Digital Channel Strategy: onsite, offsite and online #ndf2012

Digital Channel Strategy: onsite, offsite and online
Karen Mason and David Reeves (@requironz), Auckland Museum
How does an encyclopaedic museum, that is also a war memorial and a classified heritage building located on a sacred site, develop serious street cred with a virtual community?
Auckland Museum is in a process of renewal. Within a broader, strategic context – which includes the future vision for Auckland City – planning has begun towards significant enhancements to public and back-of-house spaces, the roll-out of a new brand, new collections, research and audience engagement strategies and commercial initiatives. Lock-step with these developments is the upgrade of legacy IT systems and the formation of a digital roadmap spanning distributed channels: web, smart devices, social media, ecommerce, elearning, third-party content aggregators, in-gallery interactives and off-site programmes.
This presentation aims to bring to life the practical process of defining a growth path for the integrated use of discrete digital channels aligned to the needs and motivations of prioritised users. We’ll cover ICT platforms, searchable, useable and shareable content, online engagement with collections and public programmes; who our audiences are and what is meaningful to them. We’ll question which onsite programmes need an online iteration and which interactions work better online than physically. We’ll ask what does success look like and how is it measured. And what does all this means for resource allocation and planning processes?
While answers to these and other burning questions have yet to be fully revealed, our experiences are shared as a 'work-in-progress'.

Karen:
Project started as web redesign but early realised not just redesigning website; collided with org masterplan about recasting/refurbishing galleries. Took a step back to think of digital strategy fitting into broader strategy.

Digital channels include: website, blogs, apps, onsite interactive displays, audio tours, scholarly databases, facebook, flickr, youtube, twitter...

Are we all strategied out? Is this a strategy, roadmap, plan? But needed guiding principles to inform future use and prioritisation of time, skills, money.

Want to be audience-focused and collections-led. Want to connect audience and collections. Extend reach, enable audiences to go deeper. But collections becoming more complex, audiences more diverse and with higher expectations. Challenge to create connected experiences across this complex landscape and let audiences connect back to us and to each other.

Have website, blog, social media. Various databases which don't talk to each other. Many in-gallery interactives and trails - lots of work which proud of, but want to stop creating content that's locked into a single system: want to repurpose. Hard to know where it even is. <screenshot of shared drive with a gazillion folders> - audience reaction indicates a familiar sight.

Looking at EDRMS and DAMS

Creating a content map to show content / channel / who's responsible for it / how it joins up with other content / how it can link to/from third-party sites.

Using website as central layer; social media to start conversations but website to continue conversations; where relevant drive to other sites including external sites or back to website eg for online bookings/subscriptions.

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David:
Developed guiding principles:

• Digital guardianship
• sustainable delivery
• universal access

Not just collections but context becoming increasingly important. Need to represent relationships across platforms. Build a platform not to replace systems but let them speak to each other. Collection data and context are an essential foundation - we don't have all of this in electronic form yet.

Facebook (or similar) as front face of collections? [rights issues if taking this literally]

"Collection readiness" - getting collections ready for presentation in projects. Digitisation, capture content in workflows, capture data in open formats. Can be disruptive. Permissions, rights etc - more of an issue now that we're less hesitant about letting things go. Enriched records for items on display (#1 priority.)

(Getting high quality images of "types" (butterfly specimens) [me: wouldn't it be great to get 3d images of these?] but not connected to records system.)

COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere. Capture content without thinking of how outputted, need to make it channel-neutral. Then have templated ways to turn it into various forms.

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Karen:
Web-centric but want to make things available across a range of devices. Universal access principle to let people connect wherever they are, whatever device they use. Also supports pre-visit, during-visit, post-visit, and instead-of-visit.

Easy to be captured by the latest shiny - but don't want to go down cul-de-sacs. Take a measured approach to new technologies. But confident in investing in bring-your-own-device.

The long game - vision to enrich collection with deep, rich content, deliver by open data standards, shared functional components, to let content be repurposed as diverse connected experiences across many devices to anyone anywhere.

The life cycle of online content #ndf2012

The life cycle of online content
Kate Chmiel (@cakehelmit), Museum Victoria
Content is king, declares the familiar refrain. We technologists in the cultural sector talk a lot about brilliant new applications, platforms and containers for web content, but not so much about the slippery business of creating, managing and retiring the content itself. At Museum Victoria we’re working on ways to steer our content and address three of our biggest challenges: what to do with old content, how to make great new content, and how to keep users – external and internal – happy. In this presentation, Kate will run through Museum Victoria’s online content plan, and whether it’s helping us nail the jelly to the tree.

Delete
Migrate
Update
Build

Sean Connery may have been best Bond but not up to job now. Similarly with many old websites. But can take long discussion to turn off old sites.

Should be easy to update content but someone needs time to check content and update.

Generally content worthless unless supporting business objectives and/or fulfilling user needs. Need to make sure stuff is efficient, be sustainable, make content work harder - be reused over multiple platforms.

Often content doesn't need to be made... But if you're going to, need masterplan: a map defining what, when, who, how.

• When it's born, maintained, retired. Need to return to it regularly and decide if needs to be kept, deleted, updated, replaced. Create an expiry date for content - makes review less painful down the track.
• Where it's found - not just a "dumping ground of shame". Navigation important but may become less so with new ways of exposing content. Tagging, taxonomy, metadata becoming important.
• Who - content often gets orphaned; contractors move on, staff get busy with other things. Content needs to get attached to a person, or better a position. Who makes it, edits, links, publishes, updates, removes.
• How it goes in and comes out. (The bit in the middle is outside her realm.) Need a flexible CMS - but needs to be simple for content providers.
• What - what's the content? Often needs new container - hard to create container without knowing what will go in it. Content provider working with a template doesn't always know what's happening elsewhere - that's the job of a content strategist.

Keeping everyone happy is biggest part of the job in getting people to change the way they work. Start by asking questions and listening. Who will use it? What do you know about them? How will they get to it? Clarifies purpose for content. Often people make pages for themselves - what they would like if they were the user.

Convert people. Need to convince people why this is a priority. What are the advantages of doing this? What are the disadvantages of not doing it? People are committed; no-one's twiddling their thumbs. Have to convince people this'll save time in longterm. Convince them it has to be done at all. "I spent a lot of time doing this site in 2002 and now you want me to change it?"

Web users rarely initiate communication about problems, just go away. Make user testing a spectator sport. Pick a day a month - stream the video of the testing, have tea and coffe and invite people (developer, manager, everyone...) to watch and discuss. (Have done it once but not ingrained as a habit.)

Working with researchers, some people will never play, but don't let them hold back others. Just do it - maybe professional rivalry will then come into play.

Content strategy - focus is on content rather than container. Create once, publish everywhere. Get out of pattern of thinking that website is done. Currenly most of the innovative work is happening outside of the website. Make sure our content is great so it's always worth consuming.

Humanities Informatics #ndf2012

Humanities Informatics: <!-- Insert the eResearcher + Information Specialist Here -->
Ingrid Mason (@1n9r1d), Intersect Australia
The Humanities Networked Infrastructure project is a virtual laboratory project funded by the NeCTAR programme in Australia. The project has several significant scholarly humanities datasets to bring together and map across. The immediate goal is to enable researchers to explore and interpret the commonalities.
The initial design challenge is to select description schema and use linked data and controlled vocabularies for data to align the data. This approach tests the assumption that configuring and building on the knowledge of available schema, methods and datasets, will provide a standards based and curated foundation layer to support research requirements.
This 'prefabricated' approach has been the basis by which the digital humanities and GLAM sectors have provided access to data. Observing how researchers shape and use this prefabricated environment will inform the value of that approach and the architectural modelling, and inform next steps to building infrastructure where the 'researcher query' is the lens that defines the schema.

Anonymous quote: "Gah semantic web is frying my brain!"

Intersect Australia is eResearch org. Working on virtual lab project in humanities informatics field. Talking and dreaming and living data... Have become conversant in RDF; even taking step to ontology development. Talking about linked data, data as graph. Interested in overlap between humanities informatics and GLAM digital cultural heritage.

Wants to provoke thinking - datasharing across GLAMs and scholarly datasets? Who has authority, truth, encoding consensus or contradiction? Doing something with HuNI data? etc

Digital Humanities sits within eResearch (which has been dominated by science). HuNI (@hunivl - Humanities Networked Infrastructure) is a distributed project want to explore commonalities/divergences in data. Bring together datasets, meaning dealing with multiple standards, need to build an ontology. User-centred design.

Assumptions - they're "prefabricating" but talking to researchers all the way through. Building foundation layer. Fascinated by idea of a researcher query. Work to help researchers ask the questions they need.

Project to integrate 28 cultural datasets (using linked open data) into a virtual laboratory. Want to break down barriers between disciplines. Want it to be available to all but licensing comes into it.

Data - AusStage, bonza, CAARP, AustLit, CircusOz, Australian Dictionary of Biography, PARADISEC, Australian Women's Register.......
Tools - eg Omeka, Neatline, LORE< OCCAMS, Heurist Interoperability will be key. ExSite9 tool to help researchers who collect multimedia data (image, audio, video, GPS) in field along with own notes which would otherwise go into notebook. Needs to work without wifi available. Outputs: data storage "Corbicula", aggregation, linked data service, RESTful web services, semantic mediation, discovery service, tool provision, collection level descriptions Definition of informatics from Wikipedia: "studying how to design a system that delivers the right information, to the right person in the right place and time, in the right way"

(Skimming through - slides will be online.)

"Data" an ineffective word to describe all the kinds of data there are.

Linked Data on Wikipedia.

RDF - resource description framework. Statements known as "triples" - subject, predicate, object. In different formats eg RDF/XML, RDF/JSON
SPARQL - query language

"Ingrid is a Kiwi. Conal is a Kiwi. But what is a Kiwi?"

Ontologies have concepts, relations, instances, and axioms. A set of entities within a domain are related by a concept.

Connections between people within Australian Biographies, and between a group of datasets.

Challenges:

• Need to help researchers go from above the forest through the canopy into the trees and branches.
• Unlock data, value in controlled vocabularies.

Going back to gallery land #ndf2012

Going back to gallery land
Courtney Johnston, Hutt City Council @auchmill
This talk has been prompted by a shift: from private to public sector, from things on the web to things on walls, from Cuba Street to Lower Hutt. It will range over a group of freewheeling ideas, including the sensitised museum, the stack as metaphor, and the potential of emotional interfaces. There will also be 90 seconds on the topic 'How to be a great client'.

Refers to article by Alexis Madrigal on "giving a shit".

Advice for being a good client:

• build a good relationship - trust
• be customer-focused
• don't think of them as vendor but as customer
• hard decisions are around money

Director of the Dowse Art Museum - big enough to do stuff but small enough to fly under radar. Leap from running web company to becoming director of art museum. Budget management and HR and strategy all obvious. But also experience of customer-focus, experimentation....

Lots of thinking in metaphors for transition. They're a bridge between familiar and unfamiliar. A way of making a new kind of sense. Thought of "the stack" - visualises racks of VCRs. Old boss used to say when starting a new project should go through the whole stack. Never used to take diagrams seriously because didn't help her think but now started drawing own - using stack metaphor.

"We should do X because it will better allow us to fulfill Y aspect of our mission by Z" (Nina Simon at NDF2009)

Realised her "stack" isn't a straight line but a circle - realising that fans and mission aren't two ends of a line, they're the same thing.

Can't afford to have visitors feel stupid or wrong, online or in physical space. No 404 or 403 pages in our buildings, and customer service people need to be our Fail Whales. Don't hide the thing people come to place for - in art gallery the art.

Emotional response to books, art, museum spaces. Sport as "spectacle" - event designed to evoke reaction from viewers/participants. Memorable, moving. Have we become timid? Our visitors are hungry for experience. What if we had more emotion, personality, connection in our museums and galleries.

Daydreams:

Museum of emotions - up to beginning of previous century men would have intimate relationships with each other, now seems lacking. Our language has become impoverished, fewer words for feelings. "Chivalry" reduced from whole code to "holds doors open for women". Museum of emotions is a place you go to to experience emotions that have fallen into disuse, emotions you haven't experienced yet. Not a place to learn about them but to experience them. Not a programme designed to evoke them, but one where exhibits radiate the emotion at you.

Emophoto - Makes DigitalNZ sets for various reasons - pulling things together and annotating; exploring ideas/thesis; to accompany blogposts; for amusement as public/private gifts to people. Currently can't search for sets or see sets other than those on homepage - have to follow setmakers on Twitter. Created Tumblr site to aggregate some but dependent on time. Meaning accruing to images as collected in different sets. Wants to make sets collaboratively. Frustrated that can't search sets by emotion. Let people classify images by an "emotion picker" (like a colour picker) - quality vs intensity. Both what emotion do you see in the photo, and what emotion you feel - these are different things.

[Shares descriptions of images that have moved her emotionally.]

Metadata as a way of turning looking into thinking. (@petrajane)

Hard to tweet as a director! Personal and professional smash up against each other. Risk of putting foot wrong and standing on landmine - but doesn't want to stop because openness is powerful and scalable way of staying connected to fans.

Keynote 3 by @_sarahbarns #ndf2012

Past forward: speculative adventures in the city's archive
Sarah Barns @_sarahbarns
Dr Sarah Barns is a researcher, strategist and digital producer whose work sits at the intersection of cultural heritage, digital media and urban history. Her interest take collections out of the building, capture unguarded moments, and create real time city- and data-scapes from intangible heritage.
Recent projects include the ABC Mapping Emergencies trial (2012), which delivered a crowd-sourced platform for journalists, emergency service agencies and social media users to share information on natural disasters across Australia, Unguarded Moments for Art & About Sydney (2011); About NSW Suburb Labs for the Powerhouse Museum (2011); and ABC Sydney Sidetracks (2008), a cross-platform project exploring the history of Sydney using documentary archives from the ABC, the National Film and Sound Archive and beyond.
She has a PhD in Public History and a background working as a strategist and research adviser for many cultural and media sector organisations. These include the ABC, the Australia Council for the Arts and the Creative Industries Innovation Centre. Projects, sound resources and writing by Sarah can be found on her blog at www.sitesandsounds.net.au/.

[ETA: Sarah's slides and notes.]

Last year comment made that "The 20th century has released us into history through technology". Big data is a big concern - digital deluge. She's interested less in dealing with it than in experiencing it. Previously had a sense of distance, peering through a window; now we can interact with it as a resource. A direct experience. Shows overlay of historic video over Streetview; video of Bert and Ernie peering through the camera and saying hi to us. We can interact with our past.

Interested not necessarily in most technically advanced way to do things but in where platforms are going. Various projects she's been working on in last 9 years, in interaction between archives (film, tv, sound, image), digital (relationship between information and space - eg geoweb, locative media), place (important to who we are as people), public space (site-specific installations).

"Making the invisible visible" installations from Helsinki - eg visualising pollution.

2003 looking at phones with GPS technology, location-aware, and wondering what might be done with this futuristic tech. Heard people talking at conferences about would be able to watch tv at bus station - was horrified at idea of replicating the past with old media monopolising new tech. Eg news companies when radio was introduced, opera when phone was introduced. So thinking how to engage location-aware phones with world around us? Idea of public authoring of the city. Someone did pilot of people contributing stories re places; another did pilot of navigating space and stories attached. But clunky tech meant you'd have to walk around looking at device, not interacting with the space itself. Also privileged the digital story over the physical reality.

Wanted the street to speak for itself so idea of using phone to act as homing device to history of place. Already had film and sound archive so could use these? Found people creating "sound walks"; artists and acoustic ecologists. 2007 worked with National Film and Sound Archive to reimagine archive as archaeologies of recorded action. Collection didn't include ambient recordings - hard to find. Protest footage from the 1970s (opposition to development) cf gentrified area in the present. (more on her website)

Found only could use ABC archives if employed by them, not as member of public. Created "Sydney Sidetracks". Moved away from pure interest in sound as website needs more visual stuff too. Mobile interface but very clunky and no-one used it. (She didn't even use it herself.) But well-received in terms of encouraging archives to rethink how to present collections. [Sound recording of Martin Place 1945 (first in situ sound recording in Australia) cf image of Martin Place 2008.]

Started to look around spaces for surfaces - can we interact with a space including sound but using projections? Project photos onto built spaces. Project for "Art and About Sydney" who think of city as collaborative canvas. "Unguarded Moments" asked people for photos from their life in Millers Point and got queues with photo albums. Site-specific projections of photos around the area, used windows showing (slow) video.

"Last Drinks" incorporates sound archives, images about the Australia Hotel (now site has MLC Centre), lots of culture documented about these times/places. Asked people for stories - work, marriages, photos. Scanned old Australia Hotel Journals. Not just website expecting people to visit, but plinths and other on-location things. Created a mobile site - pared down version of site.

No metrics on usage as all in public domain so hard to measure where people got to it. Naively thought could access eg ABC archives as a researcher because publically funded but no, doesn't work like that... Could only do it with partnerships/relationships.

Lightning rounds #ndf2012

Nate Solas, Walker Art Center: the intro session
In Improv, can't say "No it's not", you have to say "Yes, and" so the scene can move forward. Four rules for a show he was involved with:

• Listen - no lines so have to listen to what they're saying because otherwise your next line may make no sense. In technology we might hear "I need Wordpress" when the real question was "I need to publish information" and so our response (based on all the technological issues frustrates. (Ie reference interview)
• Accept the offer - instinct may be to say no to Skype but listen to the need to talk to an offer so "Yes, and..."
• Build on it - "...let's use Google Hangouts and broadcast it on YouTube" - add value
• Reincorporate - leverage existing tools that reliably get work done. Sometimes shiny products are good but need a collection of reliable tools.

John Sullivan, Alexander Turnbull Library: Privacy, WAI262 and bequests
Curators caught in a cleft stick: NZGOAL vs Privacy Act and WAI262. Orgs can be frustrated by curators, who can feel under siege. Not good! Need to recognise that heritage aren't just disseminators but kaitiaki of taonga. Most heritage collections aren't government information - subject to donation agreements. Privacy very relevant. Need informed discussion about likely uses of data and can be hard to explain mashups to 90-year-olds.

Sometimes easier to discuss what can't be put up openly. eg images less than 100 year old with identifiable people (some exemptions for public figures); made in schools, hospitals, prisons, etc where privacy could be reasonably expected; images related to mātauranga Māori; scenes of public trauma or tragedy; people subject to grief; material that might be objectionable under censorship laws.

Kim Baker, NZ On Screen: Rights at NZ On Screen
2007 NZonscreen initiated. Now over 2000 titles. Rights clearances important - affects what appears. Originally had no license agreement, just an Excel spreadsheet listing the films needed rights for. Now have a custom database and access to legal advice.

Many constraints when started. Started exploring, discussing with stakeholders. Some hostility - threat to livelihood. Relationships with filmmakers, production companies, NZFilm Commission, Maori TV, ....

With new platform came new requests and processes. Not paying fees so wanted lightweight license agreement with fair out. Easy-to-read two-page license agreement; also can accept agreement by email or over the phone. Respect cultural boundaries.

Got agreement to screen programmes that include association members' music.

Goal to make things easy for rights holders. Many claim they do/don't hold rights when they don't/do. Licensing for free still costs in time/resources. So far no instances of untraceable copyright holders coming back from the dead.

Some TV ad licensing under way. Need license to acknowledge that web won't always be the only way to access material. Ability to ask if rights holders want to apply Creative Commons.

Brian Flaherty, University of Auckland Library: Matapihi future
420 seconds on Windows - collective digital housekeeping.
Window as shopfront; but also window onto Aotearoa, ie Matapihi.
How is Matapihi different from DigitalNZ? It's a subset - just 14 content partners and 400,000 objects.

DigitalNZ has broad mandate - includes govt departments and private sector. Matapihi centered around NZ culture - Turnbull, Archives NZ, Te Papa.

Could say front end doesn't matter because all in Digital NZ and harvested by Google. Maybe a case for that...

Europeana opens up dataset of cultural objects for free re-use - give away their metadata. Allows user-generated exhibitions, family histories.

Matapihi could morph into advocating for open licensing, on making metadata available for aggregators (eg Summon), high-res images subset of DNZ, a pilot of NZ etext and book corpus (think about NZETC, AtoJs, Te Ao Hou, etc etc and pulling this all together), a Digital NZ GLAM filter, or something bigger: a trusted and curated space for NZ cultural heritage.

Do sets just create a digital object vending machine - lining things up together without defining relationship? Need to build narrative around images.

Or could just pull the plug. Shouldn't be scared of saying it's past its use-by date if this is the case. Currently in a state of palliative care... Do we develop it more or let it pass? The idea of looking in a window at stuff is passé - now we talk about engagement.

Emily Steel: Little Slide Dress @emilymsteel
Wearable technology project "fireflies and lightening bugs" - make a piece of clothing and put lights in it. Had to use microcontrollers and sensors. What interested her was if using something celebrating light, why not use light for input data so project would only come to life in certain conditions.

Drew inspiration from the discarded - reusing old materials. Can you turn something old into something new and celebrate the old while using the new technology? Got box of old slidefilm from garage where dumped by father's junkshop travels. Seemed to suit the theme of light.

Blending technology - magic of light bringing images to life. Always interested in light bringing movies to life.

Hence the "Little Slide Dress". Learned a lot - technologies don't always work together. Slides don't like becoming a dress. Lights don't like becoming wearable. Code likes to break.

Keynote 2 by @thisisaaronland - #ndf2012

Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland
Aaron brings big data and a big world to NDF along with a current preoccupation with time pixels / units of measure in the land of fan-fiction, rent-seeking and lifestyle porn. He’s Canadian by birth, American by descent, North American by experience et Montréalais au fon, and usually tells people he is from the internet. He’s currently Senior Engineer (Internets and the Computers) at the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and has previously worked at Flickr as Senior Engineer on all things geo, machinetag and galleries related. His work at Stamen Design as Design Technologist and Director of Inappropriate Project Names created some of the world’s most beautiful maps.
Aaron spends a lot of time thinking about archiving social software and looking glass archives, in the form the Parallel Flickr and Privatesquare projects (straup.github.com). He’s a member of the Near Future Laboratory, a frequent speaker at the Museums and the Web conference, sits on the advisory board to the Built Works Registry and has served as Co-Director of Revolutionary Technologies for the Spinny Bar History Society since 2010.
Aaron's projects and curiosities include blogging at www.aaronland.info/weblog/ and Stamen’s (very pretty) prettymaps.stamen.com, which have been exhibited and featured at the Museum of Modern Art, NACIS Atlas of Design, and 20x20.

One of the nicest things someone said to him about the Pretty Maps project was that it was "indecipherable gibberish" until they saw their own city and then it "snapped into place".

The Cooper-Hewitt is closed until 2014 and his job is to work out what will make the museum part of the internet.

What might have plausible manufacturability in the next five years?

A good time to be a design museum - design is becoming increasingly intangible. What does it mean for a museum to collect service design? If we had acquired the War on Terror how would we show that?

Why are we keeping all of this stuff? Why do we have archives or museums where we don't show people stuff? We must believe this stuff has meaning. If not, what's up with the buildings? Is it just an expensive perk?

How many buildings are actually in OpenStreetMap? 67 million as of last month. Simple conceptual model: points (nodes) bound to lat/long. A set of points (way) can get a tag building=yes. Each has a unique id. He built a website as a registry and created id so wouldn't collide with whereonearth ids.

Photo of a monkey holding a tiger. "We don't really know much about this but it's a monkey holding a tiger!" "Parallel flickr" to take a living look at user+friends' Flickr activity; and to look at backup issues. Log into it with your Flickr account. Meant to run alongside Flickr and be an alternative in case tomorrow Flickr stopped working. Mirrors Flickr url structure. Does it make more sense to run one copy of Parallel Flickr for 1 user and friends or for all of them to run a copy? It doesn't matter. If multiple users and run into the same photo ID twice just means both have seen photo - a way to rebuild network.

Habit of users of Flickr Commons of covering images in notes. How do we backup Flickr? You buy it. It's the only way to preserve the permissions. But what if you used the Commons as a seed? These are all in the public domain. Then you could go one degree out and contact people who interacted with it to archive photos and preserve permissions. If/when Flickr dies, non-public photos could go dark and only reemerge after 70 years.

Privatesquare - similar to Parallel Flickr but for 4square. Not going to tell 4square when you're at the drugstore. So a site you could tell everything and then optionally tell it to tell 4square. But there's no shared ids so there's an inability to reconstruct the network. Thought of creating a map on checkin and uploading that to Flickr and that'd provide a photoid. Or just a 1x1px image. (Flickr friends were Unhappy with this idea...)

If creating "shadow services" not in opposition but to rebuild them then need to sort this out. So someone suggested wanted to build integers as a service -> "mission integers". Text-based ids aren't as portable as numbers.

Brooklyn Integers running building ids with odd numbers while OSM gets the even numbers. Cooper-Hewitt is using Brooklyn integers. Aaron added them as a joke and they kept them. London Integers - where does this fit in? It's not that they've cornered the market, just honouring each other's offsets. So London Integers decided to fit a few million ahead of them and claim all the numbers divisible by 9 - they now no longer use numbers divisible by 9. But scaling up? Create a Ministry of Numbers and issue numbers on a per-country basis. A way for all these projects to get unique IDs...

Or create Canal St Integers - reusing twitter ids from famous people.

Spacetimeids - fancy name for a Hilbert Curve. Just 3 dimensions - latitude, longitude, timestamp. A unique id for everything (starting at 1970) (on earth).

What about lat, long, objectid - we're a design museum. We collect fire hydrants. They're meant to be mass produced and distributed globally. Suddenly you have ids for all fire hydrants of a particular model.

Museums have an obsession with experience, and obsession with demanding people time. "It's a little bit rude." Why not give people confidence that this stuff will still be here? (No rush.)

It's not that we have to do everything. It's that we can.

Amazon bought Zappos not for its shoes but because they had the world's best space-fitting software. And Kivos (sp?) for its robots which sit under shelves, lift them up, bring them to a human; ceiling-mounted lasers point from shelf to shelf and the human's job is to move the things from shelf to shelf.

If we can do this for cat litter, why not for the important stuff: our stuff? Well, Amazon has billions of dollars [me: and an overworked underpaid disposable workforce]

SelfAwareROOMBA twitter account. Our collections are becoming alive (or at least getting the illusion of being alive).

Registries - lists of things with pointers that let you find them again.

What harm does it do to give people the ability to hang "Purple and Brown" to our artifacts - to make connections, add their stories?

Museum obsession with talking about everything as a little event, an opportunity to publish a book. Instead can share it, be confident about it, be confident other people are using it to build their own stories.

Baselines: During Sandy watched Twitter messages coming in saying "We've lost the internet". Everything just said is predicated on the internet being there; internet is predicated on electricity.