ISO Museum 2.0 AAM Correspondent

Dear Museum 2.0ers,

Due to the imminent completion/opening of Operation Spy, I will be at AAM for all of four hours... if I'm lucky. So I'm looking for someone who might want to report on 2.0-related elements of the conference.

You should be:
--actively pursuing 2.0 content at the conference
--a decent writer

Your report can take the form of one long round-up post after it's over or a couple during the conference. Alternatively, I'd be happy to interview you about the conference (what impressed you, what projects did you hear about, what seemed great/lame). I'd want the post to be publishable by May 21.

And what do you get out of it? Access to a few thousand informed, engaged users like you. An "in" to ask weird questions at the conference. Please contact me at ninaksimon (at) gmail (dot) com if you are interested.

Inclusion AND 2.0 AND Elaine Gurian

Last week, I went to an event at the National Museum of the American Indian to support the publication of Elaine Gurian's new book, Civilizing the Museum, which comprises 22 essays written over 35 years of experience developing and leading museums around the world.

Elaine is considered one of the pioneers of the doctrine of inclusion in museums, pushing designers, curators, educators and museum directors to make their spaces open and meaningful to as many kinds of people as possible. In the introduction to her book, she says, "In some sense, all the essays in this volume seek answers to a single question: 'Why do railway stations have a broader spectrum of users than museums, and could museums, if they did everything right, welcome the same demographic mix through their doors?'"

Elaine commented that museums only have two things going for them as essential civic spaces:

1. Museum are civil spaces where strangers can safely go and see each other.
2. Users have access to real experiences via tangible evidence.

What does this mean? Initially, I wasn't impressed by the first one--after all, strangers are everywhere. What's so special, or important, about just seeing strangers if you don't engage with them? Elaine pointed out that there are many places in this world where space is so segregated and inter-factional relations so strained that few such "safe congregant spaces" exist. She told a story about planning a museum project in Jerusalem three years ago. Elaine sat down with members of the Arab, Jewish, and secular community and asked: is there anywhere in this city that everyone can go? They thought and replied, the zoo. At the zoo, you can stick with your own family, but you still see other people. They have picnic tables, so you don't have to eat food prepared by someone else (who might want to do you harm). Being in the presence of strangers can be itself a kind of reconciliation.

Why go to the zoo with strangers at all? Because unlike shopping or eating or educating kids, which many societies successfully self-segregate, the zoo features tangible evidence that isn't available elsewhere. So do museums.

But this isn't enough, Elaine says, for us to pat ourselves on the back. After all, train stations bring in all kinds of people. The supermarket and the park are both full of tangible evidence that is interesting and somewhat unique to those locations. The way that we build on our tangible evidence and our inherent safety/civility is what defines the value of museums.

In the Q+A, Elaine touched on some of these ways that we can design to keep museums essential. She has whole-heartedly embraced web 2.0 and talked about the fact that this is “the wild west of the web—the golden years before the fence posts go up.” She talked about museums becoming “service organizations” that anoint visitor voices from all backgrounds. And while Elaine continues to believe in the value of tangible evidence, she said, “in the keeping of things, museums think they have the information about what to say about them.” She advocated for a wider scope of object interpretation, including more multi-sensory, narrative, and emotional parts of the design palette.

The more I listened, the more I wondered: What’s the difference between inclusion and 2.0? Is there a difference between a visitor who is included and a visitor who becomes a user?

One of the important aspects of inclusion is that it considers different kinds of users—both current and potential—and their needs, entry points, and abilities. Web 2.0 doesn’t necessarily do that, for a couple reasons. First, the assumptions that web 2.0 applications make about their users—somewhat tech-savvy, happy to give up privacy for access—are often non-negotiable. While web 2.0 designers want maximal participation, they aren’t writing grants and coming up with different programs tailored to open their content to underserved users. The expectation is that the users are the ones who will tailor, and that the software is maximally flexible.

Second, and perhaps more importantly in contrast to museums, web 2.0 applications don’t exist in a physical, designed space. How you feel in a museum or bank or train station is largely dictated by how the space is designed. Does the architecture welcome you? Is it imposing, confusing, inviting? On the web, inclusion depends much more on the content (are people respectful to each other on this bulletin board?) than the over-arching design.

At her talk, someone asked Elaine, “who is the ‘we’?” to which Elaine replied, “the we is all of us.” It’s a great sentiment, and one that I believe requires both the lessons of inclusion and those of 2.0 (and probably a few others as well).

2.0 is about the FUNCTIONS we offer users. Inclusion is about the USERS who feel enabled to function.

From the inclusion skeptic, there’s the question: Which wes are we excluding when we design particular functions? And from the 2.0 skeptic: Which functions are limited when we try to design for the universal we?

The first chapter of Elaine’s book is called The Importance of “And.” She talks about the idea that there is no “right” answer—that the existence of multiple, potentially opposing answers informs and enriches museum experiences. Inclusion and 2.0 are not identical, nor are they opposing. What do you see in the “and” between the two?

Game Friday: Failure IS an Option

* you lose ✫ it's fun ★*
Originally uploaded by dr_loplop.

I used to teach gadget workshops for kids in museums. There was one particular circuit that involved a potentiometer—transistor combination that, in its early iterations, had a tendency to cause minor explosions. And so I would start every workshop by saying, “if something starts to smoke, unplug your battery IMMEDIATELY.”

Looking through evaluations from many of these workshops, I was surprised to find that “smoking potentiometer” incidents educed better ratings of the workshop, not worse. Why might this be? First of all, your circuit setting on fire is funny, exciting, and something to be proud of. When your circuit doesn’t work for no discernable reason, it becomes an “I don’t get it” that feel disheartening. But if your circuit catches on fire, you DO get it, and you can show off to all your friends what happened. Kids whose circuits caught on fire didn’t feel like losers. They felt like players, engaged and ready to try again.

In fact, I’d argue that by saying “If something starts to smoke…” in the beginning of each workshop, I introduced an element of suspense to what otherwise might feel like a pretty “safe” activity—a museum program. I planted in their brains the possibility that this might not be easy, might not be hygienic, that they might lose.

At last year’s GDC, Jane McGonigal and co. presented the “top ten findings” from game research in 2005. Number 1 was about the importance of failure in games. According to Niklas Rajav from MIND Labs, players get more pleasure and excitement out of “active failure” than success. They found that attaining a goal decreases player arousal and interest. However, failure isn’t always fun. When the failure experience is “passive,” players disengage.

What is active failure? Think of simple egg or water balloon toss games. Failure in these games is physical, humorous, and public. There are some games out there with failure modes so “fun” that people try to attain them again and again. Dropping the lemmings off the cliff. Getting slimed. Watching your circuit go up in smoke. And there are other games that people love to participate in voyeuristically for the failure, not the win. Do people who watch American Idol or Survivor tune in to see who wins? Maybe at the end… but throughout the season, the excitement is in who gets axed.

Frank Oppenheimer famously said, “No one ever fails a museum.” In the context of test-taking, this is a great sentiment that promotes inclusion and exploration over judgment and right answers. But in the context of gaming, it may be a disappointment. Designers strive to encourage “successful” visitor experiences. But by not acknowledging and designing the non-success experience, visitors often either feel a lack of challenge (because the goal attainment feels trivial) or they disengage (because the failure experience is passive).

Designing good failure modes that are funny, instructive, fair, and supportive, can increase visitor interest and engagement with interactives. There are many interactives, especially in science museums, which only give feedback when you are successful. But if we start to think of these visitor interactions as game interactions, we can talk about introducing suspense and potential for failure—which can make the experience, ultimately, more successful. So next time I can’t get the power grid correctly distributed, let me watch the city fry. I’ll laugh, I’ll get it, and I’ll try again.

Radical Trust Quiz: How Radical Are You?

Ok, a confession. Before last week, I thought “radical trust” was a savings account full of surfboards. But it’s a term that seems to be exciting a lot of folks in the museum field, and for good reason. Jim Spadaccini has a good collection of sources here, and here’s Seb Chan’s simple explanation:

Radical trust means trusting users not to muck things up (and rewarding them with control in return). ... It should also be stressed that most ’systems’ of trust in Web 2.0 applications are specifically constructed to encourage and protect, through safeguards and small but not insignificant ‘barriers to participation’ (Wikipedia’s login and lock controls, Slashdot’s reputation system, Google’s continual tweaking of PageRank etc) what is being described as ‘trust’.

Radical trust is appealing because it represents loosening of museum authority and openness to visitor input. But as Seb wisely points out, “part of the appeal of the term ‘radical trust’ is its quasi-moralistic/spiritiual/revolutionary tone.”

So let’s get down to practicalities and do some quantifying. Is your institution an open-armed wiki or a locked push machine? How much trust do you have in your visitors? Give yourself a point each time you answer yes to the questions below…

Tagging/Museum Metadata

• Do you trust your visitors enough to let them tag the exhibits in your museum or the online collections on your website?
• Do you trust them enough to publish these tags on a sign in the front of the museum or in a tagcloud on your homepage?
• Do you trust them enough to replace the text on your wayfinding maps with the user-generated museum tags?
• Do you trust them enough to let them edit each other’s tags?
• Would you allow tags that represent value judgments like “awesome” or “boring?”
• Would you make this process totally automated and unmonitored?

Rating/Museum Evaluation

• Do you trust your visitors enough to let them rate the exhibits or artifacts in your museum?
• Do you trust them enough to publish the highest ratings as “top content” on wayfinding signage and publicity material?
• Do you trust them enough to reconsider or redesign poorly rated elements of the museum?

User Contributions/Museum Content

• Do you trust your visitors enough to let them contribute to the content of your museum?
• Do you trust them enough to let them contribute to museum research?
• Do you trust them enough to judge, prioritize, and curate other visitors’ contributions respectfully?
• Would you allow content that you deem to be inaccurate?
• Would you allow content you deem to be offensive?
• Would you allow content you deem dumb, ugly, or non-useful?

Blogging/Exhibit Development

• Do you trust your visitors enough to share with them the challenges of developing a new museum project?
• Do you trust them enough to blog about your process and solicit their comments?
• Do you trust them enough to act on their comments and engage in community design?

Dollars

• How much money will/do you dedicate to these efforts?Give yourself a point for every $100k per year.

ROUND-UP...
Unlike those “are we soul mates?” quizzes, there’s no perfect score here. If you scored low, don’t worry. You’re in the same boat as 95% of museums. Of course, if you’re here because you haven’t thought about these issues before, it might be time to start. If you’re conceptually ready to accept some of the realities of what radical trust can entail, start experimenting, evangelizing, and implementing. And if you answered “yes” to every question, well, you’re a more courageous person than I.

And the money question is huge. Evangelize, evangelize, evangelize. It doesn’t matter if you are ready to tear down the walls if the influencers are still skeptical of 2.0’s value.

I scored a 13. How about you? What other questions would you add to this quiz?

Museum 2.0 has Moved (Sort of)!

I caved to the peer pressure and registered www.museumtwo.com. Now, you can access this blog through this much shorter, hopefully easy-to-remember URL (or you can still go the old way if you prefer). Enjoy and spread the word!

PostSecret: Lessons in Meaningful User-Generated Content

Recently, I’ve become a little disheartened by the extent to which the web has dominated my—and others’—thinking about ways that museums can integrate 2.0 into their offerings. But today I had an experience that reinvigorated my love for and belief in tangible projects that can fill museums with content that is user-generated, shared, and explored. I heard Frank Warren speak at the American Visionary Art Museum. Frank Warren has been called “the most trusted stranger in America.” In 2004, for DC’s Art-o-Matic community show, he initiated an experiment called PostSecret. He handed out 3000 self-addressed postcards to strangers that were blank on the front. On the back, they said,

You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything - as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.

Create your own 4-by-6-inch postcards out of any mailable material. But please only put one secret on a card. If you want to share two or more secrets, use multiple postcards. (Please do not e-mail your secret.)

Please put your complete secret and image on one side of the postcard.

Tips:

• Be brief - the fewer words used the better.
• Be legible - use big, clear and bold lettering.
• Be creative - let the postcard be your canvas.

Within five weeks, he had 100 postcards on display at Art-o-Matic. The cards were funny, heartwrenching, thoughtful, and beautiful. At the end of the show, he packed up and thought the secrets were over. But they had just begun.

Now, two years later, Frank has received over 100,000 postcards. He publishes 20 each Sunday on a website that gets 1 million hits per week. He has published three books of cards (500,000 copies), has two more in the works, and has put on numerous gallery and museum shows of the postcards. Today at the AVAM, there were at least 300 people in the crowd to see (and handle!) the cards, get books signed, and share their passion for this project. Frank was a wonderful speaker. I was so impressed by his humility and his love and respect for the people who send him cards. But the truly awesome thing about PostSecret is what a great community project it is. As the AVAM staff member who introduced Frank said, “We can all be a part of PostSecret… it may even include the work of people in this room, which is part of what makes this so exciting.” And indeed, when solicited, about 20 people in the room raised their hands to say yes, they had sent in postcards.

What makes this such a great community art project?

PostSecret asks the right question.
Museum designers labor over how to stimulate and evoke response from visitors. The most basic, and perhaps least interesting, question that is asked of visitors is, “What do you think?” How would you answer such a question? Frank’s question, or his entreaty—“send me your secret,” is both tantalizing and comforting. He publishes his home address for you to send your longings, fears, and desires to. People appreciate that openness and vulnerability, and take the opportunity to respond in kind.

And the responses are beautiful, both in language and composition. As Frank put it, “their courage makes the art meaningful.” The contributors are writing about something deeply important to them. They care, and so they labor to create something of value. Random people may not be able to create great works of dispassionate art. But in this project, each artist is uniquely powerful because they give voice to something vital, something easy for viewers to access emotionally.

PostSecret has a great medium.
As Frank said, 4 by 6 inches is not enough space to explain an entire story. Because of that inherent insufficiency, contributors are compelled to use images, carefully select their words, and the result is something evocative that is open to interpretation. When you read a card that says, “I’m still in love with who you used to be,” where does your mind go? There’s a rich inner story behind each of the cards, and it’s within all of our grasp to imagine it.

Also, the act of mailing something, of creating a physical thing and sending it off adds a tangible, potentially ritualistic element to “setting free” a secret. Frank told stories of postcards that came with $10 in postage, as if the author was concerned the card might somehow get returned to them. He also read emails from people who wrote cards, but then ended up giving them to others—family members, boyfriends, friends—instead of mailing them to him.

PostSecret fosters an engaged, caring community out of anonymity.
It’s extremely likely that individuals use the experience of writing a postcard to PostSecret as the stepping stone to sharing those secrets with loved ones. But perhaps more extraordinary is the extent to which PostSecret brings together strangers in support of one another. Each time Frank publishes a card that expresses insecurity or fear, dozens of caring emails come in. A boy sends a postcard with a photo of his blemished chest and asks, “who will ever love me?” The emails pour in: “I will. What’s inside counts.” In the Art-o-Matic show, one postcard read, “I’m a white guy who likes black girls.” During the show, Frank found that someone had written on this card. The stranger wrote, “That’s ok.” I heard so many stories of affirmation and caring today I felt like I was at a freaking Hallmark convention. But the stories were real, they represented interactions between stranger, and they were deeply affecting.

PostSecret motivates people to start their own communities and rituals for secret sharing.
There are PostSecret spin-off sites. There are also people getting active in their own communities in suicide hotlines and traditional support lines. And then there are the unusual stories. One woman wrote her secret on a post-it and stuck it on the bathroom mirror in her large office complex. Later that day, she returned to find 12 other post-its with secrets surrounding hers. A girl whose postcard about anorexia was not published on the website made a shirt that said, “20% of anorexics die. Here are the symptoms of anorexia…” and wore it to school to spread her message. Classmates and teachers asked her to make t-shirts for them to wear, too. PostSecret has a ripple effect that not only engages people in that project; it engages them in the idea of sharing with others in all kinds of ways.

PostSecret feels personal and immediate, as well as universal.
Frank said that each time he gets a postcard in the mail, he feels like he is holding “a living secret being experienced in real-time." There’s an urgency to the secrets—even ones that have been hidden for tens of years—because the postcard represents the moment at which it was finally let out. Each week, the website offers new secrets, and the old ones, stored in Frank's basement, disappear.

Frank commented that he thinks we love these cards not because we’re voyeurs, but because they reveal “the essence of humanity.” I’m not sure if that’s true, but there are certainly hundreds of postcards that resonate with me personally—and I imagine with everyone who views them. Across age, gender, continent, language, the PostSecret viewers see the same desires and troubles. There were many stories of personal action taken after reading others’ cards, and appreciation for no longer feeling alone in a secret or a feeling.

PostSecret is curated.
Not every postcard makes the website; these days, Frank receives 1000 per week and publishes about 20. He says that he looks for cards that are authentic, that tell a story that feels powerful and hasn’t been shared before. Each week, he tries to create a narrative tableau of secrets to publish, looking for a hopeful one, a funny one, a confused one. By culling down the submissions for presentation, Frank is reinforcing the values that motivated PostSecret in the first place—people sharing honest, creative expressions of their secrets. It keeps the project focused.

I felt mixed about this curated component originally. Enough people are looking at the website—why doesn’t he post them all and let people vote, like YouTube? Curating the cards probably helps keep exhibitionism and showboating at bay. It’s not about how many cards you create or how fabulist the tale you tell. It’s about how honest and real one person thinks they are. And the fact that the cards are only available for one week at a time--as an art piece, it evokes the immediacy of a secret, but as a new viewer I want access to all the content.

And this is where museums (could) step in. In the ideal world, Frank’s basement—where he sorts and selects all the cards—becomes an open collection storage facility at a museum. Volunteers can come and help sort and scan the cards. Different people could curate—not just one person—and everyone would have access to the core data. The project is active, continuing, bringing new content to the museum each week and motivating people to return and get involved. PostSecret is self-help through art, through community. It opens people to each other and to themselves. It pulls in creative expression from all kinds of people all over the world. It has web components, but is essentially about physical objects.

PostSecret is a model for where museums can go with 2.0.

It doesn’t have to be postcards. It doesn’t have to be about secrets. What are the deep questions museums can ask to get people motivated to contribute, to listen, and to care?

Game Friday: Tagging For Fun

Let’s play a game. It’s called Tag this Image! Here’s how it works.

You look at this picture.

Now, write down the words that you associate with the picture.

Are you having fun yet?

“Tagging,” or assigning descriptors to pictures, websites, and other content on the internet, is a huge trend in 2.0. With good reason. Whether on Flickr with photos, on del.icio.us with web pages, or on blogs with posts, tagging makes organization of items and search of them easier. Instead of searching based only on the taxonomy assigned by the authority who runs the site (i.e. the name of this site is X or the name of this artifact is Y), you can search based on the terms that users identify with the item.

It’s all about who has the authority to identify things. For example, I identify myself as Nina Simon, the government identifies me by my social security number, some guy on the street identifies me as a woman with curly hair… all of these are valid descriptors or tags for me, and the aggregation of these tags provides a fuller picture of who I am to the outside world.

Tagging is useful. But is it fun? On its own, not so much. Most of the incentives on sites for tagging are related to increased functionality (better organization of my sites on del.icio.us) or increased visibility (more searchable content). For internal web managers, tagging also improves accessibility for people who are blind by adding text descriptors to images so that site visitors understand the content of those images.

The ESP Game, and its related game, Phetch, are two games that create a framework to make tagging fun. These games were developed by Carnegie Mellon with funding from the NSF, with the goal of harnessing collective intelligence (and interest in playing games) to tag all of the images on the internet. Why would they want to do that? To increase the functionality, visibility, and accessibility of these images to web users worldwide.

The games take the game I posed in the beginning (Tag this image!) and make it fun by adding another player. Separately at your own computers, you tag images. Every time you and your partner player come up with the same tag for an image, you both get points. It ain’t Risk, but the addition of the social question (do we think alike?) and the game metric of scoring makes for a fairly compelling game. And it’s exciting to be part of an experiment that has a meaningful outcome.

There are many museums that are starting to experiment with allowing visitors to tag their online content, whether to engage them in 2.0 activities or to increase functionality, visibility, and accessibility of content (or both). But tagging is new enough, especially to museum audiences, that just giving web visitors that functionality is not necessarily enough to motivate them to start tagging. I’d love to see museums explore using games like the ESP Game to encourage people to engage with the museum’s content—and each other—and help the museum out, too. The games on the website at my museum are old. We don’t pay attention to them, and yet, they account for a high percentage of our web traffic. Wouldn’t it be nice to offer something useful on the game areas of museum websites?

My Unrequited (and Unsubstantiated) Love for Museums and the Web

I won’t be at the Museums and the Web conference next month; my exhibit at the Spy Museum is opening soon and we're in crunch time. But I’m developing a serious crush. MW does something that AAM, ASTC, and a whole slew of other acronym-rich conferences don’t: it gives non-participants substantive content from the meeting.

I’m still wading through the papers, all available for free, being presented in sessions at the conference. I’ve never been to MW, and have heard mixed things about its value anecdotally. But this simple act—requiring session presenters to write papers and then posting those papers freely online—is getting me interested.

Why?

It’s better for the attendees…

• Presenters are forced to think about their presentations in advance and develop substantive content to discuss. No strolling in blind and winging it.
• Attendees can more fully preview the content that will be presented to help them make better choices about what sessions to attend. No more showing up at “Interactive Theater” expecting improv and getting a sales pitch on IMAX domes instead.
• Attendees can find people of interest and set up meetings in advance based on content in common, not just on social contacts.

It’s better for the presenters…

• Presenters can develop more complex arguments that don’t play well as powerpoint bullets. They can expect more from their audience in terms of insightful questions and familiarity with the content.
• Presenters can get a fuller idea of what other presenters in the same session/content stream are discussing and can tailor their questions and connections to that knowledge.
• Presenters can send in their papers 10 weeks before the conference. That means things can stay relatively current to the conference, while still depending on solid research.

It’s better for folks at home…

• I can download papers ranging back to 1997. I can view information about their authors (although, strangely, contact information is not forthcoming).

It’s better for the conference…

• Buzz is generated around the papers before the conference even happens. People are blogging the papers; it extends the “event” of the conference in time.
  
• The papers serve as advertisement for the conference. People like me get a chance to “see what we’re missing” by not attending.
• People like me feel positively about an organization that makes content available digitally.

But every crush has its downside. Here are my idle concerns:

• Why are the papers and sessions only browsable by speaker name, not by title, country of origin, year of submittal, or whether there is a corresponding paper?
• Does the paper-paper-paper session format diminish the potential for interactivity among panelists? Do speakers expand beyond their papers, or mostly explain them? How much more value would I get at the actual conference, content-wise?

I look forward to hearing how the actual conference goes. Until then, I’ll keep sifting through papers all starry-eyed.

Just Looking? Lurkers, Judges, and Contributors

Today, personal ads from three kinds of museum users....
This weekend, I was working on this article about encouraging civic discourse in museums through 2.0 and looked up dizzily to realize I’ve been having too much of a collective action lovefest. As a designer, I believe that museums should strive to offer diverse networked, social experiences. But as a museum-goer, what about the times I don’t WANT to have a networked, social experience? What if I just want to look at the art and be left alone? One of the key aspects of web 2.0 experiences (which I was overlooking) is their flexibility in offering multiple ways to engage with the experience and the content.

Most 2.0 sites allow for many shades of “lurking” and “participating.” Consider YouTube. The large majority of YouTube users are lurkers—they watch videos, but do not submit them. The next group of people are users who rate, tag, and comment on videos, but do not submit videos. These people might be thought of as “judges,” or, at best, curators. They are adding metadata to videos about their value and content, which may be for their own use (for future navigation) or for collective use (to add to the larger conversation about what’s good and what isn’t). The smallest set are the “contributors” who actually upload videos they have made.

Many 2.0 sites that revolve around content, like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr, behave this way. There are other sites, like Delicious and MySpace, that center around a more core personal experience (your tags, your site), and so require a minimum level of individual “contributing” to start getting value from the site.

How does this relate to the experience design in museums? Most museums offer lots of lurking, some contributing, and almost no judging/curating—and most experiences are in one of those buckets without dipping into the others as well. I can make a video, but I can’t rate them. I can touch the Van de Graff generator and have funny hair, and I can watch other people touch it, but I can’t vote on videos of the FUNNIEST Van de Graff hair experiences. I can leave a comment, and read today’s comments, but I can’t flip through the archive of comments going back X years.

There are many awesome museum interactives that are for single users that have an unintended lurker benefit (funny hair from the Van de Graff being just one example). On sites like Flickr, the role of the contributor as performer for an audience is explicit—and a source of motivation to continue contributing. Not every museum visitor wants to be a performer, but when the interactive elicits a funny or exciting or fabulous result that will be watched and enjoyed by surrounding visitors anyway, that “performance” could be captured and enjoyed in other ways, in the museum, on the museum website (live Van de Graff cam?), or on other sites like YouTube for a wider audience of lurkers and curators to enjoy. With clear signage to that effect, of course.

So that’s some perspective on experiences that already exist in museums. What about new experiences, intended to be 2.0ish, that are starting to be designed now? Here are some considerations to satisfy these different kinds of visitors:

THE CONTRIBUTOR:

• If the interaction has a performance component, make that clear and reward the active participant with a small slice of fame.
• If the interaction involves an opinion or a person-specific reaction, show the contributor how their input relates to the larger network of previous contributors.
• Allow the contributor to develop a personal profile/site/collection of data based on their interactions throughout the museum. Network these profiles at the contributor’s discretion (note: doesn’t have to be totally public… think about how cool it could be if these sites were only networked within a small community, like your class or your family).

THE JUDGE:

• Wherever comfortable, give people a way to judge and classify content. This can be physical in the museum, or virtual on the web. They can take the form of ratings, tags, or comments.
• When someone judges something, connect them to other users who have made similar (or dissimilar) judgments/comments.
• Make the judgments count. Use them to prioritize content for lurkers and other judges. At best, let the judgments drive content presentation--let the users curate.
  

THE LURKER:

• Make the content easy to access from multiple entry points (in-person, on video, web, books).
• Make the content easy to navigate, and incorporate “frictionless serendipity” (thanks, Seb!) by using automatic tracking to make educated guesses about what the lurker is searching for.
• Update the content frequently and provide multiple forms of announcement about those changes.

The point here is to develop museum experiences that are available to all of these kinds of users at the same time. We’re all each of these kinds of users at different times of the day or points in our museum experience. I’d love to climb the rock wall but I’d prefer to just watch you throw the baseball. You’d love to give that painting a piece of your mind but will peacefully listen to that installation. So let’s give users an opportunity to do, an opportunity to comment, and an opportunity to watch.

Game Friday: Massively Multiplayer Online Insanity

This week, I drank a little 2.0 koolaid and joined the new Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) put out by Justin Hall and other nuts like him who want to be tracked for all the time they spend on the web—and rewarded for their actions. You can view a video of Justin talking about his theory here, or you can take the plunge and sign up. It requires Firefox, and yes, it does track every website you go to and then gives you gamer-spoof designations based on that tracking.

Justin links to other similar passive games that reward you with points for your Outlook email traffic or track your overall application usage. Like the fuel meter I talked about last week, this is gaming by passive monitoring. The idea is that the more you “level up” in strange ways (i.e. by looking at lots of websites), the more you will want to optimize your use to achieve certain goals.

There are a couple ways to look at this. On one hand, it’s a silly and somewhat pleasurable way to report on things you are already doing. Imagine a refrigerator that gave you “cheese points” for every lasagna you make. Who cares? Well, on the other hand, perhaps doing this kind of tracking will increase your awareness of certain kinds of behaviors and encourage you to change that behavior (tofu points, anyone?). And in a game context, you can set your own goals and get cheered on by the system for your achievements.

Passive games like this also reflect the continuing breakdown of privacy on the web. I have signed up for an automated personal stalker, for my own entertainment. Worse, the data accumulated about me is (in an aggregated form) available to other players. I’m encouraged to start up relationships with folks based on the fact that we both look at a lot of DIY websites.

Explore for yourself, but before you do, enjoy this very, very funny video on the future of MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online games).