Open Museum, Too Hot to Touch? Part 1

There have been a lot of ooohs and aaaahs over Open Museum this past week, in face to face meetings at museums and online via email and member comments. It's very heartening, but there have also been a number of people -- especially museum pros-- who have asked, "How they I (safely) participate in Open Museum?"

It's a reasonable question. Not only is the site still under development, but the concept is new. Who can blame their squeamishness? Nothing like novelty to set off the alarms for professionals who have their reputations -- not to mention their bank accounts -- in mind. We all know that novelty does not always entail quality. How many gimmicks or fads have floated in and bombed out of most any sector we can think of? I remember the Open Classroom model with much amusement. For us kids, it meant lots of free, unsupervised time, but it led to a backlash, which resulted in the seats being re-bolted to the floor. Though I imagine some curators would like to see their assets attached firmly to the floor, I don't think Open Museum is going to be what sends them running for a Makita drill. In fact, I think web-based participatory sites like Open Museum will become the status quo in the very near future. One look at Google Wave and you see what I mean.

Nonetheless, it seems that a little framing of the situation and a list of safe to-do's might go a long way toward diffusing some of the anxiety surrounding Open Museum.

For starters, there are precedents to sites like Open Museum in the museum world; namely, the Brooklyn Museum's award-winning online collections. Like the Brooklyn Museum, Open Museum supports participatory exhibits in many of the ways available to the Brooklyn Museum Posse and extends this support to cell phone access to in-gallery audio guides. (You can see more on how Open Museum brings together the in-gallery and online experiences here.) Very unlike the Brooklyn Museum, however, Open Museum requires no special financial, technical or staff resources: no money, no IT infrastructure, no tech expertise. Open Museum, which is web-based like Flickr and Facebook, and not-for-profit like Wikipedia, costs nothing for either the visitor or curator.

Second, Open Museum costs nothing but the user's time, which is valuable, but not an asset that will be marked in the profit and loss statement.

Third, museums have already made themselves at home (or at least have established a presence) in social media. Open Museum, which is designed for museums, harnesses the power of social media while keeping the museum's core business -- its collections and information about them -- at the center of people's interactions. Imagine a kind of Facebook for museums, where a work of art or history, is at center stage.

Finally, despite being under development (officially in alpha release), Open Museum is fully functional, robust and stable. The lingering alpha designation indicates the fact that there are features remaining to implement (especially the people part of Open Museum) and the content is limited to pilot partner museums. Beta designation will follow soon, along with new content from additional bricks and mortar museum participants.