VRA 2009 (text version)

Imagining a Smithsonian Commons

3/19/2009

For the Visual Resources Association Annual ConferenceMarch 19, 2009

Toronto, CA

Michael EdsonDirector, Web and New Media Strategy

Smithsonian InstitutionOffice of the [email protected]

Table of Contents

Relevance..................................................................................................................1

A Return to the Commons.........................................................................................2

So, what exactly is a commons..................................................................................3

A Fundamental Institution for the 21st Century.........................................................7

An Un-Common Institution.....................................................................................12

Unexpected Rivals...................................................................................................14

The Smithsonian Commons....................................................................................18

The Smithsonian Commons…coming soon?..........................................................22

References...............................................................................................................23

Note: The opinions in this presentation are mine, not the official policy/strategy of the Smithsonian…

Relevance

(Slide: national mall)

I grew up in Washington, D.C. I was into Art and science, and the Smithsonian

was pretty much the coolest thing around. I could walk downtown or take a bus

and just wander in and out of the free museums letting my curiosity take me

wherever it wanted to go. In some ways you could say that I came of age at the

Smithsonian—that as I became an independent young adult, the bricks-and-mortar

Smithsonian—the world’s largest museum and research complex—modeled my

understanding of what it was to be an adult and explore the world.

The Smithsonian did things that demonstrated the values I came to care about as a

grown up: it’s good to learn, to research and inquire, to be curious, to draw people

into discussion, to provoke and even disrupt when necessary, to think across

disciplines, to create—In short, to engage as an active participant in the world of

ideas. I grew up in a city—in a country—that valued these things, and that chose to

build on its most prestigious real estate, possibly the most valuable real estate in

the world—a kind of commons…

…a knowledge commons…

(Slide: NMNH Ocean Hall)

A public institution dedicated—literally—to “the increase and diffusion of

knowledge,” free to everyone, every day. That spoke very clearly to me about

what’s important in a democracy.

But… I grew up before the World Wide Web.

Edson: Imagining a Smithsonian Commons 1

Now, deep in the heart of this wonderful rich disruptive digital age, the

Smithsonian has been slow out of the blocks. We have not yet committed to a

digital direction.

(Slide: Smithsonian celebration on the mall {multiple})

And the question is: How should the Smithsonian Institution increase and diffuse

knowledge now, in a world with 1.5 billion internet users1 and 3.5 billion mobile

phone subscribers2 —a world in which free and ubiquitous technology enables all

of these people to be our visitors, customers, collaborators, contributors,

champions, critics, and competitors…Sometimes all at the same time.

What example shall we provide?

A Return to the Commons

In this brief talk I’ll describe to you the vision of a Smithsonian Commons—a

unique and priceless collection of content, services, and tools that we give to the

world, for free. This is the 21st century successor to the knowledge commons

imagined into being by James Smithson 182 years ago.3

(Slide: Relevance)

Fundamentally and foundationally, I’ll argue that in this century, the Smithsonian

will be relevant only if it returns to its roots and champions the democratization of

knowledge and innovation; only if it uses technology to create a free and open

commons; and only if it steps up to the plate and applies its resources and energy to

this purpose with urgency and verve.

A Smithsonian Commons is good civics, good mission, and good business.

(Slide: Transition)


So, what exactly is a commons

So, let’s unpack this idea of a commons a little bit: what exactly is a commons?

(Slide: What is a commons?)

Abstractly, it’s a set of resources maintained in the public sphere for the use and

benefit of everyone.

Usually, commons are created because a property owner decides that a given set of

resources—grass for grazing sheep, forests for parkland, software code, or

intellectual property—will be more valuable if freely shared than if restricted.

In the law, and in our understanding of the way the world works, we recognize that

no idea stands alone, and that all innovation is built on the ideas and innovations of

others. When creators are allowed free and unrestricted access to the work of

others, through the public domain, fair use, a commons, or other means, innovation

flourishes.4

(Slide: The anti-commons)

Conversely, unnecessarily restricted content is a barrier to innovation. This is the

anti-commons, a thicket of difficulties. If you can’t find an idea, can’t understand

its context, can’t leverage communities to share and add value to it, and if you

can’t get legal permission to use, re-use, or make it into something new, then

knowledge and innovation suffer.5 Unnecessarily restricted content is like a virus

that spreads through the internet, making the intellectual property provenance of

each generation of new ideas less and less clear.

The framers of our copyright laws recognized this and established the notions of

fair use and the public domain so scientists, inventors, educators, artists,

researchers, business people, and everyone can have access to the raw materials of


knowledge. A commons can be thought of as a kind of organized workshop where

these raw materials can be found and assembled into new things.

Libraries are a kind of commons. The work of the Federal government is, by law,

put into the public domain—an intellectual property commons.

(Slide: Licensing)

Licensing and labeling facilitate the creation of commons by telling users, in

advance, how the property in the commons can be used, without making them

guess or negotiate.6 The GNU Public License (GPL) enables collaborative

commons to be formed around open-source software. (Linux is distributed under

the GPL.) The Creative Commons is known and loved by millions for the way it

makes it easy for rights holders to keep their copyright but share their works with

others, without intermediaries, or to withhold some rights if they so choose.

(Slide: CC Attribution-Noncommercial license)

Even a child can understand a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial

license. If your kid is online, they’ve probably already used one too.7

(Slide: Lessig quote)

“Free resources are crucial to innovation and creativity” says Creative Commons

founder Lawrence Lessig,8 and “free” can be surprisingly profitable.

(Slide: Doctrow quote {two parts})

In addition to selling his books through normal outlets, Author Corey Doctow

gives his books away via free download on his Web site. His fans even translate

them, for free, into different languages and file formats. Says Doctrow, “I’ve been

giving away my books online ever since my first novel, and boy has it ever made

me a bunch of money.”9


(Slide: Commerce and the commons)

The relationship between free content commons and commerce often produces this

kind of up-is-down, left-is-right freakonomics. It’s because of the power of crowds

—and the “network effect” in which the activity and contributions of users creates

a virtuous cycle: the freer a commons is, the more it is used; the more it is used the

better it becomes, and the better it becomes the more people will use it and the

more value it can create.

(Slide: Crazy…?)

In 2005, a technology company put 500 of its Information Technology patents into

a free and open “patent commons.” This company felt that their best interests

would be served if the open-source software community, on their own, developed

the unrealized potential of these privately-owned ideas so that they, the patent

owners, could reap the rewards too.

Cynically, one might say: Well…that must have made them feel good, but what

kind of a fool would give away active patents in a free commons? That’s crazy

talk!

(Slide: IBM)

Well, crazy like a fox.

The fool was IBM in 2005, and the combined value of the patents was $10M.

In 2006 it was estimated that IBM donated $100M worth of effort and intellectual

property into the open source software commons for the Linux operating system,

and reaped a 500% profit on that investment through the free contributions of

others. By investing in the commons, IBM gets a top-of-the-line operating system

for 20% of the price of building it themselves.10


And, institutional leaders take note: these efforts have transformed the company.

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams write in Wikinomics,

(Slide: “IBM provides…”)

“IBM provides a surprising example of how a large, mature company with an

engrained proprietary culture can embrace openness and self-organization as

catalysts for reinvention.”11

(Slide: Shirky quote)

The kind of distributed collaboration a digital commons allows would have been

impossible even ten years ago. Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody writes, “we

are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to

cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework

of traditional institutions and organization …Getting the free and ready

participation of a large, distributed group with a variety of skills has gone from

impossible to simple.” 12

You used to need an Institution to collaborate: now you can do it, better and

cheaper, in your PJ’s from home.

(Slide: What is a commons—list)

Everywhere I’ve looked in the last year, I’ve seen the ascendance of free commons models and the erosion of proprietary content models. For a lot of reasons, spelled out at length in Wikinomics and the writings of Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, David Weinberger, and others, free and open beat closed and proprietary every time.

Not only do I think that commons models are outperforming proprietary models in most circumstances, not only do I think the commons models is more appropriate for the Smithsonian’s mission and civic function, but they really do constitute a unique new way of organizing.13


A Fundamental Institution for the 21st Century

Let’s look at some other examples of commons.

(Slide: D.C. data catalog)

The government of Washington, D.C. has created an astounding catalog of

government information, all available to citizens and for-profit companies, in real

time, to use and reuse for free. Washington’s former CTO Vivek Kundra (now

Barak Obama’s CTO) says “we want to democratize data, and move into an era of

participatory democracy where citizens can hold the government accountable

intelligently.”14

(Slide: NIH)

The National Institutes of Health requires all research grant awardees to publish

their results in a free content commons, rather than through exclusive and

expensive subscription journals. Publicly funded science goes into the public

domain.15

In a recent NPR story, Library of Congress spokesman Matt Raymond called

attention to the more than one million digital images available on their Web site for

free, no questions asked:

(Slide: Library of Congress quote)

“We were established by congress as a universal repository of human creativity

and knowledge, and that includes vast amounts of items that are in the public

domain. It is our mission to make those freely available, whether in the 21 reading

rooms of the Library of Congress, or online.” 16

The Smithsonian took a very different stance in the same story.

(Slide: Flickr Commons)


The Flickr Commons is a partnership between Yahoo/Flickr and public

photography collections across the globe. The idea is to increase access to museum

collections and experiment with the effect of Flickr’s social platform. The

Smithsonian joined the Flickr Commons in June, 2008.

(Slide: Fish sequence)

We’re only allowed to upload photographs with that have “no known copyright

restrictions.” The fact that we’re not asserting rights encourages use and re-use of

the content and is what makes this a commons. Almost immediately after we

upload photos they are harvested into the Wikimedia commons so they can enrich

Wikipedia articles.

(Slide: End-user survey data)

84% of our Flickr Commons users say they are likely to use or re-use our

Flickr images. (35% for school/academic use, 16% for

professional/commercial use.)

41% of users say they’ll reference our content from a blog or Web site.

97% of users say they’re more likely to visit Smithsonian Web sites as a

result of seeing our content on the Flickr.

All respondents report that they have a more positive overall opinion of the

Smithsonian because of our contributions to the Flickr Commons—67%

with the most emphatic positive rating possible.17

(Slide: 8 vs 2,000)

Some of our photos get many more views on Flickr than our own sites. One

particular photo that was averaging 8 views/month on a Smithsonian site gets over

2,000 views a month on the Flickr Commons. Which site is doing a better job

increasing and diffusing “our” knowledge? Ours? Or Flickr’s?


Public tagging and comments have improved access to and knowledge about these

collections. It’s not uncommon for users to identify people and locations in

photographs or correct our mistakes. People love it.

(Slide: Flickr API)

Flickr also provides an example of “the programmable web.” Flickr’s public

Application Programmers Interface (API) allows anybody to create and share new

applications that use Flickr data. Many of these applications provide important

functionality for Flickr’s users, functionality that Flickr might not ever have gotten

around to providing, like mapping and visualization tools, and tools that allow

Flickr content to be embedded in 3rd party Web sites.

(Slide: Stanford 10M in 10 weeks)

This model has proved to be incredibly powerful, especially when applications can

be made and shared in a social network. Students in an undergraduate class at

Stanford, in a semester, built 23 new applications ten weeks using Facebook’s API.

Their applications were downloaded 10 million times and made between $500k

and $1M in ad revenue. Students formed three companies, (two of which were

acquired), bought cars, paid for tuition, and in a few cases quit school to seek their

fortunes elsewhere.18

Imagine, with our collections—our raw materials—the kind of activity that a

Smithsonian Commons platform and API could stimulate.

…But my favorite commons is the MIT Open Courseware project19.

(Slide: OCW, Triatno Yudo Harjoko)

OCW started in the late 1990’s as a faculty-driven strategic planning exercise:

How could MIT be relevant and have global impact in the coming digital age? The


answer was not, it felt, to create a for-profit, online, degree-granting university

(though that must have been a very difficult impulse to resist). But what if it made

the lectures and instruction of its professors available on the Internet, for free?

Audacious!

Arguably the most valuable and exclusive asset of the university, the time and

expertise of its staff, formerly reserved for tuition-paying students, put online for

anybody to use?

But that’s exactly what they’ve done. And it’s a gas!

(Slide: OCW Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry)

Sometimes, depending on the lecture, quite literally.

(Slide: OCW Physics I)

The OCW project licenses content from the faculty (who own the intellectual

property of their courses, and who participate on a voluntary basis), re-licenses or

recreates supporting materials from 3rd party copyright holders, films and edits the

lectures, and puts it all online.

The project has made genuine superstars of many of the professors, has opened up

research, publishing, and collaboration opportunities for them, and has projected

the quality and worth of the institution out into the world.

(Slide: Harjoko quote)

I think one of the surprises for them was the extent to which OCW is used

overseas. A quote on their home page from Triatno Yudo Harjoko, head of the

Architecture department at the University of Indonesia reads: “I was amazed that a


university such as MIT would freely give access to its educational information.”

He’s using OCW to remake the curriculum at the University of Indonesia from one

“in which professors are assumed to be knowledge-bearers, and students are

expected to master a predetermined knowledge base” to one in which they are

“encouraging students to learn by themselves, and to be both critical and creative.”

How beautiful is that? Free content in an open commons at MIT used to teach

innovative thinking in a university half a world away.

How perfect it would be if content from a Smithsonian Commons—free, findable

and clearly licensed for reuse—was incorporated into instructional materials for

MIT Open Courseware? Or if OCW teaching was incorporated into Smithsonian

exhibitions or educational materials.

The concept of a Commons makes this kind of institution-to-institution

collaboration possible, and even likely, because it makes clear our desire for others

to use and reuse what we have, it clarifies the intellectual property status of

derivative works, and it aggregates content into a usable, valuable critical mass,

without the necessity of proprietary contracts. If MIT had chosen to develop a

formal contract with the University of Indonesia to accomplish the same ends, it

never would have happened.

(Slide: OCW tag line)

The tag on the OCW home page says “Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering

Minds.” No Registration Required.

That’s a great tag line. It should be ours.

(Slide: Shared characteristics)

What are the common characteristics of these commons?


They all freely share information that, in 1.0 or pre-Internet paradigms,

would have been cloistered, restricted, enclosed, or directly monetized.

They all use some kind of licensing, labeling, or permissions structure to tell

users what they can, and can’t, do with information in the commons.

They rarely, if ever, assert rigid institutional boundaries around “their”

content. Information flows in, and out, across organizational and cultural

boundaries.

They all take advantage of network effects and the power of crowds: the

more the commons is used the better it gets and the more people use it.

An Un-Common Institution

Now that we’ve taken a look a commons, let’s get a little background about the un-

common Smithsonian Institution itself.

(Slide: Hirshhorn, NASM, NMAI)

We are a vast, decentralized, enterprise. We’ve got 28 museums and research

centers, plus the National Zoo—we call them Business Units, or just units for

short.

(Slide: Diversity and depth)

The diversity and depth of our endeavors and physical collections is astounding.

We run a satellite x-ray telescope in outer space. We have databases of animal

DNA. We’re preserving extinct languages. We’re conserving the original Star

Spangled Banner. We have 137 million things in our official museum collections,

and our domain is the entire universe and all that happens in it.

And we have the talented, independent, and opinionated workforce you’d expect

with a mission like that. (There’s a joke I like to tell about this: We hire a


consultant who, in their first meeting, asks how many employees we have. 6,000

we say. Then he or she asks “How many volunteers?” About 6,000, we answer.

Then they ask “How many top-level decision-makers?” With a straight face we

answer, honestly, 12,000.)

(Slide: 99% decentralized)

But among our staff there is not a single person whose job is knowledge

management. The Office of the CIO is funded to provide the Institution with a

basic Web infrastructure and a handful of support staff, but practically everything

else on the Web is done by the business units. 99% of our digital production is

funded and executed by the units. And the unit-based Web teams can be very

small, sometimes consisting of just a single part-time content-coordinator.

(Slide: Thousand wildflowers)

We call this the “thousand wildflowers blooming in the wilderness” model, and it

is the result of the Institution’s cash-strapped operations and early ambivalence

toward the Web. Back in the late 1990’s, given uncertainty about the future of the

Internet, the latent tension between central control and unit autonomy, risk

aversion, and budget pressure, there were few incentives to establish a strong,

central organization or unifying vision.

There are a lot of great things about the thousand wildflowers in the wilderness

model, and there is a lot of visionary, award-winning work going on in the units.

Web magic truly happens when collections (or research data), experts, and the

public are in close proximity. And it certainly beats what, from the unit

perspective, is presumed to be the alternative: dictatorial standardization from a

central authority.

But with those 137 million objects, a dynamic and increasingly Web 2.0-savvy


workforce, and the mission to increase and diffuse knowledge, we’re leaving a lot

of value on the table by working in silos.

(Slide: Enumerating weaknesses)

Search and findability20 across the Web properties is poor. Usability and branding

are incoherent. Web 2.0 patterns underutilized. And the units can’t afford to

establish, maintain, and refine the platforms they want on their own, never mind

that if they could, the repetition of effort or the devastating effect on end-users

would be calamitous: Imagine 30 separate e-commerce, event ticketing, or

personalization system.

Nobody would rationally design the online operations of a world-class Institution

this way. The sum of the individual parts—the individual wildflowers—don’t add

up to more than the whole, and they should. And it’s hurting us.

How much?

Unexpected Rivals

Unexpected Rivals in Search

High profile SI projects don’t project their might online

Let’s say you did a Google search on something we here know and care quite a bit

about: the oceans.

(Slide: “Ocean” search on Google.)

You get six results above the fold: Google Images, Wikipedia, Ocean.com,

discoveryeducation.com, a site hosted by NASA (which, ironically, the Smithsonian

and a NASA researcher created in 1995 and which we don’t host on our own site),


and something called enchantedlearning.com. The first Smithsonian domain shows

up five pages later: result number 55.

Now this is a little unfair: we all know it’s easy to play “gotcha” with Google

search engine results, so what can we find out about relative traffic and use-

patterns among these sites?

Unexpected Rivals: Reach

(Slide: relative online reach of top 4 search winners)

A search on “ocean” reveals a Web

According to Alexa21 three of our Google search competitors, Google Images,

Wikipedia, and NASA, are so much more popular than we are that our traffic

doesn’t even show up on the graph with them. Note that we’re measuring the Daily

Reach of the whole si.edu domain and all its sub domains, not just those relevant to

oceans.

Even enchantedlearning.com beats si.edu in terms of Alexa’s Daily Reach

measurement. I’ll repeat that, enchantedlearning.com , a two person operation —a

site for elementary-school kids!—challenges and beats the Smithsonian, the

world’s largest museum and research complex, in online reach.22

James Smithson would be horrified. Or maybe he’d be funding

enchantedlearning.com. (This, actually, wouldn’t surprise me. Smithson was

known as a shrewd investor.23)

Unexpected Rivals: Traffic Trending Down

First ever quarterly drop in SI Web traffic while use of social sites increases


(Slide: Alexa stats for si.edu)

Another thing to notice from Alexa is that our traffic is trending down. Alexa says

we’re down 13% over the last three months, and our own log data tells us that our

traffic was down last quarter for the first time ever.

So where is our audience going? Enchantedlearning.com? Maybe. Social sites?

Probably.24

Unexpected Rivals: Brand Identity

We might not be as prominent as we thought

(Slide: Battlebrands)

And what about our overall “Smithsonian Brand?” The clever and surprising

(though not scientific) Battlebrands Web site, using the results from thousands of

head-to-head votes between random brands, ranks the Smithsonian as the 371st

most impressive of almost 800 brands, a little above Fritos and a little below TGI

Fridays. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad, but we’re definitely not up there

on hallowed ground where we thought we’d be.25

We’re Competing With…Everybody

User-contributed content dwarfs what the Institution can accomplish on its own.

(Slide: Spaceshipone on National Air and Space Museum site)

Let’s say you’re as fascinated by Spaceshipone as I am. (Spaceshipone is the first

privately funded craft to carry a person into space: it won the X Prize and was

designed and built by Burt Rutan and funded by Paul Allen.) It’s hanging—a

monument to outside-the-box thinking— in the National Air and Space Museum a


block from my office. I go. I see it. If I want to know more I can go to NASM’s

site and find a picture, a QTVR of the cockpit (which is very cool), and some

authoritative text.

(Slide: Spaceshipone on Wikipedia)

Now look what happens when I search on Wikipedia. Hyperlinks!

(Slide: Spaceshipone on YouTube)

And on YouTube—a cornucopia of footage!26

(Slide: Spaceshipone on Flickr)

Or Flickr: over two-thousand images tagged, by users, with exactly Spaceshipone:

launch pictures, cockpit pictures, fan photos, spaceshipone tattoos —it’s

predictably amazing.

So if you’re John or Sally Q. Public and you want to know about the things in your

world, where are you going to go? Which Web sites gives you what you’re looking

for?

How can our small Web teams, or even the whole Institution, compete…with

everybody? Should we fight them, or join them?

The Demographic Tsunami

Today’s digital natives are tomorrow’s core audiences

(Slide: demographic tsunami: Pew research chart)

The habits, ideas, and perceptions of “everyone” is changing. This is

fundamentally a different world than the one I grew up in, and a tsunami of

demographic changes is about to hit us.


(slide: Online content creation by age)

This is a chart of the percent of people engaged in online content creation graphed

against their age. Younger people on the left-hand side of this chart tend to have

radically different assumptions about information, brands, and the relationship

between online vs. offline, but we tend to cater to the constituencies for our

traditional offerings, which tend to skew older.

One day, we’re going to wake up and that line (on the graph) will have moved far,

far to the right—social networks, mobile access, and commons patterns will be part

of everyday life for our core demographic. If they’re not already.

(Slide: Lee Rainie quote)

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet in American Life project says “Everything

we hear from people we interview is that today’s consumers draw no distinctions

between an organization’s Web site and their traditional bricks-and-mortar

presence: both must be excellent for either to be excellent.” 27

Memo to the Smithsonian: The Tsunami is coming.

The Smithsonian Commons

(Slide: How shall we…?)

So I ask again: How shall the Smithsonian advance the increase and diffusion of

knowledge, now? Hopefully, as I’ve been talking, you’ve been able to draw crisp

lines between the challenges and opportunities I’ve described and a way forward

for an institution like mine.

(Slide: Givens… {sequence})

Given that we’re a publicly funded institution with a civic mission. Given the


nature of that mission. Given the enormous scope of our endeavors and our siloed

operations.

Given the model of the commons…the rise of social media, the rise of distributed

collaboration, the rise of crowdsourcing, the rise of “free” business models, and

shifting attitudes about content and brands…

(Slide: Game changer)

…I assert that reshaping our digital identity around the concept of a Smithsonian

Commons is the way to move forward—it’s the game changer: a low risk, high

reward proposition that addresses the fundamental challenges of the Institution in

terms of brand, audience, operations, speed, governance, integrity, education,

research, revenue generation, leadership, and legacy.

(Slides: challenge-by-challenge)

Brand

The simple concept of a commons brings cohesion and clarity to the

Smithsonian’s vast online offerings. A preeminent and rising brand can

attract users, subscribers, sponsors and philanthropic dollars.

Audience erosion

Bricks-and-mortar audiences are not capable of growing as fast, as large, or

as efficiently as online audiences. Through the commons model we can seed

the Internet with high-value content and use social networks to increase the

relevance and value of our work. People—especially people under the age of

30—are going to immediately understand and respond to the idea of a free

Smithsonian Commons.

Operation in silos

A voluntary commons model built on transparency and trust—and

supporting (rather than competing with) the work of the units, provides an


excellent alternative to working in silos.

Speed

Bricks-and-mortar initiatives can take a long time to get off the ground. The

commons model can be prototyped and made genuinely useful in a short

period of time. In the time it’s taken to give this talk we could have used free

consumer technologies to create a terrific Smithsonian Commons social

network site. Maybe somebody has.

Doing more with less

In this economic climate, and facing an unfunded backlog of building

maintenance projects, it’s more important than ever to be able to do more

with less. The beauty of the commons is that it scales: by involving the

public we can amplify the reach and impact of the Institution’s baseline

activities. There are only a few of us: there are billions of Internet users a

click or two away. We probably have things they’re interested in and they’ll

love us if we share.

Governance and integrity

To be successful, a commons must be inherently trusted and transparent.

These are excellent reflexes to cultivate and highlight within the Institution.

This is the right model to perpetuate.

Education

Planning next-generation education programs is a top-priority at the

Smithsonian. A content commons can serve both as a collaborative

workspace used to create programs and a clearinghouse used to distribute

and improve them.

Research

Smithsonian researchers need private, semi-private, and public collaboration

and information-access platforms to advance and share their work.

Aggregating these services into a commons provides a stable base and opens


the door to new kinds of cross-disciplinary investigation. When we first

started putting collections online in the 1990’s we were able to see our

holdings in brand new ways: imaging now being to see across collections,

and across institutions, with the same clarity.

Revenue generation in harmony with mission

Attempting to monetize access to, and use of, media and ideas is not a

sustainable business model. Through these low-margin business practices

we alienate users, perpetuate the practice of institutions charging each other,

discourage research and publication, and undermine our civic mission. The

commons presents a win-win alternative: gradually reduce our dependence

on revenue from access and use fees by aggregating visitors under a strong

brand and offering sponsorships and other value-added products and

services. (NPR has an exemplary business model in this regard.) We’re

going to make much more money with “free” and a large audience than by

charging for transactions with a small audience, and it’s a much better fit

with our mission.

Leadership Position

Championing free and open content and asserting the critical role of public

institutions in stimulating innovating and knowledge creation would define

the Smithsonian as a leader. Science, education, creativity, and civic

discourse are all headed towards a participatory commons model. Being out

front now will heighten our influence and stature, and funders are often

willing to help institutions take risks if it’s likely they can succeed and lead.

Institutional legacy

The Smithsonian Commons can leave a lasting legacy for the Institution. It

is truly a return to the roots of our mission, a gift to the world, and a vote of

confidence in participatory culture and innovation. The Smithsonian

Commons marries James Smithson’s vision of what a knowledge institution


can and should be to how knowledge can and will be created in this century.

It’s also a vote of confidence in the transcendent creativity and imagination

of the people, and I think James Smithson would approve.

(Slide: Transition)

(Slide: “I want to be a commons”)

(Slide: “Don’t forget about us”)

The Smithsonian Commons…coming soon?

(Slide: …Coming soon?)

This has been a big download—a lot of information to unpack and digest.

I want to leave you, as a last impression, with a more emotional perspective…

(Play trailer movie)


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1 Internet World Stats, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm2 November, 2007 statistics from International Telecommunications Union, http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/newslog/Global+Mobile+Phone+Users+Top+33+Billion+By+End2007.aspx3 James Smithson set the wheels in motion in his will, which was drafted in 1826. http://www.si.edu/about/history.htm4 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Alex Kozinski, emphasized the role of free content and the public domain in an influential 1988 intellectual property decision involving, of all people, game show icon Vanna White. Judge Kozinski wrote: “Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.” (Lessig 2001) p 2035 This is an almost universal idea. I picked up on the idea of rights “thickets” from Hess and Ostrom (2007) and also Blonder (2005), though I believe it’s origin is elsewhere.6 Bollier, 20057 See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ for a description of the Attribution-Noncommercial license8 Lessig, 2001, p 149 Green, 200810 Tapscott, 2006, p 81. On Meet the experts: Robert Sutor on the IBM patent commons initiative (IBM Developerworks, 2005) Robert Sutor, Vice President of Standards at IBM says about their patent commons: “This is all about increasing innovation. This is all about understanding that open and collaborative work is becoming increasingly important, and that when balanced with the traditional proprietary model, open and collaborative work can drive new and wonderful things for the industry.”11 Tapscott 2006, p 8312 Shirky, p 2113 As Nancy Kranich, former head of the American Library Association, puts it, “Understanding knowledge as a commons offers a way not only of countering the challenges of access posed by enclosure [of resources], but of building a fundamental institution for the twenty-first century.” (Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p 92)14 Kundra, 200815 National Institutes of Health, see References for URL16 The NPR story, Protest Puts Smithsonian Images on Flickr Site, contrasts the Smithsonian’s public domain policies with those of the Library of Congress. The context of the Matt Raymond quote is:“Like the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress gets the majority of its funding from the Federal Government, but the library is taking a very different approach to the prints and photographs it makes available online. Spokesman Matt Raymond says that more than 1 Million digital images are available for free, no questions asked. ‘We were established by congress as a universal repository of human creativity and knowledge, and that includes vast amounts of items that are in the public domain. It is our mission to make those freely available, whether in the 21 reading rooms of the Library of Congress, or online.’ (NPR 2007)17 From an ongoing end-user survey of our Flickr Commons users. Official/final results have not yet been released.18 From the author’s written notes, O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference, June 6, 2008. Also http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/10-million-in-10-weeks-stanford-facebook-class-fall-2007-dave-mcclure19 Massachusetts Institute of Technology OCW, see Works Cited for URL20 My first contact with the word “findability” was through reading Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become (O’Reilly, 2005). I use the word to escape the traps of talking about search, information architecture, design, and labeling in isolation. Findability is all of those things interacting together.21 A web-traffic measurement tool that uses online panels of users to measure traffic. http://www.alexa.com.22 The enchantedlearning.com “about” page says: “Enchanted Learning, LLC produces children's educational web sites and games which are designed to capture the imagination while maximizing creativity, learning, and enjoyment. We believe that children learn the most (and retain it the longest) when they are actively involved in educational pursuits that are clear, logical, stimulating, and fun. Ease of use is a hallmark of our material. Children need the clearest, simplest computer interface, and our material is created so that the navigation and controls are intuitive. Our mission is to produce educational materials that emphasize creativity and the pure enjoyment of learning. The underlying message is that curiosity and exploration lead to delightful learning experiences. WEB SITES DEVELOPED by Jeananda Col and Mitchell Spector” http://www.enchantedlearning.com/ELS.shtml accessed 11/12/200823 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Smithson24 Even pornography may be losing to social sites. In a widely reported story, Bill Tancer of Hitwise says in his book Click that “surfing for porn” has dropped in half over the last ten years. “My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites,” says Tancer. (Porn passed over as Web users become social, 2008. http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSSP31943720080916?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=10112&sp=true )25 http://brandtags.net

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSSP31943720080916?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=10112&sp=true

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSSP31943720080916?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=10112&sp=true

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/ELS.shtml

http://www.alexa.com/

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

http://www.si.edu/about/history.htm

http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/newslog/Global+Mobile+Phone+Users+Top+33+Billion+By+End2007.aspx

26 For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNXahIoXMw827 Email to the author, 21 April, 2008. Author Bruce Sterling puts it another way: “If you’re under 21 you don’t likely care about any supposed difference between virtual and actual, online and off. That’s because the realms are penetrating each other. Google Earth mingles with Google Maps and daily life shows up on Flickr.” (Green, 2008)