Lego Beowulf and the Web of Hands and Hearts, for the Danish national museum awards (text version) :: Michael Edson

Michael Peter Edson
Director, Web and New Media Strategy
Smithsonian Institution

Danish National Museum Awards
Bikubenfondens Museumpriser
Copenhagen Denmark
June 11, 2012

Lego Beowulf and the Web of Hands and Hearts
Michael Peter Edson, Danish National Museum Awards, June 11, 2012

Notes/About

The PowerPoint for this talk is available at
http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/michael-edson-lego-beowulf-and-the-web-of-
hands-and-hearts-for-the-danish-national-museum-awards
The video of this talk is online at [TBD]
This talk was the keynote at the Bikuben Foundation National Museum Awards in
Copenhagen, Denmark, June 11, 2012 (http://www.museumsprisen.dk/)
The audience was directors and executives from Danish museums, The Danish
Heritage Agency, the Association of Danish Museums, and other invited guests. The
event was held at the National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst, or
"SMK") (http://www.smk.dk)
I've included thumbnail images for key slides in the talk, just to help orient readers
visually. All the slides are available in the PowerPoint version, of course.
Special thanks to Tobias Golodnoff, Nina Hviid, Charlotte S H Jensen, Miriam
Lerkenfeld, Merete Sanderhoff, and Jacob Wang for their help and guidance

Table of Contents

Prelude ............................................................................................................................................ 2
Before the World Wide Web .......................................................................................................... 2
The Broadcast Idiom of the 20th Century........................................................................................ 3
The Dark Matter of the Internet ..................................................................................................... 5
Strategy at work .............................................................................................................................. 7
Example: SpaceShipOne ............................................................................................................... 12
This is your homepage .................................................................................................................. 14
Very powerful stuff ....................................................................................................................... 21
Lego Historical Reenactments ...................................................................................................... 24
The Battle of Maldon .................................................................................................................... 25
The web of hands and hearts ....................................................................................................... 29

1


Prelude

Hi everyone.

This is going to get weird pretty quickly.

I don't think I was brought here to deliver a standard keynote, and you're certainly not going to
get one.

[Play video]

[Video: Lego Beowulf, http://youtu.be/1SGJS0VN0hE ]

Before the World Wide Web

[Slide: View of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.]

I grew up in Washington, D.C..

I was into art and science and the Smithsonian was pretty much the coolest thing in town. I
could walk from my house down to the National Mall and wander in and out of free museums,
all day long, every day—every day but Christmas…Letting my curiosity take me wherever it
wanted to go.

2


In some ways you could say I came of age at the Smithsonian. That as I became an independent
young adult, the Smithsonian modeled the kinds of behaviors that I came to care about as a
fully enfranchised citizen: It's good to inquire, to ask questions, to draw people into
conversation, to debate, to disrupt and even provoke when necessary. In short: to engage as an
active participant in the world of ideas.

And it didn't escape my attention, even as a teenager, that my country, my city, my culture,
chose to build on it's most valuable real estate—possibly the most valuable real estate in the
world, a public institution dedicated, literally, to the increase and diffusion of knowledge.

That spoke very clearly to me about what is important in my society, and about what values I
should live up to as an adult.

But, all of this happened before the World Wide Web.

Remember that? There was a time before the World Wide Web.

And the question now is, to achieve these same outcomes in society, what do we do?

What do you do to get this job done?

The Broadcast Idiom of the 20th Century

[Slide: exterior of the National Gallery of Denmark]

So, here I am, outside the National Gallery of Denmark, the Statens Museum for Kunst, where
we are gathered today to celebrate the Bikuben Foundation National Museum Awards.

I've been to Copenhagen a few times. I'm very impressed with the Danish museum
community—the memory institutions of Denmark. I'm going to draw in the libraries and
Archives and everyone who does this work together.

I'm very impressed with your sense of mission, your sense of purpose. Your professionalism.
Your collegiality, the way you collaborate. This strikes me very strongly—your passion about the
job that you do and the outcomes you want to achieve in society. And the trust that the people
of Denmark place in you.

3


Over the 20th century, really the last half of the 20th century…I'm not a museum studies expert,
but my sense is that over the last half of the 20th century we developed a set of conventions—a
set of ideas about how we would organize to do the work of museums in our culture. To do the
work of memory institutions.

And it goes kind of like this.

[Slide: Resources trust, money, real estate collections, staff, and attention go into museum
organizations and beneficial outcomes for society come out the other end]

You put resources in one end of a pipe. And by resources I mean money, land, trust, attention,
mindshare—you put that in one end of a pipe and out the other end you expect some
outcomes. You want something to happen.

You don't just do all of this to exist. …well, you could. There are probably a lot of museums that
could get their jobs done just by existing and keeping moisture out of the vaults. And that's
great. That has to happen, but there's more to it than that.

We put a lot of energy into these things we call museums and we want some outcomes. You
want something to happen.

So, resources go in: outcomes go out. And I think in the 20th century we settled on some
decisions about how that would happen. And how we thought that would happen is with the
broadcast idiom.

[Slide: The broadcast idiom, "we do and they consume"]

4


Broadcast.

Broadcast is great. We, the smart, trained people—the experts—and back before the World
Wide Web we knew who the experts were… We do stuff. And they—the people who aren't us—
consume it with gratitude, but mostly passively. We do, and they consume. And the arrow
always goes that way, from us to them.

Think about this idiom.

Great things happened with the broadcast idiom. It gave us automobiles. It gave us the Hoover
Dam shown in this Ansel Adams photograph. You don't get the Hoover Dam and Automobiles
by crowdsourcing them on Twitter. (Or maybe you do…)

It gave us Baywatch. One of the great—all of the great television cultural moments of the 20th
century. It gave us all that great stuff.

The Dark Matter of the Internet

But there are some new physics—some new laws of mathematics in play.

It's like astronomers, who are trying to make the mathematics of the physical universe work out
and they notice that there's a galaxy over here that the math says should be doing this, but it's
doing that, and the math doesn't work out unless you invent and factor in an enormous new
kind of mass named dark matter. There's some other material in the room now that changes
the physics of how we do this work in society, and the dark matter is called the Internet. Not
just the technology of the Internet, but the things the Internet lets us do together, as human
beings.

So there are new laws of physics that we need to bake into this equation of the broadcast
idiom.

*Slide: The Long Tail, Joy's Law, Cognitive Surplus, Moore's Law & Mobile, Every user a hero…+

The Long Tail.

5


One of the best books about how technology and new media works now. The Long Tail (by
Chris Anderson) talks about how you used to need to have big popular hits—hit records, the
best museum that everyone would go to. But now, because of the Internet, people can form
their own communities, huge communities, around shared niche interests. (Millions and
millions of small niche communities that add up to more engagement and more effort and
more…living…than the few hit products we broadcasters can manufacture.) Extraordinary
individuals…we don't have to look at all our consumers, all of the public, as one generic mass.
We can look at individuals who form their own communities around shared interests without
any central control. I'll show you some of this later.

Joy's Law.

Bill Joy was the co-founder of Sun Microsystems in the U.S., and he famously said "no matter
what business you're in, most of the smartest people work for someone else." 1

Now try saying that at one of your next staff meetings.

Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail, told us at a conference at the Smithsonian, pick
anything from your 139 million object collection and the odds are that the people who know
the most about that object don't work for you, and you don't even know who they are. That's
what Joy's Law is all about.

Cognitive Surplus.

Clay Shirky posits that among the Internet connected, educated citizens of planet earth, there
are 1 trillion hours of free time every year that can be used for some higher purpose. (As a
point-of-reference, Americans spend about 200 billion hours every year watching television.) 2

That's not the broadcast idiom you're looking at. Imagine being able to do something with that
cognitive surplus. You can't harness those trillion hours of labor through the one-way pipe of
the broadcast idiom.

Moore's Law.

Moore's Law is the rule-of-thumb that describes the exponential growth of processing power
that gives us smaller, cheaper, and more powerful computer processors every year. If my math
is correct, in 12 years my iPhone will be 1,700 times more powerful than my laptop computer.
That's intensely disruptive. We'll all be walking around with little supercomputers in our
pockets and we won't even think twice about it.

And these aren't just passive consuming devices, these are participatory devices. These are
devices with cameras and video recorders and sensors in them. This phone knows where I am,
it knows my altitude, it knows I'm in Denmark, in Copenhagen, at the Statens museum for Kunst
(the Danish National Gallery of Art) at this Bikuben Museum Awards event, without me having
to tell it that. That's a global data network, that's a two way pipe.

This is very different. This is not making Baywatch in your movie studio in Hollywood.
6


And then this other law of physics…

Kathy Sierra.

Kathy Sierra, who is a real inspiration to me—a thought leader in Social Media—says:

"I am your user. I am supposed to be the protagonist. I am on a hero's journey. Your company
[your museum, your culture, your government…+ should be a mentor or a helpful sidekick. Not
an orc." 3

(…and of course, as you all know, the orcs are the bad guys from the Tolkien trilogy.)

This is a very different relationship with your audiences. This is not broadcast. This is a two-way
pipe.

And this is the new physics that we need to build into our organizations and our understanding
of who we are and how we're going to get work done.

And this is not breaking news. This is not bleeding edge news. These physics have been known
to us for about 10 years. What is bleeding edge is how we're going to act on it.

So this (broadcast) is a great way to get work done…I love going into a museum exhibit that
doesn't have flashing screens and touch-screen tables and social media…I love exhibits like that,
but broadcast is not a complete tool kit. Broadcast is not a complete way to achieve the mission
that you all are trusted with achieving.

So how do you turn all of this into something useful?

How do you do this?

Strategy at Work

I get to go to a lot of strategy workshops because of my title and the organization I work for,
and they all look kind of like this. This is not a workshop I was actually at, it's a photo I got from
the photo sharing site Flickr, but they all look like this. It's a kabuki theater performance. You all
have run these, I know you have. There's someone at the front, usually a hired person from
outside because you can't have your own people running something like this, God forbid. So
7


you bring someone else in who pretty much agrees with you… I hear knowing laughter from the
audience…and rest assured that nobody listens to me back home either: I have to come
overseas to feel like I know something…

Someone is up front saying we need to go boldly into the future, we need to use crowdsourcing
and Flickr and YouTube to get stuff done now. And usually the highest paid, best looking people
in the room are also up front and they say yes, we must do these things, make it so. And then
the people who are empowered to make these things happen are translating this forward-
leaning, fast, agile, audience-oriented way of working, into the broadcast idiom. Because that's
how we do work. That's what organizations do.

Clay Shirky has written that organizations represent "frozen choices." 4

We've set up our organizations because we needed to be good at the broadcast model. So
when you give an organization like this something to do, it turns the challenge into a broadcast
challenge. So these managers say ok, ok, we'll have a committee that will meet for every month
for a couple of years and we'll make a strategy and we'll make this thing happen and la-la-la-la
broadcast.

And usually the most junior person in the room—it's often been me, and I'm nothing
special…grab any 20 year old kid off the street, and they're going to be able to see this
disconnect between the lofty, aggressive goals of forward-reaching vision and the way we're
often choosing (or not choosing) to execute on that vision with the broadcast idiom.

This is an example from a real strategy workshop I did participate in. The strategic goal of this
museum—and don't try to guess what museum this is because you're not going to get it right:
I've subtly changed some of the mission statement to protect the innocent.

[Slide: "Strategic goal of the museum"]

The strategic goal of this museum is to become "the preeminent place for engagement and
dialog about national identity and the accomplishment and experience of citizens."

Wow. I love that.

And I've read a lot of your mission statements and they're great. I'm sure that in many ways you
feel constrained by them or want to improve them, but from my outsider's perspective they're

8


great. This is stuff I want to give my trust to—that I want to support as a taxpayer and taxpayer
of whatever country I’m living in.

So, the proposed big project to execute on this lofty vision, knowing that we're at this juncture
between broadcast and other ways of doing work is,

"Build an online collection of 10 million portraits of citizens and their stories, created
and uploaded without official curation by members of the public."

10 million portraits. Wow. That's a big number. Can you get that through the broadcast idiom?
I don't think so. There aren't enough interns in the world to do that through the broadcast
idiom.

The project proposal continues…

"Build a community around this initiative to fuel engagement with national history, biography,
and artistic creativity."

Yeah. I'm into that!

After 45 minutes of brainstorming and whiteboards and post-it notes and all the stuff you'd
expect to see at the kabuki theater performance of a strategy workshop, this is the project we
came up with to execute on this vision:

"Do a website about family portraits."

Something got lost. That's the broadcast idiom speaking. That's what an organization can
accomplish without using the new math of the Internet.

And it kind of raises some questions.

Society gives us these resources—trust, reputation, great real estate, expert staffs, a great
legacy of collections—and we're supposed to accomplish something that needs accomplishing,
otherwise we'd be giving those resources to the ministry of sport or to pave streets or
something. You've got to do something worth accomplishing.

Are we doing the best job with that trust? Are we using the best tools?

----

9


[Slide: Smithsonian Institution Web and New Media Strategy]

In developing the Web and New Media strategy for the Smithsonian we tried to develop a
shared language about how we would act in this moment.

[Note: The strategy is available via the Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy wiki at
http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+--+Table+of+Contents

and as a .pdf file at http://smithsonian-
webstrategy.wikispaces.com/file/view/20090729_Smithsonian-Web-New-Media-
Strategy_v1.0.pdf ]

We're talking about a learning model. A new learning model. We don't want to throw out all
the good stuff that the broadcast model did—long, patient scholarship, for example.

[Slide: Updating the Smithsonian Learning Model]

[Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy, 2: Update the Smithsonian Learning Model.
http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+--+Themes#learning ]

We could focus on only this picture and I could stop talking now and we could get this
presentation over with very quickly. This is what's important: the old learning model based
almost exclusively on the one-way flow of information from so-called experts to passive
recipients, and the new learning model…based on interactivity and dialogue, between us and
our audiences, and among out audiences themselves.

10


*Slides: "…these connections are the most important"+

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.

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.

[Slide: The Business Model]

…And the business model.

"The Smithsonian’s basic business model is to create social and economic value through the
increase and diffusion of knowledge. Web and New Media programs are both an intrinsic part
of this overarching model and an opportunity to develop new kinds of revenue in harmony with
the mission…

11


Ultimately, the most valuable business asset we can cultivate—and the one that is most
fundamental to our core mission—is a community of engaged and committed Smithsonian
enthusiasts."

[Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy, Goal 7: Business model. http://smithsonian-
webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Goals+5+-
+8+Interpretation%2C+Technology%2C+Business+Model%2C+Governance#businessModel ]

Example: SpaceShipOne

Let me give you an example. A specific example.

We own SpaceShipOne at the Smithsonian. The first privately finance rocket ship to take a
human being into orbit. It hangs at the National Air and Space Museum a block from my office.
It is a testament to American ingenuity and verve…

[Slide: SpaceShipOne on the National Air and Space Museum website]

Here's our official collection-information webpage for SpaceShipOne.

[http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?id=A20050459000]

You've seen this kind of page about a million times before: there's a little thumbnail picture and
some curatorial text, and it's about what a curator can do. A curator can't write a novel about
every one of our 139 million objects. And that's fine.

But I'm a curious person, and I want to know more about SpaceShipOne.

So I go to Wikipedia…

12


[Slide: Wikipedia page for SpaceShipOne, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne]

…and what do I get? Hyperlinks! Hyperlinks to articles about the space flight and the spacecraft
and the people and the science… And the Wikipedia page has been translated into 28
languages. I get 14 images, many of them in high resolution and all of them under Creative
Commons licenses. And all of this I get through the collaborative effort of over 400 volunteer
researchers and editors.

Then I look in Flickr, the photo sharing website.

[Slide: Flickr search for SpaceShipOne, http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=spaceshipone]

Nobody is really in charge of Flickr. There's no bureaucrat saying "let's catalog some
photographs of SpaceShipOne, shall we?" It just happens. It happens because of these
extraordinary individuals and the Long Tail. These communities that have formed around
shared interests.

I search Flickr for SpaceShipOne, exactly the name of the spacecraft, and I find 2,592 photos
that users—people!—you all, have taken, uploaded, and tagged, labeled, cataloged, with
exactly the name of the object, with no central coordination.

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[Slide: Flickr photo of SpaceShipOne, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pvogel/110579166/in/set-
72057594079211111]

And the photographs are amazing. And the point of it is that it's predictably amazing.
Predictably. People know they will be satisfied when they go to Flickr to try to find out about
the world.

Flickr's users—people—have contributed photographs of SpaceShipOne being launched,
pictures of it being made, launch photos, cockpit photos, pictures of people's SpaceShipOne
tattoos. It's predictably amazing, and it's very human.

Or, go to YouTube.

This is a rocket ship, right? It flies!

[Slide: Video of SpaceShipOne flight, http://youtu.be/FNXahIoXMw8]

Which one of these websites tells you more about SpaceShipOne? Our page with 100 words of
text and a thumbnail photograph? Or a video of the thing flying?

Where would you go to explain SpaceShipOne to a teenager? Or to figure it out for yourself?
There's no competition.

The broadcast model is great, but it's not a complete way to explore the world.

This is Your Homepage
14


A friend of mine worked on a strategy workshop for the newspaper industry, and he asked a
focus group of young people "where do you go to find your news?"

One of them answered,

"If the news is important enough, it will find me."

That sent a chill down the spines of the newspaper industry executives. But that's the world
we're living in.

Where do you go to find out about your culture? To understand the physical world? Your city?
Your country? The world of ideas? … Do you go to museums? Sometimes, yes.

[Slide: Danish National Museum website: http://www.natmus.dk]

And these are great museum websites. I love your museum websites. I love them, but I'm going
to be picking on some of these websites to make a point or two.

[Slide: Google search webpage]

This is your homepage.

It's almost a trite thing for a digital strategist to say, but Google is your homepage. And you
know it. You've used Google to search your own websites and collections.

15


Let's look at how we would do this using a Danish museum object. I asked some of my Danish
colleagues—Merete Sanderhoff from the National Gallery and Charlotte S H Jensen from the
National Museum and the National Archives–for a cultural object or work of art that would be
recognizable to all Danes, and they suggested your Solvongen, the Trundholm Sun Chariot.

If you search Google for "Solvongen" and you get this: a regular Google search engine results
page, with a lot of good stuff on it.

[Slide: Wikipedia page for Trundholm Sun Chariot,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot]

The top result is always Wikipedia. And it never disappoints. But look at the terrible images.

[Note: There's a story here for another time. See Europeana White Paper No. 2, The Problem of
the Yellow Milkmaid: A Business Model Perspective on Open Metadata at
http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/whitepapers/ for a story about how the
Rijksmuseum put free, high resolution images on their website to help purge the Internet of
low-quality images like these.]

[Slide: Facebook page for Trundholm Sun Chariot, via Wikipedia,
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Trundholm-sun-chariot/135441099821236]

Who knew that the Sun Chariot had a Facebook page? I think that's kind of awesome.

16


With a little work and a little help from my colleagues at the National Museum of Denmark I
found the definitive collection information page for the Sun Chariot. This is it! This is the
epicenter.

[Slide: Solvongen collection information page on the National Gallery of Denmark website,
http://natmus.dk/en/historisk-viden/danmark/moeder-med-danmarks-oldtid/the-bronze-
age/the-sun-chariot/]

And there's a nice video about the Sun Chariot by a curator that's been viewed 2,845 times.

Using Google I found a discussion forum, the Skadi Forum [http://forums.skadi.net/] that has a
discussion thread about the Sun Chariot. Though the Sun Chariot discussion is very brief,
overall, the Skadi forum has 40,000 members who have made 700,000 posts across 300
discussion topics.

I found a nice book from the National Museum of Denmark, and you can search the text for
information about the Sun Chariot and read about it online.

On Google Books I found a book called The Best Art You've Never Seen: 101 Hidden Treasures
from Around the World.
[http://books.google.com/books?id=g15MdNvO5ngC&pg=PA55&dq=trundholm+sun+chariot&
hl=en&sa=X&ei=ciHTT4yLA4Hh0QHWwvWYAw&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false]

I found this book in 1/100 of a second.

It has an article called "Hidden by Choice" that groups artifacts from all over the world, with
nice photographs, really great, accessible text:

"The Trundholm Sun Chariot could easily have been carried in someone's arms. It was
found in a peat bog in 1902, deliberately broken into little pieces and carefully placed
there about 3,500 years ago."

"It could easily have been carried in someone's arms"…what a human way to describe that
object. A scholar might not want to read this, but I'm not a scholar. Yet.

17


[Slide: National Museum of Denmark homepage, http://www.natmus.dk]

And I love these home pages. You've done a great job on your core websites. They're beginning
to be inside-out—the people are beginning to go in front, the human activity in front of or
besides the objects, showing life and excitement and activity.

But this is also a great homepage for the National Museum.

[Slide: National Museum of Denmark page on Pinterest, http://pinterest.com/nationalmuseet/]

This is the National Museum of Denmark's homepage on Pinterest, which is a neat website that
lets you collect pictures.

People love collecting pictures. People are born collectors. Which is probably why we have
museums in the first place.

The National Museum has organized some of their pictures on Pinterest, and I thought,
hmmm—I wonder if I can find pictures of the Solvongen, the Sun Chariot, here?

So I go to the search box and I type in Sun Chariot—the English word for the Danish object—so
I'm already probably putting myself at a disadvantage for finding anything significant—but look
at what I found.

18


[Slide: Pinterest search results for "Sun Chariot"]

I found this page with tons of people who have collected objects related to the Sun Chariot.

30 or 40 different visual references to the Sun Chariot from the National Museum of Denmark,
other bronze age sun wheels, chariot iconography from antiquity, here's one for "sun chariot
Russian embroidery"… It goes on and on. I never would have found this related imagery and
iconography. But look at how it found me!

9 Trundholm Sun Chariots were found and collected and tagged by users of Pinterest—
people—without any central coordination or control.

Let's look at the first link that came up.

[Slide: The Sun Chariot as collected on Pinterest,
http://pinterest.com/pin/32369691041944044/]

This Sun Chariot was collected—pinned, in the lingo of Pinterest—by Sunnifa Heinreksdottir.

At the bottom of this page you can see that Suniffa's Sun Chariot is part of a collection she
made called the Bronze Age.

Let's look at that.

19


[Slide: Sunnifa Heinreksdottir's "Bronze Age" collection on Pinterest,
http://pinterest.com/harrasteora/bronze-age/]

Neat!

She's collected objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (A lot of them!)

A British Archaeology website.

Many from the National Museum of Denmark.

And there's the Sun Chariot that Sunnifa Heinreksdottir collected.

But it's not from the National Museum of Denmark. This instance of this photo links back to a
course syllabus page for Western Culture 101, Beginnings to 900 C.E. from the Hampden-
Sydney College in Virginia, about three hours from my home. (http://people.hsc.edu/faculty-
staff/maryp/Core/western_culture_101_studylinks.htm. And this pin shows another terrible
image.5)

So she's not even referencing the definitive source-of-record for the Sun Chariot, the record
from the world's authority on the Sun Chariot—the organization that "owns" it and is entrusted
with its permanent care—and yet she found it. Or it found her.

[Slides: Sunnifa Heinreksdottir's collections on Pinterest, http://pinterest.com/harrasteora/]

Sunifa Heinreksdottir has made a number of collections of images on Pinterest. You can begin
to get an idea of who this human being is.

20


She's got a collection called Anglo Saxons. Rings. Willows. Spinning. Straw hats. Basketry.
Spindle whorls—which is a particularly beautiful collection. Bronze Age. Iron Age….

This is someone who is very engaged—very engaged in figuring out all the stuff that you care
about. It goes on and on and on. It's so rich.

OMG. She's curating her own museum. She's curating.

She's sense-making. Which is I think what we want in society. I think those are some of the
outcomes we want. But you didn't have to make this happen. You didn't have to help make this
happen—it's happening. You can help it happen. You can get in the way. You can make it harder
for people to do this—to take your images and your data and your resources and your expertise
and your communities and curate them and share them and build upon them. But they're going
to do it anyway. Or they're going to move on to something else and forget about you and the
things you care about. But either way, it's happening.

Very Powerful Stuff

This is very powerful. Let me show you how powerful.

Sunifa Heinreksdottir, on Pinterest, has collected 1,060 pictures. They're called "pins" on
Pinterest. There they are.

[Slides: Sunifa Heinreksdottir's pins on Pinterest, http://pinterest.com/harrasteora/pins/]

I need to develop a new graphic design aesthetic to represent the vastness of this kind of social
media activity. This took me a long time!

There's metadata, there's source citation, provenance, crediting, it's traceable. We should have
invented this!

Sunnifa follows 41 people.

Following means that when these 41 people do something on Pinterest, Sunnifa gets a
notification about it.

21


41 people is like the size of a little village. But, thanks to the physics of the Internet, it's a little
village with an enormous reach.

[Slides: Sunifa Heinreksdottir's "followers" on Pinterest,
http://pinterest.com/harrasteora/following/ ]

And there they are, Sunnifa's 41 followers. We can see them and get a sense of their character.

They're from all over the world.

London. Portland Oregon. Kansas. Cape Town. Antwerp. Dorset, UK. Ireland. "A little village of
20 houses in the North of Germany." —that sounds quaint, but look, this user has 1,927
followers! From his or her home in a little village in the North of Germany.

And each of these people are collecting and curating and following and being followed by
people. And they, in turn are following and being followed by other people.

If you look at Sinnifa's 41 followers, they, in turn are followed by 16,090 followers and follow
12,485 people. So this network, just a step away from this random woman I chose because her
collection was the first one that came up when I searched for the Sun Chariot on this one social
media site, has 28,485 people in it!

Can we build a network like this through the broadcast idiom, where we engineer final projects,
in toto, from inside the walls of our organizations and transmit those products to a passive
audience? Maybe. Maybe one network like this. But probably not. And this is just one user of
the more than 10 million users of this website.6

This is happening because of the new physics—the dark matter of the equation that relates
resources to outcomes in organizations—the Internet.

And this is not passive consumption.

It's not like going to the movies and having movie information pumped down a one-way pipe
into your brain. This is about doing stuff. Doing. This is very active. I understand that one of the
essential 21st century learning skills is supposed to be active learning.

22


When people do things, it changes them. It changes you when you do, when you commit to
something, some idea, to action.

[Slide: SMK visitor photograph on Flickr,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nerosunero/5974261976/in/set-72157627152703345/]

People participate in Viking reenactments. And they share thousands of photographs of them.

They go to your museums. They love your museums. When I talk about the "hearts" in the web
of hands and hearts, this is partly what I'm talking about. People are emotionally invested in
what they see and do and take away from your museums. It's strong. They want to tell you how
amazed they are at what they see, and then many of them want to go and do something. Even
if that is only representing a token of having been here.

[Slide: SMK visitor photograph on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/monsted/487105795/]

There they are, right where you are sitting now.

Your fans have made tribute videos. People who visit your museums are making these tribute
videos on their own and uploading them to YouTube. Setting pictures to music. Just because
they love what they've seen. People are doing things. They want to do. These are active
participants.

And once they've done something for you, about you—they've bonded with you. That's the
basis of a strong relationship—potentially a lifelong relationship that's yours to ignore or
nurture.

23


Lego Historical Reenactments

In a combination of this Flickr and Pinterest activity—sharing photos and belonging to groups
with shared interests…Groups of enthusiasts, extraordinary individuals forming relationships on
the Long Tail around shared interests…and what goes on in YouTube—making, publishing,
teaching...

…I found a group of people on Flickr who share photographs of historical reenactments done
with Lego bricks.

[Slide: Historical Lego group on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/groups/historical_lego/]

I just searched and found this group at random.

This group has almost 800 members, and together they've uploaded over 7,000 photographs.
And it's all a result of these people being immensely curious and creative and that they're doing
things with the information and inspiration they get form you and libraries and archives and
school and friends and neighbors.

I did a search for content related to "Viking" from within the Lego Historical Reenactment group
on Flickr and I found people doing reenactments of important moments from Norse history.

And if you read the posts and comments from the members of this group, and they're very
concerned with the details: would this kind of helmet be used in 10 th century Denmark? And if
the answer is no, then it's not uncommon to see individuals figuring out how to find or make
their own Lego pieces. When we talk about the pedagogy of "knowledge networks" –this is it.

Here’s a company called Brick Forge that makes historically accurate Viking helmets in a variety
of colors.

The website says,

“If you are looking for a more historic alternative to the iconic horned Viking Helmet -
look no further. The BrickForge Viking Helmet is based on the more traditional
'Spanglehelm' design and features a spectacle guard around the eyes and nose.”

24


This is amazing engagement.

People write long fictional essays and illustrate them with Lego reenactments.

They explore and dramatize the Viking Sagas.

How many times have we, in our museums, posted something to our websites hoping to get
comments engagement, but nobody came? And here's this person who is doing reenactments
of Viking history with Legos and he or she has hundreds of comments.

And who are these people?

This person is from Holland, Michigan, in the USA. Holland, Michigan—could your marketing
department have identified an audience for Viking history in Holland, Michigan? No. This is not
broadcast physics, but it's perfectly, unremarkably normal online.

[Slide: Viking ship Lego model on Flickr,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thorskegga/4941989896/in/pool-371955@N24/]

Here's someone who did a reconstruction of a Viking ship, using Legos, and shared the photos
online. This woman describes herself as a "middle-aged eccentric woman living in High
Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England." And she's part of a community, friends with, this person
in Holland, Michigan, because of their shared interests. That's very powerful stuff.

The Battle of Maldon

I showed you, at the beginning, the Beowulf reenactment done in Lego. I didn't spend a lot of
time looking for these things, they're just there, in incredible abundance. There are more than 6
billion photos in Flickr, contributed by users, cataloged by users—people—without any central
control or coordination, and it's growing at a rate of about 4,000 pictures a minute, 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week. Can you get that kind of scale with broadcast? Never.

25


This video has over 200,000 views. How many views did the official, canonical video about the
Sun chariot on the National Museum website have? 2,000 views?

[As an aside, does that mean that this Beowulf video is 100 times better than the National
Museum video? Well, it depends on what your goals are, but "better" or not, this difference in
views is indicative of what I think are the relatively low standards for impact and scale that we
often have in memory institutions, and the enormity of the audiences that are available to us
on social media sites, outside the broadcast idiom, should we choose to go there. The Beowulf
Lego video is quite an obscure piece of content in YouTube, yet I know of very few museum
videos that have gotten anywhere near this level of viewership. Judgments of quality aside,
we're not often playing in the same league as even modestly successful social media content,
and I see no intrinsic reason why this is the case. American museums have a combined annual
budget of over $20 billion.7 We could produce any kind of online content we wanted, and we're
competing with people—and often losing to—individuals who create content on their own
time, with few resources other than passion and curiosity.

[Slide: The Battle of Maldon. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuxv510dh6w ]

I found this Lego reenactment video for an Old English poem called The Battle of Maldon. It's
had over 162,000 views. I don’t know much about Viking history, but this seems very specific—
like an actual battle.

Before I play this video, notice that the subtitles for this video are in Old English. The makers of
this video are closed captioning in a language that's been dead for a thousand years. Every
detail of the story, the poem, seem to have been thought about and considered. Decisions were
made.

I love the way the videographer depicted the blood from the arrow hitting the soldier with the
little red Lego knobs. That's immensely clever to me, but probably something that's been
passed between fans and makers of these videos for years.

And did you notice the fantastic way they depicted the tide coming up the river through the
stop-motion animation of the Lego tiles moving across board? That's beautiful, abstract art—
expressive cinematography—to me. But it's important to the story too—the tide coming in and
out is extremely important to the narrative of the poem and the battle because when the tide
goes down the sandbars are exposed and the troops can cross and engage in battle. If this

26


videographer is 8 years old or 80 years old, they're thinking. They're doing. They're fully
engaged in this subject matter and sharing meaning with their community.

It looks a lot like learning to me.

Maybe I want to know more about the Battle of Maldon. Where do I go?

A search on the National Museum of Denmark website for “Battle of Maldon” returns no
results. Why would it return results? It’s not a Danish battle and there are apparently no
resources or objects directly related to the Battle of Maldon, or at least there are none that are
cataloged that way. An individual museum can’t be all things to all people. It can’t be in that
central position in the new “learning model” all the time.

[Slides: Wikipedia page for Battle of Maldon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Maldon),
and the related Geohack page
(http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Battle_of_Maldon&params=51_42_
55_N_0_42_3_E_type:event_region:GB)]

A Google search for the Battle of Maldon” points immediately to a Wikipedia page, which gives
me a sketch of the details and a number of supporting links and citations. (A Wikipedian told
me that Wikipedia is a great place to start research, but a terrible place to end it. I found that to
be a very helpful piece of insight.)

And I'd never noticed this feature before I was preparing for this talk, but there's a little link at
the top of this article about the Battle of Maldon that says "coordinates." Map coordinates.
Hmmm, I thought, what happens when I click on that?

You go to a website called Geohack, which is created and maintained by Wikipedia volunteers
to provide internet map sources to enhance Wikipedia articles. (And how did that link get on
that Wikipedia page? Somebody got the idea to put it there and did it.)

Geohack has an index of several dozen mapping websites, with the map coordinates of the
Battle of Maldon linked into them.

This map is from OpenStreetMap, which is a citizen-created, free, open source mapping site. It
says in the sidebar " OpenStreetMap is a free worldwide map, created by people like you.”

27


OpenStreetMap has hundreds of thousands of contributors who volunteer their time and
knowledge to make free maps better for everyone.8

And there it is, the site of the Battle of Maldon, a town named Maldon, North East of London. It
looks like exactly the kind of place I'd expect a Viking battle to take place.

The “history” tab for this map reveals that this map has been drawn over many years by a
community of dozens—maybe hundreds of volunteers. Their edits and contributions are all
logged on the site. One log entry reads,

“Harmonized tagging of Ways of St. James…Fixed some little minor stuff” [April 28,
2012]

Another says,

“Updated ownership of bakery” [April 24, 2012]

[Slide: Google Street View near the Battle of Maldon]

I click through to Google, on the same coordinates, and I can use Google Street View, a
technology that is most commonly used for helping you find a house or store or restaurant, and
I can look around, the site of the Battle of Maldon, which happened on August 10, in the year
991, right here.

I can look at pictures. I'm thinking of the Lego imagery of the creek and the tide coming in. It's a
beautiful, lush, tidal flat. This starts to feel very real to me.

And I recognize this statue of Byrhtnoth, who lead the Anglo-Saxons, unsuccessfully against the
smaller Viking force.

28


[Slide: "'Brythnoth' Earl of Essex" by Brian Digby, https://ssl.panoramio.com/photo/7753503]

We tend to dismiss the quality of citizen-created content—we're the people who know how to
make beautiful photographs—but this is a beautiful photograph. This took my breath away.

Search Flickr or Google Images for "Danish Museums" and you get thousands of beautiful
photographs.

People's kids. Families. Things they did. Places they saw. Friends. At all times of their lives. It's
all right here.

[Slide: Visitor photographs of the SMK, on Flickr]

The Web of Hands and Hearts

[Slide: A Web of Hands and Hearts]

29


When I talk about a web of hands and hearts, and I think about this chain of interactions
between trust and reputation and money coming into our institutions, and wanting the best
things to happen in society to come out the other end…this is what I'm really talking about. This
is a force to be reckoned with.

And these kinds of interactions, this kind of activity and doing and sense-making shouldn't just
be outcomes at the end of a process that we orchestrate and enable. This should be the
inputs—a natural and essential component of the world of trust and reputation and resources
that feed, that nourish our memory institutions, and our society. This kind of activity, of
passion, of dedication and curiosity and scale should be—in fact, are—as essential to our public
institutions as electricity and heat and walls and expert staff and telephones and all the other
things we would never think of starting or finishing the work of museums with.

We can stop all of this from happening. We can insist on the paramount importance of our own
expertise and opinions. Or we can be like guides, the mentors and trusted sidekicks that Kathy
Sierra talks about. The public, citizens, people…value and want our expertise, but they don't
only want our expertise, they want to build and do and engage in sense-making on a scale and
in a way that we few professionals can't even begin to imagine. It's a glorious thing.

Many of my colleagues have been galvanized in the last 20 years by the belief that our memory
institutions…that society needs us. We've seen how quickly our cultures can forget how to
make good decisions about difficult ideas. And I see a future that will be dominated by difficult,
challenging ideas coming into our view.

If we don't get good at using the best tools to think about the future, to understand the
physical world, to understand and build our shared cultural heritage, to come to grips with our
human shortcomings and deep potential, to do the work that matters, and do it quickly…then
we're going to be in a lot of trouble.

I'm very hopeful that our memory institutions, our civic institutions, can figure this out. The
world still needs us to be authorities. It still needs us to be broadcasting, but that's not all it
needs. It needs us to help.

Thank you.

[Slides: "Let's make the future together. Mange tak! Thank you!"]

30


***

“When it comes to dealing with the big problems we face, are we just going to be a crowd of
voices, or are we going to be a crowd of hands?”

[Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_pahlka_coding_a_better_government.html ]

1
Joy's Law is frequently referenced in business and strategy contexts without academic source attribution. A
suitable primary reference seems to be Lakhani KR, Panetta JA, "The Principles of Distributed Innovation," 2007,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1021034.
2
Shirky, Clay, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Penguin Press HC, 2010. The
reference is towards the end of chapter 1 (Sorry! I've got the book on the Kindle and it won't show me page
numbers. It's around kindle location 376 for what it's worth!)
3
From Twitter user KathySierra, November 5, 2009
4
Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis", Clay Shirky, December 2, 2011
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2011/12/institutions-confidence-and-the-news-crisis/
5
In addition to the Rijksmuseum example cited above, the following correspondence between Katie Filbert from
Wikimedia, D.C., and Alan Newman, the Chief of Imaging and Visual Services at the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C. shows the relationship between open image access policies and the propagation of high-quality
images across the Internet.

Upon announcing the National Gallery of Art's new public domain policy
[https://images.nga.gov/en/page/openaccess.html], Katie Filbert writes

This is wonderful news!

The images will be immensely helpful for Wikipedia articles about artwork and artists that are in the NGA
collections and likely will inspire Wikipedia editors to improve the articles.

Cheers,
Katie Filbert
Wikimedia DC

Alan Newman replies,

Katie,
This is exactly what we hope to see.
Flush the junk out of the culture that was scanned from books and bad reproductions.
Refresh with new authoritative images and catalogue data for all to use unencumbered.
Make it easy for a K-12 kid to use in school or a lecturer to use. etc.

Cheers,
Alan Newman
Chief, Imaging and Visual Services
National Gallery of Art

31


(Email correspondence from March 19, 2012, on the Museum Computer Network listserv. Reprinted with the
permission of Mr. Newman and Ms. Filbert.)
6
Stats are from This Is Everything You Need To Know About Pinterest (Infographic), Jordan Crook, March 14th,
2012, Techcrunch, http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/this-is-everything-you-need-to-know-about-pinterest-
infographic/
7
Museum Financial Information, 2009, AAM Press, 2009. The exact number of museums cited by AAM's study is
17,744. AAM notes that this number is extrapolated from other data and is not an exact count. The $20.7 billion
figure is cited on p. 49.
8
New York Times, Online Maps: Everyman Offers New Directions, by Miguel Helft, November 16, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/technology/internet/17maps.html

32

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