over the real world. The critical step we are experiencing now is the ability to map digital information over the physical world, making AR on mobile devices possible. With mobile devices came the ability to put AR in the hands of everyone. Using location and compass capabilities that come with mobile devices, museum visitors can hold their mobile device at eye level and see digital information mapped over their view of the museum. This information signifies where users are located and what direction and exhibits they are viewing. Users can view content such as blueprints to a Historic building mapped over the current structure, take tours of the museum based on their location or even prompt a virtual reenactment of a historic event to be viewed while in the exhibit, all from their mobile device.

Augmented Reality & mobile applications for museums would impact museum planning, exhibition design and museum attendance in a positive way. Those tools would allow curators to design interactive exhibits that would draw the attention of a younger, more mobile connected audience. Through the use of social media visitors could share their favorite painting, sculpture or collections with their friends, bringing more attention to the museum and its exhibits.

The session will show, in full scope, the evolution of interactivity in museum exhibits and how augmented reality applications could work to positively impact museum exhibitions. Below are links to a few examples of what a museum Augmented Reality mobile application looks like, using The Smithsonian Institution as a location.

Sample screens:
www.mindgrub.com/proposals/ar/ARapp_ip_ARView.jpg
www.mindgrub.com/proposals/ar/ARapp_ip_ListView.jpg
www.mindgrub.com/proposals/ar/ARapp_ip_MapView.jpg

Session Info 

• Keywords: augmented reality, mobile devices, mobile applications, social media
• Relevance: New Media Directors, IT Directors, Marketing & Public Relations Directors within the museum community

The content management system Drupal is experiencing growing popularity and adoption in the museum field. Drupal offers significant benefits to museums: it’s powerful, widely-supported and open source. Our paper will explore the use of Drupal within the museum community.

Our paper will present the results of a survey of a wide range of museums (art, science, history, large and small) that are currently using Drupal. We will examine the primary benefits and challenges of the system for museums.
Has Drupal met the museum’s expectations? What unexpected issues did the museum encounter in adopting Drupal? Were they technical challenge or issues of workflow and change management?

What are the most commonly deployed Drupal modules? Are administrative users limited to the webmaster or web team or does staff from across the institution update their own sections of the site? Has Drupal been a challenge for non-technical museum staff? Does Drupal scale to support the needs to the largest, most heavily trafficked sites? Is there an impact on hosting requirements when an institution adopts Drupal?

One of the concerns about using open source technologies is the absence of a product vendor to provide service and support. How do museums handle ongoing service and support issues for Drupal-powered sites? Has the lack of a conventional product vendor (and the presence of a large community of independent Drupal developers) proven to be a burden or an opportunity for museums?

One of the greatest strengths of Drupal is its extensive and rapidly growing library of community-contributed modules. Our paper will explore Drupal modules that have been developed by museums (some of which have been contributed back to the community) and modules that address issues of particular concern to museums including:

• Integration of external data sources such as data from Collections Management Systems and Digital Asset Management Systems such as the online collections of the Art Institute of Chicago
• CRM tools such as CiviCRM
• E-commerce modules such as Ubercart
• Calendar module being developed by Balboa Park Online Collaborative
• Calendar and TAP mobile platform developed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Finally we’ll look at the some of opportunities offered by the upcoming release of Drupal 7.

Session Info
Keywords: Drupal, open source, content management systems
Relevance: Our session is designed for museums currently using Drupal and those considering their content management system options. The session will be relevant for IT and web staff at a range of large and small museums.

We’re very pleased indeed to announce that THATCamp has partnered with the Museum Computer Network to bring you an “unconference within a conference.” THATCamp MCN, offered in conjunction with I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In 38th Annual MCN Conference, will be free and open to anyone who wants to attend and share ideas and get work done in the company of experienced museum professionals used to working with technology.

October 28th – 30th, 2010

Sheraton Austin at The Capitol

Austin, TX

See also the website for the associated conference, I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In 38th Annual MCN Conference.