Agents of Cultural Change 20 April, 2009
Posted by Kostas in news.trackback
by Angelina Russo*
(Visiting Blogger)
Who or what are the agents of cultural change for the cultural institution sector?
Over the past 20 years, the communication of cultural materials has undergone a number of transformations:
- early shifts from single institution, building-bound collections to first generation online cultural networks: CHIN, CAN, The European Library
- recognition of the need to link content to communities through compelling stories; the development of second generation cultural networks which incorporate user innovation. Culture Victoria, NMOLP
- third generation: shift from top-down cultural networks to bottom-up value networks which use open innovation models to embed audience experience in the interpretation process. Picture Australia – Click’n'Flick, Flickr Commons.
Two definitions enable us to make this case:
user innovation is primarily used in the early idea-generating phases of new communication projects. Communities are asked to engage in a co-creative process to create new knowledge (eg: digital stories) which the organisation then disseminates through their own processes and internal innovation capabilities. Good examples of this include the Culture Victoria portal, which includes a number of commissioned digital stories and the National Museum Online Learning Project which incorporates commissioned audio and video to inspire audiences to create new content for their personal site.
Open innovation occurs when institutions engage in a co-creative process with communities and the new knowledge is then able to be used by both parties to create new business opportunites. For instance, Picture Australia’s Click’n'Flick is both an example of user innovation (communities engage in a co-creative process which creates new knowledge for Picture Australia archive) and an example of open innovation – Flickr contributors have access to their creative content, can continue to promote themselves and create new business opportunities outside of, and potentially strengthend by, the partnership with the National Library. Even though the Picture Australia program has been around for a while now, open innovation in cultural institutions is still quite rare in museums.
Collections, the mainstay of cultural institutions, are contextualised through their association and provenance with communities. Yet collections + communities is not enough. For audiences to ‘make meaning’ of cultural content, the sector uses interpretative techniques such as exhibitions, public programs, educational and outreach programs. The rise of online activity has brought with it the opportunity to create digital content which links collections and communities though compelling stories told by/and or for audience members.
First generation online cultural networks such as Canadian Heritage Information Network, Collections Australia Network demonstrated how institutions could partner to deliver their content online. These networks aggregated content from a number of organisations and made it available in one simple portal. Second generation cultural networks recognised the need to link content to communities through compelling stories which add audience experience to the process of interpretation. Third generation cultural networks take advantage of social networking technologies to create new value networks based on open innovation models which enable audience experience and creativity to be integral to the understanding of cultural materials both within and outside of the institution.
A great deal of resource has been put into the development of online cultural networks: Victorian Cultural Network, National Museums Online Learning Project UK, the Europeana project are examples of federated search initiatives which have been developed to connect audiocultural content through cultural portals. Transformations in cultural communication are characterised by a shift towards open innovation and new partnerships outside of institutions to create and distribute new knowledge.
Some questions which arise:
- Entrenched practices and assumptions – who has the right to do what with the collection? What is it there for?
1 – What transformations in cultural communication could be seen as agents for cultural change?
2 – How might we encourage experts to engage in dialogue with audiences?
3 – In what ways can we connect audiences in public spaces?
4 – How might mobile technologies be used to enhance experience?
5 – Can social networking raise awareness of ethnic community issues?
6 – What are your thoughts on public companies using social networking to connect audiences to broader social issues?
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*Angelina Russo is an Associate Professor at the Swinburne University. Angelina researches the connections between museum communication processes, multimedia design and digital content creation. She is Chief Investigator on the ARC Linkage research project Engaging with Social Media in Museums which brings together three Australian museums and the Smithsonian Institution to explore the impact of social media on museum learning and communication. Between 2005 and 2008 she led the ARC Linkage (relinquished to the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation) research project New Literacy, New Audiences which examined the development of user-generated content in collaboration with six major Australian cultural institutions.
Kostas
helenreesleahy
julianhartley
Robk
hi everyone. looking forward to discussion! thanks to Kostas for organising!
Hi Angelina, thanks very much for the post! Lots to reflect upon! Hopefully technology won’t let us down tomorrow and we can have the Skype conversation!
thanks kostas. speak then! cheers
[...] In an article destined for cultural agents, Angelina Russo, a researcher in museum communication, highlights some of the challenges cultural institutions are facing in applying social networking technologies to their drive to attract and interact with their audiences. She has noted a “shift towards open innovation and new partnerships outside of institutions to create and distribute ….” [...]
Hi Kostas
Just letting you know that I’m here! Hope the session is going well!
Cheers
Angelina
Thank you for the opportunity to speak during the session. I look forward to further discussion
Hi Angelina, many, many thanks indeed both for the post and the Skype-enabled conversation! Your post on agents of cultural change gave us lots to talk about in the class. Having your input over the phone as well was very useful indeed. Much appreciated!
The three main points we’ve discussed in the class were:
- the idea of a ‘value network’: how is a ‘value network’ defined, who participates in the network, what is the role of ‘content’ in that network and how value is generated;
- who or what might be considered an ‘agent’ for cultural change (with reference to new modes of communication and sharing of knowledge/expertise); and
- what the motivation may be for experts (e.g. museum curators) to engage with audiences in such value networks.
Just to kick off the discussion here, I’d like to say that I found very interesting what you said about ‘value networks’ (as opposed to ‘cultural networks’): that their value emerges from a bottom up participation and creative use of museum-generated or user co-created content. This shifts the emphasis of the network from the institution or indeed the content itself and puts it on the different ‘actors’ or ‘agents’ in the networks (being institutions, individuals or modes of communication), the process of ‘networking’ itself as well as the experience of the content. What I find particularly thought provoking in the idea of a ‘third generation cultural networks’ is that value or valued content is not attached to one place or a single author, but is generated in the collaborative process of sharing, re-contextualising, re-using and consuming. And I think, your notion of ‘open innovation models’ becomes very important in this respect.
Yes, indeed it is interesting the recognition of the collaborative process to move towards open innovation. Some designers involved in the work with non-designers, we refer to it as: co-design, while trying to involve people in different stages of the design process. In this context the issues that come to my mind are:
a) how the roles and negotiations with people give shape to the proposal?
b) how we can propose sustainable conversations along the process?
I might be too concern on the practicalities of this and deviate your interesting discussion. But I need this “how to” in concrete cases for understanding.
Regarding above comment:
The following links refer to Picture Australia – as per Angelina’s post – the ‘third generation’ of networked communication modes
http://www.alia.org.au/groups/quill/issues/2007.2/picture.australia.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html?pg=4&topic=crowds&topic_set=
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2006/id20060713_755844.htm
http://www.flickr.com/groups/pa_ourtown/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/re-pictureaustralia/
And some provocative afterthoughts drawn on analysis of above links:
After fascinating experiment with our on-line (to some degree) lecture, I wanted to check how the ‘third generation’ or ‘bottom – up value network’ works in practice. The area of my interest were concrete solutions, in terms of functional rules/ software design/ institutional organization, i.e. how members of community can cooperate with museum when they construct the content and how is maintained their involvement in process of assessing and dissemination. The Flickr webpages hosting Picture Australia – Ourtown and Re-Picture Australia projects were the objects of inquiry.
My primary thought is that the novelty of applied structure lays rather in business-like method (see above links about outsourcing/crowdsourcing), than in genuine change of relations between community and heritage site. Although the content presented on Flickr pages is user-generated indeed, the innovative participation of individuals is limited to creation of pictures and placing them in proper place along with relevant description. Somewhat more complex engagement is evident in a case of Re-Picture Australia where users re-contextualise the old photography according to own taste, imagination, creativity etc.
Potential acquisition:
To have your images considered for acquisition by a Picture Australia contributor:
- include detailed captions, descriptions and tags;
- upload high resolution images e.g. 2500 x 1900 pixels;
- allocate a creative commons or all rights reserved licence;
- include alternative contact details or check Flickr mail regularly
(http://www.flickr.com/groups/pa_ourtown/)
After an autocratic process of acquisition made by museum curator, the community and the contributor’s control over own production utterly vanishes. The method of communication remains me more patron – client relations than creative partnership. I agree, that in act of creation, choice of artworks, adding descriptions authors have an opportunity to influence the potential meanings. Nevertheless, similar range of opportunities had XIX century home-grown watercolorists making landscape paints for their own sake. The most significant difference between relations with an old painter and dealing with a modern digital photo-amateur lays in the handy proximity of digital storage on the service of the museum (no need for pursuit). By the means of digital networking National Library of Australia has been able to establish an acquisition channel and bottomless reservoir of digital images (as long as is able to maintain peoples commitment).
From my point of view, to change presented business-like solution into community regulated network there is need to develop tools/instruments enabling, apart user-creation, also user-participation; i.e. interaction from the level of production to interpretation, up to decision what, where and why exhibit. For example, a possibility to vote for the favourite picture can be the first step to enable an active engagement of the public.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this discussion. The main points have been:
- how do current models of value networks actually engage audiences in a co-creative relationship along the value-chain, through creation, development, distribution and promotion.
- what models for participatory content creation can be cited for the development of true audience/ institution partnerships?
These are the fundamental points which we are currently working through within our own research. At the moment I don’t really think there are satisfactory answers for either, in the context of museum practice at least.
Recently, we have seen some examples which begin to speak to these questions: for instance:
Curator’s with presence
Powerhouse Museum Curator’s blog
- presenting a face behind the expertise
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/blog/?p=246
-Curators reaching out to community
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/blog/?p=436
Institution as network provider
http://collectish.com/
Here the Melbourne Museum has provided a facility for audience members to organise, share and explore their own collections. The collections on this site are not the institutions.
Institution as network provider
Artbabble
http://www.artbabble.com
a place where everyone is invited to join an open, ongoing discussion. Established by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, it is intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives.
The questions around the value of these new networks offer profound opportunities to witness change in the museum environment. Artbabble and Collectish are examples of value networks where the institution takes its lead role through actively encouraging scholarly debate.
As we discover and contextualise more examples, I will add them to this post!
Hi Angelina,
Great and thought-provoking post here, and many thanks for your comments over at http://openculture.collectionstrustblogs.org.uk.
There are several observations I wanted to make, so apologies if this is something of a list.
I would typify your ‘value networks’ as communities of practice. These communities are interesting in that they tend not to be egalitarian in practice, even if they are in principle.
Of the examples you cite, and indeed our own equivalent, Collections Link (www.collectionslink.org.uk) in the UK, the majority are only apparently open. Even if they begin in a foment of co-creation, they very often resolve down to quite a traditional centralised model.
Take Linux as an example – far from a free and untrammelled democracy, the world of Linux development has a King (Linus Torvalds) and Barons (the relatively tiny community of ‘decision-makers’ within the development community. The same is true of wikipedia, which is carefully quality-controlled (‘mediated’) in most nations and indeed centrally.
Take your aggregators too – in principle, these should be the idea instrument to deliver co-curation of digital culture with the user. In practice, there is still an expectation that the aggregating agency will ensure at least a minimal guarantee of quality, which depends on interventive mediation.
That the move towards truly democratic co-creation and co-curation of collections is taking a long time to get going is due largely to how change happens in the sector.
Any process of large-scale cultural and organisational change depends on some pre-conditions:
First, there needs to be an impetus – some motivating force which compels us to act;
Second, there needs to be a motivating vision, not of what we are losing or leaving behind but of what lies on the other side of the ridge – the way the world will be when the change has happened;
Third, there needs to be a demonstrable benefit of the change which satisifes the needs and motivations of different levels of the organisation from strategy to operations to economics.
Museums are a century-old proposition, and subject to inertia in both the public perception of our role and purpose and in our own. There remain large parts of the professional community for whom the above criteria are not at all clear. Why is this change necessary? Why is it beneficial, and to whom? How will it help me increase my performance against my external performance indicators?
This is part of the reason why apparently open networks often resolve down to centralised authority – because when push comes to shove and the police are at the door, professionals want an ‘authoritative’ view on a particular area of practice and are seldom satisfied with the authority of the crowd (nothing gives reassurance like an ‘expert’).
By the same token – the public are not demanding co-creation. At least, the majority of museum visitors aren’t – they are demanding traditional passive visitor experiences which connect with their expectations of leisure time.
It is always important to question the true derivation of this momentum in some parts of the museum community. I certainly believe that the next two generations will come pre-loaded with the expectation of the right to co-create, but for the current generation, it is a novelty, and not always a welcome one.
And, to be honest, the current generation of museum managers and curators are not resisting the move to open collaboration with the user because they are some cult of recidivist reactionaries – it’s because in the heirarchy of what their users are expecting (the demand towards which their entire professional training has been geared) co-creation is an exotic plaything, not a central requirement.
It is telling that we practitioners who spend our time discussing open collaboration with users are ourselves a ‘value network’ – and we must always guard against achieving revolutionary change on our own small island which fails to reach anyone else in the sector. I know Copyright specialists in museums, for example, for whom this is genuinely an absurd new idea which has sprung into being overnight.
I think that the change will come, but not in quite the way we envisage. Ultimately, we will probably have to accept that our sector’s ‘offer’ to the mainstream public depends on a particular value proposition, and that part of this proposition is inherently connected to centralised authority. At the same time, we will be able to add value to, and extend this proposition by creating controlled opportunities for co-creation and, I would hope, by acquiring a new professional behaviour which ensures that when people have something to share about collections, it is possible for them to do so.
Hi Nick and thanks for the thoughtful response. We’re continuing the conversation at http://www.museum30.ning.com
Cheers