Opening remarks for The Commons and Digital Humanities in Museums Sponsored by the City University of New York Digital Humanities Initiative, November 28, 2012 Organized by Neal Stimler and Matt Gold, with Will Noel and Christina DePaolo. http://cunydhi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/11/07/wednesday-november-28-the-commons-and-digital-humanities-in-museums/

1. Super-Successful
GLAMs
Opening remarks for
The Commons and Digital
Humanities in Museums
Sponsored by the City University of New York Digital Humanities Initiative
November 28, 2012
http://cunydhi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/11/07/wednesday-november-28-the-
commons-and-digital-humanities-in-museums/
Michael Edson
Director, Web and New Media Strategy
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
@mpedson
Slideshare.net/edsonm

2. [Annotated/expanded text.]
[Note: big font size for better reading on Slideshare.]
[Note: I’m not an official spokesperson for the Smithsonian Institution. These views are my own.]
They have some of the most important missions in society,
The increase and diffusion of knowledge
Smithsonian Institution, USA1
A center for learning, tolerance, dialogue and understanding
Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt2
...[To support] citizens in the defense of their rights and
encourage the production of scientific and cultural knowledge
ArquivoNacional, Brasil3
They are GLAMs: galleries, libraries, archives, and museums—
sometimes called memory institutions—and I have yet to visit a healthy
community without one or meet an individual who has not had their life
changed by one in some way.
But this talk is about turning that bet on its head and asking: Can you,
with your heads and hands and hearts, change GLAMs?
Can everyone, working together in new ways, amplify and supersize the
impact that GLAMs have in society?
1

3. ● Can we put the tools of knowledge creation—of all kinds of
creation— into more hands to catalyze research and
discovery?
● Can we share the joy and meaning of artistic and cultural
exploration with more citizens?
● Can we deepen engagement with the challenges that face our
species, and in doing so, can we nurture the habits of a civil
and sustainable society?
● And ultimately, can we make these changes quickly enough,
and at big enough scale, to make a substantial difference in the
lives of individuals and the fate of our species?
I hope that tonight, Will Noel, Christina DePaolo, and Neal Stimler and I
will outline, in one interrupted chain of thought, the ideas that connect
successful - - supersuccessful - - galleries, libraries, archives, and
museums, with the essential capabilities of the World Wide Web so that
we can get better outcomes, for society - - for all of us.
I have no doubt that we are capable of changing GLAMs—they are,
after all, just human institutions: made by us, for us. The first question
then - - the first link - - is not whether change is strategically possible or
tactically achievable, it is whether we care enough about the institutions
and the outcomes to make change happen in the first place.

4. The success of GLAMs is a matter of urgency
So let me begin by asserting that the work of GLAMs matters, now.
GLAMs are easy to dismiss as tourist attractions, warehouses, book
depots, or the trophies of rich industrialists.
But look at GLAM mission statements - - look at what they say they do,
and sometimes actually do, and then look at the problems we face on
earth today.
We, as a species, are faced with unprecedented environmental, social,
and geopolitical stresses4,
● atmospheric carbon has reached 391.03 parts-per-million
● 16,928 species are currently threatened with extinction, including
21% of all mammals
● there are 63 active armed conflicts worldwide
● and 1.4 billion people—more than the populations of the USA,
Canada, and the European Union nations combined—live on the
equivalent of less than $1.25 a day.
And these are just some of the challenges of the present moment: the
future is even more uncertain, and it is likely that we will live the rest of

5. our lives in an epoch of dramatic and accelerating change--even without
taking into account what will surely come crashing down on us, as a
species: the specter of DIY-Biology and advanced biotechnology,
nanotechnology, and artificially extended human life just to name a
few.5
As Sir Ken Robinson said at the closing talk of the 2006 TED
conference,
“If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring
in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on
parade over the last 4 days, what the world will look like in 5 years
time, and yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the
unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary."6
Given the missions of GLAMs and the resources and attention they
consume, an objective observer would reasonably conclude that we, in
our societies, believe they represent a potent tool for addressing big
challenges.7 GLAMS are supposed to nurture creativity and knowledge
creation; learning and independent thinking; civic engagement and
dialogue around ideas that matter.
There are approximately 18,000 museums in the USA alone, and
together they spend more than $20.7 billion annually to achieve their
goals: this is more than the gross domestic product of almost half the
nations on earth.8

6. Society has wagered, by creating and supporting memory institutions,
continuously and at great expense for thousands of years,9 that they are
good for civilization. That if we take them away or weaken their
effectiveness we get less learning, less enlightenment, less knowledge
and wisdom, and less shared experience and dialogue in our
communities—and that we will be impoverished by this absence.
Conversely, we wager that if GLAMs succeed—have more impact,
touch more people more deeply in more ways—our communities will be
nourished.
But the primary model we have used to convert our investments in
GLAMs into civic value is an old one, based on tools and methods that
enclose resources, exclude participants, and ultimately diminish
outcomes.
The impact of GLAMs is inhibited by the broadcast model
We formed our collective expectations for the performance of memory
institutions—how they do their work and the scale of impact they could
achieve—back in the 20th century, in the age of enduring wisdom,
before the World Wide Web.10 This was the broadcast era, and it
worked the same in GLAMs as it did in government, business, and

7. nonprofits. To create outcomes in the world using broadcast era tools,
leaders needed to,
hire experts and put them in a organization, with offices,
cubicles, an administrative staff, lawyers, a human resources
department...
put resources into the organization: money, trust, mindshare,
reputation, real estate, physical and intellectual property
try to get something valuable to come out of the other end
In this model, the people inside the organization—the experts—defined
the problems, engineered the solutions, and delivered them as final
products down a one-way pipe to mostly passive recipients—
consumers—on the other end. This was a reasonable way to work given
what was possible with the mass media platforms that were available:
We didn’t know we could enlist the participation of millions of
individuals in any way because we couldn’t harness, or even find those
participants through television, radio, and print publishing platforms. 11
We did know that we could count the number of visitors through our
doors, the number of items accessioned into collections, and the number
of scholarly publications we published. And it was good.
My sense is that most GLAMs were founded, staffed, and organized
before the World Wide Web.12 Most GLAMs still utilize the broadcast

8. model almost exclusively, and it can do a lot of good.13 The broadcast
model gives us stately library buildings filled with patrons borrowing
books, glorious museum exhibitions, research publications, and priceless
collections of scientific and cultural artifacts. The broadcast model will
continue to be important for scholarship, learning, and culture in the
future, but given what we now know about the physics of the web - -
what it allows us to do that we have never been able to do before - - the
broadcast model seems like an incomplete model for accomplishing
important things in society.
But three ideas, central to the work of Will, Christina, Neal - - and also
everyone at the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, define a new way
forward.
Joy’s Law, Cognitive Surplus, and Kathy Sierra’s “Every user a hero...”
- - they illuminate the path forward. They fire a lethal silver bullet
through the werewolf heart of 20th century broadcast model value
creation.
Joy’s law
Bill Joy was the co-founder of Sun Microsystems in the U.S., and he
famously said "no matter what business you're in, most of the smartest
people work for someone else."14
That’s not an easy thing to say at a staff meeting, but think about it.

9. For example, the Smithsonian Institution’s mission is “The increase and
diffusion of knowledge”, and of their core objectives is to create
breakthroughs in biodiversity and climate change research.15But there
are 6,000 Smithsonian employees, only a small fraction of whom work
directly on climate change or biodiversity issues and there are 7 billion
people on earth? Where is most of the innovation, and the drive, and the
knowledge, and the discovery going to happen---where is most of that
work going to happen? Inside the walls of a single institution?Or
everywhere else on the planet? That's what Joy's Law is all about. Joy's
Law stands the broadcast model on its head.
Cognitive Surplus
The second idea is Cognitive Surplus. Cognitive Surplus is the title of a
recent book by Clay Shirky, and in it Clay figures out that among the
Internet connected, educated population of planet earth there are a
trillion hours of free time every year that can be used to achieve some
greater good.
A trillion hours.
Clay notes that in the United States over 200 billion of those hours are
spent watching television.
There's a lot of time there that can be used, with a new way of
organizing, to accomplish something.

10. Every user a hero…
The third law of physics I want to talk about is by Kathy Sierra, who is a
thought leader in social media and new media. Kathy has observed that
in the old days of the 20th century, an institution, a brand, a government
would say "Trust me, trust us, because we are great." And she observes
that now the formula is "Trust us, buy our product, follow us, because
we help make you great."
That’s a very different way of running an organization, or approaching
creating value in society: rather than being great - - succeeding by
manufacturing greatness within the organizational walls - - greatness is
achieved indirectly, by helping individuals to be successful outside
organizational walls.
Kathy Tweeted in 2009,
"I am your user. I am supposed to be the protagonist. I am on a
hero's journey. Your company should be a mentor or a helpful
sidekick. Not an orc." 16
What you should do

11. So, let’s say you believe that these things are true - - that transition
between broadcast models and other models really happening and you
want to make it happen, as a citizen, a policy maker, or an employee of a
gallery, library, archive, or museum. What do you do? If you looked at
the actions of an individual or organization, how could you tell the ones
who believe this has happened from those that do not?
Over the years I’ve written about the design patterns of how
organizations make these thing happen - - ingredients that, together and
in different combinations, seem to feed the kinds of scale and
interactions we are seeking - - we so desperately need in society. And
you can look these up and read them and make use of them.17 And Will
and Matt and Neal and Christina will talk about some of the practical
and useful applications of these commons design patterns: I have learned
these patterns from watching their - - and your - - actions.
But I want to mention five things that can be done, practically, by almost
anyone who has an interest in advancing the goals of society through the
work of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
[Note to readers: More work needed here - - I’ll update
this document as I introduce new/better examples.
Thanks!!]
1. Look outside your organization

12. The first is to think, not “what can I do inside my organization, to
advance my goals” but to look for people and groups - - outside your
organization. Find those people, and ask them, with all humility, how
you can help them. Rather than try to manufacture all the outcomes you
want from within your organizational walls, ask people already active
doing the kinds of things you want to see more of in the world how you
can contribute to their success.
[Examples of things institutions can do (Tracking down
examples of):
Stockholm’s TekniskaMuseet (Technical Museum) hosts
regular Nerd Cafés for science and technology
enthusiasts
genealogy resources at National Archives of Denmark,
and crowdsourced content
OBA library in Amsterdam gives free office space to
entrepreneurs and startups
US National Archives’ Citizen Archivist Dashboard
The Arctic Studies Center at the Anchorage Museum
gives… ]
2. Find a piece of information you can liberate

13. Will Noel and ChristinaDePaolo [presenting next], as individuals within
their organizations, are methodically working to ensure that high quality
resources are more findable, more accessible - - and, by removing
unnecessary intellectual property restrictions - - more reusable by people
who are advancing the goals of their institutions.
Christina’s project, the Balboa Park Commons, is focused on
releasing huge quantities of resources for educators. 18
In May, 2012 the Walters Museum uploaded 19,000 images from
their collections into the Wikimedia Commons, so that those
resources and their metadata can be freely incorporated into
Wikipedia articles, and also - - because they released most of the
images and metadata into the public domain - - re-used by anyone
for any purpose.19
[Anyone can contribute re-usable photographs and text
to the Wiki Loves Monuments project. In 2012 “More than
350,000 images have been submitted by over 15,000
people for the 2012 competition in countries all over
the world.” (http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/ )]
3. Generate effort
In my own digital projects, I’m focusing less and less on counting hits,
image views, and the length of visitor sessions, and more on generating

14. effort and action - - human hours invested towards outcomes I care
about. In one project I’ve included a goal of generating a million hours a
year of effort from users.
[Examples: Trove (Australian national library),
OpenStreetMaps, Zooniverse, Cam Clicker, Open Ideo…]
4. Where do you want to be in 1 year?
If we gather here again a year ago from today, what one or two things to
we need to have accomplished...Or we should hang our heads in shame.
Often when I put that challenge to an organization or work group, the
goals they set are accomplished in weeks and months. Relentless focus
on goals is required to make progress in any context.
[Example: Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of
Denmark) open access initiatives/CC-BY pilot project]
5. Think big, start small, move fast
Finally, this is something I picked up from the social entrepreneurship
movement, and I repeat it in almost every talk I give: Think big, start
small, move fast - - but move. Get it done.
***

15. So, looking at these examples and thinking about the talks you’re about
to hear, I’m confident we can move from exclusive, broadcast methods
of value creation to inclusive, saleable, powerful models.
WE can put the tools of knowledge creation into more hands to catalyze
research and discovery
We can share the joy and meaning of artistic and cultural exploration
with more citizens
We can deepen engagement with the challenges that face our species,
and in doing so, can we nurture the habits of a civil and sustainable
society
And we can we make these changes quickly enough, and at big enough
scale, to make a substantial difference in the lives of individuals and the
fate of our species
This story matters now because the stakes, now, are ridiculously high.
Our fulfillment as individuals, the deep rewards of our family and
community life, the future of our species, and the plight of every other
living thing on earth might quite literally depend on the next few
decisions we make about how our civic institutions work and what kinds
of interactions and outcomes they celebrate.
Thank you.

16. 1See http://www.si.edu/about
2See http://www.bibalex.org/aboutus/mission_en.aspx
3
See http://www.arquivonacional.gov.br/cgi/cgilua.exe/sys/start.htm?sid=1
4
Sources for these facts are carbon: http://co2now.org/; extinctions: Facing the Future
http://www.facingthefuture.org/GlobalIssuesResources/GlobalIssuesTours/Biodiversity/tabid/506/Default.aspx?gcli
d=CIGFoO6-t7ICFcaiPAodLjIAaA ; armed conflicts: http://conflictmap.org ; poverty: Office of the UN
Commissioner for Refugees, http://www.unhcr.org/4a2fd52412d.html
5
John Kotter establishes the basic premise that we live in a time of accelerating change in his book A Sense of
Urgency. (Harvard Business Press, 2008). The “DIY” in DIY Biology is an acronym for “Do It Yourself” - - see
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIY_biology) and Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life,
http://marcuswohlsen.com/book/
6
"Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity"
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html, filmed February 2006
7
There are a lot of ways to assess the success, and failure, of individual institutions and GLAMs as a whole. For the
purpose of this short chapter I’m asking the readers to perform a kind of logical shortcut and just consider what
GLAMs say they do, as expressed in their mission statements, and the resources and privilege we confer to them.
8
“Museum Financial Information, 2009”, AAM Press, 2009. AAM notes that the number of museums is
extrapolated from other data and is not an exact count. The $20.7 billion figure is cited on p. 49.
8
Regarding the GDP information, see International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, October
2010: Nominal GDP list of countries, data for the year 2009,
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/02/weodata/index.aspx. Of the 181 countries whose GDP's are listed
by this report, 86 have GDP's under $20.7 billion. Getting the data from this resource directly is a little complex but
the Wikipedia has a useful summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal).
9
I haven’t found a solid reference for the appearance of the first library, museum, or archive in human civilization,
but the Library of Alexandria was built in the 3rd century B.C. (Wikipedia cites the Letter of Aristeas as the source
for this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
10
See Tim O’Reilly’s seminal essay from 2005, “What is Web 2.0”, http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-
20.html
11
Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson (of Wired magazine) have done an extraordinary job of articulating this point
over the years.
12
To-do: facts to back this up.
13
Though there are innovative, non-broadcast activities in many GLAMs, they tend to be small scale and low risk
projects when compared with overall institutional budgets and staff hour commitments. As a general indication of
this, the American Association of Museum’s “Museum Financial Information, 2009” report, cited above, states that
the median annual Internet and website investment in American museums is $5,113, just 0.4 percent of total
operating expenses, though they note that further research is needed to understand if the number reported is truly

17. representative of all expenses (p. 106). Clearly, American museums, as a whole, are not investing much money in
new digital publishing and audience engagement paradigms, or technology projects of any kind.
14Joy's Law is frequently referenced in business and strategy contexts without academic
source attribution. A suitable primary reference seems to be Lakhani KR, Panetta JA, "The
Principles of Distributed Innovation," 2007,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1021034
15 See http://www.si.edu/about
16 From Twitter user KathySierra, November 5, 2009
17 I’m thinking specifically of
“Making and the Commons” http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/makers-and-the-
commons
“Museums and the Commons: Helping Makers Get Stuff Done”
http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/museums-and-the-commons-helping-makers-
get-stuff-done-6779050
“Imagining the Smithsonian Commons”
http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/cil-2009-michael-edson-text-version
18 See http://www.balboapark.org/bpoc/work/commons
19 See https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/08/walters-museum-uploads-19000-photos-
to-wikimedia-commons/ . Note that there seems to be some uncertainty about the
intellectual property status of some of the works and texts - - see the comments at the end
of the above-referenced blog post. I’m not sure what to think at this point: more research
needed.