social media & government: an example
sebastian chan
manager, web services
powerhouse museum
sydney, australia
webdirections south
september 27, 2007
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• more usable
services
• the value of being
citizen-centric
• emergent cross-
government value
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 13

• a real world
example
• what we did
• what we learnt
• recommendations
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 14

citizens are diverse
(why are do so many government websites look the same?)
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 15

we owe them a
better experience
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 16

we might learn
something from
users too . . .
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 17

how popular are
government websites?
2% of sites viewed by Australians
up to around 6% including all health and education
(Hitwise Australia, Aug 2007)
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SITE % of category
Bureau of Meteorology 17.38%
Australian Taxation Office 3.70%
Centrelink 2.25%
Australian JobSearch 2.12%
ATO- Tax Agent Portal 1.51%
Roads and Traffic Authority, NSW 1.47%
Dept of Immigration & Multicultural 1.20%
& Indigenous Affairs
ourbrisbane.com 1.15%
NOAA National Weather Service 1.10%
Medicare Australia 1.10%
NSW Lotteries 0.92%
CityRail 0.89%
ASIC 0.86%
NSW Transport Infoline 0.73%
ABN Lookup 0.70%
(Hitwise Australia, Aug 2007)
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a case study
semi social search + tagging + core data
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an early experiment
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Electronic Swatchbook
www.powerhousemuseum.com/electronicswatchbook
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 25

swatchbooks used by
designers and students
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phase one - digitisation
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catalogued as books
used as ‘pages’
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or as parts of pages
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out of copyright
all now public domain
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launched May 2005
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offers print
resolution downloads
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phase two - classification
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no existing taxonomy
or classification at the
swatch level
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invites users to ‘describe’ the swatch with simple
facetted tagging (patterns, colours, mood)
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 35

invisible tagging
no feedback, no
incentive
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 36

10,000 users
gigabytes of downloads
monthly
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what did we learn?
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 38

users will tag even with
no incentives
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 39

tags will be of
average quality even
with no feedback
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 40

users can be
motivated to help
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 41

so how could this be
applied to something
bigger?
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 42

like all agencies we had
corporate databases on
our website
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like most they
were hard to use
and made for experts
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‘threshold fear’
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also applies to websites
and user interfaces
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 51

we had another
problem
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the public is generally
unaware of musuem
collections
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84% begin an
information search with
a search engine
(online computer library center
‘perceptions’ report 2005)
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 54

Powerhouse
collection search 1.0
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target audience - experts
focus - accuracy
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searchable only on the
museum’s own website
(deep web)
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“advanced search”
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one small problem
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there aren’t very many experts
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8% of Powerhouse
Museum traffic
(May 2006)
17,000 visits
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difficult to browse
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but does it need to be
this way?
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 63

the library
“i didn’t realise there was also a book about that”
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 64

the supermarket
“what else do i want”
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powerhouse’s new open
storage facility
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these can all be
browsed
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Powerhouse
collection search 2.0
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represents ~70% of
active collection online
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built entirely in-house
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target audience - non experts
focus - simplicity and
serendipity
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accessible where the
people are already
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where students and
teachers look first
“in the flow”
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“simple search”
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emphasis on results,
recommendations, filtering
to obtain accuracy
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63% of Powerhouse
Museum traffic
(Dec 2006)
355,000 visits
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these are new users,
new audiences
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now 17 million object
records viewed since
June 2006
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~50,000 object records
viewed daily
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interest is very broad
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95% of all available
objects visited at least
once in first ten weeks
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most popular object
viewed only
28,000 times
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32nd place
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223rd place
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4th place
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it has never been on
public display
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how does it work?
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 91

four key features to
enhance serendipity
and ‘browsability’
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two are organisationally
generated, two are user
contributed
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object name and
type taxonomies
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applied to ~90% of
collection
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by trained registrars
and curators
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subject taxonomy
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applied to objects
catalogued since 2000
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by trained registrars
and curators
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user keywords/tags
folksonomy
(augmented serendipity)
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tagging is anonymous
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there are no explicit
incentives for taggers
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tags are passed through
a ‘badwords’ filter
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7,296 user tags
4,934 unique tags
added to 4,032 objects
318 archived/deleted
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tags complement
existing rich text
records
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and formal taxonomies
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for discovery
not descriptive purposes
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used in many different ways
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black
green
vase
blue
chinese
value
gold
white aboriginal
most common tags australia
price
silver
wood
japanese
glass
olympics
fish
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search tracking
‘implicit tagging’
(frictionless serendipity)
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aggregated synonyms
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high volume of searches
eliminates ‘false drop’
errors over time
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this year there have
been 7.1 million
on site searches
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~64,775 unique
search phrases
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all users contribute data
anonymously
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manufacturing
cricket
tennis
trophies football
bats
search relationships
alistair morrison
sarawak
hedda morrison
peking china
netsuke
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what are we learning
about our audience?
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there are lots of them
and they now look at
multiple objects
in a visit
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Collection visits Total site visits Objects viewed
2,000,000
1,500,000
1,000,000
before launch
500,000
0
May 2006 Dec 2006 August 2007
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what they look at
how users search
how they describe it
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bridging the
‘semantic gap’
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fashion
japanese fashion
clothing
anime
pop art
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search trends
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last 90 days for search phrase “australian design”
1,500
1,350
sydney design 07 promo starts sydney design 07
1,200
1,050
900
750
600
450
300
150
0
90 days ago yesterday
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how are users
responding?
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telling us more about
our collections
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organisational effects?
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renewed focus on the
collection
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significant increase in
public enquiries
roughly 300% increase
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changed nature of
public enquiries
new users come with different understandings and
ideas about ‘what you do’
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what are we working
on next?
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more reuse of content
and syndication
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becoming location
aware & mobile
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inspiration from the
library world
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“emergent value”
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new visualisations
‘experiencing’ data
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timeline
‘popularity’
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APIs and feeds
more than just Opensearch which we have
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search relationship
visualisations
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ramping up
the social layer
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lessons learned?
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prototype to solve an
existing problem
This gets necessary organisation buy-in
and proof-of-concept
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expect to have to work
outside your existing CMS
Or you’ll pay through the nose
and it still won’t be flexible enough
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build internal capacity
It really helps if you haven’t outsourced everything
You will be needing internal developers
once the users arrive
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launch early
Once you have a stable enough beta, go live.
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be prepared for
surprises
Your existing users will be joined by a lot of others
who will behave differently
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overuse
underuse
different uses
Be prepared to scrap and refocus if your new
users don’t use certain features
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your data may have
a different external
use value
Maybe the community can better visualise your data?
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scalability
Be prepared
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 166

oh and one more
thing . . .
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About NSW?
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 168

experimental project
(and a demand driven encyclopaedia of NSW)
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cross goverment
data mashups
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Powerhouse
Museum
State Library of NSW
trialled across Arts
portfolio first
Australian
Art Gallery of NSW
Museum
Historic Houses Trust
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open APIs
what do we need?
data feeds
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About NSW may act as
a feed repository for
developers
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more?
sebastian chan, powerhouse museum, september 2007 - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog 174

sebastian chan
manager, web services
powerhouse museum
sydney, australia
sebc@phm.gov.au
Fresh + New blog
THANK YOU. www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog
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