That is to say, it opened the Virtual Test Zone gallery with the world's first exhibits that were developed through an open source process, under a Creative Commons license, and prototyped in Second Life. Although other museums have experimented with letting visitors modify, evaluate or contribute content to their exhibits, the Tech is the first to throw the doors of its content creation process completely open to the public.

And what, you ask, of quality? Well, the exhibits in the Tech Virtual Test Zone answer that decisively. These seven exhibits are innovative, engaging and first-rate. To sense this for yourself, take this video tour. Credit for this goes first of all to their authors, whose exhibits were selected from a large field of contenders. Credit also goes to the acumen of Nina Simon, the Curator-pro-tem of the exhibition, and to the skill of The Tech's remarkable engineers, for turning bits to atoms. Simon and the engineering staff reinterpreted the virtual exhibits into steel, wood and plastic, transforming some of them almost beyond recognition. For a side-by-side comparison of virtual and real exhibits, see this page.

To celebrate this milestone, The Tech organized a Summit on Digital Democracy in Exhibit Design on the same day. The program had two keynote speakers. First Peter Friess explained how, when hired as the Tech Musuem's President, he was charged with renewing its galleries on a regular basis because, in Silicon Valley, visitors expect to see the "latest and greatest" innovations. He explained how he came up with the idea of "open sourcing" the curation process to meet this business need.

Opening of the Virtual Test Zone gallery	Summit attendees in SL watch Philip Rosedale watching them

Then Philip Rosedale, Chairman of Linden Labs, spoke. He described how building a Star Trek-style door for his childhood bedroom provided the inspiration to create the Second Life virtual world. In Second Life, the residents or "avatars" are encouraged to build whatever they like and provided free tools to do so. Every object they create can be scripted, to make the world dynamic and interactive. These are the very qualities that make Second Life ideal for rapidly prototyping museum exhibits. The keynotes were being streamed into the virtual Tech Museum in Second Life. There was standing room only in both real life and Second Life, and between the two about 130 people attended the Summit. As Rosedale spoke, he referred frequently to this virtual part of his audience. Occasionally he read aloud the chat comments coming from Second Life, displayed on a flat panel monitor at the front of the auditorium: "You tell 'em, Philip, I'm in-world 18 hours a day and it's my regular job."

Rosedale had strong praise for The Tech Virtual:

What's happening here at The Tech is just incredible ... in terms of the evolution of virtual world technology.
All intellectual production will soon move into cyberspace... I can't thank you guys enough because you're doing it. You're proving it. You're making the point, this is exactly the proof point that you look for.
I can't tell you how excited I am to be here and see what's been built at The Tech.

After the keynotes, one of the exhibit designers, Marie Crandell, recorded a video tour of the Test Zone gallery, demonstrating the exhibits and interviewing several of the other designers. At the end of her tour she was joined by Philip Rosedale and Nina Simon, who provided more details about some of the exhibits. Commented Rosedale: "It is so amazing that this happened so fast - I just can't believe it. I thought it was going to be, like, two to three years."

The novel strategy of open source museum development has borne its first fruit, the Art, Film & Music exhibition which is opening next month.  All six winners from the recent SL to RL competition will be included.  To celebrate, the Tech will host a Summit on Digital Democracy in Exhibit Design on June 4, 2008, the day of the opening.  The event will take place at The Tech in San Jose, and will also be streamed live to The Tech Virtual Museum in Second Life.  Keynote speakers will be Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab founder and Chairman, and Peter Friess, Ph.D., President of The Tech. A panel of leaders from the museum and technology worlds will consider the following questions:

• How can external experts and amateurs play a role in exhibit design?
• How useful are virtual worlds for museums?
• How to build and manage an online community.
• How to foster inter-museum collaboration.

And You, as a member of the Tech Virtual community, are invited!  Remember the date:

The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, launched in December, is Museum Director Peter Friess's grand experiment in open sourcing the museum's content development process. His idea, that is, is to fill the halls of a major museum with exhibits conceived entirely by outsiders, prototyped in Second Life, and licensed under Creative Commons for all to use. Although other museums have tinkered with having visitors participate in the process of developing exhibits, or used Second Life as an alternative presentation medium, none has dared this radical step before.

So far, about three dozen projects have been set up in Second Life (out of 65 on the Website). On Friday, Feb.29, the first four of these were chosen for incorporation into the real museum. They were: Artist-in-Residence: The Painter, Musical Chairs, Wikisonic and Connecting Point: Hole in (Virtual) Space. They represent, respectively, an interactive view of the evolution of a painting over time, a musical carousel where each seat represents different instruments in an orchestra, a 3-D music box where viewers set the "pins" corresponding to the placement of notes on a staff, and a RL-SL portal through which visitors on both sides can collaborate in a variety of games. Images of these exhibits in the Second Life workshop are shown below. Click on an image for a larger view.


Artist-in-Residence was created by Marie Crandell, in real life a systems accountant from Plymouth, England. Musical Chairs was created by Leanne Garvie, a philosophy graduate student and artist from Toronto, Canada. Wikisonic is the brainchild of Jon Brouchoud, an architect and designer from Madison, WI, USA. Connecting Point is the product of a team from the Salford University, in Manchester, U.K. Alan Hook is an artist, inventor and graduate student, and Pete Wardle is a lecturer.

These four projects are every bit as varied as are their authors, but they have certain things in common. Besides scoring well on all the criteria for the exhibit competition, they share the following additional characteristics:
▪ they emphasize interaction with and participation by the viewer,
▪ their exhibit concept was developed first on the Website, and then prototyped in Second Life, and
▪ interestingly enough, their final form in real life will probably be quite different from their present appearance. Their real world instantiation will be a poetic, not a literal, interpretation of their Second Life form. This reflects the fact that real life and Second Life are quite different, particularly with regard to the way visitors can interact with an exhibit (for example, there's not much that avatars can do with their hands in Second Life).

As our Engineering Shop begins the job of interpreting and building these exhibits for our upcoming Art, Film & Music exhibition opening in June, many other promising exhibits are moving forward in Second Life. There will be two more rounds of judging, on March 15 and March 31, for Art, Film and Music, and soon selections for other exhibitions at The Tech and even for other museums.

History will tell whether this open source experiment in museum exhibit development will become commonplace, or even worth repeating. But it is here now, and these exciting exhibits are proof that it works.

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 Pink put 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:

1. 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. 
   
2. 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 of Innovation (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?