Michael Edson 2 - Urgency

I think we're at an interesting moment now. Five years ago, sometimes three years ago, we were making guesses about what would work with the Internet. What would work with new media. Where the world was headed. But there was a lot of speculation and a lot of skepticism.

I remember the early meetings when we talked about Wikipedia as a legitimate competitor to our ancient trusted institutions. That was a real debate, and there was a lot of dismissal - - how can a bunch of people working on a wiki ever create anything useful? That debate is over now. There was debate and skepticism that mobile would be a factor in people's daily lives. That debate is over now. There was a debate that citizens, individuals, working independently without central coordination, could do meaningful work in society. The last time I checked, the Zooniverse crowdsourcing website had over it 800,000 active participants. TED has had 1 billion video views. If I look at any big problem in the world I can see where citizens working in extraordinary new ways using the simple tools at the Internet can accomplish that work.

So the moment we're in now is... There are two bets our colleagues need to place: How can we take advantage of the things - - the aspects digital culture that are rock solid and bankable now - - basic execution of digital fundamentals, and then, how, when, with what urgency... can we transition the way we think about our jobs from what I've been calling the broadcast model, where we the experts, we decide what problems will be solved, we decide how to solve them, we build the solutions, and we deliver them to a passive audience - - how and when will we transition from that model to the model where citizens really are our co-creators. That's the challenge. And it's not about cosmetic differences, it's not about having a blog, or having Twitter: its fundamentaly about how to scale are impact in society, using the right tools to get our job done now, and I think that impact be dramatically stronger than it's ever been.

This is a moment in our place on earth, as a species, when we really need learning institutions and memory institutions to do an excellent job. An absolutely breathtaking job, and its no longer acceptable to me to only prosecute that mission by hanging pictures on walls, inviting people into buildings - - that's okay, we still need to do that, but we also need to do the other thing - - Not a year from now not three years from now... Now.

So those are very lofty ideas. Where it becomes very practical is how you insert these big ideas into the daily work of museums.

So think of the time line of a typical museum project. Some group of individuals gets an idea in their head - - "we're going to do an exhibition we're going to do a publication, we're going to do an educational program..." and when that idea crystallizes, our institutions and the individuals in them carry into that moment their training and their biases about what success looks like and what is possible, and what I'm asking - - what all of us are trying to ask our colleagues to do and our institutions to do is to is to stop at that moment and rethink what is possible. There's a moment of opportunity when we can have a much bigger dream about what can be accomplished and how quickly it can get done.

So the old way was to have an idea to put our heads down practice our our crafts of scholarship and design for 2, 3, 5, 10 years, sometimes, and then come up for air and share what we know. From what I've observed about how successful humanistic enlightenment activities are being done on the web, this moment can be much more powerful, if immediately the organization thinks globally, thinks "Internet by default" and thinks "open."

These ideas I'm borrowing from, stealing from, adapting from, the great thinkers who have been writing about this for more than a decade - - both Chris Andersons: Chris Anderson of TED and Chris Anderson of wired; Clay Shirkey; David Weinberger... Tim O'Riley wrote what is web 2.0 in 2005 ...still incredibly valid and pertinent. Work globally - - global by default, open by default, web by default.

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