David Bowie
“My policy has been that as soon as a system or process works, it’s out of date…I move on to another area.”
Ask Me Anything: Reddit AMA January 12
On January 12th I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) on MuseumPros, a group of over 1,800 museum professionals “dedicated to people who work in GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives & museums).”
Update: post questions and follow along here.
I’ll be participating alongside my colleagues Ed Rodley and Emily Lytle-Painter. Blaire Moskowitz (aka Redpotato / @blaireMoskowitz) and Scott Chamness (aka Eistean) will moderate and answer questions too.
http://Reddit.com/r/MuseumPros
I think the general idea is that we’ll let questions accumulate and be upvoted through the middle of January 12th (in the North American time zones) then Ed, Emily, Scott, Blaire and I will really start engaging from mid-day onward. (I myself will be in and out of the AMA several times during the afternoon and into the night.)
If you have questions about the AMA or getting started with Reddit, please give us a shout!
Many thanks to Scott and Blaire, both for including me in this awesome event and for leading and sustaining MuseumPros over time.
See you tomorrow.
Joining the UN Live Museum for Humanity
On January 1st I’ll be leaving the Smithsonian Institution to become part of the founding team for a new institution, the United Nations Live, Museum for Humanity, currently being envisioned for Copenhagen, Denmark.
In addition to a physical building in Copenhagen, UN Live will include a global network of peer institutions, small and large scale programs, and, of course, a robust global digital presence. A UN resolution to charter the institution is currently under development in consultation with the Member States.
In my day-to-day work I’ll join Executive Director Jan Mattsson, Head of Secretariat Henrik Skovby, Project Director Jesper Lindhardt, Project Manager Emil Rostgaard Schelde, and Project Associates Anders Kjøller-Hansen and Oskar Harmsen. Artist Olafur Eliasson has played a key role in developing the creative concept for the institution, and many other remarkable people are contributing their time and expertise to the project.
My primary responsibility for the next six months will be to help pull all of this expertise and creativity together, broaden the network of contributors, and refine the overarching scope and vision for the institution.
My working title will be Associate Director / Head of Digital, UN Live Museum. The project team is based in Copenhagen but I’ll stay on the East Coast of the USA for now.
UN Live is in its early phases, but Jan, Henrik, Jesper, Olafur and the rest of the team and community have done a jaw-droppingly spectacular job in bringing this concept from nothing to something tangible, inspiring, and worthy in a very short amount of time. I can only hope to do justice to their vision.
Love letter to learning
“Society is investing in you so that you can help solve the many challenges we are going to face in the coming decades, from profound technological challenges to helping people with the age-old search for human happiness and meaning.”
The article reports that Coward is being fired for his unconventional approach to teaching, despite its enormous popularity.
“I used to think it was about (their) egos, but in fact it’s about keeping control,” he said.
New work
“Fire and Frost,” My essay for David Bollier and Silke Helfrich new anthology, Patterns of Commoning is now up in both English and German. Buy this excellent book now.
My essay Hidden collections for everyone is up on CLIR’s blog now. It’s about global audiences and some work I’ve done recently through freelancer.com with people in Mexico, the Ukraine, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria and Ghana. The essay is published as an epilogue to Collaboration, Innovation, and Models: Proceedings of the CLIR Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives Symposium, released earlier this week.
Dark Matter, which I wrote in 2014 for the Code | Words project, has now been published in an anthology for the project by Museums Etc. Ed Rodley did a tremendous job keeping this project alive, and though I haven’t received my copy yet it looks like a very handsome publication from what I can see online. Proceeds from copies bought through this link will support a scholarship fund for the Museum Computer Network conference.
Dark Matter has also been published in Luis Mendes’s crowdfunded bilingual (Portuguese/English) anthology Reprogramme. Definitely buy this book.
How Change Happens, my slides explaining the change model behind the Openlab Workshop concept, was featured on the Slideshare home page last week. It’s been viewed in 116 countries so far.
"Our values and yearnings"
“It’s impossible to gaze at the photos of Pluto sent back by the New Horizons spacecraft, and not be awash with wonder at the marvels of nature and the daring behind our choice to explore it. […] It matters not that [New Horizons] is a machine: We made it, which means it embodies our values and yearnings and speaks to our sense of ourselves as fully as any painting or cathedral might. We anthropomorphize the machines, as we should.”
Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. Licensed under Public Domain via Creative Commons (link)
Thanks to @DarrenMilligan for the find.
Steal it back
“The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.”
The full poem:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back
"They understood the Internet as a set of values"
From a book talk with Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, May 2, 2013 https://youtu.be/z3Ynp2gjfQY
Walter Isaacson: But does technology eventually make democracy inevitable?
Jared Cohen: One of the observations that we actually came away with was from Myanmar. We’re in Myanmar about a little over a month ago. Less than one percent of the population has access to the Internet. Up until eighteen months ago it was one of the worst dictatorships in the entire world. Now it’s in some kind of transition, still very much speculative, about whether it’s a democratic transition.
What was interesting about Myanmar and perhaps something that shocked even us is even though less than one percent of the population has access to the Internet, everybody had heard of it.
And they understood the Internet as a set of values, as a concept, as an idea, even before they had experienced it as a user, or as a tool.
And their understanding of the internet was not based on a Chinese interpretation of the Internet, it was not based on an autocrat’s version of the internet, they understood it in terms of it its western values of the free flow of information and civil liberties.
And what that means to us is you have 57 percent of the world’s population living under some kind of an autocracy. What happens when their regimes try to create an autocratic internet that doesn’t correspond with their democratic understanding of what it should be? What does that clash look like?
We don't know the answer to that yet.
“Mars is going to need a global communications system, too.”
Even wider destinies
“A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. … It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces.”
“There are only two numbers on the Internet: infinity and zero.”
“You know, there is no future tense in the Finnish language. While in English or German you might say, ‘I am going to do this or that,’ or ‘I shall have done that,’ a Finn would say, ‘How can you trust people who have different ways of talking about the future? Either you do it, and consider it done, or not.”
“For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few…It would be much simpler to take home a few floppy disks tucked into an attaché case.”
Badass
“Technical Definition of Badass: Given a representative task in the domain, a badass performs in a superior way, more reliably.”
Sierra continues:
Experts are what they do not just what they know.
It's what they do with what they know.
And it's their ability to do it again and again and again.
Expert/badass performance is both superior and more consistent than the performance of those who are knowledgeable and experienced but not producing expert results.
Experts make better choices than others.
“Time is that which makes contradictions possible.”
“You can’t solve a political problem with an engineering solution.”
“There are two main lessons: One is that you can’t solve a political problem with an engineering solution. And [second] you can only engineer so many 9s on the end of 99.999% sure it’s going to be OK. When you’re trying to make guarantees about 10,000 years, it just doesn’t work. There’s always a hole in your theory. So, it’s actually better to come up with a series of century theories than to come up with one 10,000 year theory.”
“She changed color beneath my touch.”
"The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine.
As we gazed into each other’s eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers, latching on with first dozens, then hundreds of her sensitive, dexterous suckers. They felt like an alien’s kiss — at once a probe and a caress. Although she can taste with all of her skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom. When I stroked her soft head with my fingertips, she changed color beneath my touch, her ruby-flecked skin going white and smooth.
Athena was remarkably gentle with me — even as she began to transfer her grip from her smaller, outer suckers to the larger ones. She seemed to be slowly but steadily pulling me into her tank. Had it been big enough to accommodate my body, I would have gone in willingly."
— Adapted from Deep Intellect by Sy Montgomery, Orion Magazine, February 2015. Athena is a forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus in the New England Aquarium in Boston.
Sclerotic, unchanging, and poorly led
“There’s some kind of a problem here. People are coming out of these universities, they’re very very ready to work in organizations that are interesting and powerful and which listen to them and give them what they need…and they change the world. And the problem is that almost everyone who comes out of undergraduate and graduate school finds the organizations that they join [to be] sclerotic, unchanging, poorly lead… It’s a huge sort of whack to these young people. We’ve got a disconnect between the training and the inspiration of our young people and the institutions and organizations that they are joining.”
“We don’t go on because we’re ready. We go on because it’s 11:30.”