Platforms and Power

    While this book is about design, institutional platforms that support visitors connecting to each other have political implications as well. If experts, exhibits, and program staff no longer deliver content exclusively but also serve as platforms connecting one visitors' experience to anothers', institutions' roles as content authorities diminish. This is threatening to the power that staff have enjoyed for many years in cultural institutions, and it can generate a great deal of fear and resistance.

    These power struggles are not new, especially in the educational sector. For example, in the 1960s, educational revolutionary Paulo Friere spoke out against traditional schooling systems, claiming schools were oppressive systems promoting non-reciprocal relationships between teachers and students. Friere sought alternatives that would engage equitable communities of learners, and one of the ideas he promoted was networked education. In his 1968 manifesto, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Friere suggested an educational model based on a person-to-person network in which each individual would list his skills in a kind of phonebook. The phonebook would serve as the "available curriculum," and people could call each other and solicit instruction from each other on everything from auto mechanics to poetry. Friere argued that this kind of citizen-powered education would be much more powerful and valuable to communities than schools.

    What Friere didn't discuss was how he would design his hypothetical phone book. As we've seen in the above case studies, there are significant value judgments inherent in the design of platforms that connect users and their contributions with each other. How would you design Friere's educational phone book? Would you organize it by skill offered, location of the instructor, or the name of the person offering it? Would you include information about each person's relevant experience and credentials? Would you encourage learners to rate their learning experiences and use those ratings to reorder the list? Would you introduce a feedback loop to help people find the most popular teachers, or would you design the platform to distribute learning experiences as equitably as possible across participants? 

    Each of these decisions would send the resulting community experience down a different path. Platform designers have incredible power over the user experience, but it’s a kind of power that may be unfamiliar to those used to designing and presenting content experiences. It’s not the power to be the only voice in the room but the power to determine who speaks and in what order.

    To be successful leaders in a socially networked world, museums must feel comfortable transitioning from controlling content to managing platforms. One of the primary fears museum professionals (and all professionals) have about entering new relationships with audiences is the fear of losing control. For hundreds of years, staff have owned the content and the message. While exhibit designers may acknowledge the fact that visitors create their own versions of the message around subsets of the content, they haven't traditionally empowered visitors to redistribute their own substandard, non-authoritative messages.

    In most museums, the professional expertise of the staff--to preserve objects, to design exhibits, to deliver programs--is not based on content control. It's based on creation and delivery of experiences. And in a world where visitors want to create, remix, and interpret content messages on their own, museums can assume a new role of authority as "platforms" for those creations and recombinations. The problem arises when expertise creates a feeling of entitlement to control the entire visitor experience. Power is attractive. Being in control is pleasant. It lets you be the only expert with a voice. But if our expertise is real, then we don't need to rule content messages with an iron fist. We can manage the phone book instead of oppressing the classroom.

    Developing museum platforms that allow us to harness, prioritize, and present a diversity of voices around content does not mean giving all the power to visitors. Platform designers grant them a few specific, designed user opportunities--to create their own messages, to prioritize the messages that resonate best for them personally--in the context of a larger overall ecosystem. The platform is what's important. It's a framework that museums can (and should) control, and there's power in platform management. There are four main powers that platform managers have:

    1.    the power to define the types of interaction available to users

    2.    the power to set the rules of behavior

    3.    the power to preserve and exploit user-generated content

    4.    the power to promote and feature preferred content

    These powers constitute a set of controls which constitutes a real and valuable authority. Let's take a look at each one and how it might be applied in cultural institutions.

The power to define available interactions

    This power is so basic that it is often overlooked. On YouTube, users share videos. In Free2Choose, visitors vote on questions of personal freedoms. On ScratchR, users remix Scratch programs. In the Living Library, people have one-on-one conversations. On Signtific, players debate the future of science. Every platform has a limited feature set and focuses on one or two basic actions that users can take. Your institution doesn’t need to offer every kind of interaction under the sun--you just have to pick the few interactions that most support the kind of behavior and content creation that you value. There's a lot of power in the specific decisions about whether users will be allowed to contact each other directly, make comments or ratings, or produce various kinds of digital and physical artifacts. If you focus your platform on a very small set of active features, you will be able to steer the direction of the overall user experience and the body of growing visitor-driven content.

The power to set the rules of behavior

    User-generated content sites control user and community behavior, both implicitly through the tools that are and aren't offered, and explicitly through community management.  Every online social network has rules about acceptable content and ways that users can engage with each other, and those rules have serious implications about the overall tone of interaction on the site. Consider the difference between the type of comments found on YouTube and those on Flickr. On YouTube, the comments are often so poor and inconsistent that there are user-generated programming scripts people can download to hide comments with excessive profanity, terrible spelling, overuse of punctuation and capitalization. The Brooklyn Museum, which has won awards for their open, transparent engagement with online communities, was forced to moderate comments on YouTube during their Blacklist Project exhibition, in which visitors were able to make videos in the museum that were directly uploaded to YouTube.  As Shelley Bernstein, the museum's director of technology, put it: "I was surprised by how many members of the community were sharing racist statements at YouTube (we have never had this problem on other platforms). *wow* can only describe some of the comments that were deleted because they were in such clear violation our comment guidelines. Only one video was deleted due to a violation in guidelines, but the opposite was true on YouTube, where in my entire career, I have never deleted more comments or blocked so many users. We have a very high threshold, so just know this problem was significant. There was something about the subject matter of the show, what we were asking and how people were responding, combined with this particular on-line community that generated a lot of issues in this arena. Now that the show has closed, we will go in and turn off comments on every video and that’s a first for us."

    Meanwhile, on Flickr, comments tend to be focused on the technical quality of images and are generally neutral or supportive. The environment feels different than that of YouTube, and that is partly due to the highly active community management team, which employs highly subjective (read: powerful) criteria to enforce Flickr community guidelines. The differences between the tone of conversation on YouTube and Flickr is partly due to the different user demographics, but it is largely dictated by what the platform designates as appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

    Differences in community guidelines and rules often influence the makeup of users who feel welcome and choose to engage.  When it comes to cultural institutions, comparable rules can guarantee that the platform remains a safe, welcoming place for visitors of all kinds. There are some "rules" already in place--like the rule that you have to pay to enter--that may have great effect on the types of users who engage in museums and the behavior they display within. Museums should consider, as Web 2.0 community managers do, what behaviors and visitors they want to support and which rules will make those people feel most at home in the institution.

The power to use and exploit user-generated content

    Platforms also have the power to set rules related to preservation and ownership of the content they display--often with quite strict intellectual property statutes that favor the platform over users. Every time you post a photo on Flickr, you give its owner, Yahoo!, the right to use that photo however they see fit in perpetuity. The same is true on YouTube. On sites like Facebook circa 2009, which are "walled gardens," users can't even easily export their profile content (friends, events, updates) outside of Facebook itself.

    Again, these rules reflect platform control, and when the control is too heavy-handed, users get annoyed and stay away. Museums will always need to retain some powers to manage the preservation of objects, to wield IP controls properly, and to manage the digital reproduction and dissemination of content. They also need to protect users’ privacy. There are many models as well for how to share and use visitor-generated content for institutional gain.

    For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Ghosts of a Chance game accessioned player-generated objects into a temporary part of their collection database, with clear rules about what happened to the objects at the end of the game (they became the responsibility of the game designers, a sub-contractor to the museum). The Metropolitan Museum has used visitor-generated photos from Flickr in their advertising campaigns, following explicit rules about the ways that visitors are credited for their work. The Chicago Children's Museum used visitor-generated multimedia stories in their Skyline exhibit as the basis for research on cognitive development. The Powerhouse Museum and the Brooklyn Museum have both created on-demand print books of content generated by visitors for community exhibits and online projects. At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Gail Durbin has discussed using content created in museums as the basis for customized on-demand retail items, like personalized calendars showing images of your favorite exhibits, or one-off books of images captured at a fabric-making workshop. In the same way that Web 2.0 sites display a range of respect for user-retained intellectual property, museums can navigate and create their own rules--and related powers--for content developed by visitors on site.

The power to promote and feature preferred content

    One of the greatest powers retained by participatory platform managers is the power to feature content that reflects the values of the platform. The ScratchR case study demonstrates how much power is baked into basic design decisions about what to display on the platform’s homepage. Just as the question of which stories to feature and bury in a newspaper is a question of power, so too is the question of how to feature content in social networks. Remember the questions about how to design Friere's phonebook; many come down to the question of how content will be selected for promotion. These values may skew towards promoting content with the most popularity/views, the newest content, or content that is unique in some way. The choice of what to display on the front page is not just about design. There have been huge user-protests of both YouTube and Digg for perceived bias in the "featured content" algorithms that vault some content to the top. And while some sites strive for transparency, most find ways to feature the kind of content and behavior that they want to see modeled for other users.

    There was a fascinating example of the power of platform design in the successive redesigns of Facebook from mid-2008 to mid-2009. Over this time, Facebook evolved from focusing on personal profiles shared with small groups of known individuals to focusing on publishing lifestream-style feeds of status updates and short-format content for mass audiences. Whereas previously Facebook, like MySpace, was a place to maintain your profile and connect to a web of friends and acquaintances, by spring of 2009 it had become a personally-relevant content stream, a dynamic newspaper created just for you. Some users complained and left the service, but most remained—and changed their own behavior to match Facebook’s new design.

    In this way, the power to promote and organize users’ content may be the most important platform power when it comes to cultural institutions because it is the one that most dramatically enables the platform to present its values and model preferred behavior. It is also the most technical power, because it requires understanding how design decisions affect broad patterns of user behavior.

    Cultural institutions are still learning to wield this power effectively. When museums do assume this power, it is often in a zero-transparency way that doesn't model behavior for users. When I spoke with Kate Roberts about MN150, the Minnesota History Center exhibition based on visitor-generated nominations, she explained that after the nomination period was over, they entirely shut down visitor engagement in the selection process. It just felt too messy to do anything but lock the staff in a room and sort through the nominations. When the exhibition opened a year later, visitors could see which nominations were valued and featured, but they couldn't get this information in an early feedback loop that would have allowed them to improve their nominations during the submission process.

    The Brooklyn Museum’s 2009 Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition project provides a notable exception to this muddled approach. For this project, museum staff created very specific platform that tightly constrained user behavior to collect information about content in a particular way, governed by a well-articulated value system. This platform, which is explored in detail in Chapter 4, was very powerful—so much so that some users felt they were subject to its mercy rather than in control of their own experience.

    There are real opportunities here for cultural institutions to retain authority related to visitor values, experiences, and community behavior. The power of the platform may not let you dictate every message that floats through your doors. But with good, thoughtful design, it can ensure that those messages enhance the overall museum experience. When you are able to network individual visitors' experiences in ways that are both useful and beautiful, you will be able to motivate new experiences and relationships that are exciting and valuable for the institution and users alike.

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