Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present :: Michael Edson

Michael Edson
Director, Web and New Media Strategy
Smithsonian Institution, Office of the CIO
edsonm@si.edu | @mpedson

This is what
I’ve been
talking about
recently…

http://www.dish2011.nl/
http://aarhus11.jboye.com/
http://www.opentext.com/2/global/products/products-
opentext-social-workplace/products-opentext-social-
workplace-speaker-series
July 2011 NDIIPP/NDSA Partners Meeting
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/n
ews/events/ndiipp_meetings/ndiipp1
1/
http://www.dkmuseer.dk/tidliger
earrangementer/1186.html
http://www.infotoday.com/cil2012/day.asp?day=Friday

Michael Edson
@mpedson

Michael Edson
@mpedson
slideshare.net/edsonm

Text version of this talk
(with links and footnotes)
http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm
/michael-edson-let-us-go-boldly-
into-the-present-text-version

Michael Edson
@mpedson
www.si.edu/commons

Michael Edson
Doesn’t make policy,
not a spokesman

From Zero History by William Gibson
Photo © Michael O’Shea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quartier_Commons.jpg

“But now he saw, however
briefly but
with peculiar clarity,

“But now he saw,
however briefly but
with peculiar clarity,
an aerial penguin
cross the intersection ahead
of him.

“Something wholly
penguin-shaped,
apparently four or
five feet long, from
beak-tip to trailing
feet, and made, it
seemed, of mercury.

“A penguin
wrapped in
fluid mirror,
reflecting a
bit of neon
from the
street
below.
rue in Latin Quarter by Charles Hutchins, CC attribution
http://www.flickr.com/photos/celesteh/396424823/in/faves-46758972@N00/

rue in Latin Quarter by Charles Hutchins, CC attribution
http://www.flickr.com/photos/celesteh/396424823/in/faves-46758972@N00/
“Swimming.

Moving as
a penguin moves
underwater, but
through the
Latin Quarter air,
at just above
the height of
second-story
windows.
“Swimming.

“Moving down the center of the street that
crossed the one he walked on. So that it
was revealed only as it crossed the
intersection.
2008_06_27_paris_walk_06 by Doc Searls, CC Attribution
http://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/4745436344/sizes/l/in/photostream/

intersection.
Swimming.

Propelling itself, in a
gracefully
determined
but efficient
fashion, with its
quicksilver
flippers.
intersection.
Swimming.

Photo by paige_eliz, CC attribution,noncommercial, no derivatives
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paige_eliz/480028794/sizes/l/in/photostream/
“Then a bicycle crossed,
on the street, going
in the opposite direction.

Photo by paige_eliz, CC attribution,noncommercial, no derivatives
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paige_eliz/480028794/sizes/l/in/photostream/
“Did you see that?”
Milgrim asked
the cyclist…

“Did you see that?”
Milgrim asked
the cyclist…

I was asked to give a
talk at the Cincinnati
Contemporary Arts
Center this spring as
part of their “Where do
we go from here?”
series

…And I thought that
to answer that
question you first had
to think about where
“here” is in the first
place.

…And I thought that
to answer that
question you first had
to think about where
“here” is in the first
place.
“Here” isn’t
where it used
to be.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/0806
23fa_fact_thurman?currentPage=all
If you lived in
Southern Europe
30,000 years ago,
you might have made
cave paintings like
this.

If you lived in
Southern Europe
30,000 years ago,
you might have made
cave paintings like
this.
“Here” was a period
of cultural continuity
that lasted 25,000
years.
1,000 generations.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools
_kill_creativity.html

Contrast that with
what Sir Ken
Robinson had to say
at TED 2006…

“…children starting school this year [2006] will be retiring
in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise
that’s been on parade over the last 4 days, what the world
is going to look like in 5 years time, and yet we’re meant
to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think,
is extraordinary.”

The Future
is stuff that
hasn’t happened yetThe future is stuff that
hasn’t happened
yet…Well, that’s what
we used to think.
That’s what this talk
is about.

The strategist as a visionary
15 years ago, I
thought it was the
strategists job to look
far out over the
horizon…

15 years ago, I
thought it was the
strategists job to look
far out over the
horizon…
But now, much of that
distant, misty future
has already happened.
The present is what’s
interesting and difficult

Strategy is language that does work

Somebody smart
said “software is
language that does
work.”

Somebody smart
said “software is
language that does
work.”
Strategy is the
same—it’s a tool
that helps you get
difficult things done.

This is not just idle philosophy,
our work matters

1997
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/do-modems-still-matter.html

date
T.F.O.Technology Fetish Object
A pattern I’ve noticed:
speakers often have
a slide with a date at
the top and a
Technology Fetish
Object at the bottom,
to show how quickly
the gadgets of our
youth go out of date.

1997
[ Modems ]

1997
Half of Americans
who were online
used one of
these…

1997No focus, zoom,
or preview.
Stored 8 photos
at 640 x 480

Remember this?
The Blue Screen of
Death?
People had a special
relationship with their
BSOD

http://www.techmynd.com/50-plus-blue-screen-of-death-displays-in-public/
People had a special
relationship with their
BSOD

http://www.techmynd.com/50-plus-blue-screen-of-death-displays-in-public/

http://gizmodo.com/282986/the-blue-screen-of-death-tattoo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/invattur/4013772522/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Digital
Strategy!

We’ve got
to be more
S.F.O.
Digital
Strategy!

Yes, we must
be more
S.F.O…

We’ve got a year
to decide…
Blah blah blah
broadcast

Everyone is down-sampling new
ideas into a familiar context, in
this case the broadcast idiom
(and pace) of the late 20th
century

Example
From a real
museum strategy workshop

Become the preeminent place
for engagement and dialogue
about national identity and
the accomplishment and
experience of citizens
Strategic Goal of the museum

“Build an online collection
of 10 million portraits of
citizens and their stories,
created and uploaded
without official curation
by members of the
public. Build a
community around this
initiative to fuel
engagement with
national history,
biography, and artistic
creativity.”
Proposed

“Do a website about
family portraits”
Proposed Adopted
by members of the
public. Build a
initiative to fuel
engagement with
national history,
creativity.”

by members of the
public. Build a
initiative to fuel
engagement with
national history,
creativity.”
“Do a website about
family portraits”
Proposed Adopted
Disconnect between
different
understandings of the
present

• 2002: Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs
• 2002: Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas
• 2005: Tim O’Reilly’s what is web 2.0
• 2006: Wikinomics
• “You” were the person of the year IN 2006!!!
They nailed it
5 – 10 years ago

2002
Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs

2002
“The first signs of the next shift began to reveal
themselves to me on a spring afternoon in the
year 2000. That was when I began to notice
people on the streets of Tokyo staring at their
mobile phones instead of talking to them. The
sight of this behavior, now commonplace in much
of the world, triggered a sensation I had
experienced a few times before—the instant
recognition that a technology is going to change
my life in ways I can scarcely imagine.

2002
—the instant recognition that a
technology is going to change my
life in ways I can scarcely
imagine.”

2002
Lawrence Lessig: The Future of Ideas

2002
“The open and neutral platform of the Internet
has spurred hundreds of companies to develop
new ways for individuals to interact. …Groups form
easily to discuss any issue imaginable; public
debate is enabled by removing perhaps the most
significant cost of human interaction—
synchronicity.

2002
“I can add to your conversation tonight;
you can follow it up tomorrow;
someone else, the day after.
And this is just the beginning, as the technology
will only get better.

2002
And this is just the beginning, as
the technology will only get better.”

And this is just the beginning, as
the technology will only get better.”
2002
Two years
before
Facebook was
founded
Four years
before Twitter
launched

2006
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
Wikinomics

2006
Wikinomics
“Smart companies are encouraging, rather than
fighting, the heaving growth of massive online
communities—many of which emerged from the
fringes of the Web to attract tens of millions of
participants overnight. Even ardent competitors
are collaborating on path-breaking scientific
initiatives that accelerate discovery in their
industries.

2006
Wikinomics
“Indeed as a growing number of firms see the
benefits of mass collaboration, this new way of
organizing
will eventually displace the
traditional corporate structures as
the economy's primary engine of
wealth creation.

2006
Wikinomics
“Indeed as a growing number of firms see the
benefits of mass collaboration, this new way of
organizing
will eventually displace the
traditional corporate structures as
the economy's primary engine of
wealth creation.”

2005
Tim O’Reilly
What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and
Business Models for the Next
Generation of Software

2005
Tim O’Reilly
What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and
Business Models for the Next
Generation of Software
1. The long tail
2. Data is the next Intel Inside
3. Users add value
4. Network effects by default
5. Some rights reserved
6. The perpetual beta
7. Cooperate, don't control
8. Software above the level of a single device

December 25, 2006
“You” are the
person of the year

December 25, 2006
“And we didn’t just watch, we also
worked. Like crazy. We made
Facebook profiles and Second Life
avatars and reviewed books at
Amazon and recorded podcasts.
We blogged about our candidates
losing and wrote songs about
getting dumped. We camcordered
bombing runs and built open-
source software.”

Note: More examples related to
open content and intellectual
property are in Addendum 1
at the end of this show (slide 152)

We’ve come to
recognize a new
set of patterns
over the last 10
years

Global audiences forming
around niche interests

“No matter what business
you’re in, most of the smart
people work for someone else”

A Trillion hours/year of time
available for creation and
collaboration. (via Clay Shirky)

Websites that get better the
more people use them

In 12 years this device will be
1,706 X more powerful than my
desktop computer

Billions of connected mobile
users. Voice, data, cameras,
GPS, sensors…

Your users are heroes in their
own epic journeys. Your job is
to help them be great.
[via Kathy Sierra]

These are not new ideas
anymore

anymore
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/99432/jimmy-wales-aps-landing-pages-a-good-if-late-idea/
“Nothing in this [strategy]
couldn’t have been written by
someone actually savvy in the
Internet culture five years
ago. ”
-- Jimmy Wales on
AP’s Digital Strategy

anymore
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/99432/jimmy-wales-aps-landing-pages-a-good-if-late-idea/
“Nothing in this [strategy]
couldn’t have been written by
someone actually savvy in the
Internet culture five years
ago. ”
-- Jimmy Wales on
AP’s Digital Strategy
OUCH!

Interview with William Gibson

“I think that when I was first reading science
fiction, which would have been in the late 1950’s,
the consensual “now” was 3 or 4 years long, and
with 3 or 4 years of relatively unchanging ‘now’ a
writer of science fiction had the space in which to
erect something

“I think that when I was first reading science
fiction, which would have been in the late 1950’s,
the consensual “now” was 3 or 4 years long, and
with 3 or 4 years of relatively unchanging ‘now’ a
writer of science fiction had the space in which to
erect something.

“…With that long a ‘now’ you could build a
relatively big structure before that now
hauled itself into the future that made
your big structure obsolete.

“But today, now can feel like a news cycle. It’s like the
now is too narrow to allow for that big a construct. We
have too many wildcards in play with regard to our future
to casually erect believable futures beyond a few years.”

“But today, now can feel like a news cycle.
It’s like the now is too narrow to allow for that big a
construct. We have too many wildcards in play with
regard to our future to casually erect believable futures
beyond a few years.”

“But today, now can feel like a news cycle.
It’s like the now is too narrow to allow for that big
a construct. “We have too many wildcards in play
with regard to our future to casually erect
believable futures beyond a few years.”
http://matthewsheret.com/2010/10/04/timelines/

[The penguins are real]

20 million items in Europeana
66 million books in Librarything
250 million items in Trove
6 billion photos in Flickr
100 billion photos in Facebook
19M Wikipedia articles
And we have this
“now” in great
abundance

“If you wanted to start a company back in 2000 it was a lot
more difficult than it was today. You’d actually have to go out
and buy dedicated servers, and there was no Amazon S3.
There was no EC2. To get an idea off the ground today…
[compared with] even just a few years ago…over this last
decade the barrier to entry has been lowered quite a bit, to
where if you have something new you want to explore it really
is a couple thousand dollars to get something off the ground
and launch it.”
Digg founder Kevin Rose
This Week In Tech, episode 228, at 22:00

The present is far more interesting than
most organizations have noticed
[paraphrase W. Gibson]

Cheap platforms and successful examples
are all around us, in abundance…

Now, let’s get practical.
Once you believe that the present moment is interesting…
What should you do about it?

This document describes a
transformational change for the
Smithsonian, which will have impact on
the Institution’s culture, operations,
allocation of resources, talent
recruitment, and priorities. The Smithsonian Commons
http://www.si.edu/commons/prototype
http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+--+Table+of+Contents

Design Patterns for
Going Boldly to the Present
1. The extra-terrestrial space auditor
2. On ramps and loading docks
3. Edge to core
4. Focus on mission
5. Place the bet

Oh, and please stop
innovating…
Failing fast…
Risk taking…
Collaborating…

Oh, and please stop
innovating…
Failing fast…
Risk taking…
Collaborating…
Don’t focus on having more innovation!
Focus on making progress towards well defined
goals—doing “work that matters” [via Tim O’Reilly]. If
you need more innovation or collaboration to get
there, then remove the obstacles and step on the
gas.
See Forget innovation, from Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund
http://www.sitra.fi/julkaisu/2011/forget-innovation

1. Extraterrestrial Space Auditor
http://www.flickr.com/photos/markusram/2060743986/sizes/o/in/photostream/

The British navy, "at the peak of
their dominance in the 17th
century," took 150 years to adopt a
proven remedy
for scurvy
Via Scott Berkun
The Myths of Innovation

“Andreessen’s advice
to old media…”

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/andreessen-media-burn-boats/

2. On Ramps and Loading Docks
http://www.flickr.com/photos/debcll/2359690453/sizes/l/in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/debcll/2359690453/sizes/l/in/photostream/
“I’m all about building flexible
networks so we can move ideas
and goods between us and our
customers, partners, and
beneficiaries—quickly knowingly,
and efficiently.”
Carl the Loading Dock

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cycleologist/3780757186/

“A platform beats an
application anytime.”
Tim O’Reilly
What is Web 2.0

“A platform beats an
application anytime.”
Tim O’Reilly
What is Web 2.0
…But think expansively
about what constitutes a
platform.

3. Edge to core
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcocastelli/3313416138/sizes/l/in/photostream/

3. Edge to core
“Innovation at the Edges:
A Commons in the Middle”
Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy

3. Edge to core
Innovation becomes
infrastructure

3. Edge to core
Innovation becomes
infrastructure
Help it!

3. Edge to core
Innovation becomes
infrastructure
Help it!
Even if the edge
and the core are
outside your own
organization

Smithsonian Strategic Plan
Grand Challenges
1. Unlocking the Mysteries of
the Universe
2. Understanding and
Sustaining a Biodiverse
Planet
3. Valuing World Cultures
4. Understanding the
American Experience
4. Focus on mission

4. Focus on mission
65 million people died in
World War II

4. Focus on mission
The National WWII Museum is
very focused on their mission

1. What world am I living in?
2. What impact does my country,
my city, my organization want to
have in that world
3. What should I do today?

1. What world am I living in?
2. What impact does my country,
my city, my organization want to
have in that world
3. What should I do today?
Keeping these three things in working memory at the same time is
what we have to practice and get good at.
This is it. This is the job.

Think Big
Start Small
Move Fast

5. Focus on mission
Thanks!
@mpedson

Addendum 1
The following slides were added to the
“They Nailed It” section for
Sharing is Caring: Digitized Cultural Heritage for All
Copenhagen, Denmark, November 11, 2011
They are specific to that conference’s focus, intellectual
property policy and openness in heritage organizations.
;)

• 2001: Creative Commons founded
• 2001: MIT Open Courseware founded
• 2002: Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas
• 2002: Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs
• 2006: Wikinomics (IBM)
• (2008: Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy)
They nailed it
5 – 10 years ago

2001
Creative Commons founded
http://katiejane12.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/my-creative-commons-license/

2001
MIT Open Courseware founded

2001
“I was amazed that a university such as MIT would
freely give access to its educational information.”
Triatno Yudo Harjoko
University of Indonesia

2001
Other universities may be striving to
market their courses to the Internet
masses in hopes of dot-com wealth. But
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
has chosen the opposite path: to post
virtually all its course materials on the
Web, free to everybody.”

2001
Other universities may be striving to
market their courses to the Internet
masses in hopes of dot-com wealth. But
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
has chosen the opposite path: to post
virtually all its course materials on the
Web, free to everybody.

2001
''Selling content for profit, or trying in
some ways to commercialize one
of the core intellectual activities of
the university seemed less
attractive to people at a deep level
than finding ways to disseminate it
as broadly as possible.'’
[Professor Stephen Lerman]
Faculty Chairman
Professor Stephen Lerman

2001
''Selling content for profit, or trying in
some ways to commercialize one
of the core intellectual activities of
the university seemed less
attractive to people at a deep level
than finding ways to disseminate it
as broadly as possible.'’
[Faculty Chairman
Professor Stephen Lerman]

2001
100 million users in first 10 years

2002
“If the Internet teaches us anything,
it is that great value comes from leaving core
resources in a commons, where they’re free for
people to build upon as they see fit.”

2005
A dumb company
gave away $10 million
in IT patents…

$100 million investment
returned to the Linux commons
…generated a 500% profit
2006

2008
The Public Domain
James Boyle

2008
The Public Domain
James Boyle
“The public domain is not some gummy residue
left over when all the good stuff has been
covered by property law.
The public domain is the place we quarry the
building blocks of our culture.

2008
The Public Domain
James Boyle
“The public domain is not some gummy residue
left over when all the good stuff has been
covered by property law.
The public domain is the place
we quarry the building blocks of
our culture.”

2008
Smithsonian Institution
Web and New Media Strategy

Goal 7. Business Model
“The Smithsonian’s basic
business model is to create
social and economic value
through the increase and
diffusion of knowledge…
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.”

Goal 7. Business Model
Revenue Generation in Harmony with Mission
Attempting to directly monetize access to, and use of,
museum content does not appear to be a sustainable
business model. Through these low-margin business
practices, we alienate users, perpetuate the practice of
institutions charging each other, discourage research and
publications, and undermine our civic mission.
It is likely that the Smithsonian will make more money by
promoting “free” resources to a large audience than it can
make charging small amounts for small transactions to a
small audience, and it is a much better fit with the mission.

Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present :: Michael Edson

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