What is a Commons?

A short talk for

Opening the Field

Walker Art Center

6/2/2010

Michael Edson

Director, Web and New Media Strategy

Smithsonian Institution

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

Note: this short talk was developed for the Walker Art Center's Opening the Field event on June 3rd, 2010. (http://calendar.walkerart.org/event.wac?id=5666) My job was to speak first and give an overview of what a digital commons is or might be. These remarks draw heavily from my work on the Smithsonian's Web and New Media Strategy and the Smithsonian Commons project, and of course on the work of the many giants of the commons movement upon whose shoulders we stand. I've included endnotes and links wherever possible, and there's a list of references at the end. –Michael Edson, 6/2/2010

Update: there's now a video of me presenting this talk at the walker: http://channel.walkerart.org/play/opening-the-field/. My part starts after the introductions, around minute 12. –Michael Edson, 6/15/2010

I'm Michael Edson. I'm the Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the

Smithsonian Institution, and I'm leading a new project called the Smithsonian

Commons. My job this evening is to establish some assertions or givens about

what a digital commons is or might be. Think of me as DJ Mike, laying down a

beat for the def jam to follow…1 I'm about to open up a fire hydrant of ideas on

you, but if you miss something, don't worry, this talk, with footnotes and links, is

up online, along with related talks, papers, and slide shows.

I grew up in Washington, D.C. I was into Art and science, and the Smithsonian

was pretty much the coolest thing around.2

Any time I wanted to, I could walk downtown and just wander in and out of free

museums, letting my curiosity take me wherever it wanted to go. In some ways

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

you could say that I came of age at the Smithsonian—that as I became an

independent young adult, the bricks-and-mortar Smithsonian—demonstrated the

values I came to care about as a fully enfranchised citizen: it’s good to learn, to

research and inquire, to be curious, to draw people into discussion, to provoke and

even disrupt when necessary, to think across disciplines, to create…

I grew up in a city—in a country—that valued these things, and that chose to

express those values by creating and maintaining—with the best tools available to

it in the 19th and 20th centuries—an institution of buildings and staff and experts

and collections and bureaucracy for manufacturing knowledge and delivering

learning to a grateful and attentive public.

And it was good. It helped me become the citizen I am today. But…it was before

the World Wide Web.

The Smithsonian Institution has a new 5-year strategic plan that articulates four

grand challenges.

Unlocking the mysteries of the universe, understanding and sustaining a biodiverse

planet, valuing world cultures, and understanding the American experience. Not a

modest checklist for five years!3

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

And I love this strategy. I love this strategy because it talks about doing difficult,

audacious, important work in society. Work that matters.4

But from where we stand now, deep in the heart of this wonderful rich disruptive

digital age, the crazy new "logic of digital technology"5 raises certain first-order

questions about how we work on these grand challenges.

• Where is this work going to take place?

• What kinds of organization, infrastructure, platforms will be needed to support this work?

• What is the organizational change model? How will change happen? What will change look like when people come to in the morning?

• Who will be the innovators? The connectors? The drivers of change?

• And, ultimately, who will be the beneficiaries?

The tools of the last century will be important to us. But every plot twist, mystery, and love scene in the story of how the Smithsonian will do its job now, seems to weave its way through the idea of a digital Smithsonian Commons.

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

So what is a commons?

A commons is a set of resources maintained in the public sphere for the use and benefit of everyone.

Usually, a commons is created when a property owner decides that a given set of resources—grass for grazing sheep, forests for parkland, software code, or intellectual property—will be more valuable if freely shared than if restricted.

In the law, and in our understanding of the way the world works, we recognize that no idea stands alone, and that all innovation is built on the ideas and innovations of others. When creators, scientists, inventors, educators, artists, researchers, business people, entrepreneurs—when everyone has access to the raw materials of knowledge, innovation flourishes.

Conversely, unnecessarily restricted content is a barrier to innovation. This is the anti-commons, a thicket of difficulties. If you can’t find an idea, can’t understand its context, can’t leverage your social network, however you define it, to share and add value to it, and if you can’t get legal permission to use, re-use, or make it into something new, then knowledge and innovation suffer.

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

Unnecessarily restricted content is like a virus that spreads through the internet, making the scaffolding upon which we build each generation of new ideas less and less stable.

I like to think of a commons as a kind of organized workshop where the raw materials of knowledge and innovation can be found and assembled into new things.6

Or, if you need to build a digital commons, as I do, perhaps it's best to think of a commons as a fortifying gumbo that's made with various combinations of 12 ingredients. Think of the next few minutes as a cooking show, and I will be the perky television host who suggests to you, what you might put in your commons

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

gumbo.

1. Federated

A commons brings things together that would otherwise be separate. The Smithsonian Collections Search Center brings together over 4.2 million object records from more than 23 Smithsonian collection information systems. http://collections.si.edu/search/

2. Designed for you

Software developer and social media thought leader Kathy Sierra says that every user is a hero in their own epic journey.7 The job of the Smithsonian Commons is not to broadcast our accomplishments to a grateful public: it's to help you succeed on your epic quest through life. (See the Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy at http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/The+Smithsonian+Commons+--

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

+A+Place+to+Begin

3. Findable

It doesn't do much good to have a bunch of stuff in a commons if you can't find anything. The crowdsourced stock photo site iStockPhoto does a better job helping me find stuff than any museum, library, or archive site I know. Industrial supplier McMaster Carr is a standout as well. http://isockphoto.com and http://mcmastercarr.com [AR – check link]

4. Shareable

The whole purpose of putting resources into a commons is so that they can be shared and used. A commons is shareable by default. On the Brooklyn Museum Web site, sharing is built right into the platform. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/157722/Morris_Kantor

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

5. Reusable

Intellectual property policies in a commons are uniform and clearly stated so users know, in advance—without having to ask or beg—that they can incorporate resources from the commons into new works. On Flickr, the copyright and permissions are stated clearly, everywhere. http://flickr.com

6. Free

“Free resources are crucial to innovation and creativity” says Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig.8 Free, Findable, and Shareable form a particularly powerful combination. The Internet Archive says on their home page that "like a paper library, we provide free access…" http://www.archive.org

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

7. Bulk Download

Sometimes people need a lot of something, or all of something, to solve a problem. On the Powerhouse Museum's Web site, you can download their entire collection database with one click. http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/download.php

8. Machine Readable

Sometimes you need to be able to write a program to work with data—particularly when you've got a lot of it. 9 The information in a commons needs to be understandable to computer programs—machine readable. Data.gov is designed to encourage digital mashups through machine readable formats. http://www.data.gov

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

9. High Resolution

A commons should make available, for free, the highest quality, highest resolution resources possible. On NASA's Web site, you can download photographs so big that you can see how individual grains of Martian soil were compressed by the wheels of the Mars Rover. The paltry images on most museum Web sites thwart the efforts of researchers and enthusiasts, and undermine our attempts to let the drama and importance of our collections shine through.http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/panoramas/spirit/

10. Collaboration without Control

Because resources are free, high quality, and sharing and reuse are encouraged, new kinds of collaborative work can take place—are taking place—without needing to involve lawyers, contracts, and bureaucrats.

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody, writes “we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organization …Getting the free and ready participation of a large, distributed group with a variety of skills has gone from impossible to simple.”10

MIT Open Courseware has case studies of exactly these kinds of collaborations. http://ocw.mit.edu and http://ocw.mit.edu/about/ocw-stories/triatno-yudo-harjoko/

11. Network Effects

In a commons designed with network effects in mind you get a virtuous cycle: the more the commons is used, the better it becomes, and the better it becomes, the more people will find and use it. Over 180,000 people have added map data to the OpenStreetMap project11, and those contributions have created a powerful resource that can be used and re-used by anyone, for free. http://www.openstreetmap.org/

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

12. The Public Domain

The public domain is important. James Boyle writes that the Public Domain is not “some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The public domain is the place where we quarry the building blocks of our culture.”12

13. Trust

After thinking about these 12 dimensions for a couple of months I've decided that there's a 13th, and that's trust.

Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly said "the network economy is founded on technology, but can only be built on relationships. It starts with chips and ends with trust."13

The Smithsonian is in the forever business. By putting something in the Smithsonian Commons—be it a cultural treasure, or a folk song, a fossil of a bug, a lecture, or a community—we're asking people to trust us. We're not going to scam you. We're not going to violate your privacy. We're going to be honest about what we do and don't know, we're going to be open to new ideas and points of view, we're going to help each other figure out the world, and these promises are good,

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

forever. Museums and libraries and archives some of the few organizations in our culture that enter into those kinds of promises, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

This, then, is the 13 ingredient gumbo

We are just starting the process of building the Smithsonian Commons—it's very complex and there are a lot of unknowns and surprises down the road.

To help people imagine how the Smithsonian Commons will help us all achieve our goals and to help us think through the steps of building and refining this vision we've built a series of prototypes—little movies really—that show what the future commons might look like as seen through the eyes of four different kinds of users:

A museum visitor a 4th grade teacher gathering materials about Theodore Roosevelt for a

classroom activity

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

a millennial, or digital native, who is mostly seeing Smithsonian content out on the social Web

and an amateur astronomer, a citizen scientist who is incorporating Smithsonian research into his own Web projects and mashups

Let me end my part of tonight's festivities by showing you this prototype of how an amateur astronomer might use the Smithsonian Commons. (Available soon at http://www.si.edu/commons.)

***

Further Reading

These works were not directly cited, but may be of interest.

Edson M. (2009) Imagining the Smithsonian Commons. http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/cil-2009-michael-edson-text-version Video: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1327813

Edson, M., and R. Cherry, Museum Commons. Tragedy or Enlightened Self-Interest?. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2010: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Published March 31, 2010. Consulted April 6, 2010. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/edson-cherry/edson-cherry.html and on slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/museum-commons-a-professional-interaction-museums-and-the-web-2010-michael-edson-and-rich-cherry

And I'm always surprised when I find I haven't cited either Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0" or Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. They're required reading for those who seek to be well informed about digital strategy and culture.

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail. November, 2004. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html (This is the starter article from Wired magazine. For more, I recommend his book of the same name.)

O'Reilly, Tim. "Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software." O'Reilly.com. 9/30/2005. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Works Cited

Boyle, James. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. New Haven and

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Michael Edson: What is a Commons? Remarks for Opening the FieldWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 6/3/2010

London: Yale University Press, 2008.

Eight Principles of Open Government Data. December, 2007. http://resource.org/8_principles.html

Fair Use in the U.S. Economy. Computer and Communications Industry Association, 4/27/2010. http://www.ccianet.org/index.asp?sid=5&artid=158

Green, David L. Ed. iQuote: Brilliance and Banter from the Internet Age. CT: Lyons Press, 2008

Kamenetz, Anya, DIY U: Edpunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont. 2010.

Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random House, 2001.

Online Maps: Everyman Offers New Directions. New York Times, 11/16/2009. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/technology/internet/17maps.html?_r=1

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody. New York: Hyperion, 2008.

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1 That's going to sound so wonderfully wrong when I say it from the stage.2 It was like a little mini Internet—or maybe more accurately, a little Microsoft Encarta—before either of those things existed…3 I jest. We don't imagine that we're going to accomplish these four grand challenges and be done with them in 5 years. It's a process. The Smithsonian's 5-year strategic plan is at http://www.si.edu/about 4 With all due credit to Tim O'Reilly's ideas on "doing work that matters." http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html 5 Kamenetz, p. XI6 Note that in a physical commons like your wonderful Walker Open Field, you have a competition for physical resources. Only so many sheep can graze in a single pasture before it's all used up. If I choose to have a rock concert in one corner of the commons it might spoil your poetry reading at the other end. This is where the phrase "the tragedy of the commons" comes from, but lawyers say that digital resources in a commons are "non-rivalrous"—there's no rivalry for them. We can all download all the pictures in my commons over and over again and they never run out. All of our sheep can eat the same digital grass to their heart's content.7 From Twitter, @kathysierra, 11/5/2009: "I'm your user. I'm supposed to be the protagonist. I'm on a hero's hourney. Your company should be the mentor/helpful sidekick. Not an orc." Kathy's Web site is Creating Passionate Users: http://headrush.typepad.com/8 Lessig, p. 149 I borrowed this principle from the Eight Principles of Open Government Data. 10 Shirky, p 2111 New York Times, 11/16/2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/technology/internet/17maps.html?_r=1 12 Boyle, p. 40. The Computer & Communications Industry Association estimates that public domain, fair use, and other forms of non-copyright content contributed $4.7 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2007, and industries that benefit from this type of intellectual property employ 1 in six workers in the U.S. An example of public domain content is the endless stream of meteorological data that NOAA pumps into the public domain. Weather.com, the Weather Channel, and almost every weather forecast you've ever seen can trace its ancestry back to public domain data from this government agency.13 Green p. 50