Open Sourcing the Museum
What's going on here? Why create an empty virtual museum? Who can play at the museum game?
The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop is an experiment in adaptation. Institutions need to adapt in response to changes in taste, technology and the zeitgeist, and museums are no exceptions.
The technology of the information age is changing us from a society of mass consumption into one of collective participation. Flickr, YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia, del.icio.us and other Web 2.0 tools are creating a many-to-many culture of production and sharing. As Daniel Pinkput it, we have achieved "digital marxism" where technology has put the machinery of information-age production into the hands of the people. How will this change museums?
This experiment in museum evolution introduces two innovations:
- It separates exhibit design from exhibit construction. By introducing Second Life as a rapid prototyping tool for exhibit design, this experiment makes it possible for individuals from around the world to collaborate on the same exhibit project. Using The Tech Museum in Second Life to showcase these exhibits designs makes it easy for museums to pick and choose what they will build in real life for their visitors.
- It opens the exhibit creation process up to the world at large. If you think you have the chops to design a first-class museum exhibit, you have a chance to create one for The Tech Museum (and win a $5,000 prize in the process).
Good museums have always copied exhibits from one another. Together with the Creative Commons license, the first innovation has the potential to create an open source market for museum exhibits, similar to the successful gift economies for open source software, scientific advances and educational courseware. It liberates the content from the container.
The second innovation has the potential to improve the quality of museums by bringing in new talent, new ideas and new points of view. As leading computer scientist and Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy recognized: "the smartest people in this business don't work for my company." By opening up the design process, it breaks down the visitor-curator dichotomy, replacing it with a continuous spectrum of participation:
VISITOR <-> VOLUNTEER <-> EXHIBIT DESIGNER <-> CURATOR
This experiment proposes one answer to the question posed above: "How will museums enter the Age of Participation?" Do you think it will succeed? Is this the future of the museum?
Open Workshop
