Video and transcript from my 2016 TEDx talk about the vision for the Museum for the United Nations, top-down and bottom-up design, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the potential of a new kind of museum in society, dedicated to catalyzing action and change. I gave this talk after about a year on the project, at a moment when I/we were just beginning to understand what this museum should be.
Transcript
Where do we learn to become citizens? To practice thinking about the future? To develop the empathy, and compassion, and ultimately the courage and wisdom to act?
I was sitting in my office a few months ago when I got an unusual email message.
Dear Mr. Edson, it read, would you please join us at the United Nations in New York City to help create the vision for a new institution we are calling the UN Live Museum for Humanity.
UN Live will be a museum, civic space and headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark; a network of partner institutions and public venues throughout the world; and a global digital presence, free and open to everyone on Earth.
The goal of UN Live will be to help people everywhere become a part of the work and vision of the United Nations and to catalyze global effort towards achieving its goals.
And after reading that message a few times to make sure it was really addressed to me, and taking a walk to calm myself down, I replied, yes, I would be delighted to attend the meeting at UN headquarters in New York, thank-you-very-much.
Then I went online to see what I could learn.
Like many people, I suspect, I was largely ignorant about what the UN really is and what it does.
[SLIDE: UN first general assembly]
The United Nations was founded in 1945 to prevent another global war in the aftermath of World War II. 51 nations signed the original treaty, and at the time the population of Earth was only 2 billion people.
[SLIDE: United Nations Radio]
State-of-the-art information technology was the telegraph and short wave radio. Delegates took steamships to attend the first meeting of the general assembly in san francisco.
Today, 193 member states represent the world’s 7 billion people.
[Slide: UN Today]
And the UN’s portfolio includes peacekeeping, economic and social development, the environment, human rights, and humanitarian work.
[SLIDE: SDGs]
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals articulate 17 global challenges and 169 specific targets to reach by 2030.
It’s an incredible list. Ending extreme poverty. Ending hunger. Establishing gender equality. Don’t feel bad if seeing this knocks you back in your seats or makes you laugh a little - - That laughter is the sound of your brain getting your body ready to take action!
And that’s what we want!
[SLIDE: UN delegate from Estonia and child]
The UN belongs to all of us - - and it needs all of us. It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it is hard to imagine a world without it, and over the last 7 decades it has become one of humankind’s most important achievements.
The UN is dedicated, from the first words of its original charter, to “We the peoples” - - but currently it’s very difficult for “we the people” to act as stakeholders. There is no public place, online or anywhere in the world, where you can touch the UN, learn about it with your mind and your senses, where it welcomes you as a partner, and where you can become a part of its work.
[SLIDE: BLANK/BLACK slide]
The UN was founded, by necessity, to be an organization of governments relating to governments. “nation-to-nation”, as you might say. But we live, increasingly in a “person to person” or “peer-to-peer” world.
A world in which many of the problems, and many of the solutions, lie outside the domain of governments and traditional institutions.
Now don’t get me wrong, the work of Institutions is immensely important. When you need to focus a lot of effort on a task for a long period of time, when you need to build trust, not for a day or two, but across generations.... Or when you need public transparency, public accountability, or when you need to act in the interest of all of society, even the disadvantaged and those without a strong voice of their own - - then there’s nothing like an Institution.
But the work of institutions, alone, is not enough in an age that is defined by continuous accelerating change - - And when new ways have opened up for us to work and learn together at a global scale.
And the scale of that can be amazing.
A few years ago, Dr. Mitchell Dunier of Princeton University decided to teach his Introduction to Sociology class to anyone in the world, for free, over the World Wide Web.
[Slide: 40,000 and 130]
40,000 students from 113 countries signed up. And the most remarkable thing about it wasn’t that so many people from so many countries wanted to study sociology...
[Slide: study groups]
It was the friendships that formed between students, and the local study groups formed spontaneously in pubs and living rooms and libraries all over the world - - and it was the quantity and quality of feedback that such a diverse and global group of students channelled back into the teaching process - - Dr. Dunier said that within a few weeks of starting the course, had received more substantive feedback on his ideas and his teaching than he had received in his entire career of teaching in a traditional classroom setting at Princeton.
[SLIDE: BLANK/BLACK slide]
So there is amazing potential in this huge scale of online access and dialogue, but sometimes we worry that the work of citizens, peer-to-peer, can feel uncoordinated, incomplete, and superficial. More about “liking” a cause on Facebook than about solving a real problem.
And I think this presents one of the defining challenges of our time: we have so much important work to do and there is so much joy and fun to be had - - can we get the strength and stamina of institutions - - AND - - the scale and creativity of the crowd - - working together on things that matter to all of us?
[-----------------------------]
As I read and re-read that email from UN Live, I was not surprised by the questions they were asking about institutions, and citizenship, and participation at a global scale.
I had been thinking about these issues for many years while working at the Smithsonian Institution,
[SLIDE: Smithsonian]
the world’s largest museum and research complex, just across the river from here in Washington, DC. I worked there for 25 years, first, cleaning plexiglas for exhibitions, and later as a digital strategist helping to lead the Smithsonian into the connected age.
The Smithsonian has 6,000 employees, 137 million physical objects in its collections, and a mission of “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” It flies satellites in outer space for NASA; it preserves extinct languages; it has produced thousands upon thousands of free public exhibitions about history, culture, and science...It goes on and on.
And yet what my colleagues and I discovered, as we opened the Smithsonian to the Internet over the last two decades, was that no matter how brilliant we were, how expert our researchers were, how much they knew, how hard they worked, how much money we spent - -
Our “audience” - - our network - - which includes 6 year olds and Nobel laureates - - almost always knew more and could do more than we could on our own.
[SLIDE: BLANK/BLACK slide]
At a certain point this was just a matter of numbers. Today, more than 3.4 billion people have Internet access. Even the largest, most brilliant institutions can not match the creativity and energy of their audience when that audience is part of a network that connects almost half the people on Earth.
[---------------------------------------]
All of this was racing through my mind as sat in my office that day reading and re-reading the invitation from the people at UN Live. And a few weeks later
[SLIDE: UN Flags]
I found myself walking past the flags and up the steps into UN headquarters to spend a day with an eclectic group of artists, diplomats, technologists, and entrepreneurs - - all of us trying to imagine a new kind of institution that would advance and support the work of the UN - - not from the top down, through governments and treaties and diplomacy between nations - - the UN already does that - - but by adding to that capacity from the bottom-up, by connecting ordinary people to the mission of the UN, and to each other, through a global museum.
UN Live could not be a traditional museum in the sense of endless hallways full of fossils and old paintings - - though I do love those kinds of places.
[SLIDE: MUSEUM CROWD]
UN Live would need exhibitions, but it would also be a gathering place, a lab, a hub, a creative place space, and a civic classroom that would invite the public to learn with their minds and their senses - - not just as spectators, but as full participants in the UN’s mission, whether they were in Copenhagen or Buenos Aires or anywhere in the world.
It struck me very clearly that day, that an institution like UN Live could foster a new sense of global citizenship and create a new bond between the UN and billions of the people it was founded to serve.
And so not only did I attend the meeting in New York that day, but I became part of the small founding team that is working to bring UN Live to life.
[SLIDE: UNLIVE LOGO]
We are a small team, and a young project, and we have a lot to learn, but UN Live already has a strong group of supporters: artist Olafur Eliason, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and his three predecessors, and the leaders of UNESCO, UNICEF, the UN Development Program, and the High Commissioner of Refugees.
And even as we speak, the UN General Assembly is considering a resolution to endorse the creation of the UN Live Museum.
UN Live will come at no cost to the UN: This project is currently being supported by major foundations in Denmark, and it has the backing of the Danish and Copenhagen City governments. I think of this project as a gift from them - - from us - - to the world.
[----------------------------------------]
[SLIDE: BLANK/BLACK slide]
I love the theme of this conference: Future Tense. In a few minutes the doors of this auditorium will open and we’ll walk outside and begin making the future together, as neighbors and citizens and friends.
The UN is 70 years old. It has accomplished so much, but what will we say about the UN 70 years from now? Or 700? What does that future look like? What do we want that story to be?
I think it will be a story about citizenship, and empathy, and compassion, and learning to have the courage and wisdom to act.
And I think UN Live can help that story to come true.
Image Credits
All images accessed June 2, 2016
1.
CC-BY-NC
United Nations Photo
First General Assembly
The First Session of the United Nations General Assembly opened on the 10th January 1946 at Central Hall in London.
Clement Attlee, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, addressing the General Assembly. On the podium to the rear, from top right are: Trygve Lie, First Secretary-General of the United Nations: Paul Henri Spaak of Belgium, First President of the GA; and Andrew Cordier, Executive Assistant to the Secretary-General.
UN Photo/Marcel Bolomey
Photo Date: 10/01/1946
Photo # 166000
2.
CC-BY-NC
United Nations Photo
World Radio Day
Radio coverage of United Nations activities is provided by the Department of Public Information and includes short-wave broadcasts of important meetings as well as daily news broadcasts in the five official languages - English, French, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.
In the radio booth of the Security Council Chamber during a meeting of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission are a United Nations Radio Division technician at control panel and a narrator. Lake Success, New York.
UN Photo
19 March 1947
Photo # 291849
2.
By Patrick Gruban, cropped and downsampled by Pine - originally posted to Flickr as UN General Assembly, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4806869
3.
Sustainable Development Goals
Screen capture from
http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/uploads/SDGs-GlobalGoalsForSustainableDevelopment-05.jpg
4.
CC-BY-NC
United Nations Photo
Assembly Proclaims Decade of Action on Nutrition, Adopts Fifth Committee Texts
The General Assembly appointed a new advisory body member, adopted a package of texts recommended by its Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) and decided to proclaim 2016-2025 the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition.
Gert Auväärt (Estonia), Rapporteur of the Fifth Committee, with a young guest ahead of the Assembly meeting.
UN Photo/Manuel Elias
01 April 2016
United Nations, New York
Photo # 669617
4.
CC-BY-SA
Nicola Sap De Mitri
Studying in Starbucks
Singapore 4 oct 2013
5.
CC-BY-NC
William Beem Follow
Natural History
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
6.
By Steve Cadman CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AThe_United_Nations_Secretariat_Building.jpg
7.
CC-BY-NC
Source: https://flic.kr/p/adDe8D
NASA HQ PHOTO
STS-135 New York City Visit (20110816004HQ)
Hundreds of onlookers watch a presentation by the crew of STS-135, Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Doug Hurley, and Mission Specialists Sandra Mangnus and Rex Walheim in the Hall of Universe at American Museum of Natural History, Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011, in New York City. The crew from space shuttle Atlantis (STS-135) is in New York City for a three-day visit. Photo Credit: (NASA/Paul E. Alers)