Creative Commons Licenced Idea: Museum Bailout
Posted in General on 27. Apr, 2009
Last week, I made a call out for a web app coder/programmer. I know I was vague on details at the time because I hadn’t fully formed the idea.
I spoke to 8 people about it. 8 people have all rejected/pulled out for a variety of reasons.
So now, I’m going to describe the idea as best I can (remember, I am no programmer) and kick the idea out there to see what happens.
This idea/design/thing (and only this idea) is going under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence. This means I want you to share this idea, remix this idea, tell people where you got this idea (preferably a link), not to try to make money from this idea and give whatever you make from this a CC license as well.
The rest of this blog is under All Rights Reserved, Copyright, Voodoo Curses etc.
So I’ll begin.
MUSEUM BAILOUT
Through no previous planning or collaboration, both me and Nina Simon made a call for people to sign up to a Brooklyn Museum membership because of the recent news of them having quite a large budget cut. Turns out we made quite an impact. I saw that it was retweeted a lot. Which got me thinking. So much news about the doom and gloom of the financial state of museums, not much news about how we can fix it (bar wishing for handouts). Not many of us can conjure up several million to plug a hole in a museum budget. But several million of us could conjure up a little bit of cash that could go a long way to improving things.
This requires some activism. It requires a people-sponsored bailout of our museums.
At least this bailout won’t go into an undeserving executives bonus. Even better, you actually get something back! You get to be part of something and they give you stuff in return!
I notice how almost every museum has a membership program. I also notice how these are often tucked away in the corner of a website. I also notice there seems to be nothing anywhere looking like a directory of membership plans.
The Webapp would be a way to promote as many museum’s membership plans as possible in the simplest way. I think its better if I describe the process:
-A Museum Membership Officer (or similar) registers on the site.
-They are validated, probably through making sure the email is the museum’s own domain.
-The Museum then logs in, fills out a form of all their membership details. (name of member, length of time, costs, benefits etc) and links to website where you can sign up. This avoids the potential mess of trying to trying to mash together checkouts/credit cards/billing operations.
-Museum adds its location to a Google map.
-User goes to app, looks up town/city etc…
-User finds locations of nearest museum locations.
-User clicks on museum location, brings up separate database entry (So the “map tag” is a link to something else, not having just text attached to the “map tag”. This is because more clever things may be required later)
-User looks at a Museum’s membership details. Clicks a link to Museum’s own membership website
-For the sake of analytics and maybe learning something from the numbers, the Museums get stats on how many people clicked their map tag, or looked at their membership plans, or clicked on the link to their own Museum’s website.
-User then signs “pledge” to promise to buy membership X from museum Y, using email and CAPTCHA as validation to avoid spam. This looks like a petition. Name, Email (not to be shown), age, location, drop-down menu of museums, then a secondary drop down menu of there different plans.
-This then forms a big list of people promising to buy a membership. “Jeff promises to buy an 1stfans membership from Brooklyn Museum” etc. I know this isn’t exactly accurate, but this way doesn’t require any linking to Museum’s own billing system and also doesn’t require the Museum to report back with confirmations (because they probably wouldn’t anyway). This is why we’re planning on tracking promises, not sales.
-User then gets little badge/widget saying that the are supporting the museum bailout with a membership X to museum Y. They can put this on their blog/myspace etc. This is to spread the word.
-Here’s a TRICKY BIT. There should be a big running totals/stats on the front of the app. A total of every “pledge”, so 10 people promise to buy 10 memberships costing $100 each, there’s a thing on the front saying “Museum Bailout Total Promised $1000″ or something or “10 promises so far”. These number could possibly go onto the widget. Then there’s a big list of people’s promises.
That’s it. Essentially a big directory of museum membership information, a Google map, a widget and a petition. There’s a lot of scope of adding extras, like a delicious.com/digg feed of new reports on museums financial plight (to remind us why we’re doing this), or signing the pledge with a twitter account means (with your permission) you tweet “I will buy this membership” or something, or make the whole thing a facebook app.
Please, by all means spread this idea. Whilst I do want to hear from you if you plan to do something with it, please don’t email me saying “I’m interested in doing this” and then email me a bit later saying “Sorry, can’t do it”. If you’re serious, then I’m serious and will help any way I can and will blog the hell out of it (as will, I imagine, lots of others). In fact, contact me with something approaching a working beta. Put questions into the comments below.
I am, as always, reachable via pete(at)newcurator.com
Hi, Pete -
this looks extremely useful, indeed. I was speaking about something pretty similar, in a way, some months ago, at a UNESCO workshop organized for museum professionals in Tashkent: one chapter of the workshop dealt with the “Spend less, let others work” issue (very crucial, due to budget cuts not only in some remote country, but in the “affluent” ones, as well…).
My approach, at that time, was rather “the other way ’round” – with resources like (google?)map linked data, info and pictures on a specific site provided to museum (or archaeological) institutions by what could be considered a potential audience of primary relevance (since they where already so interested in the institution’s “object of conservation” to document it, and to make an upload thereof to the internet…).
But your description is very powerful and detailed. I’m not so good a programmer, I fear, to be of practical help to you, right now – but I’ll gladly help you spread the word about this.
With kind regards,
Alessandro
P.S.: I’m behind @crdav on twitter, btw… :)
I was one of the 8 people who E-mailed and then said “sorry, I can’t do it”, so take this with whatever amount of salt you wish: the idea is good, don’t get me wrong, but technically there’s a lot left to figure out here. Interactions around the features, what the site looks like, analytics, authenticating people who register museums, etc. Some of these subsystems have whole companies that provide similar services.
Then you have the issue of figuring out how to handle the whole “promise” idea. Do you attempt to authenticate whether the user has made it to the “donation successful” page or something similar, or do you just take the user’s word for it? And are promises compelling to the public who sees this (promised) museum bailout? I’m not sure. That’s not supposed to be a leading question.
So while I feel a bit shamed for being one of the 8, you gotta cut us some slack here, Pete. There’s still a lot left to do on the intellectual side for this, and it’s a big time commitment to do correctly. Just my two cents. That said, I also hope to see it done. And done well.
I expect this could be done with some mishmash of Drupal, CiviCRM, and Google’s APIs. The problem I see is not with building it in the first place, but rather that it would have to be maintained – both on the technical side, and just keeping the database free of junk. Pieces of it could be done and maintained easily, but the whole thing (together) would be a lot of ongoing work. It would make a lot of sense for AAM, or even large regional museum associations to do something like this, if they could commit the resources.
On the other hand, I kind of wonder how much such a thing would be used. Do people search the web for organizations (like museums) in their area with the goal of becoming a member? I’d guess not (and looking at our website analytics would support that negative guess).
I would be interested to know if anyone gets much traffic from searches specifically related to membership.
Jeff, this wasn’t meant as a dig at you personally. Yeah, you said you couldn’t do it, but we had a very useful conversation about it and for that I really appreciate the time you spent on my foolhardy ideas. You least of all should feel ashamed.
I know there’s a lot to figure out technically. If I was a coder, I would have worked it out all myself.
Authenticating people who work for museum would have been simple, just like I do here with comments. You register, I approve/validate each one. Not a quick process, but hey. I do it with every twitter follower and I did it with the ArtFriday social network that used to run on here (it was based of Elgg)
The “promise” thing was just a fancy petition (because I can work out a way to be an agent of membership registration. That would take far too much work). People would “promise” on a simple piece of honesty. I know I would love to have actual running totals on credit card sales, but again, too much work.
I figured a million (I had silly/high hopes) people said “I’m going to support my museum”, then that would make an impact. Me and Nina made a lot of noise and Brooklyn Museum got new members. Simple as that. This was something to make a lot of noise over. It was more a banner than a recruitment drive. If I had this little app, I would have spoken about it, blogged about it, got on my high horse and told everyone about it. People would have linked to it and retweeted it, and maybe some museums would get something out of it. Nothing more. I knew it wouldn’t solve a problem…
K Landon – I imagine it could have been built on lots of things. All of which tends to baffle me. But I would have maintained it. If there’s a set of buttons saying APPROVE, DELETE and EDIT, I would have done all the leg work like I do in the background of this WordPress blog.
If it took off, of became really popular, then I might have thrown something more substantial behind it. This was to start small.
Who knows if people’s habits are to seearch for memberships in their area. I did think a database/directory of several hundreds museums and their membership plans may have been useful. Especially when I’m shouting how our museums are hurting and we, the people, need to help them out when many aren’t helping.
I got a ton of traffic from my No Sleep Till Brooklyn Museum post. An absolute ton. I imagine Nina Simon got a bit as well. It wasn’t from google searches, it was from activism. It really spread like wildfire over twitter (especially over that little band of very close-knit museum professional and artists that I call followers) and Brooklyn got a couple of dozen members. That’s real money from real people that goes right into BM just because me and Nina made a call to museum-loving folk.
This app was only going to capture that. Nothing more.
Hi Pete:
I’m afraid I don’t have any surefire strategies, only encouragement.
Allyson Lazar (http://twolsanday.blogspot.com/) and I devised a similar project back in 2007. Under the working title MuseumMatch, we hoped to create a site where people could give any amount directly to the museum of their choice. Alternately, museums could post descriptions of exhibitions that they could produce only with specific, additional funding. If a visitor wanted to see that exhibition become a reality, he or she could donate directly to that cause in any amount they wished.
Unfortunately, Allyson and I hit many of the same roadblocks you encountered. And, again, it was early 2007 so the technology (or at least awareness of certain technologies) was not as far along either.
If you’re curious about similar models used by non-profits other than museums, I encourage you to contact Allyson as she presented on the topic of e-philanthropy at a number of museum conferences.
Best of luck. I really do hope that this idea comes to fruition.
///
@creativemerc
I’m another who turned down the project. Mainly because while I felt I could perhaps emulate some of the spirit of what Pete is after, like Jeff says, to really do it properly takes a lot. What I would have turned out with spare time would realistically have become yet another anonymous Google mashup, mostly unused and quite pointless. I don’t feel ashamed of turning it down – merely by giving your reasons, Jeff, you give Pete invaluable thought that helps toughen up the plan and take it to the next level.