Open Objects: Sharing is caring keynote 'Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons'

"Today I'd like to present both a proposal for something called the 'Participatory Commons', and a provocation (or conversation starter): there's a paradox in our hopes for deeper audience engagement through crowdsourcing: projects that don't grow with their participants will lose them as they develop new skills and interests and move on. This talk presents some options for dealing with this paradox and suggests a Participatory Commons provides a way to take a sector-wide view of active engagement with heritage content and redefine our sense of what it means when everybody wins. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this - I'll be following the hashtag during the session and my contact details are above. Before diving in, I wanted to reflect on some lessons from my work in museums on public engagement and participation ... One thing I learnt over the past years: museums can be intimidating places. When we ask for help with things like tagging or describing our collections, people want to help but they worry about getting it wrong and looking stupid or about harming the museum.   The best technology in the world won't solve a single problem unless it's empathically designed and accompanied by social solutions. This isn't a talk about technology, it's a talk about people - what they want, what they're afraid of, how we can overcome all that to collaborate and work together ... So a few years ago I explored the potential of crowdsourcing games to make helping a museum less scary and more fun. In this game, 'Dora's Lost Data', players meet a junior curator who asks them to tag objects so they'll be findable in Google. Games aren't the answer to everything, but identifying barriers to participation is always important. You have to understand your audiences - their motivations for starting and continuing to participate; the fears, anxieties, uncertainties that prevent them participating. [My games were hacked together outside of work hours, more information is available at My MSc dissertation: crowdsourcing games for museums; if you'd like to see properly polished metadata games check out Tiltfactor's http://www.metadatagames.org/#games] ..."