“A Catalog of Connections”Intro remarks and greeting for Europeana’s

EuropeanCultural Commons

Workshop

Limassol, Cyprus | October 30, 2012

Michael Peter EdsonDirector, Web and New Media Strategy

Smithsonian Institution

Video: http://youtu.be/VlHC0uPqdRY

This is a transcript of a video recorded for Europeana’s European Cultural Commons

workshop in Limassol Cyprus on October 30, 2012.

The video is online at

http://youtu.be/VlHC0uPqdRY

Table of Contents

A Catalog of Connections................................................................................................2

1. Europeana is one of the most important projects in the world today...4

2. Europeana won’t succeed by trying to be great..............................................5

3. A commons is like a gumbo......................................................................................6

4. Beware of certain words............................................................................................7

“Culture”............................................................................................................................7

“Audience”........................................................................................................................8

“Access”..............................................................................................................................9

“Engagement”...............................................................................................................10

5. Think like investors...................................................................................................10

Some additional notes/references..........................................................................12

Helping other people succeed...............................................................................12

Hubs and spokes.........................................................................................................13

Hi everyone.

I’m Michael Edson. I’m the director of web and new media strategy at

the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

But I suspect that many of you know that, and I know many of you in

that room in Cyprus today. I wish I could be there with you. I’m very

proud to know all of you. And I’m very very proud as a member of the

human species, of the work you’re doing today and the work you’ve

done through your whole careers to make culture and scientific

knowledge and the work of museums and libraries and archives

relevant and important and meaningful in society.

I think Europeana is one of the most important initiatives in the world

today. As Harry Verwayen said so persuasively at the Open Knowledge

Festival in Helsinkin last month [September, 2012, see “Open Cultural

Heritage Special Europeana Announcement from Harry

Verwayen” http://bambuser.com/v/2996301 ], what you’re doing

shows the world that Europe can accomplish difficult, meaningful things

if you work together and if you stick to your principles. That means a lot

to us here in the states. It means a lot to people all over the world. So

keep going.

I said that I’m with the Smithsonian Institution, but I’m not an official

spokesperson for the Smithsonian today. I’m speaking as a private

citizen who has been thinking a lot about the cultural commons, and

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thinking a lot about how our knowledge institutions can thrive and do

the important work they need to do in society during the digital age.

A Catalog of Connections

About a year ago I read a really interesting article in Quora. Quora is an

online site that’s about asking and answering questions and it’s often

full of surprises. This article was called “What is it like to have an

understanding of very advanced mathematics?”

[ http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-

understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics , also cited and discussed

a bit on my tumblr at http://usingdata.tumblr.com/page/4]

OK…That’s kind of cool.

The answer, the best answer, the longest answer, was from an

anonymous mathematician who talked about what it is like to think and

work as a mathemetician. Two ideas came out of that writing, that essay,

that really blew me away. And I think they’re relevant for you today.

The first is – and I’m going to read off of a cue card behind the camera –

“You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep

understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when

you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem

and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time

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you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite

brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is

knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of

confusion.”

That’s definitely the way I feel most of the time, grappling with these

issues that you’re working on constructively today. I feel like I’m always

working in a state of confusion and like I never have a complete grasp of

what’s going on. So I would say, allow yourselves to be comfortable in

that state of confusion and allow yourselves to resist the temptation to

feel like you’ve mastered it. Because you haven’t mastered whatever

you’re working on - - things are changing that quickly.

The second paragraph, element, of this article about mathematics that

interested me so much was, and I’ll quote this also,

“You are often confident that something is true long before you

have an airtight proof for it (this happens especially often in

geometry). The main reason is that you have a large catalogue of

connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if

X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things

you know to be true…”

I love that idea of having a catalog of connections. I love that idea of

having a catalog of concepts, and that working through difficult ideas

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and unknown ideas is a matter of making connections between that

catalog of concepts.

In the spirit of that idea, I want to give you five concepts to think about -

- I want to assert five concepts that you can think about today. And you

can think about understanding the connections between them in

relation to your job in this workshop.

* * *

1. Europeana is one of the most important projects in the

world today

In the 20th century – in the 19th and 18th and 17th centuries for that

matter - - we made these wonderful institutions, these museums,

libraries, archives, scientific organizations, knowledge institutions. And

nobody told us we had to make these things. We felt compelled to make

them as a human race, as a species. I think these institutions and what

they represent in our genome is a part of our operating system - - part

of the operating system of society.

And we made them out of the tools we had available to us, out of the

materials we had available to us - - bricks and mortar and iron and glass

and big marble columns and magnificent spaces in the middle of our

cities. And also quiet, dark rooms - - filled with shelves and drawers of

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magnificent and unrivaled examples of human creativity and insight.

And samples of the natural world, the scientific world.

But we have new tools now. We have very new tools now, available to

us today, that we didn’t have 3 or 4 years ago, let alone 30 or 40 or 300

or 400 years ago. And it’s really important that somebody figure out

how to do the work that society expects us to do - - needs us to do - - in

our institutions, with these new tools. Because the tools are… I won’t

say more powerful, but… powerful and meaningful in a way that our old

tools just are not. And I think this concept of a commons—and what

Europeana is doing and stands for—really paves the way, more strongly

than any other initiative I know of.

So that’s concept 1.

2. Europeana won’t succeed by trying to be great

Concept 2 is that Europeana won’t succeed by trying to be great.

I want you to resist the temptation –the incredible gravitational pull—of

trying to make Europeana the strongest, biggest, bestest, most bad-

assedest portal in the world.

Most of your success will come through making other people great - - by

being a supporter of the passion and enthusiasm and the inquiry and

intelligence and the verve of everyone else in the world.

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I’m remembering a conversation I had with an online video portal

company, I think it was SchoolTube. They approached the Smithsonian

wanting us to become involved in creating content for teachers and

students. Our initial reaction was “Oh, we’re going make the best 2-

minute videos that teachers will ever use.” And, I think when the end of

the day came, most of us realized that the most powerful thing that we

could do was “B-roll.” Was footage of George Washington’s (our famous

“founding father”) battle uniform, or of the Washington Monument, or

Dorothy’s slippers [from The Wizard of Oz] - - or resources that other

people could use, teachers and students could use, to do their own work.

So rather than manufacturing a complete vision of the future, or a

complete vision of knowledge, or of creativity, ourselves, and delivering

it through our portal down a one-way pipe to a passive audience…

Maybe the most powerful thing we could do was to provide a very

simple platform that other people could use to be successful.

And I think there’s a lot of wisdom and potential in that direction, for

your thinking: what can you do that will make your citizens, your

countrymen and countrywomen, be more successful? Maybe you take a

humble role. A back seat. Maybe you’re just a simple platform that

people use to come and get the resources that they need to use to weave

the tapestry they’re building their lives with.

…That’s number 2.

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3. A commons is like a gumbo

Number 3 is, there are a lot of ideas on the table. I saw Harry

Verwayen’s excellent briefing paper - - Harry and staff and team’s

excellent briefing paper - - and there are a lot of ideas on the table about

what a commons is. I want to assert that those ideas are not a fixed

formula, they’re more like the recipe for a soup, or a stew, or a Southern

Louisiana gumbo. You can make substitutions. You don’t need all the

ingredients. You can use different ratios of them depending on what job

you’re trying to do today, or who your audience is.

So don’t think too hierarchically or rigidly about “if we don’t do this it

can’t be a commons.”

I’m thinking about Italo Calvino’s book “Invisible Cities”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities), imagining many

different kinds of cities, some impossible, some real…Not all commons

have to be the same or follow the same mould.

And that leads me to idea connection catalog number 4…

4. Beware of certain words

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There are certain words that you need to think critically about - - you

need to question your use of, because they mean radically different

things to different people.

“Culture”

The first is “culture.”

I’ve noticed when I come to Europe - - and this is true in the states as

well - - when we talk about culture we talk about the opera…we’re

thinking about the opera, we’re thinking about institutions. I learned a

new term: “S.O.B’s” - - Symphonies, Operas, and Ballets - - the “S.O.B’s”!!

You’re talking about institutions, and when you talk about serving

culture, sometimes you’re thinking, without even meaning to, you’re

talking about institutions and governments providing services to other

institutions, that then provide culture for their citizens. That’s not

always the best use of that term, or really what it means.

I’m interested in the person who’s in their living room playing the

harmonica. Or learning to play guitar, or singing in a community choir,

or making art or writing poetry - - those individual makers or creators

or imaginers in your populations that you serve. Sometimes culture is

about what they’re doing.

The institutions of the 20th century had a hard time finding and relating

to those people. But now those people can find each other, and they can

find you, and that redefines that term “culture.”

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“Audience”

Another term is “Audience.”

Is Europeana’s audience other institutions?

Is it your 2,200 institutional partners?

Or are they the citizens, that get served?

And then, which sub-audience of those citizens? I think we’re inarguably

in a Long Tail environment where you have hundreds or thousands of

niche audiences. So as you talk today, be exceptionally clear about what

you mean when you say the word “audience.” Who is that?

“Access”

Another danger word is “access.”

As in, “We’re going to provide access.”

Access is not the same as use. It’s not the same as sharing.

Access usually, in the parlance of museums and libraries and archives,

means, “You can come, and ‘access’ our stuff, on our terms, through our

pipe.”

[As a point-of-reference, I had a conversation with the registrar of a

massive natural history collection a few months ago. She stated,

categorically, that her museum provided “free and open access” to their

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online collections. In fact, her museum only releases metadata and

digital images of collection items under a full “copyright, all rights

reserved” status, and images are only released in low resolution. But to

her, this constituted “free and open access” because her museum was

not charging a fee to access these materials online.]

And that, maybe, is not the most productive way of thinking about

access in terms of a cultural commons.

Along those lines I think we imagine the future as having us [our

institutions] be a hub, still, but with a lot of spokes: people will have to

come to us to access the things they need. But maybe the best role for us

is not as a hub, surrounded by spokes, but as one of the endpoints. Part

of a network of peers.

“Engagement”

The last term I want you to think about is “engagement.”

Often when we talk about engagement we talk about you, out there, the

public, coming and being engaged with us, with our stuff, on our terms.

That’s not what I think a 20 year old would think “engagement” means

today.

Engagement is a two-way pipe.

Engagement is peer-to-peer (without institutional mediators, hubs).

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Engagement is on terms your users are defining on their own, without

you, every day.

So think about the bias of that term, engagement, when it comes up.

5. Think like investors

The last connection I want to bring up is… “pride” is not the word… but

I’m very proud to know that you all are there today, as investors.

You’re investing your own time, your energy, the reputation of your

institutions. You could be doing anything with this time today, but

you’re investing it in helping think through the European Cultural

Commons. Think like investors.

Where are you going to put your resources?

When do you want payoff for that?

When do you want benefits from that?

Where do you want to be a month from now?

Where do you want to be a year from now?

Really press the urgency of that investor thinking. I think there’s so

much you can do now, so much you can do in the short term. Many of

you have heard me repeat something I heard somewhere else,

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Think big.

Start small.

Move fast.

…But move. Do what you can, but do it.

***

And on that note, maybe I’ll get back to my hurricane preparation. It’s

Sunday [October 28, 2012], things are starting to get cold here, the

weather is coming from a strange direction. Probably as your workshop

is happening we’ll be hunkered inside my house, without electricity,

hoping that the roof doesn’t blow off.

So enjoy warm and sunny Cyprus and…I’m just thrilled, I’m

overwhelmed and thrilled at the direction you’re headed, and the rest of

us, the rest of the world, is cheering you on.

So go get ‘em.

[Recorded October 28, 2012, in Falls Church, VA]

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Some additional notes/references

Helping other people succeed

This meme has been around for a while, and is deeply connected with

the Web 2.0 movement: see Tim O’Reilly’s seminal What is Web 2.0

essay [http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html] , and his

recent, excellent post on LinkedIn, It's Not About You: The Truth About

Social Media Marketing

[http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121002122119-

16553-it-s-not-about-you-the-truth-about-social-media-marketing?

goback=.ptf_]

Kathy Sierra’s ideas about the changing relationship between customers

and brands (and institutions for that matter) deeply resonate with me

and have been a kind of sigil that I’ve used to unlock a lot of new

thinking. I talk about Kathy’s “every user is a hero in their own epic

journey” tweet in nearly ever talk I give, most recently here: Open

Digital Heritage: Doing Hard Things Easily, at Scale (p. 3)

[http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/michael-edson-open-digital-

heritage-doing-hard-things-easily-at-scale-text-version ]

Hubs and spokes

I was thinking about Clay Shirky’s writing about the newspaper industry

here: Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2011/12/institutions-confidence-

and-the-news-crisis/ ],

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“All of this seems to offer the grandmotherly option between

Starkman and the FON crew — “You’re both right, dear. We

need institutions and we need experiments.” Even given this

hybridization, though, our views diverge: Plan A assumes that

experiments should be spokes to the newspapers’ hub, their

continued role as the clear center of public interest

journalism assured, and on the terms previously negotiated.

Plan B follows Jonathan Stray’s observations about the digital

public sphere: in a world where Wikipedia is a more popular

source of information than any newspaper, maybe we won’t

have a clear center anymore. Maybe we’ll just have lots of

overlapping, partial, competitive, cooperative attempts to

arm the public to deal with the world we live in.

Some of the experiments going on today, small and tentative

as they are, will eventually harden into institutional form,

and that development will be as surprising as the penny

press subsidizing journalism for seven generations. The old

landscape had institutions and so will the new one, but this

doesn’t imply continuity.”

Also, Brewster Kahle, in Interview: Brewster Kahle on Radio Free Culture

[

http://freemusicarchive.org/member/jason/blog/Interview_Brewster_

Kahle_on_Radio_Free_Culture ]

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“…we’re really organized toward having many winners.

We want to have many publishers, many libraries, many

authors who make money. And everyone is a reader. So the

idea of having lots of winners and no central points of control

is how we got here on the internet. It’s why Creative

Commons is kind of an interesting approach, why open

source has been working well. The world wide web doesn’t

have central points of control. This is just the way to make a

robust, evolving, environment.”

I’ve unpacked the ideas around hub-and-spoke vs. lots of hubs and lots

of spokes here: Lego Beowulf and the Web of Hands and Hearts, (p. 11)

[http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/michael-edson-lego-beowulf-and-

the-web-of-hands-and-hearts-for-the-danish-national-museum-awards-

13444266 ]

“And it's important to emphasize that as it's shown, this

network of connections—this learning network—shows us,

the Institution, at the middle. But these are not just one way

connections from us in the middle outward to our audience

on the periphery. These are two-way connections between us

and The People Formerly Known as the Audience (a phrase

widely attributed to NYU professor Jay Rosen)—between us

and everyone else in the world.

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To press the point even further, the most important part of

this knowledge network, this new learning model, aren't the

links between the few of us who work at memory institutions.

The really powerful links are those that connect "our"

audience members to each other. Perhaps the most powerful

place for us, as museums, in this diagram is at the side, as

generous and helpful guides, catalysts, and conveners—as co-

participants—rather than as owners or monopolists.”

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