Slides from my presentation at the MCN 2013 conference in Montreal. Looks at the challenges of promoting openness in museums, even when it is espoused as an institutional priority.

1. After You’ve
Opened
Pandora’s Box
Image here aligned with MCN above
and baseline of text next to it.

2. The many outcomes
of trying to be more open
at PEM
Ed Rodley
Peabody Essex Museum

3. We have a directorial
mandate:
Figure out how to engage
with a global online
audience

4. We have a bunch of
problems, including:
•Our Wikipedia entry is terrible.
•Our photo policy is pages long & changes
3x a year.
•Our social media presence is too PR-driven.
•Our digital asset management is not what we’d
like it to be.

5. How to unravel this big ball
of interconnected issues?
The short answer?
Take it a step at a time, on as many fronts as
you can.
Nobody gets there in one step.

6. Reframe problems as
opportunities to deliver on
the mission
Moving from “We can’t because…” to
“We should, because…” makes things easier.

7. Even when its completely
aligned with mission and
goals, changes is hard.
•Nobody learned how to do this.
•There’s no “right” way, or even “best practice”.
•Everybody’s already busy.

8. So what’s that look like in
regard to Wikipedia?
•Agreeing to discuss it at senior mgmt level.
•Assigning resources to it.
•Talking with the WP community.

9. So what’s that look like in
regard to photo policies?
•Looking for opportunities to encourage visitors
to take and share photos of PEM.
•Agreeing to stop watermarking PEM-produced
images.
•Revisiting contract language around photo
permissions, and possibly not taking shows
with restrictive policies.

10. So what’s that look like in
regard to social media?
•Forming SM team and advisory group to
coordinate our outreach.
•Launching blogs.
•Making it easier for staff to participate in our
SM efforts.

11. Offer professional development
around these tools
We recognized a need for fast, focused PD and
came up with a Social Media 101 brown bag
lunch series.
•SM platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc…)
•Writing for blogs
•Cloud-based tools

12. So what’s that look like in
regard to digital asset mgmt?
•Hire somebody before buying a DAMS
•Look at workflows, not tools
•Work on getting the back end right.

13. Look up
The scale and reach of more open digital efforts
is mindbending.

14. Edit-a-thon
WW 1 edit-a-thon Stockholms Universitet. , Sweden.
In 5 hours, 12 editors:
uploaded 10 new images from the Europeana database were uploaded
to
Wikimedia Commons.
Five new Wikipedia articles were written and
17 existing articles were enriched with images.
The improvements to the articles were done in Swedish, Finnish,
English,
German and Dutch.

15. Key Findings:
The articles that had images added to them (in all languages) were
viewed
453,047 times in November and 389,122 times in December. By June
2013,
after six months, the articles had received a total 1.8 million views.

16. Find Ambassadors
And find ways to support them

17. Find ways for the most
people to win
Instead of an “us” versus “those
people” paradigm, find ways for
people’s passions to be harnessed

19. Questions for you:
How do convince the trepidacious
to release control of assets? What
strategies work?

20. Questions for you:
How do you reconcile openness
and increasing participation with
the strongly held view of (art)
museum as a temple and
resistance to “diluting” the
authority of the institution?

21. Questions for you:
How do you change people’s
minds about “giving it away for
free” from a bad thing to a
necessary way of achieving our
missions? +1