Connected Audience Conference — slides, references, and notes

Image of program description listing speakers

Thursday I’ll present a talk at Connected Audience 2025: Factors, Challenges and Opportunities of Cultural Participation for Youth sponsored by the IfKT, Institute for Cultural Participation Research (Institut für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung), Berlin.

The session will be moderated by Ryan Auster of the Museum of Science, Boston, with Kaly Halkawt Lundström of Stockholm University and Dimitra Christidou and Sofie Amiri from the National Museum, Oslo, Norway.

My contribution will be about why we need to create new kinds of museum institutions — everywhere, urgently, starting yesterday — that support young people as legitimate “doers” and problem-solvers in society, and how we approached developing the voice, know-how, and agency of of our visitors at the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai.

I’ll post the full talk (both shortened and full versions) as well as slides, notes, and a transcript below.

Slides and Video

Four thumbnails representing the slides, video, and transcript

References

“The right to the future tense”

This is one of the recurring themes of Shoshana Zuboff’s stunning 2018 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Honestly, Google’s AI did a better job summarizing this concept than any single source I’ve found, including Zuboff’s book iteslf: Shoshana Zuboff defines the "right to the future tense" as the fundamental human ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future. It is the essence of free will, autonomy, and the ability to make meaningful choices about one's life. Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism, which involves companies using data to control and predict behavior, encroaches upon this right by limiting individual agency and autonomy. (Google Gemini on May 18, 2025, citing an interview with Zuboff in The Harvard Gazette and a book review on Taylor & Francis Online.)

“Information-deficit model of behavior change.” Wikipedia.

“The knowing-doing gap”

Jose Antonio Gordillo Martorell, Founder and CEO of Cultural Inquiry

Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation

On the Opening of the Museum of Solutions (my blog; linkedIn)

Webinar, Create Dangerously: Museums in the Age of Action

via NEMO — the Network of European Museum Organizations, 14 February 2023 (Video, slides and background)

What Are We Missing? Libraries and AI

Computers In Libraries 2025. Leslie Weir and Claire McGuire on stage with Erik Boekesteijn on the video link, Washington, DC. CC-BY

Updated March 30, 2025 at 4:27pm EST.

(Notes and references are at the bottom of the post.)

What Are We Missing? Libraries and AI? (Google Slides or pdf) was my short provocation for the March 27th Computers in Libraries keynote panel.

I made the following 5 assertions regarding the library sector’s response to AI.

  1. At the heart of librarianship is a Jeffersonian/Franklinian bond between a librarian and a citizen.*
    This bond serves a profound purpose in democracy & human rights.

  2. AI, developed by/for narrow, private/governmental interests, drives a wedge between librarian, citizen, and democracy.
    We are in the midst of a cultural revolution, not yet usefully recognized by public intellectuals, that cuts at the heart of our Jeffersonian/Franklinian bond. AI is one of the drivers of, and characters in, this revolution.

  3. We are only investigating a small subset of AI’s scope and impact.
    As we try to understand the impact of AI on our societal purpose, we are making a “thinking error” that restricts our vision: We are primarily considering AI as an assistive technology that helps with our standard modus operandi, which is only a small subset of AI's consequences for librarianship and democracy.

  4. We are misjudging the speed of AI’s emergence and the intentions of its primary owners.
    AI is emerging fast — more quickly than institutions can typically react; Big Tech has unprecedented power/wealth and a poor track record vis-a-vis culture, democracy, and human rights.

  5. We have an obligation to intervene on behalf of our Jeffersonian/Franklinian purpose.
    We have the nascent skills, community, and mandate to act, as well as a history of involvement in issues of societal importance.

Action is critically important. See the link below for more info about a "23 Things" for AI.

* For readers not steeped in the lore of American librarianship, Benjamin Franklin is credited as the inventor of the free lending library. Thomas Jefferson advanced the idea that a well-educated and informed populace was essential for the success of a democratic republic.)

Notes and references

Program

Program description (CIL 2025 website), featuring Claire McGuire (IFLA), Leslie Weir (Director of Libraries and Archives Canada and president elect of IFLA), Erik Boekesteijn (National Library of the Netherlands), and me.

Get involved — 23 Things

My Slides

What Are We Missing About AI? (Google Slides or pdf)

References for the slides

Matrix Diagram (above)

  • This is the chart I showed to illustrate how we’re primarily talking about AI as an “assistive” technology — basically as an individual/office productivity tool, while more-or-less ignoring AI that has a higher level of cognitive ability/utility or a broader scope of societal impact. Here’s the full chart in various manifestations on Google Sheets.
    I used the following resources to come up with these hierarchies,

Other works referenced and cited

Anything else? Feel free to ask!! (Link to my contact me page.)

References for European Heritage Hub Forum, Bucharest

Just scrapping together a quick list of references for my talk today at the European Cultural Heritage Summit in Bucharest.

This was an event organized by the Europeana Foundation and the European Heritage Hub in association with Europa Nostra.

The topic was an exploration of the role of digital cultural heritage in the triple transition of Europe (digital, green, and social).

My role was to present a short provocation advocating for the daring, urgent use of cultural infrastructure to catalyze global effort - - actual action - - towards the climate emergency and the SDGs.

Links and references:

Examples of projects on the other side of the Big Frickin’ Wall

  • Brooklyn Library, Books Unbanned

  • MIT Open Courseware

  • Internet Archive National Emergency Library

  • Leiden European City of Science 2022 (365 days of programs in the community)

  • NEMO - Network of European Museum Organizations (activity around climate action, political action, etc)

  • List of references (good Digital stuff) prepared for European City of Science (40+ projects in 4 blog posts starting here)

  • MuSo homepage

  • National Geographic Society’s pivot toward environmental/social impact reporting (I don’t have a reference for this, but as I recall the editors decided to pivot to a more activist voice as a result of the programs and panels that took place during the Society’s 100th anniversary in 1988.)

  • Hip Hop Festival, Maramureş History & Archaeology Museum

    • https://hiphopkulture.ro/evenimente/roots-festival-de-cultura-urbana-2024-baia-mare/

    • https://www.directmm.ro/comunitate/cultura-urbana-la-muzeul-de-istorie-maramures-in-premiera-va-avea-loc-concert-special-de-hip-hop-in-incinta-institutiei-cand-are-loc-recitalul/

    • https://www.directmm.ro/comunitate/cultura-urbana-la-muzeul-de-istorie-maramures-in-premiera-s-a-organizat-un-concert-special-de-hip-hop-fondurile-pentru-achizitia-de-rechizite/

    • https://​www​.maramuresmuzeu​.ro​/

  • Green Council, Șirna Communal Library, Prahova County, Romania

    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC1CC4lhEmQ

    • Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/irna-public-library-romaniapdf/257829154

    • https://www.ifla.org/events/ifla-ensulib-webinar-series-sirna-public-library-from-romania/

Links/references for Living With War and the Lianza New Zealand National Library Conference

logo - text that says "living with war"

Ahiahi pai to all of you at the Lianza 2023 New Zealand library conference (October 31)!

And greetings to my colleagues at the Living with War conference in The Hague (November 3rd)!

For the Lianza conference I’ll be joining you from from inside the wood fabrication shop in the 10,000 square-foot Make Lab of the soon-to-open Museum of Solutions, Mumbai! And on November 3 I’ll be with you in person in The Hague for Living With War.

We are opening in November and we’ll be releasing more info, teasers, and events info very soon!

(You can check out our Instagram {the main platform in India} and website now for some sneak peeks of the building, program, and philosophy. Here’s a short post (about my joining the team) that gives a good short overview of the project. LOL see below for a special personal photo album treat.)

Links and notes related to my talk

  1. Photos — Some photos of the site, construction, and goings on here.

  2. Climate Things — I mentioned the Climate Things initiatives, 23 Climate Things and the Culture for Climate Innovation Prize. We would love to have you all involved - - so drop us a note and let us know how we can help! Special shoutout to the great Erik Boekesteijn (who I believe is with you there today?! Hi Erik!), Jan Holmquist and Julia Matamoros who are bringing their tremendous passion and expertise to the project, and of course our initial group of funders/supporters.)

  3. Culture, climate, and The Big Frikin Wall —This talk was a super-short “reduced Shakespeare” version of longer, more detailed work on the subject of updating library practice and The Big Frikin’ Wall, so here is some more detailed work if you’d like to dig in.

    MuseumNext Interview: Culture, activism, and the big Frikin' Wall - a long interview with me about these ideas

    Video and slides/links for NEMO webinar, Create Dangerously: Museums in the Age of Action - tons of notes, references, and a 45 minute webinar version of these ideas from the Network of European Museum Organizations. (Also a keynote talk from the NEMO 2022 conference in Lisbon.)

    Notes from Digital, Culture, and the Transformation of Europe - a cool set of slides presenting the outcomes/synthesis of a 2021 workshop with library and museum/cultural leaders in Leiden, The Netherlands

…More coming soon. Got to watch the conference talk now!

"Digitality" references for MuseumNext and Computers In Libraries

This week I’ll be speaking at the MuseumNext Green Museums Summit and Computers In Libraries (two separate conferences) about “digitality” and climate action in the cultural sector.

Here’s the gist of it: The climate emergency asks museums, libraries, and other heritage, knowledge, and memory institutions a series of tough questions about their purpose and relevance in society. How big can they work? Who do they involve? Who do they serve?

Compared to the scale and speed of the climate crisis and the mind-blowing scope of what we must accomplish together in the next 10, 20, and 30 years, what can the cultural sector do?

These questions are hard to discuss within the cultural sector. Though the humanistic, prosocial values in the sector are strong the sector’s institutions, in particular, are wary of disruption and have evolved to think in conservative, risk-averse ways. But the climate emergency acts like an X-ray or lie detector on institutional thinking, revealing gaps between values and practice that might go unnoticed when working on smaller concerns.

One of those gaps has to do with digital. Digital is currently a blind spot in our thinking about climate action, and in both of these talks I’ll argue that the museum and library sectors are operating with a confused and outdated concept of digitality that impedes our ability to think clearly about the kinds of impact we are obligated to create. An updated concept of what “digital” means in the 2020s — new tools, new skills (and learning to appreciate neglected old tools and skills) and a new understanding of the digital public sphere are all needed to help us find a new direction and unlock new capabilities within the sector and in the communities we serve.

But (or perhaps, and), going there — having a solid conversation about what digital is and can do requires us to question some tightly held assumptions about trust, disruption, and power.

Below are links to slides, references, and other useful/relevant information cited in the talks.

I’ll post slides transcripts from these talks ASAP.

Resources mentioned in the talks

Updates

General intro stuff from first 10 minutes

European climate and recovery initiatives

The European Commission has put €1.8 trillion on the table for the next 6 years’ work on The New European Bauhaus, pandemic recovery, and European Green Deal.

  • New European Bauhaus
    A new EU initiative launched in 2021 to be the cultural front-end for the European Green Deal. “The New European Bauhaus initiative calls on all of us to imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls. Beautiful are the places, practices, and experiences that are: Enriching, inspired by art and culture, responding to needs beyond functionality; Sustainable, in harmony with nature, the environment, and our planet; Inclusive, encouraging a dialogue across cultures, disciplines, genders and ages.”

  • Pandemic recovery
    €807 billion for 7 priority areas, including cohesion, resilience, natural resources/environment.

  • Green Deal
    Targets 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and by 2050: “economic growth decoupled from resource use”, carbon neutral, and “no person and no place left behind”.

Workshop notes (Digital, Culture, and the Transformation of Europe)

Farhad Manjoo: “A bag of mixed emotions”

Why Tech Is Starting to Make Me Uneasy, Farhad Manjoo, 11 October 2017.

“In 2007, when Mr jobs unveiled the iPhone, just about everyone greeted the new device as an unalloyed good. That's no longer true. The state-of-the-art, today, is a bag of mixed emotions. Check might improve everything. And it's probably all so terrible in ways we're only starting to understand.”

Reactions to Trump withdrawing the US from the Paris accord

Pew Research

I cranked through about 10 years of Pew Research Center reports in trying to figure out the evolution of our concept of digitality over the years. The first link, Visions of the Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center, was particularly useful for gaining some insight into how “experts” conceptualize the role of information technology in society. That being said, I was dismayed, but not surprised, to see so few mentions of the climate emergency in any of these reports. Overall, these Pew reports reminded me of how essential and empowering the Internet is in so many people’s lives.

Here are a handful of the most useful reports. The full list is on this spreadsheet.

“Cataloging projects”

I put this spreadsheet together after reviewing 1000 pages of my own notes on digitality, 30+ reports from the Pew Research Center from the last 10 years, and notes from our November 2021 workshop on cultural-sector climate action.

There are three tabs

  • References lists 323 digital-related sites, apps, technologies, concepts, patterns, phenomena, and attributes that I’ve tagged, subjectively, with some adjectives like prosocial, civic, empowering, and dangerous.

  • Sorted by tag count shows each tag on its own column, and then a list of all the digital-related things that have that tag. You can hover your mouse over each cell to see a note and link (if there is one)

  • Link to sources shows a list of 89 articles, books, and references mentioned on the References tab

The empowering side of digitality

The Dark Side

Disruption Theory

Books, Articles, Videos

A big long list of relevant resources in this spreadsheet here, and a handful of the most relevant below.

Slides for "What is awesome?" at Computers in Libraries

2021-03-24 Edson CIL (1).png

Here are the slides for What Is Awesome? How to create a ‘reference survey’ for your new digital initiatives, a short talk I’m giving at Computers in Libraries today about how to do a lightweight competitive analysis for your new digital initiatives.

I’ll be joined today by special guest star Meta Knol, Director of the Leiden 2022 European City of Science initiative.

"What websites should we look at?" or "What have you seen that is good?" are questions that often get asked at the beginning of new digital projects. But with the vastness of the Internet and large number of new apps and technologies appearing every day it can be hard to answer those questions in a way that creates useful, actionable insights for teams and decision makers.

In this talk I use Meta’s project as a case study to show participants how they can approach this challenge, and what else they can do (and what they shouldn’t do) when someone asks “What is awesome?” on the Internet.

(The examples I use are drawn from 4 recent posts below, starting here.)