Microvolunteering

Futurismic links to an NPR article about The Extraordinaries, a start-up that hopes to give your smartphone an “on-demand volunteering” app.

Through The Extraordinaries, you might be able to use your smart phone — while waiting in the dentist’s office or standing in the Dept. of Motor Vehicles line — to:

• add identifying tags to photos and videos for a museum

I don’t know why Futurismic mentions Twitter as no-one else does. Although it would make sense for them to try to use it as iPhones are not the be-all-and-end all of smartphones.

Museum collection folksonomy isn’t a new concept. I’m always reminded of this whenever it’s brought up.

There are things already out there that do this, like Steve.museum. Wikipedia Loves Art and the Indicommons certainly touches on this area too. I like the idea of doing it with twitter. I remember Shelley at the Brooklyn Museum doing a “guess the animal” with a bunch of x-rays on twitter that I enjoyed playing. I wonder if you could automate the same sort of thing. People follow a twitter account that spits out links to an object every 15 minutes and you reply with a bunch of hashtags. There would probably need to be some kind of banned word list and method to moderate the more weird answers. Maybe the program could keep score/give prizes/promo codes. As far as I know, this isn’t already happening.

But I think the idea of microvolunteering in museums has a lot more to offer. I’m not sure when online-based volunteering became crowdsourcing tags only. I’m pretty sure that most volunteers sitting in museums aren’t trying to come up with one-word descriptions of objects.

Here’s a though about voluntwittering: I could spend all day volunteering trying to hand out leaflets about an exhibition or I could reach about 2000 people with a retweet in a few minutes. I don’t get rewarded for a RT (maybe a thank you) yet I could say on a CV that I volunteered with a museum if I stand in the road trying to catch random stranger’s attention (which is pretty damn important in getting a museum job nowadays).

Voluntwittering. Man, can I claim trademark?