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Peer Production in the Museum Context: a Strategic Plan for the Future
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peer-production.md

Peer Production in the Museum Context: a Strategic Plan for the Future

Andrew Monks, May 7, 2015

Abstract

Museums could increase their ability to accomplish their missions using limited resources by leveraging peer production economies. They could become the canonical reference source for information within their field, and they could harness the work of a large online community to create and improve their educational resources. By accomplishing those two things, a museum can establish itself as the primary academic entity in its field, bringing attention and centralizing research and content production. Over the next year, I will create a software package and a documented procedure which museums can follow to accomplish these two goals.

Contents

Context

My practice in general revolves around encouraging people to use and engage with evolving technology: creating technical literacy through teaching and writing, explaining potential benefits, creating easy-to-use tools, and generally steering the world towards a technological future. I turned my gaze towards museums. I’m specifically interested in how museums can fit into (and benefit from) a peer production economy.

What Is This Paper?

In the introductory presentation, I define peer production and provide a vision of what a museum engaged with the peer production economy might look like. The purpose of the presentation is to provide a starting point for a conversation with a museum. In this paper, I offer a plan with detailed steps for how a specific museum: the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture can move into that vision with a limited staff and budget. I get into the details: cost, staff allocation, tooling, what to do in what order, and the like.

Where Is This Going?

Next month, I’ll deliver a version of this presentation at that museum. Over the following year or so, I hope to get a grant to work with them to put the plan into action. Over the course of that time, I’ll create a free, open-source system (complete with extensive documentation and a software package) that other museums will be able to use. At the end, I’ll produce a case study of how well it worked, and publish that case study along with the plan so that other museums might follow suit. I hope to end up with a publishable series of steps that any museum could take without having to incur the cost of hiring programmers or doing extensive strategic planning: a museum should be able to read that document and know exactly what steps to take and what resources will be required.

My hope is that by finding outside grant funding for the first museum, and by freely publishing my techniques and results for use by subsequent museums, no museum will incur a significant cost by implementing this plan.

Why

I will begin by presenting an argument as to how a system of peer production might be beneficial to a museum. I will define peer production. I will describe the relationship museums currently have with the peer production economy, and I will illustrate the relationship I believe they could have. By the end of this section, you will agree that museums ought to embrace peer production. In the next section, I will offer a plan for how to create that relationship.

What Is Peer Production?

First, I’d like to talk about what peer production is. I'll define peer production as, 'production by a self-organized community, in which work is produced by large numbers of people work cooperatively'. Some would specify that what I'm describing is specifically commons based peer production, a term coined by Yochai Benkler. Yochai cites the concept as having originated with Columbia Law professor and freedom advocate Eben Moglen. Yochai is sort of the founding father of this research. He's the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In 2005 he published a paper from which I've drawn a great deal of inspiration: Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials.

Yochai defines the impetus for peer production as follows:1

A billion people in advanced economies have between two and six billion spare hours among them, every day. [...] Beyond the sheer potential quantitative capacity, however [...] a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more, rather than less, likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience. They have diverse interests—as diverse as human culture itself. [...] It is this combination of a will to create and to communicate with others, and a shared cultural experience that makes it likely that each of us wants to talk about something that we believe others will also want to talk about, that makes the billion potential participants in today’s online conversation, and the six billion in tomorrow’s conversation, affirmatively better than the commercial industrial model.

So, by enabling a large number of people to work together collaboratively, peer production models accomplish two things: they expand the set of workers, and by allowing a majority to collaborate, they increase the chances that the work will be valuable to that majority.

Where Has Peer Production Succeeded?

The archetypal examples of peer production in action are Wikipedia and the Linux Kernel. Wikipedia needs no introduction. Linux is a computer software which runs on the majority of the worlds servers. You could argue that Linux powers the Internet.

I think Linux is a particularly effective example because while Wikipedia is arguably the only resource in its class, Linux has replaced entrenched commercial products and, "has become so technically powerful that it lays claim to a prestigious title–it runs more of the world’s top supercomputers than any other operating system."2.

Statistics show that although Wikipedia lacks a hierarchy of experts, its content is more complete and more correct than traditionally produced encyclopedias.3

How Does Wikipedia Use Peer Production?

Yochai mentioned viking ships, so I’ll use that as an example. Let’s say you wanted to learn about viking ships. You’d probably start with Wikipedia, where you'd find a cohesive and helpful article. As of today, the viking ships article has been edited a total of 808 times, by 480 individual people. Since the article's creation in 2003, it's been edited on average once every 5.5 days.4

Aaron Swartz provided a particularly interesting analysis of who contributes to Wikipedia in 2006. Previous research had shown that while the majority of edits are committed by dedicated group of regular volunteers, but Aaron discovered that these edits were primarily stylistic changes to fit content into the wiki's idiomatic structure. He used a data-driven approach to show that the majority of content is created by non-active Wikipedia users who typically edit 10 or fewer articles within a particular, narrow area of focus.5

'Wait!' you might ask, 'How do I know that those 480 people even know the first thing about vikings? Why should I trust them?'

Wikipedia policy would argue that you shouldn't trust those people. Two of Wikipedia's core content policies are No Original Research, or WP:NOR, and Verifiability, or WP:V. The WP:V policy states that, "Content from a Wikipedia article is not considered reliable unless it is backed up by citing reliable sources. Confirm that these sources support the content, then use them directly".6

According to these policies, all content on Wikipedia, including facts and synthesis/analysis, must be attributable to a reliable, published source. Furthermore, anyone using the encyclopedia must be able to check that the information comes from a reliable source. Of course, not every article is perfect, and Wikipedia is a constant work in progress. But through these policies, Wikipedia makes it possible for a reader to determine exactly how imperfect any given article is, by checking and validating its citations.

Wikipedia even provides a list of which sources are most likely to be reliable:

  • University-level textbooks
  • Books published by respected publishing houses
  • Magazines
  • Journals
  • Mainstream newspapers

In conclusion, these policies show that those who decry that Wikipedia has no place in academic writing are correct, but their claim is noncontroversial and misses the point. Wikipedia is a tertiary source. Citing an encyclopedia has never been good form7, and Wikipedia even provides an article about its academic use. This conclusion is echoed by Cullen J. Chandler and Alison S. Gregory in their paper, Sleeping with the Enemy: Wikipedia in the College Classroom.8

This exploration of Wikipedia has proven that a peer-produced source can be a valid academic tool if used correctly. Next, I will provide a description of two ways in which a museum might maximize the value it derives from peer-produced media. First, how a museum can use and benefit from an existing source like Wikipedia, and secondly how a museum could stand to benefit further from creating its own peer produced repository.

Two Models Of How A Museum Could Fit Into A Peer Production Economy

Museums have an opportunity to benefit from peer production in two primary ways. First, they can be the reliable sources that Wikipedia references. Second, they can leverage the work of peer communities to produce educational materials and museum content. By combining these two approaches, museums can more effectively achieve their mission while using fewer staff and monetary resources. I'll explain the simplest first.

Museums As Peer Producers Of Content

Because of Wikipedia’s role as an encyclopedia, they seek only to republish information that is publicly available elsewhere. So, the museum needs to make their educational materials available online and ideally, the museum needs staff to synthesize those information into Wikipedia articles

By publishing educational content and seeing that it is added to resources like Wikipedia, museums can increase their visibility and become the canonical source for information within their specialty. If an informed user of Wikipedia must very the original source of information, and a museum is that source of information, that museum gains a huge amount of traffic from Wikipedia.

If a museum publishes enough high quality educational content, the Wikipedia community will eventually find them. This is the most important step. However, a museum can speed that process up by having committing staff or volunteer time to editing Wikipedia and adding information sourced back to the museum.

Museums already have an enormous amount of high quality educational content. In fact, producing and distributing educational content is the primary activity of museums. However, many museums do not publicly publish this content. There are several reasons, but the greatest is that it would take time and money and web developers, and they'd need people to enter all their data and reformat it for the Internet. It's too hard.

Over the next year or so, I will make it easier. I will develop a software package that museums can install and deploy in a few hours without technical staff. I will produce clear documentation of the entire process. By simply uploading as much wall text as they already have, they can get started with an online catalog. Over time, they can gradually add new content at their own pace. Because a museum is a highly reliable secondary source, this online wall text will be a perfect encyclopedic reference.

Museums As Beneficiaries Of Peer Production

Currently, the educational materials distributed at museums are created entirely by museum staff. They read reliable sources like journals and books, they do original research, an they synthesize that information into pamphlets, wall text, audio guides, and all other kinds of educational material. But museums only have so many staff: staff are expensive. If people outside the community were invited to contribute to this educational content, the museum would be able to produce more and stretch their budget further.

Of course, museums can't simple make their walls editable. Partly because it's impossible, and partly because as Wikipedia says: a publicly editable document can not be considered a reliable source on its own. But it can be a useful tool, a sort of staging area in which reliable museum-quality content could be created and developed.

One might read this and argue that museums are already beneficiaries of peer production. Every museum relies on volunteers! Traditional volunteer systems are a start, but the barrier to participation is extremely high. Not only do volunteers need to be local, but they typically are only empowered to help with museum operations, not content production. Only museum staff work on the primary work of doing research, documenting the collection, and writing content. It's still crowd-sourcing, but it's not exactly peer production. This is a very important distinction.

Case Example: The Polish Museum Of America

The Polish Museum Of America is a struggling museum in Chicago. They have a vast collection of Polish artifacts, including 70-80% of the Polish pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair. However, they are only able to display 10% of their collection.9 The other 90% is sitting in warehouses, uncatalogued, educating no one. Part of the reason is limited space, but our guide explained that the primary reason is that they simply don't know enough about the objects to display them in their museum space. They have high standards! They can't just go putting out objects willy-nilly! Until they have proper information about that 90% of their collection, they'll never be able to display it. But their staff is busy. They can't afford to hire new people to do research and create supplementary educational materials to support the objects.

But, they could put pictures of their warehouse online, in a less formal setting. They could invite the interested public, the worldwide community of people who care deeply about Polish history, to help identify the objects, and to go out and find reliable sources to provide more information. Eventually, that online community might produce enough information that the museum could finally put some of those objects on display.

What Does It Take?

Museums need an informal place online where they can incubate content before it's ready to be formally displayed. They need to invite the larger online community to contribute information and work until the content is of high quality. Museums need to be able to set up this informal online system without committing significant staff time or resources.

If the online system provides enough structure, the community could even handle a great deal of the quality control process. I will write policies that these online systems can use, where contributors identify when material has reached museum quality. Then, museum staff will be notified so that they can verify the sources of the information and get it on the wall.

If this is successful, the museum's online system will become the primary destination for people seeking to produce and synthesize content related to the museum's specialty. This in turn will bring the museum a great deal of attention within that academic community, and achieve its mission.

Putting It Together

If a museum successfully achieves both of the models I've described, they will become a completely integral piece of the academic community in their field of specialization. They will be the primary reliable source for information about that field, linked to by encyclopedias and news articles worldwide. They will also be the primary online place where academics, historians, and researchers, professional and amateur come together to create and distribute content within that field. Imagine teachers and students and hobbyists and anyone in between working together on the shared goal of creating informative educational content. Museums are uniquely positioned to become the future hubs of academia, and prove their value into the future. They'll have an easier time getting grants, higher quality materials, and hugely more attention. All without a significant resource commitment.

Currently this is impossible. The tools simply don't exist. A museum could hire a web programmer and a sociologist to create the online system and the rules and policies that will enable it, but it would be prohibitively expensive and outside the museum's core competency. It simply wouldn't be a good idea for a small museum. I intend to develop such a tool so the museums don't have to.

The tool will enable both types of interaction with peer production through two major public-facing sections. It will provide a canonical, staff-produced place for publishing reliable museum-quality information relating to the museum's catalog and related topics within the museum's area of focus. It will make it easy for museums to begin by publishing their existing educational materials in small increments as they have the time and resources to do so. The second section will be harder to make: a publicly editable repository for incubating content and developing it until it reaches appropriate quality to be published in the first section.

The system will be complete and reliable enough for non-technical users to install, deploy, and maintain. It will be free or cheap to operate, and leverage a cloud-based PaaS system so that the museum staff needn't concern themselves with servers, systems administration, or programming. It will be fully programmatically tested. The project will follow the tenets of reliability engineering by following the Long Term Support (LTS) product lifecycle management policy. This will enable smaller museums to rely on the software, confident that they won't have to commit more resources to frequent upgrades.

Most importantly, the system will be free software (in terms of liberty). The source code and all documentation will be released online under the MIT License, so that museums can be confident that no future entity will be able to change the price or break a contract and stop them from using it. Their hard-entered data will not be trapped, or subject to the whims of commercial interests.

I think that by following such a system, a museum can actually less money and staff resources to achieve their current level of quality, or therefore improve quality significantly within their current budget and resources.

Implementation

I seek a grant to enable the completion of this project. It will take significant work to develop and maintain both sections of the software package, and it will take even more work to produce enough supporting documentation and research to make the package provably useful to a non-technical museum. Once the product is released, it will be possible to continue to support its development and maintenance by selling support and consulting services to larger museums. In order to ensure that the project is useful, I'll need to work hand-in-hand with a museum to fully understand their needs and make sure that all of the features are usable and useful for a real, working museum. The experience of having worked with that museum will allow me to produce a case study documenting the real-world benefits of the system.

The grant is important because I'll need to be able to convince a small museum to work with me. My idea is complex and unconventional, but if I can approach the National Puerto Rican Museum of Arts and Culture with funding already in place, it will be a much easier sell.

Citations

  1. Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials, by Yochai Benkler
  2. Linux Rules Supercomputers, in Forbes Magazine
  3. Grading Wikipedia in the Denver Post, An empirical examination of Wikipedia's credibility in the journal First Monday, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, in Nature.
  4. Edit Staticics for Viking Ships on Wikipedia
  5. Aaron Swartz: Who Writes Wikipedia?
  6. [the Wikipedia verifiability policy, WP:V](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
  7. Steven Dutch at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay's References for College Papers, published before Wikipedia was founded
  8. Sleeping with the Enemy: Wikipedia in the College Classroom, by Cullen J. Chandler and Alison S. Gregory at Lycoming College
  9. My notes from a visit to the Polish Museum of America

References

In the production of this paper, I have referenced and synthesized information from a large number of publications. I've done my best to maintain as complete a list as possible. Here it is.

Project

Here's a short list of people and organizations who might be particularly useful contacts as I go about this process:

Peer Production

I've read a great deal about the concept of peer production in general. Here are some particularly useful sources:

Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler is the most prominent research academic working with peer production. He has produced a great deal of relevant work, but here are some particularly useful and relevant references:

Ben Mako Hill

Ben Mako Hill is a sociologist who also works extensively with peer production. We once had a conversation which was the catalyst for my interest in this field. Here is an incomplete list of publications he's written from which I've drawn inspiration or council for this project:

Wikipedia

As the most relevant example of peer production to this project, Wikipedia is particularly fascinating. I have been collecting scholarly articles about Wikipedia and its production for a long time. Here is a partial list:

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