Open Culture 2010 ruminations #2: Europeana, UGC and the API, plus a bit of "what are we here for?"

OK here's a relatively quick one: there was lots of discussion at Open Culture 2010 about user-generated content, and (praise be!) lots about the API. Where I see a gap is in the link between these two.
Some background: Jill Cousins, Europeana's Director, outlined the four objectives that drive project/service/network/dream (take your pick), which go approximately like this:

1. To Aggregate – bringing everything together in one place, interoperable, rich (or rich enough) and multilingual


2. To Facilitate – to encourage innovation in digital heritage, to stimulate the digital economy, to bring greater understanding between the people of Europe, to build an amazing network of partners and friends


3. To Distribute – code, data, content


4. To Engage – to put the content into forms that engage people, wherever they may be and however they want to use it

Jill pointed out that there are multiple stakeholders with their own agendas, all of whom need serving. They aren’t always in conflict, but it’s our job and Europeana’s job to help to show them how their agendas actually align. We have users (that’s a pretty large and heterogeneous group!), content providers (only slightly less so), policy-makers, ministries, business users.... Having identified the value propositions for these groups it becomes clear where we need to fill some gaps in content, partners, functionality and marketing (the latter really hasn’t started yet).
A key plank in the distribution strategy is the API. For engagement, an emerging social strategy includes opportunities for users to react to and create content themselves, and to channel the content to external social sites (Facebook and the like). Both of these things are too big to go into here, but I think one thing we haven't got covered properly is the overlap between the two. Channeling content to people on 3rd party sites ticks the "distribution" box but whilst that in iteself may be engaging it is not the same as being "social" or facilitating UGC there. If people have to come to our portal to react they simply won't. In other words, our content API has to be accompanied by a UGC API - read and write. Even if the "write" part does nothing more than allow favouriting and tagging it will make it possible to really engage with Europeana from Facebook etc.
What falls out of this is my answer to one of Stefan Gradmann's questions to WP3 (the technical working party). Stefan asked, do we want to recommend that work progresses on authentication/authorization mechanisms (OAuth/OpenID, Shibboleth etc) for the Danube release (July 2011)? My answer is a firm "yes". Until that is sorted out we can't have a "social" API to support Europeana's engagement objective off-site, and if such interaction not possible off-site then we're really not making the most of the "distribution" strand either.

Two interesting ReadWriteWeb stories

Just a quickie. Two things caught my eye on RWW:
Confirmed: Microsoft Acquires Powerset. So MS moves into semantic search with the acquisition of a promising startup. Yahoo! will have to fight ever harder for survival if MS is really determined to do this. Anyway, it may be time to start talking to MS about how to work with all the yummy structured data we have in MLAs (yes, that means you EDL)
Gnip: Grand Central Station for the Social Web. This is all about tackling the myriad interfaces and data formats of social software APIs. It's a comparable problem to that faced in our sector and the solution of a mediator is interesting mainly for that reason. It's also potentially directly relevant where we're working with data in social sites.

DataPortability.org gets real muscle

ReadWriteWeb points to some potentially very significant news on the data portability front:
Bombshell: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org
Data portability and identity management are related to semantic web, to UGC, to interoperability and doubtless many other essential issues today, so as a user and a developer this is pretty promising news.

Brooklyn Museum and social software

Nins Simon has posted this interview with Shelley Bernstein on Museum 2.0. Interesting from the POV of museums experimenting with various current social software gubbins, and how they feel this fits in with their mission.

Odds and sods 3

Well what with disease, conferences and various other out-of-office experiences I have had very little time at my desk to do real work, let alone meta-work like this and I have some catching up to do. However real work must come first, so this will have to be super-skimpy.

First, Ross's new book should be out any day now. I can't wait to read it. I just flicked through the proof in his office and know it's going to be a great and stimulating read.

We've opened a new gallery at MiD , "London, sugar and slavery", which I can't wait to see tomorrow when I'm at Museum in Docklands for the MCG meeting. My part has been to do with the ArcIMS mapping application, which isn't yet on the web but is in the gallery. Let's be honest, ArcIMS is a pain in the rear and you need a pretty good reason to justify the effort involved if you choose to use this over one of the free mapping apps, although of course they also have their learning curves and limitations. What they don't have is installation issues; OTOH you can't install them, and hence your client machines must have web access enabled. As our experiences this summer with web access on gallery machines was so dreadful we're keen to avoid this, although from past experience we know it's perfectly possible to do this safely and effectively - we just seem to be lacking the skills at present. On the subject of installation, I should say that the current version of IMS is actually pretty straightforward, perhaps disturbingly so - I think I was looking for all sorts of post-installation configuration changes to do that didn't actually need doing. But there are always complicating factors, and it's still taken me the best part of 3 days to get the thing working on our internal CMS server.
Anyway, our app uses ArcSDE, a new departure for us, and Pete's written some cool queries to make this a little more interactive than some of our previous efforts. We've got some bugs to iron out, to do with our merging and over-riding tool behaviours, but it's reasonably presentable.

Next up, Mia. Our social software torch-bearer has been working hard in all sorts of directions trying to get us off the ground with blogs, forums etc., not to mention organising our chaotic efforts with Flickr and the like. She's now got us going here: http://mymuseumoflondon.org.uk/. BIG congratulations, we're in the 21st century! Now we need to work out our management practices, encourage authors, look at how to embed and integrate this with our main sites, and see how it takes off.

I guess I should mention Jonty, but I'd rather not. If you insist you can check him out on our sites or on YouTube.

CHArt: the conference last week deserves a post of its own. For now, I'd like to give honorary mentions to J Milo Taylor, Tara Chittenden, Jon Pratty and Bridget Mackenzie, Tanya Szrajber, and Douglas Dodds, whose presentations I particularly enjoyed.

EDLNet. Did I write about this yet? I hope so. Watching over the mail list and looking at some discussion documents (so far simply lurking) I have some hope that the project will place the right emphasis on function over interface, given limited resources. Jon and Bridget talked about "Your Paintings" at CHArt, so far just a proposal but one that I would think could be designed to mesh well with EDL. I hope to talk more to Jon about this tomorrow.

Martin Bazley and Nick Poole are keen to get together with some of the people involved in IT in the London Hub so we've set up a meeting at MoL next week to see what we can draw out, initially to help them with a strategy for the SE Hub. I'm interested to see what they come out with for a strategy there. I also know that Martin wants to pursue some of the issues around stats that Dylan and I were talking about before, since he has got the job of writing a report for the London Hub on the question. I'm just a half-blind opinionated fool on the subject but if I have anything useful to offer I'll try.

Kurt Stuchell has put together a widget bringing together podcasts and blogs from/about museums worldwide. I reserve judgement on the thing itself, which I'm sure will be of use to some, possibly me included. The main point is that it's nice to see this happening in museums, full-stop. There must be lots of other imaginative ideas out there for what museum material can be widgetised. The Rijksmuseem's widget is perhaps obvious but effective nevertheless and perhaps we should do something a little similar: push object data out in an RSS feed to be consumed via a client-side JS snippet, perhaps. As I say, not that imaginative but worth a crack.

Micah Blue Smaldone. Do yourself a favour and get some. He may not be your cup of tea but you need to find out for yourself. The more I hear the more I'm ensnared. Follow far enough from the link above and you'll reach this where you can hear some spell-binding live renditions.