This is the second part of an article looking at the authorial voice and what we can and can’t do with it.

Okay, deep breath…

So you’re a major cultural institution; you’ve got fantastic content and you’re an authority on it (well, as much as you can be these days). What happens when your most precious commodity leaks out online and starts appearing all over the place? What happens when the general public start to - gulp - edit it?

What can you do? Luckily there’s a simple answer to this one: nothing. You can’t do anything at all. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We can’t control the content other people generate, even if it borrows heavily on our own work (although certain ultra-rich authors might disagree with that). The cost involved in having staff trawl the web for doctored content and then try to fix it would be enormous - and pointless.

So if we accept that we have no control over this unauthorised content, we must ensure that there exists a definitive set of our ‘official’ content. If a Wikipedia article on a famous painting in your collection is wrong, that’s clearly not great. You can try policing all of those articles wherever they crop up but it’s probably easier to paint numbers onto waves. Better to provide tools that enable wikis and others to link back to your site - where you can provide your definitive guide to the work. You can’t really do much more than tell users where your opinion is held - and protect that site like a fortress!

Case in point - on a previous blog I wanted to include an image from a major institution’s collection, clearly mark it as their copyright and provide a link back into their online collection. But it turns out I can’t do that without emailing them, waiting for a response and possibly even paying them. I simply don’t have time for that, and of course there are lots of similar (free) images around. Result: they lost a link and free publicity.

We can’t stop people taking our content and doing what they want with it. And so the easier we make it for users to legitimately use or reference our content - in a way that you can control e.g. an object widget that users can embed in their own pages - the more likely they are to do so. A great commercial example of this is the iTunes Music Store. Why pay for a song that is wrapped up in DRM when you can ‘borrow’ one from peer-to-peer networks? Well, using those networks can be difficult (I am told) you have no guarantees as to the quality of the content you are accessing, download times vary, connections often drop… and the result is that Apple sell billions of songs a year. In this case - for the majority of users - it’s more work to break the law than to follow it.

So be as open as you can with your content but know where to draw the line. And User Generated Content? Well it has a place - although personally I’m not that interested in what Bernard from Skipton-Under-Lyme thinks of Marriage a la Mode - provided there is no confusion between users’ opinions and the curatorial one.

Rather than harvesting individual opinions it is perhaps more interesting to find out what society in general thinks of art - or as large a section of it as you can canvas. With that in mind do have a look at Brooklyn Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Click! in which they are creating a public-curated gallery based on online submissions and voting. Anyone can vote; the process is simple, effective and quite eye opening. It could be a triumph, it could be a disaster - but it’s a fascinating experiment and one which I will watch with interest.

And he takes another breath at last!

Something that keeps cropping up whenever I meet with museum and gallery professionals is the tricky issue of Authorial Voice (caps added to make it sound more… er… authoritative).

The traditional model has of course always been: we tell you what we believe… and you (the public) believe us. The explosion of online content sources such as Wikipedia has put a rather large dent in this model; users have access to so much information (and not all of it good) that they are perhaps less likely to accept what institutions tell them at face value. Or, to put it another way, a dialogue is beginning to happen between institutions and users. And that’s a good thing.

My naughty link to the questionable content at the Creationist Museum leads to an important point. Some institutions in America are now adding ‘we believe’ to long-held absolute positions, like evolution. There is an opposing belief - and if cultural institutions scoff and ignore they will only help to legitimise it. We need to engage with the argument and prove our point.

Users have access to unparalleled amounts of content; this is a new thing, it’s a good thing but it’s never happened on anything like this scale before. The more viewpoints we can access, the more complicated the cultural landscape becomes - and therefore it is all the more important that museums and galleries are seen to take a firm but well-reasoned - and appropriately open - position.

But what happens when the content leaves the institution and Joe Public gets their hands on it? I’ll look at that in my next post, You’re wrong and I’ll write (clever, eh?)

There’s an interesting post by Nina Simon on her Museum 2.0 blog about how museums can learn from the gaming community about engaging with their community influencers.

Community influencers operate in the social space that surrounds a game and often have more influence with other users than those who have high scores. They are people who are highly engaged with the game, either positively or negatively and have “leadership, empathy for what people like and don’t like, ability to sooth ruffled feathers, articulate.”

With Museums increasingly operating in a virtual community whether they actively support them or not (visitor photos on Flickr, reviews on Trip Advisor, blog postings etc), there is an opportunity for Museums to reach out to their community influencers and engage with them, either as informal advocates or providers of valued feedback.

http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007/09/game-friday-supporting-community.html

If engagement is the key to the Web 2.0 (and Media 2.0) world - and that’s what we believe - then what are the implications ? What are the rules of this new world ?

Reviewing our own experience (over twenty years and hundreds of projects) and what we know of the industry at large, we have developed a proposal: four rules for success in the world of Web 2.0 and Media 2.0.

Our four proposed rules are as follows :-

1. Be engaging - reach out, garner attention, give the network reasons to engage with you
2. Be engaged - join in, be part of the larger process, grow your network and help to grow the network as a whole
3. Be authentic - remember who you are and take the process to heart
4. Be agile - things are happening quickly, respond quickly and economically

The first rule addresses the economy of attention - interactive media are engaging media and people now expect you to compete for their attention and reward it when you get it.

The second rule addresses the network economy - as the network created by online media grows it brings bigger and bigger rewards for those who can work with it effectively.

The third rule is a rider to the first two and likely applies to any organisation working in a time of accelerated change - but it is particularly important in a media-saturated world where organisations and people have enormous freedom over where they go and how they present themselves (and will therefore encounter many challenges to their sense of identity).

Lastly, the fourth rule speaks to the unprecedented speed with which the Web 2.0 world is developing and the opportunities it provides for rapid, collaborative, development.

As we said above, we arrived at this set of rules by reviewing the past, out of that review came a dozen or so principles which seemed to apply pretty universally. The process of condensing that larger set down to these four keys was then surprisingly quick and the result feels right and has been pleasingly robust - i.e. working with the four rules has confirmed for us their importance and primacy. Time will show how well they stand up when more widely publicised and applied.

The four rules will each be the subject of forthcoming articles.

MySpace is signing up 250,000 new users daily - March 2006 [source]

“Media companies don’t control the conversation anymore…” Rupert Murdoch 2007-05-07 [source]

The world where organisations controlled access to the media and operated on a ‘we publish; you consume‘ basis is disappearing. The impact of what has been called ‘Web 2.0′, as seen in blogs like this one, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, open source software, and social networking, is all around us.

Maybe that is obvious, but it is also unprecedented. The internet, i.e. the world’s first truly global network, has recently been supercharged: first by growth in bandwidth; secondly by a profusion of connected multimedia devices; and thirdly by an epidemic of social networking systems.

So Rupert Murdoch is right: these changes are profoundly important. This is not just about Web 2.0 it’s about Media 2.0. The impact extends far beyond the worldwide web. But if so, how should we respond?

Trying to find an answer we have been asking ourselves some questions :-

Cogapp has been working with interactive media for over twenty years, what have we been doing? What have we been doing for our clients? What have our clients been trying to achieve for their organisations? And what more can we all do now?

Our conclusion is that the answer to these questions lies in a practice - something that we have (all) been doing for the longest time but which now needs to be moved up-front and centre, to become the theme of our work and for our industry generally.

We are talking about ‘engagement’: a practice of open, active, mutual interaction, extended over time, in a group of more or less equal participants, undertaken for mutual benefit.

[For a discussion and definition of customer engagement, a current hot topic in brand marketing, see the excellent Wikipedia article on Customer Engagement. The engagement we are talking about goes wider than brands and customers.]

Engagement turns out to be what people want, what the new media can deliver and also the key to their development.

We arrived at ‘engagement’ by reviewing our past projects, examining what was good about them (or bad) and why.

Where we could point to success, ‘engagement’ was the word that kept cropping up: engagement between ourselves and our clients, engagement between our clients and their communities; the desire to stimulate engagement as a gateway to learning; the need for programmers to engage deeply with their technology; the use of social networking systems to stimulate engagement within a community.

It turns out that interactive media are the engaging media - engagement is what interactive media can deliver.

And as the interactive media become pervasive and predominant, engagement becomes a public expectation. Modern communities expect organisations to engage with them. Engagement is not just an opportunity for organisations it is also a challenge to which they have to rise.

Engagement is the key to the success of our products and the key to the success of our projects. Where our products create engagement between an organisation and its community they succeed, where engagement fails they fail. Similarly, engagement at all levels and between all stake holders turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be critical to success of the corresponding development projects.

Since we have adopted engagement as our theme we have found it endlessly useful. Useful for diagnosing how problems have arisen and how to fix them and also creative, suggestive of new ideas for projects and new ways of tackling them.

In the next post we’ll set out the four rules we are using to help us apply the theory of engagement to our work.