Comment Cards 2.0: Three Tools to Check Out

In many museums, comment cards are currently the most "participatory" part of the visitor experience. It's the one place where visitors can offer direct, open-ended feedback on the institution's content and services. But there are three problems with museum comment cards:

1. The comments are so scattered over a wide range of topics (including generic ones like, "Thank you!") that the signal-to-noise ratio is low. Unless you digitize them, they become unwieldy and impossible to search through and derive meaning from.
2. In most institutions, the suggestions on comment cards don't get to the people in power. If they are read, it is primarily to address any chronic problems (i.e. complaints about the third floor bathroom), not ideas or opportunities.
   
3. There are few, if any, ways to write back and continue the conversation with the visitor who commented. Relatedly, there is no way for other visitors to easily join threads of conversation--to do anything but offer their own discrete atomized comments.

In other words, comment cards aren't effectively organized for use. Enter the internet. Recently, a whole slew of new web-based applications have popped up to make it easier for companies to gather and prioritize feedback from users. While these began in the pretty geeky world of people suggesting new features for software (see featurelist as an example), there are now several services with slick user interfaces that allow you to offer feedback on everything from Whole Foods markets to Barack Obama's presidential agenda. Because these services present individual feedback in a social environment and allow users to vote for their favorite suggestions or questions, the institution can easily see the prioritized desires and concerns of visitors without having to read hundreds of cards.

These services could be a powerful, cheap alternative to comment cards--especially those that are focused towards making suggestions about the museum. If you are considering replacing comment books or cards with digital kiosks, why not put the kiosk online and use a system that will allow visitors to vote for others' suggestions, comment on new ideas, join conversations with staff about opportunities, see which suggestions have been adopted by the institution? These third-party applications provide a ready-made environment for comment cards to become more useful and usable to visitors and staff alike.

Here are the top three tools I've been exploring: IdeaScale, GetSatisfaction, and uservoice.

Ideascale
prioritizing suggestions for specific programs

A couple of weeks ago, I opened this Ideascale website to invite readers of this blog to suggest and vote on Museum 2.0 community activities of interest (please vote and comment--I will move to action stage at the end of the month). Ideascale is the most basic of these three tools, offering three actions a user can take: suggest an idea, vote for or against an idea, and comment on an idea. The ideas can be tagged and grouped into categories, and can be browsed in time order, by most popular, or by category.

My account is free, but you can pay $15 per month for a bunch of moderation tools and secure portals. There is also a way to award rewards based on the number of points accrued by a given user (you receive points for commenting, voting, and suggesting) - for example, IdeaScale's parent company, QuestionPro, will give you a $10 Amazon gift certificate when you accrue 100 points on their own virtual suggestion box.

IdeaScale is best for individual programs or events because it focuses on prioritizing via voting. The suggestions have to be reasonably focused so that people can make comparative judgments. It may be useful if you want to ask "What kind of teen programs should our museum offer?" because all of the answers will be related and can be judged as better or worse than each other. IdeaScale is less useful for questions like, "What should we change about our museum?"--it may be hard to compare suggestions like, "new bathrooms," to "longer hours" to "more tours"--and therefore, the content becomes less useful.

Two interesting examples to check out: ChoiceHotels, a booking software used by hotel managers, and AsktheSpeaker, in which Ideascale was used by Netroots Nation to select questions to ask Nancy Pelosi in an interview. Both of these are specific; the first, about the feature set for a software service, and the second, focused on a single event.

Positives of Ideascale: Easy to customize the look and feel to brand to your site. Simple, understandable functionality. Focuses users on prioritizing ideas. No ads in any version.

Negatives of Ideascale: users must register an account to comment, suggest, or vote.

Best use for museums: When you want people to share their suggestions for a specific element of the institution (i.e. exhibition name, what kinds of programs do you want, what should we offer in our cafeteria) and want to gather both ideas and votes for each idea. While IdeaScale could be used as a standalone kiosk or a link from the website, but probably is better for specific, targeted projects than as an entire comment card solution.

GetSatisfaction
ongoing conversation with users about visitor experiences

GetSatisfaction is the youthful giant of this field. While IdeaScale is about sharing suggestions for particular programs or services, GetSatisfaction is a "customer service and support" system. Rather than just suggesting ideas, users can "ask a question," "share an idea," "report a problem," or "give praise" to the company or institution. These types are color-coded so a user can quickly scan down and see the problem reports (red), which they may want to respond to quickly. Users can also submit their emotional feeling about the idea or problem via a set of emoticons that let you know generally whether people are happy or pissed off. GetSatisfaction makes it very clear which users are employees and which are customers, and lets users know at the top of the page how many employees are engaged in the forum (so you know whether you are in an entirely customer-based discussion environment or one that has a lot of active participation by the company).

GetSatisfaction is more about conversations with customers than prioritizing suggestions. There are great secondary tools to allow you to follow individual conversation threads and users have profiles that can be developed across the site (similar to Yelp!). While you can vote on a given question or item to say that "you also have this question," that feature is not as frequently used as the "reply" function. Where IdeaScale is about sorting suggestions by priority, GetSatisfaction is about connecting with users and their concerns and questions. It is primarily used by web companies, but there are some media providers like the BBC and venues like Whole Foods using it.

Positives of GetSatisfaction: Creates an ongoing forum for communication with users. Can be used for multiple kinds of requests--content questions as well as concerns about the cleanliness of the bathroom. Great user interface; see this in-depth article about its design.

Negatives of GetSatisfaction: Free version has ads. Users must register an account to comment, suggest, or vote. Requires ongoing feedback and use by staff to adequately address user concerns.

Best use for museums: If you want to have ongoing conversations with visitors about their questions and concerns, GetSatisfaction is a good option. This is like a comment card system in which you are expected to respond to most of the questions and concerns. It could be a robust complete system, but there is a heavy staff time investment required.

uservoice
voting fairly for new ideas

uservoice is still in beta, and it got on my radar through their clever creation of a Obama agenda suggestion implementation (it does not appear to be affiliated with or sponsored by the Obama team). It is very similar to IdeaScale, focusing on making suggestions, voting, and commenting, with one unique difference: users are given a set number of votes (10) to distribute among the ideas listed. While suggesting a new idea is up front on the site, the fact that you only have ten votes to spread around adds a game-like element that focuses you on checking out many ideas and distributing your votes wisely.

For this reason, uservoice may be an interesting tool to use if you want people to vote for options in a controlled way where different users' contributions are balanced (i.e. voting for a favorite exhibit). The concept is that some of the ideas in the uservoice list will be adopted by the institution, and then the votes for that idea will be "freed" back to the voters for use on other ideas. That concept relies on users returning to the site multiple times--something no museum can really count on.

Positives of uservoice: Does not require registering an account to suggest an idea, comment, or vote. There is only a free version currently with no ads.

Negatives of uservoice: The vote cap may be confusing and or limiting to users.

Best use for museums: If you want to invite people to vote on topics and require them to really value their votes, uservoice could be a strong tool. I could imagine it being used, for example, in a climate change exhibition to invite visitors and staff to recommend energy-saving options for the institution and for visitors to vote on which they think the institution should prioritize.


One key requirement to make any of these systems successful is that you must place it prominently in your physical museum or on your website such that people can easily access it when they have their question or comment. That is more likely to happen in the museum than online. This could even be the start of a great "online extension" activity for visitors. Rather than dropping their comment cards into the black hole of a suggestion box, they could start conversations and engagement with the institution--originating with both positive and negative impressions--that continue for a long time. One of the most interesting things I noticed as I scanned the Whole Foods GetSatisfaction site was how many topics started negative and ended up becoming polite, engaging conversations between customers and employees. And while the tone of the Whole Foods employees is very marketing-ish, it's also personal, and it seems to work. Annoyed people are converted. They are spending more virtual time with the brand, and with real people associated with it. They are having conversations. And I think that's encouraging some of them to go back to the store.

Why let Whole Foods have all the fun? How do you use comment cards in your museum, and how would you like to see them evolve?

Scratch: An Educational, Multi-Generational Online Community that Works

Last week, I was reintroduced to Scratch, a graphical programming language designed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. I first saw Scratch a few years ago, when I had friends working at the Media Lab, and at the time it seemed like a neat way for kids who were unfamiliar with programming to jump in and start designing their own interactive stories and games. It was a serious improvement on tools like Logo Turtle and Hypercard that I grew up with... but still, a programming environment.

Then, in May 2007, the Scratch online community (called ScratchR) was released. It's a place for Scratch users to upload, share, and remix their Scratch projects. ScratchR is a true social network, connecting hundreds of thousands of people--kids and adults--in about 200 countries around the world. It's an inspiration to anyone trying to create an online community around informal learning. In this post, a look at the intentional design choices that make ScratchR work.

There are four sections to this post:

1. An overview of ScratchR user types and related statistics.
2. Why people participate.
3. How kids and adults are able to play together safely.
4. How ScratchR makes strong use of platform power and social objects.
   

You may want to open a window with the ScratchR homepage so you can refer to it throughout this post.

First, a look at statistics on user types.

As of today, ScratchR boasts 236,997 projects created by 37,820 contributors of ScratchR's 174,425 registered members. Those are big user numbers. What do they mean?

As in any online community, ScratchR has spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators. The ScratchR spectators are part of the 5 million+ ScratchR website visitors who check out projects but don't join. If you've clicked on a link to the site from this post, congratulations--you are a ScratchR spectator.

The 174, 425 registered members are all joiners. I'm one of them. I've joined the site, but I haven't yet uploaded anything or commented on anything. I'm still a "passive consumer" in the eyes of ScratchR, but my actions are tracked every time I view a Scratch project (as are spectators'). In this way, like on YouTube, my actions as a viewer still affect the creator community, because creators are aware of the number of views on their projects.

ScratchR provides four tools for collectors and critics. For any project, you can "love it" (which is like giving it a thumbs-up), "add it to your favorites" (which is a private collecting function), "flag it as inappropriate," and write comments about it.

And finally, ScratchR focuses most of their love on the creators--people who actually design Scratch projects and upload them to ScratchR. It's worth pointing out that there are many people out there who use Scratch to make things but don't share them with the online community. For this reason, part of ScratchR's goal--besides attracting new creators--is to seduce experienced creators to join the community. These experienced creators already have a relationship with Scratch, and ScratchR was originally created to help these people connect with each other and build more sophisticated projects together.

Here is the user profile by age circa July 2008 (per this report). While the largest grouping is from age 9-18, you can see the long tail of participants up into their 60s. Many adults have become engaged with Scratch both as mentors/educators and as creators in their own right.


And here is the creator profile by participation. While the majority of creators only upload one project to ScratchR, there is a long tail of usage. The spike at 21 projects is for creators who have created more than 20 projects.

Okay, so that's who is using ScratchR. But what makes it special? What makes them use it?

Why people participate.

Scratch's lead creator, Mitchel Resnick, likes to say that Scratch has a "low floor, high ceiling, and wide walls." That means that it's easy to start using it, you can use it to varied levels of sophistication, and you can use it for a diversity of purposes. Some people make games where you catch fireflies. Others make shows where hamsters sing and dance.

But all of those functions, and the extent to which Scratch is low, high, and wide, don't relate specifically to ScratchR. What make Scratch users come to the online community?

Some of the reasons are obvious. People want to share their projects to get a little bit of fame, to connect with others who create similar projects, and to be inspired by what others have created. And ScratchR provides tools to support these interests. Yes, you can mark projects as your favorites, comment on them, and "love" them. But you can also join galleries (like Flickr pools) for specific affinities. There are almost 15,000 design galleries on ScratchR, ranging from small critique groups to tutorial groups to Christian groups to anything goes groups.

You can also remix other projects. This is the most novel sharing tool I've seen on any social network. It's comparable to the tools that allow you to re-blog items of interest, but unlike situations where I make a response video on YouTube, ScratchR actually allows you to download the original project, add or alter the programming, and then upload the result as a remix (with credit to the original creator). This is a HUGE value-added for people to join the community--they gain access to the code to every project on the site, and are encouraged to share what they've made with it.

Adults and Kids, All in One Place.

Before seeing ScratchR, I pretty much thought it was impossible to design an online community that could safely support kids under 13 (the age that COPPA kicks in) working with people of all ages. ScratchR is not 100% safe, as I'll explain, but they have created a site that is fully functional for both kids and adults. Let's take a look at the safety of each aspect of the site.

Sign up: Pretty Safe.
When you sign up, ScratchR asks for your age. If you are under 13, instead of asking for your email address, it asks for your parent or guardian's email address (email addresses are only used to help you retrieve lost passwords). If you are under 18, ScratchR will display your home country but not your state or city. Everyone is instructed not to create usernames identical to their real names. Yes, people can lie about these things, but the worst that can happen is that a child will willfully lie about her age and enter her own email address and city/state. But that email address is never accessible to other users, and unless she is from a town of 1, she's somewhat protected.

Profiles: Very Safe.
Unlike other online communities, ScratchR does not allow you to "pimp your profile" with all kinds of information. As an adult, my profile shows my username, photo, city, state, and country. For kids, the profile only shows username, photo, and country (and most people use "sprites"--Scratch characters--for their photos). In fact, profile isn't even a tab--instead, it's called "My Stuff," and it is primarily for showcasing each user's projects, favorites, galleries, and friends.

Communication: Pretty Safe.
Unlike other online communities, there is no way to privately message anyone in ScratchR. If you designate someone as your "friend," that just means that you link to their projects from your page. There is no private chat. All inter-user communication happens in public comment boards connected to projects and galleries. Yes, it is possible for someone to reveal private information on a public comment board, but the number of community eyes on each board means that that kind of content can be seen publicly and addressed quickly.

Inappropriate Content: Debatable.
So if all of this is safe, why are there still some teachers and parents who won't let their kids participate? There is one section of ScratchR that could be deemed "unsafe": the Newest Projects section, featured prominently on the homepage of the website. Because projects are not vetted before they are uploaded and placed in Newest Projects, it is possible for projects to show up there that are inappropriate. Once they are up, they are likely to be flagged as such and removed--but there is the possibility for people to be exposed to offensive content during the narrow window of time when projects first go up. While this doesn't constitute a safety danger for any given user, it does mean that the content is not 100% controlled. It was more important to the ScratchR team to acknowledge every new submission prominently on the homepage than to check each one first. More generally, ScratchR relies on the community to largely self-police via the Flag as Inappropriate tag. Some adults may be skeptical of the efficacy of this policy, but as ScratchR scales up, it is hard to imagine another form of policing that wouldn't significantly reduce participation.

Of course, the question of putting adults and kids together isn't all about safety. There are so many awesome and fascinating educational interactions on ScratchR that emerge from the interplay among users. The adults aren't solely there as monitors--many are creators. The "high ceiling" means that many adults use Scratch for their own enjoyment. And that gets kids and adults discussing all kinds of things. For example, check out this discussion about the Monte Carlo method, Pi, and what it means to be forty.


How ScratchR makes good use of platform power and social objects.

ScratchR is really well-designed. In the platform power post, I wrote about the four powers a platform has:

1. the power to set the rules of behavior
   
2. the power to preserve and exploit user-generated content
   
3. the power to promote and feature preferred content
   
4. the power to define the types of interaction available to users

We've already addressed some ways that ScratchR does 1, 2, and 4. Let's look at #3--the promotion and featuring of content.

When you look at the homepage for ScratchR, you'll notice that there are seven starting points for checking out projects of interest. These are (in order):

1. Newest Projects
2. Featured Projects
3. Top Remixed Lately
4. Surprise Projects
5. Top Loved Lately
6. Top Downloaded Lately
7. Top Viewed Lately

It's worth noting that on a standard browser window, you can only see 1 & 2 before you have to scroll down the page. So order really matters here--and when we look at the order, we see the priorities that ScratchR supports:

1. Newest Projects - encouraging people to upload projects
   
2. Featured Projects - showing what the team considers to be high quality & diversity
   
3. Top Remixed Lately - encouraging creators to build on each other
   
4. Surprise Projects - suggesting that you explore all kinds of projects
   
5. Top Loved Lately - recency of users' preferences (encourages you to love projects)
   
6. Top Downloaded Lately - recency of users' preferences (encourages remixes)
   
7. Top Viewed Lately - recency of users' activities (encourages exploration)
   

Looking at this list, you see that the top four types reflect the values of the ScratchR designers. The last three reflect the interests of the users--and not in quantity (i.e. most views) but in recency. The ScratchR team intentionally wanted to avoid a massive popularity contest, so they promote activity on the site, not aggregate growth of views, loves, or downloads.

There are also ways from the homepage, without scrolling down, to download Scratch (of course!), join a gallery, and participate in a "design studio" (a ScratchR team-led gallery). Again, the ScratchR team is promoting use of Scratch and community-building around the programming environment.

Does it work? One of the most interesting things about ScratchR is the small range of views for each project. A featured project may have 200 views, and a very popular project may have as many as 1000 views, but most projects have somewhere in the 10s of views. On most user-generated content sites, the vast majority of content is barely viewed. But this is often obscured by design that focuses attention on the top viewed-content. On YouTube, the disparity between the top and the bottom has created famous users, and may make some newbies feel like they can never succeed. ScratchR's intentional avoidance of popularity as a metric of success may foster more participation in small community groups, like galleries, that can give satisfaction in loves, comments, and remixes, if not in huge view counts.

Of course, there are people who try to game the system, or translate an unhealthy interest in popularity to an unhealthy interest in something more valued by ScratchR, like "loves." There are many projects with comments from their creators like "I know this sux but if I get 10 loves I will make another one." But again, because it's not about popularity, some of the gaming can have really positive effects. If someone decides only to make remixes because that's more likely to land them on the homepage, they've made a choice to constructively build on the work of others. And that's a good thing.

The only criticism I have of ScratchR's design is that there is no way to embed Scratch projects in other places on the Web. UPDATE--this is not true. To embed a Scratch project, you need to scroll down on the project's page and look for the "Link to this project" on the right column. Thanks to Tom for pointing this out!

One final comment about ScratchR. Last month I wrote about Jyri Engeström and his theory that social networks only work if they are organized around a core social object and a verb that defines how people manipulate that object. ScratchR is incredibly strong on Jyri's list of requirements for strong social networks. The objects are the Scratch projects. The verb that people do is create. People share their projects via ScratchR. And the remixes are a true "gift" to participants to continue using the program.

I bring this up because I think ultimately the success of ScratchR comes down to the fact that it is a social network designed around an object that the Scratch team had already identified as social. The initial NSF proposal for ScratchR focused on creating networked opportunities for teams of kids who were already using Scratch and for whom a social component would add value to their education experiences.

And so I conclude this very lengthy post with a question:
What social objects do you already have in your programs, collections, and visitor experiences that are itching to have a broader social environment in which to grow?

Intranets, Yammer, and Other Web 2.0 Tools for Staff Communication

What's the most immediately useful application of Web 2.0 tools to your museum? It probably isn't new forms of visitor engagement (no matter how much I write about those relationships). So many museums suffer from departmental siloing, deluges of all-staff emails, the painful jujitsu required to collate seven versions of the same document... the list goes on. And while defining new relationships with visitors may be a complex institutional process requiring buy-in on many levels, there's no reason not to move quickly and confidently to improve the ways that staff communicate inside your institution.

Here are seven frequent staff communication problems, and tools to address them. They all involve tearing down silos, removing gatekeepers, and making it easy to get the information you want when you want it. Oh, and they're mostly all free.

1. Is your staff directory perpetually out-of-date?

Create a shared Google spreadsheet that lives on the Web and can be updated by everyone. This way, each new staff person can enter her own name, email, phone, etc., and change things as needed. You can even create a handy form to send out so people don't have to edit the spreadsheet itself. The document will always available in its most recent version on the Web, and you can easily add new fields as needed by your institution. Here's an example that took me 3 minutes to create: fill out this form to be added to our imaginary directory!

2. Do you have no idea what's going on beyond your department or team except when an annoying all-staff email announces locker cleanup this Friday?

Set up Yammer to host an internal, private free Twitter feed for your institution. Yammer works like Twitter--people send out short messages that anyone can read or follow. You can receive the messages on the Web, on your desktop, on your phone, or in an instant messaging client. The difference is that all of the messages are internal to your institution. This means a quick way to:

• let staff know about fundraising successes
• share funny visitor stories from the floor
• make staff aware of a big group, program, or event in the museum
  
• tell people there are cupcakes in the break room
• update folks on new media hits
  
• let staff know that an important donor is coming into the offices
  

Right now, most museums share this information via all-staff emails (or not at all when it comes to the quick stories that give the pulse of the institution). By using a service like Yammer, people don't have to read and delete emails clogging their inbox--they can let the messages they don't care about go by, and hone in on the ones that really interest them.

You don't need everyone to sign up to start using Yammer--you can start with a small team or a few interested staff members. The more people use it, the more diversity of information from across the institution you'll start sharing on a daily basis. Not only can it reduce the all-staff email frustration, it can give you a pulse on what's happening in every area of your institution.

3. Do you need a way to report, document, and share day-to-day information on a project or within your department?

Many museum teams don't see each other in person every day. This is true for operations teams, which often include part-time staff who don't intersect, as well as for development teams, which often involve outside contractors or remote staff. Some operations teams use a log book to keep staff updated on the activities of the previous day, but too many rely on word-of-mouth and lose the opportunity to document institutional history and convey knowledge from staff member to staff member.

Internal team blogs can ameliorate these gaps in interaction by providing a group-authored space where staff can share everything from daily log reports to research thoughts. You can set up a free blog via Blogger (my preferred platform) and set it to private, identifying a key set of people who are allowed to author and read posts. You will effectively have a departmental journal of work going on, discoveries made, major events that deserve to be discussed and memorialized. And since people can subscribe to blogs via RSS, staff can select the departments they want to follow "on-demand" without getting bogged down by lots of all-staff emails.

4. Do you need a way to do research and brainstorm collaboratively with your team?

Whereas blogs are a good reporting mechanism, wikis are a better collaborative tool. An internal, shared group wiki will allow you to explore different topics (i.e. create new pages for new areas of interest), refine mission statements, and aggregate research resources in a central area. I like Wik.is as a free, no-ad, easy to use tool, and have been using it with many clients to keep notes from meetings, organize information, and share resources. Most wiki systems also allow you to easily attach documents. A good wiki can easily become the homebase for creative group work.

5. Do you need a way to share links, images, and videos besides emailing them around?

You can create lists of links on wikis and blogs, but there are also tools that allow you to connect directly to other staff members while you are in the process of discovering and bookmarking items across the Web. Delicious is an online bookmarking system that makes it easy for you to "tag" websites of interest and save them on a single webpage. By sharing your bookmarks with other staff members, you can create targeted link lists for a variety of projects. For example, here's my Delicious page. You can see my network--the people who I'm connected with. We can surf each others' bookmarks, and if we choose a shared tag for a project, then anyone can search Delicious for that tag and see all bookmarks related to that project.

You can do similar things on Flickr and YouTube to share images and videos of interest. I "friend" people I'm working with, and our cumulative "favorites" on these sites become useful resources for image and video reference.

6. Do you need a way to author and revise documents with others?

Many people use Google Docs for this, though I find the interface a bit confusing. I prefer to use wikis to create group-authored documents. All of the text is available directly on the wiki page (no attachments to save or links to click on), easy to edit, and every revision is automatically saved. You can even subscribe to the recent changes and get them sent directly to your email inbox or to a feed reader like Google Reader. Here's a sample document that you can add to and change to get the feel for wiki editing, this time using a wiki service called WetPaint. (I chose WetPaint instead of my favorite wiki provider, Wik.is, because WetPaint allows non-registered users to edit pages.)

7. Do you need a way to put all of these activities in one place?

You may look at all of the above suggestions and think, "Oy. She wants me to sign up for blogs, wikis, yammer... this is way too many different tools to learn! How will I keep track of them all?"

There are two ways to organize all these kinds of Web 2.0 communication: you can do it for free by creating a custom homepage, or you can pay someone else to aggregate it in something like an intranet.

First, two ways to do it yourself:

1. For all staff: create a wiki that just features links to each of the different services you are using. You can easily edit it to add new blogs, shared documents, or other wikis that different teams are using. The wiki becomes both a record of all internal social media work and an easy place from which to access it. If you are really tech-competent, you can download the open-source version of Mindtouch (makers of wik.is) to create your own custom community site.
   
2. For yourself: create a Google homepage that has individual links to the different wikis and shared documents in use. You can embed a Google Reader into your homepage and enter all of the addresses for blogs and wiki updates into that reader to create an aggregate feed of posts and changes across all your internal sites.

Paying someone else to create an intranet--a webspace that provides all of the functions listed above (directory, wikis, blogs, updates)--can be very useful IF you are ready to make these new communication systems institution-wide requirements. Web 2.0-enabled intranets are fabulous because they don't require an administrative gate-keeper, but if no one uses them, they're not worth the money. If you're not sure you need an intranet, I recommend starting with some experimental, small projects and see how things go. If you get critical mass and want a more integrated system, you can spring for the intranet.

Here are three robust intranet solutions to consider:

1. ThoughtFarmer. This is my favorite "wiki-inspired" intranet solution, which provides dynamic, integrated staff directory, departmental wikis, and individual blogs, all connected in an attractive and simple to use interface. ThoughtFarmer costs $109/user (20% discount for non-profits, about $5000/year for updates) and requires a minimum of 100 users. ThoughtFarmer is the best option if you are a large institution with an interest in collaborative documentation, creative work, and messaging.
2. SocialText, like ThoughtFarmer, is a wiki-based collaborative internal workspace. The pricing is comparable ($5000 minimum startup), though there is a small business version for $10/user/month. SocialText is more customizable than ThoughtFarmer but lacks some of the more attractive user interface elements of ThoughtFarmer. SocialText is best for highly tech-literate folks who want to customize their own experience.
   
3. Google Apps. Google Apps provides more standard enterprise needs, like email, calendar, and instant messaging, and fewer Web 2.0 applications (Google Docs and Google sites). This is a good solution if you are looking for a new email and calendar server, but may not be perfect if you really want dynamic shared spaces.While you can use Google Apps for free, to have a version with no ads and good backup systems you'll pay $50 per user per year.
   

Remember, you don't have to do all of this at once. But if even just one of these seven problems is something that has you banging your head against the ticket counter every day, consider trying one of these suggestions. It will change your workflow--reducing your reliance on email, allowing you to get and receive on-demand information--and it will require you to be more proactive about "following" activities across the institution. The benefit is more flexible, varied content from across the museum, and smarter collaboration with team members. Fewer headaches guaranteed.

What tools do you use to make your collaborative work easier?

Sending Collections on the Road: Geocaching and Museums

I’ve received a few inquiries over the last year about museums and geocaching. So I felt lucky last week to learn not only about an innovative arts exhibition employing geocaching, but to discover that its exhibit developer, Seth! Leary, is something of an expert. I sat down with Seth! to ask him all the dumb questions about geocaching and museums you can imagine… and a few more.

Geocaching Basics

Geocaching is an activity in which people (geocachers) use GPS receivers to hunt down specific locations (geocaches). The geocaches have items inside: goodies to take home, trade for stuff you’ve brought with you, or transport to new locations. Many geocaches have a paper log inside so that geocachers can write down when they found the cache, what they took/left inside, who they are, etc. Some people use a higher-tech logging system by tracking the items online to see who has found them and where they’ve gone. Geocaching.com is a clearinghouse for thousands of items, geocaches, and geocachers, or as Seth! puts it, “MySpace for inanimate objects.”

Thousands of people geocache for a variety of reasons: to explore new places, to have outdoor adventures, to search for surprises out in the world. Seth! commented that the demographic of people who are involved is much broader than you’d think, including lots of families looking for a fun, educational, free activity.

Sounds like there might be some overlap with your museum audience? Both geocaching and museums are fundamentally about exploration and discovery. Both relate to the human drive to collect stuff. Both attract locals and tourists who may travel out of their way for the thrill of collecting another place or experience. And in an industry where many of us are scratching our heads about intelligent uses of technology that don’t tie visitors to computer terminals, geocaching stands out as an activity that is mediated by technology but also promotes exercise and outdoor activity.

The Bellevue Sculptural Travel Bugs Project

This summer, Seth! worked with the city of Bellevue, WA, to incorporate geocaching and user-generated content into their public sculpture exhibition to put a new spin on the concept of “public art.” As Seth! explains:

The city of Bellevue, Washington holds a public art sculpture exhibition every couple of years. For a related teen project, I was invited to teach roughly 200 middle- and high-school students about geocaching (a GPS-based scavenger hunt) so that they could send miniature sculpture pieces out into the world. The process is somewhat involved, but fairly simple. Each student would create a fist-sized sculpture piece (of recycled or renewable materials; the theme was "green") and the sculpture would get a Travel Bug tag with a unique serial number. The sculptures then get placed in a geocache where members of the public (geocachers) can pick them up and move them to another geocache. The little works of art then travel around the region, transferred from person to person via the hidden geocaches. Each leg of their journey gets logged online by the geocachers so that a continuous travelogue is created, including any photos that the geocachers choose to post. The sculptures then make their way back to City Hall (hopefully) where they are displayed in an exhibit that will be up until October. Traveling public art! Each geocacher is a curator and registrar and art appreciator along the way.

The “travel bugs” that Seth! refers to are dog tags with unique serial numbers on them that geocachers can use to track items easily online. You can check out the path of some of the teen sculptures here. Click on a sculpture, and you’ll automatically be taken to the geocaching.com page for that item, and if you scroll to the bottom, you can see the path the sculpture has taken thus far. Some of the people who picked up the sculptures intuited “goals” for the sculptures, such as this hungry whale sculpture which was taken to the aquarium for a photo shoot by one energetic geocacher, and later went to the “travelbug hospital” at another benevolent person’s home for repairs.

These 200 teen sculptures are being released in stages, with the hope that most or all will find their way back to City Hall by the end of the exhibition in October. Some are already on display along with the stories of their travels from City Hall and back again.

I asked Seth! what challenges came with this project. He talked about the volume of sculptures—that with 200 pieces going out from one location, it was tough to energize the local geocaching community to really get each of the sculptures moving on an interesting narrative. And indeed, some of the sculptures haven’t gone far since they were first launched from City Hall.

Seth! also talked about the importance of marketing events and programs like these specifically to the geocaching community. There are robust community discussion boards on the Web for geocachers as well as state and local associations. Because taking up geocaching is not entirely casual (you need to invest in the GPS receiver), it’s important to energize locals in that subculture for a project like this to succeed.

Here’s what I love about this project:

• It expands the audience for the sculpture exhibition. It engages subculture of demographically mixed folks (geocachers) with a museum-related art activity that they might not otherwise have been drawn to.
• It sends art out instead of locking it in. This is a project that breaks down the walls of the exhibition and gets the collection out on the road into the community.
• It invites people to engage with collections in a new way. The person who picks up a whale sculpture and takes it to the aquarium is having an active, two-way relationship with it. Geocachers value their finds and care for them, direct their travel, and write their own narratives into the items.
• It plugs into a ready-made, programmatic, technology-mediated activity at very little technical or financial cost to the institution. All Seth! had to do was purchase the travel bugs ($5 apiece, to track the sculptures), launch the sculptures from a registered geocache, and set up the individual item pages on geocaching.com. From that point on, it was geocachers with their own GPS receivers who found the sculptures, logged their stories, and kept them moving.

Geocaching and You?

Like many others, before talking to Seth! I’d perceived geocaching as a complex, expensive activity: a dubious fit for a museum. But after learning more from Seth! and from the resources at geocaching.com, I’ve been converted to think of geocaching as a fun way to engage visitors with collections, place, and technology. I asked Seth! how he would recommend museums get involved with geocaching. He offered these ideas:

First, get someone on your staff to try finding a cache. Like any technology, you should try it first to see what it’s about so you get a sense for how it works. It’s very easy; you can go onto Geocaching.com, type in your zip code or address, and you’ll probably find a few caches within miles of your home. You’ll need a GPS receiver (some smartphones do this now) and maps are useful.

Then, determine your goal – why do you want to do this with visitors? There are lots of possible reasons. It could be to hold programs or camps to help people understand the GPS technology, like orienteering. Or the technology could be incidental and you could just be encouraging people to go out and experience certain areas of the community. You could launch your own items (I’d recommend doing just a few unique ones) with travel bugs and assign them goals: travel to another museum, or move every 24 hours, or whatever would serve your interest and make a fun game. If you had just a few compelling items, you could really get enough players interested to rally.

But if you want something easier than sending out items, the simplest way for museums to use geocaching is just to place one. Make a nice geocache and hide it on the grounds, somewhere that is hidden but easily accessible without trampling the shrubs. Then, post a well-planned geocache page to go with it. Add some history about the museum or the area. Geocaches cannot be "commercial" so one has to be careful about over-promoting on the web site. But simply having a presence on Geocaching.com with a cache will bring visitors to the door. This is especially helpful for small museums that might get overlooked by out of town visitors or even the locals. This is a pretty low-effort project on the part of the museum but can have fun results.

History museum or other locally-themed museums might make a project for volunteers or teens that involves gathering waypoints (coordinates) for places of interest and then putting together a virtual map/tour. The waypoints could be put into a file (.gpx or .loc) which can then be downloaded by users who would go out to visit the sites. It might be accompanied by a podcast, so it becomes a city-wide audio tour!

I know there are several geocaching enthusiasts in the museum community. I’d love to hear your stories of why you do it and how you’d like to see it happen in museums. What do you see as the challenges and opportunities? And how close is the closest geocache to your house? You may be surprised (I know I was)!

User Experience Design Patterns from the Yahoo! Library

When you design a new interactive, talkback station, or traditional exhibit for your museum, what best practices and design requirements do you consult? Do you use in-house documents to guide your actions? Do you use classic books? Museums don't have a well-developed body of industry-wide best practices. The "every exhibit is different" argument leads us into idiosyncratic practice, which is ok in institutions that retain staff for decades, but not so useful in the contemporary world of shifting workforces. We each have our own rules of thumb and dos and don'ts. But we don't have a standard vocabulary for addressing common problems, and as we solve them, we rely on institutional memory to retain the lessons learned rather than finding a way to universalize and document them.

This week I've been looking at a more deliberate way to document best practices from the world of user experience design. Yahoo! is a very large company with a wide variety of user-facing products created by staff who in many cases have zero interaction with other staff also creating user-facing products. This creates two design problems. The first is consistency. To a user, interacting with Yahoo! maps and Yahoo! fantasy sports should feel similar. If the fantasy sports staff never interact with the maps staff, how will they align what common user actions (e.g. ratings) mean in the world of Yahoo! products? The second problem is redundancy. If the fantasy sports staff have come up with a great way to rate other members of the community, why should the restaurant review staff design their own rating system?

The solution is a design pattern library, a place where Yahoo! staff publish generalized solutions to common user experience problems. These can be as broad as "how do you communicate change on a webpage?" or as specific as "how do you rate an object?" The patterns are arranged hierarchically, with some patterns including many sub-patterns for specific manifestations of the problem. At every level, the pattern includes a problem, an image-based example, a solution, recommendations for use, and rationale. The patterns serve both as useful how-tos and thoughtful why-shoulds. They are used internally across Yahoo! by a community of designers who rate, comment, and adapt them for use.

And now Yahoo! is making some of them public. You can access a limited design pattern library here. Of particular interest to museum folks are the "social" patterns, which include best practices for feedback/review architecture and reputation indices. The review architecture is useful when considering how to design talkback stations, the reputation patterns valuable in the application of game mechanics to museums.

In 2006, I wrote about how game mechanics can improve the stickiness of a museum experience. Now, these Yahoo! reputation patterns explore the impact a variety of game devices (points, leaderboards, competitiveness) have on social communities. How should you identify different constituencies in the community? How can you reward participation, and what kind of participation should you acknowledge? In simple language, clear examples, and helpful bullet points, the Yahoo! design patterns help us tackle some of these questions.

They're also enormously useful from an industry development standpoint. You can read more about Yahoo!'s process for creating their internal pattern library in this paper. That library, unlike the patterns published publicly, is very much a living, shifting set of best practices. It gives Yahoo! staff a common vocabulary and supports a culture of institutional sharing and reflection. And while exploring best practices for collectible achievements is fascinating, there's a whole world of other design practices I'd like to see chronicled in this fashion. ASTC gave us ExhibitFiles, a place where museum exhibit designers share case studies and reviews of individual exhibition projects. But maybe we need to create design pattern library for exhibits as well, a place where people can share solutions and recommendations for problems across exhibitions ranging from wayfinding to personalization.

How do you share and learn about best practices for general museum-related problems and solutions? What formats and content would be most useful for you?

Curated Collaborative Filtering: Listening to Pandora

How is a museum like a radio station? Both are collections of discreet, loosely organized content pieces that are both familiar and new. Your overall enjoyment of the content experience is determined to a large extent by the balance of items you like and those you don’t, those you know and those that are new. The more time between the good stuff, the less likely you are to tune in again in the future. And your loyalty to the radio station (its stickiness) relies on the regular introduction of unfamiliar content in an enjoyable context.

These criteria aren’t easy to meet, and the result is lots of people like me who never listen to non-talk radio. But recently I’ve become obsessed with a new kind of (internet) radio station, one that’s converted me back from my CDs to the radio. It’s called Pandora, and its successes reveal interesting lessons about aggregating museum content.

Pandora uses collaborative filtering to create a real-time radio station for you based on your preferences. You enter a seed artist or song (or several) and Pandora starts playing music that it interprets as related in some way to your selections. The extraordinary thing about Pandora is the complexity of its filtering. It doesn’t just group artists together and play music by similar musicians. Instead, it uses hundreds of tags, signifiers assigned to each song by a team of musicians, to find correlated songs that may be of interest. Pandora is a product of the Music Genome Project, in which musicians define the individual “genes” of a song via signifiers and use those to generate song “vectors” that can then be compared to create highly specific and complex musical narratives.

For example, I created a radio station today based on just one song: Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes by Paul Simon. That radio station then played:

• She’s a Yellow Reflector by Justin Roberts
• If Only the Moon Were Up by Field Music
• She’s Going by The English Beat
• You’re The One by Paul Simon
• Withered Hope by They Might Be Giants
• Big Dipper by Elton John
• Wait Until Tomorrow by New York Rock and Roll Ensemble
• The Tide is High by Blondie

Most of these songs were a. new to me and b. enjoyable (thus meeting the radio stickiness criteria). For each song, I could click a “Why?” button to see Pandora’s explanation for why it was played. For example, this image explains why The Tide is High was included:
There are over 400 different tags used to relate songs in the Music Genome Project, ranging from “brisk swing feel” to “lyrics that tell a story” to “sparse tenor sax solo.” From a single seed song, Pandora will generate a whole channel of music, and will shift and refine that channel based on your thumbs up/down rating of each song played. In this way, Pandora makes inferences about what you might like and introduces you to new music.

And it’s the introduction to new music that makes Pandora uniquely interesting to me as a museum person. When we talk about allowing visitors to curate their own museum experiences by voting for exhibits or aggregating custom tours, the fear among curators is that such projects will denigrate the collection and turn the museum visit into a kind of popularity contest. In short, we fear that visitors, if given the tools to create their own narratives, won’t want or use the ones we provide.

Pandora is a model for an alternative. Rather than user-based collaborative filtering, in which visitors receive recommendations based on what other “people like you” enjoyed, Pandora is an example of item-based collaborative filtering, in which visitors receive recommendations based on the similarity of previously selected items (seed songs) to potential members of the collection.

Pandora and the Music Genome Project is controlled by experts, musicians who, like curators, are uniquely skilled at identifying and tagging songs to create musical genes that represent the full spectrum of musical expression. And their expertise makes for a better experience for me as a user/visitor. As an amateur listener, I could not tell you the particular elements of “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” that appeal to me. Listening and reacting to the Pandora-generated songs allowed me to understand the nuance of what I like and don’t like. Turns out that I enjoy songs with “extensive vamping.” Could I have articulated that at the start? No. Not only does Pandora introduce me to new music, it expands my vocabulary for discussing music. I learned something! From experts!

Users of Pandora are protective of the Music Genome Project experts. There have been interesting discussions on the Pandora blog about the slow inclusion of user-based filtering, and listeners' related fear that it will taint the waters of the high-quality item-based process. The Music Genome Project involves visitors' submissions in a limited way. The core value is in the professional categorization of the songs.

Which means that curators still have a powerful role to play in the future of museums. Imagine if an art museum worked this way, if curators tagged every piece with tags representing everything from “misogynistic undertones” to “Picasso blue period” to “asymmetrical” and generated a tour for you real-time on a handheld device. You could have a personalized trip through the museum, enjoying an experience that is both highly responsive to your preferences and one which deepens your understanding and ability to articulate why you like what you like. In some cases, people might be surprised to learn that they prefer artists whose subject matter comes from childhood memories, or those who work in a specific medium. While the museum can’t be physically rearranged for each visitor, the content can be remixed conceptually to present a progressively engrossing, educational experience.

Personalization doesn’t just give you what you want. It exposes you to new things, and it gives you a vocabulary for articulating and refining why you like what you like. Pandora’s collaborative filtering process contextualizes data from a very personal starting point. You get the analysis and the narrative, but you get the slice that will resonate most with you. The world is opened a little wider and hopefully, you keep listening.

How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?

On Monday, David Klevan (from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) and I spoke at the MAAM Creating Exhibitions conference about Web 2.0 and museums. I provided the Web 2.0 framework, and David shared lessons learned from the huge range of projects the Holocaust Museum has initiated.

The biggest question that came up again and again was: how much does it cost? In most cases, the audience wasn’t asking about money: they were asking about time. When David explained that each of the Holocaust Museum’s myriad comment boards, blogs, and online forums is moderated by a staff member, the audience turned a little green. As one woman put it, “spending time on this means time staff isn’t spending on other work.” Absolutely. So in the interest of hers, yours, and everyone else’s time, here’s a rundown on what I see as the real time costs of a variety of Web 2.0 ventures.

The time cost of Web 2.0 is not in product development but in product management, maintenance, and growth. It may take you only a few minutes to create a blog, but doing so means (hopefully) a commitment to frequent content posts. When you start any Web 2.0 initiative, you should think about what (and who) it's going to require over its lifespan, not just pre-release. The time estimates below are written with sustainability in mind--the week-by-week management of Web 2.0.

First, the cheap options... and probably the most valuable. You don't need big time to get started with Web 2.0. Got 1-5 person hours each week? Become a participant.

You don't need a lot of time (or any technical expertise) to jump into the world of Web 2.0 and sniff around. Better yet, some of that sniffing can be appended by friendly actions that require little more than a keyboard and an interest in talking with others about your museum.

In 30 minutes, you can learn a lot about your institution and visitor opinions of it. You can...

• Search for your institution on Yelp and TripAdvisor. If reviews include incorrect information, add your own comment giving helpful information about hours, prices, and new cool things people might like. If there are negative comments you want to address, commiserate, be friendly, and help them know that you care.
• Check yourself out in the blogosphere. Go to Technorati or Google Blog Search and put the name of your museum (or exhibit, or program, or...) in quotation marks and hit search. You'll see all the mentions of you in recent blog posts. If something looks interesting, click through and read the post. You might even want to post a comment (and link back to the museum website).
• Look for photos of you on Flickr and videos about you on Youtube. Again, add comments that give tantalizing information about the ancient vase behind the smiling girl or upcoming programs featuring those video-recorded light sabers. This is also a good place to get an education in how people are using images from your institution--both legally and illegally.

There are also a few Web 2.0 activities you can initiate without requiring frequent content updates. You can...

• run a Twitter feed. The most time-consuming part of this is not posting content (how time-consuming can 140 characters get?) but attracting followers who will read your content. Search for people or institutions of interest to follow, and the followers will come.
• post images from museum events on Flickr, upload videos from events on YouTube. The time these require is highly correlated to whether you are currently generating this kind of content, but if you are already snapping shots, putting them up on the web (with a handy link back to the museum website) is a cinch, and it's totally acceptable to do it sporadically.
  
• create and manage a Facebook group or page, or a MySpace page. These are arguably the most time-consuming of the "cheap" time options, but if you have staff members who are already using these social networks, you can quickly broadcast out to a large group of people (like Twitter) at infrequent points, and provide a place for that group to meet and interact with each other. You can also have an extremely strange representation of yourself, as does the American Museum of Natural History. It must be working for them--they have over 2000 virtual "friends."
• manage an online comment board on your website. Yes, it sounds overwhelming when David talks about monitoring all the boards on the USHMM website. But in reality, the monitors are making a very simple designation: is this offensive/dumb/nonsensical, or can it stay up as a comment? It's not hard to make that decision; most of us could do it in a few seconds. And since the average online museum comment board garners just a few comments each week (if you're lucky), this needn't be an onerous activity.
  

Have a bit more time and energy? Not satisfied with the puny 140 character limit on Twitter? If you have 5-10 hours per week, become a content provider.

You can...

• Start a blog. There are many third party applications like Wordpress and Blogger on which you can host a blog with very little technical knowledge. Yes, you have to do a bit more than just typing to add the images and format the style of the page, but there are simple templates to work with as well (for example, this blog is served on a standard Blogger template). The challenge with blogging is frequently updating the content; I'd say once a week is a must, and posting two or more times per week is a great goal. If you spread the writing out among staff, it needn't take more than 10 hours a week to get three great posts up and monitor (and respond to!) the comments. For more information about what kind of blog might be right for you, check out this post.
  
• Start a podcast. Same as the blog, but requires a microphone and some audio editing software. If you are comfortable producing audio content, it's quite simple to start a podcast... and reasonable to put out new content as infrequently as once a month. You don't need to have fancy machinery to make this happen. What you need is organization, interesting content, a person who can edit audio (which you can do for free with Audacity), and a place to post it. You don't have to host the audio yourself; you can use a service like Feedburner to host, organize, distribute, and market your content. If you want to get really fancy and go video, you can "vodcast" this way, too.
  

But you want something bigger? Have gobs of time and some technical know-how? Then sheesh! With 10-20 hours per week, become a community director.

These projects tend to be custom and are harder to define in neat bullets than the others. They include projects like...

• community websites like Science Buzz (Science Museum of Minnesota) and Red Shift Now (Ontario Science Center) that combine a variety of text, video, audio, and image content accessible both from the museum and from the web. In these examples, staff are continually producing new content and interacting with the community via comment boards and other uploaded user-generated content.
  
• open collections databases like the Powerhouse Museum's tagging system, where visitors can add their own keyword tags to museum artifacts. In this case, staff are producing digital assets and managing a back-end program (read: software techies) to provide visitors with the content they want via passive tracking of usage.
• experiments in social networks like those performed by the Brooklyn Museum via their Facebook applications and video contests or by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in their Google Earth work and myriad comment boards. This pretty much requires dedicated staff.
• open exhibit development projects like The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop. While it took a full-time effort to launch this Web+Second Life platform where visitors can propose and prototype their own exhibits (the best of which we are now building at The Tech), it now takes only about 10 hours of my time weekly to manage the community, coordinate classes, support virtual exhibit designers, and make it happen.
  

And that's the reality of many of these projects. The thing that often differentiates the heavy lifting ones from the simple activities is the ongoing development of new content, new platforms, and new experiments. Once they are running, any of these projects, even the ones that sound most ambitious, tend to require part-time maintenance and management, not full-time employees.

These projects require a fundamentally different skill set than many of the other jobs we do in museums. Think of the folks doing these activities as floor staff working in your virtual galleries. They have some content knowledge and an interest in engaging with visitors. They aren’t super-techies or crack content experts. They manage relationships instead of producing exhibits or events. Some museums are starting to reflect this in their hiring, adding "community management" to job descriptions that formerly were just about content production or distribution.

But you don't have to change your title to get started. Bookmark your hour each week and start wading in. What ideas have I left out that you would add to these lists? What costs are you most concerned about when you consider embarking on Web 2.0 ventures?

Cocktail Party Participation: Revisiting Twitter

Last year, I wrote a post explaining what Twitter is and how it might be applied in museums. At the time, I was a Twitter non-participant, a lurker on the edges. Now, a year later, I’m using Twitter on a daily basis, and it’s brought up some new observations about participation on websites and in interactive venues like museums.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, Twitter is a service that allows you to send messages of 140 characters in length to a set of people (“followers”) who self-elect to receive your messages (“tweets”). A year ago, I wrote about the potential of Twitter as a platform-agnostic service; you can send and receive tweets on the web, on your phone as text messages, on instant message clients, and on a variety of downloadable applications (like Twitterific, which I use for the Mac). Each person with an account on Twitter effectively has two social networks—your outgoing set of followers (people who receive your tweets) and your incoming set of tweets from the people you follow.

Twitter is often categorized as “micro-blogging,” and for the haiku experts among us, you could post very short blog entries via Twitter. If you want to report live from an event or speech, you can use Twitter to send out individual chunks of information, a string of mini-pearls of insights and reactions. When I previously wrote about Twitter, that was the extent of my knowledge. I thought that Twitter was for broadcasting—a different but related kind of broadcasting from blogging. But now that I’m a Twitter user, I realize that Twitter is not (mostly) about broadcasting. It’s about conversations. If a blog is a lecture with a q&a session at the end, Twitter is a cocktail party, a stream of interrelated one-liners and repartees.

Consider, for example, this blog. It is not a cocktail party. I’d love Museum 2.0 to be a more participatory site with comment streams rampantly debating each post topic, but the reality is that my voice dominates the site. Each week, about 1,500 unique people visit Museum 2.0 and post an average of five comments. That’s lousy participation! If I told you I'd created a participatory website in which 0.3% of visitors add their own content, you'd probably send me to a dictionary to look up "participatory."

But this comment rate is typical for a blog. The format (I write a lot, you get to respond at the end) is a standard push content model. I read lots of blogs and very rarely add comments. My guess is that most of you come here to read content, not to get into a lively conversation. For some people, commenting on blogs is scary; for others, it's just not a compelling way to engage. For some, it's technically inconvenient: if you’re one of the folks who read this blog via email or RSS feed, you don’t even have easy access to the comments—either as a reader or a contributor (but please, do click through to the site when the spirit moves you to read and participate in the comments).

Twitter is different. On Twitter, I have 54 followers—1/30th of Museum 2.0’s weekly readership. And yet when I send a quick question out on Twitter, I often receive five responses immediately from different sources. On Twitter, my own content production trend is inverted--I more frequently respond to others' tweets than post my own. On this blog, I'm the voice of authority (albeit a non-traditional one). On Twitter, I'm one voice among many.

Thus for some institutions, Twitter may be a better choice than blogging. If your goal is to create an online space that encourages visitor participation, a blog with a 0.3% rate of visitor content production is probably not a good choice. Twitter is a hybrid broadcast/communication platform--part blog, part instant messaging system. It's more discussion-oriented than social networks because there isn't the other content (video, photos, profiles) to get in the way. In short, Twitter provides opportunities for genuine conversations with visitors.


What makes Twitter a conversational space? How can the aspects that make Twitter work be applied to other participatory efforts? Some thoughts on what makes Twitter tick...

There is no dividing line between producers and consumers. On a blog, users have clear roles: someone writes the posts, and someone else reads (and potentially comments on) them. On Twitter, everyone is a Twitterer. You may follow lots of people and rarely tweet, but very few people sign up as pure followers and never tweet themselves. It's like signing up for a social network--the expectation is that you will build your profile and then use it to link to others. Even if you sign up for Twitter in the beginning as a lurker, you quickly can get hooked into participating, just as some people get hooked on updating their Facebook status (which, incidentally, you can do from Twitter). This lack of a line also applies to authorities--I admit it gave me a thrill to know that Obama (via some 20 year old lackey, probably) is one of my followers. It's the same frivolous pleasure that comes from "friending" the City Museum on Facebook. It's a party where no cliques are closed.

The limits on expression level the playing field. In a world where everyone only gets 140 characters in which to express oneself, the trivial and the profound are on roughly equal footing. This brevity encourages the timid to participate and limits the long-winded from crowding the stage.

You are broadcasting to a network, not an audience. When you send a tweet, you know exactly which individuals are receiving it (your followers). This social knowledge makes people more comfortable tweeting personal content and observations. Blog producers are always looking outward towards a larger future audience. Twitterers are speaking to a known group, and may have more respect, familiarity, and interest in them. It's a party of friends and acquaintances, not an auditorium of strangers.

You get immediate feedback. When I send a tweet, I get responses within minutes. When I see someone's tweet of interest, I respond immediately. The short format makes it easy to feel comfortable just dashing something off--no email signature necessary. There are negatives to this; while a person may comment on a blog post months after it was created, tweets have a short lifespan. If you make a witty remark at the party and your friends were turned the other way, it dies. But when it sparks, the energy and chatter swells.

You can spend as much time as you like. If your institution starts a blog, you need a blogging strategy which hopefully includes frequent, high-quality posts. That can be hours of work each week. Twitter is not as professional a broadcast medium, and it's acceptable to use it intermittently (as the Obama campaign does) or inconsistently (flurries of tweets followed by low activity). While it's important to grow your following/follower network to have impact, the focus is more on attracting and engaging with people than producing content. Be a lively party guest and you don't have to host the shindig to command some attention.


There are plenty of reasons to dislike Twitter. Not everyone wants a round-the-clock party running on their desktop full of guests announcing lunch plans and their new favorite web tool. But it's another tool in the spectrum of participatory web experiences, something worth understanding and putting in context alongside social networks and blogs. And it's one of the easier ones to get started with if you want to test the waters. If you've got your dancing shoes on, sign up and join the party. Open invite--BYO Insights.

Oh, and add a comment here sometime. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Quickie Links: Surveys, Transcripts, and a Strange Bedfellow

I was going to wrap a nice story and post around each of these but decided to just get the information out there.

First! Ideum, the company that brought you ExhibitFiles (with ASTC), is conducting a survey on museums' needs in support of an NSF grant proposal (Open Exhibits) to build open source templates for simple interactive exhibits (timelines, digital collections, news kiosks). What does that mean in simple terms? Ideum wants to make a tool so that you can create your own simple, attractive computer-based exhibits without multimedia staff or contractors. Given what a great job they did making ExhibitFiles easy to use, I expect that Open Exhibits will be truly accessible to non-code monkeys. Please help them help you and take the survey...

Relatedly, if you are super computer-savvy and impatient for a web version of this sort of thing, check out Omeka, a free open source platform for creating digital collections and exhibitions. Omeka is a project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and is primarily intended for use by institutions looking to create simple online exhibitions. It's technically over my head, but if you are someone for whom "plugin" isn't something you do with your toaster, it's worth checking out.

Also, Susan Spero has transcribed ALL of the scribbles we put on the wall at the Museums and Civic Discourse colloquium at JFKU on March 8. No, it ain't pretty, but this Herculean effort includes several gems, especially the references to particular projects (in and outside museums) worth pursuing. Check them out here.

Finally, a friend wrote today to congratulate me on my "new and extremely strange website." Sadly, I do not have a new and extremely strange website. But it turns out that someone else is doing something much more interactive with the Museum 2.0 name... have fun with it and don't get too anxious. Enjoy!

MuseTech Central: A New Resource for Museum Technology Projects

Who's doing audio tours on iPods? Which museums have experience creating collection tagging systems? Who tried GPS Twitter craziness and failed? To find the answers to these questions, you used to have to send emails out into the void, hoping you might hit someone who can help you find your way. I know; I send and receive plenty such emails.

But fear no longer! The Museum Computer Network and Museum Software Foundation have teamed up to bring you MuseTech Central, a site where you can share your own technical projects and search through a growing resource list of others. They make it very simple to add your own project (takes about 5 minutes), and the best part is that each entry is linked to a person--a human being who you can contact to find out more about the project. I sat down with Susan Chun, cultural heritage consultant and member of the all-volunteer team who developed this resource, to learn more.

How did this project come into being?

It was a volunteer effort. We thought it would be a good idea, no one had all the resources to do it, but we figured we can all chip in and get stuff done. The Museum Computer Network (MCN) is hosting the site, but all the work was done by volunteers.

That's really impressive, especially considering that other similar projects like ExhibitFiles, which are not volunteer-based.

I think there's a real value to volunteer projects. We opened MuseTech Central, then got blogged by our friends at the Walker the next day. Nate (the blogger) asked for a bookmarking feature, and then I responded by asking him to contribute to the programming of the site. When the project is all-volunteer, you can reach back out to the community with requests for help. It helps sidestep any sense of entitlement of what MCN ought to do for people.

What are your goals for the site?

I hope the registry will help us understand the trends in technology use. The person who is most served by the registry is the one who is planning a project, considering a project, or seeking funding for a project. It's fairly shocking that we don’t have any resources that can do that in a comprehensive and ongoing way.

Also, as the site grows, the aggregated knowledge can help us share resources, reduce redundancy, and come together as a museum community. Finally, I see this as a way to connect museums to the growing community of people studying museology. We need to bridge the gap between academics and museum professionals by being more open with our processes, so that their research is informed by us, instead of living in its own realm.

How do you see it growing? One of the challenges I've perceived with ExhibitFiles is the overwhelming percentage of members who are lurkers, not contributors.

Yes, that's a huge issue. I see us as having an uphill battle to convince people that as part of their normal project management practice, they need to put things into the registry. Technology professionals don’t really understand that they need to contribute to the information economy. There are so many who have registered or browsed but have not contributed a record. I don't really understand what the value is of being a member of something like this and not contributing.

What are some of the changes you'd like to see that might help encourage contributions?

We’d like to beef up the person side of this. Adding a way for people to contact each other, to have discussion threads, is another wish list item. We also want to make it easier to enter a new project; I want it to be a 3 minute process.

I found it quite a quick process, and even though the project descriptions are short, having the contact person listed makes a huge difference. Do you see this evolving more into a social networking site, or a reference that people use as a resource when needed?

I see this as a reference tool in which the user and the contributor are identical as a community. I'd like to see our field evolve such that as a matter of habit, we record our projects into this repository. I'd like to see simple projects, like updating the phone system, in there as well as the sexy ones. We update our records when the projects change. You’re a good citizen if you are contributing, and if not, you’re not.

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I came out of this discussion thinking about Susan's comments about how museum professionals should treat references like this. As someone managing a technology project at a museum, my immediate impulse upon hearing about MuseTech Central was to go there and add my project--it's free advertising for what we're doing, and a great way to hook in with others who might be doing related projects or have questions about museums and virtual worlds. It's great to aggregate this kind of content in one place, so you don't have to scramble from the bowels of one museum website to another looking for information on that crazy membership database you heard about. But I can understand the basic issue: why spend extra time publishing your work on an external site?

The answer is the same as the answer to why people post videos to YouTube, write papers for conferences, heck, it's why I blog. You do it to be famous. To give back to the community. To learn more and be part of something.

How else can we incentivize good information economy citizenship? I think that game mechanics, like those employed by Ebay (your star changes color the more you buy and sell), Paperback Swap (for each book you offer, you get a credit for a book), or Nike+ (you can "race" people in remote locations) would help. But until MuseTech finds the right volunteer to implement them (you?), I'll offer up my own Nike+ style challenge:

Go check out MuseTech Central. But don't just look. Add something. It doesn't have to be fancy. Write about your ticketing system, your podcast, your interactive kiosk. Then, come back here and post a comment. I'll publish a full list of the new projects you add in a post next week.