Curating Contributions: Visitor and/or Staff? (Title change suggestion, SB)

    Who should curate visitor contributions, and how? (Have you already made assumption that they should be curated? SB) Curating visitors' contributions isn't good or bad,(actually, curation can be good and bad - it can encourage good participation process/product or discourage it. SB) but like all decisions that impact participants, curation policies need to be clear to participants. If visitors create something and then drop it into a black hole for staff review, they need to understand how their submission will be evaluated, how long it might take, and whether they will be notified if their contribution is included in some audience-facing display. This doesn't need to be exhaustive; even a sign that says, "Staff check these videos every week and select 3-5 to be shown on the monitor outside. We are always looking for the most creative, imaginative contributions to share with visitors." can help visitors understand the overall structure and criteria of curation. Very few institutions get back in touch with visitors to let them know that their content is being featured, but doing so makes good business sense. It's a personal, compelling reason for the institution to contact people who may not have visited since making their contributions, and it's likely to bring them back to show off their creations to friends and family. (Suggest that institutional recognition of need for feedback, and clarity of feedback loop is an essential condition of a successful invitation to participate. You modeled this well in your invitation to participate in review of this book. SB)

    When considering what your curation policy will be for a contributory project, consider whether your goal is to give everyone a voice or to sculpt a high quality audience experience from contributions.(Ouch. Is it really one or the other? The implications are that if everyone gets a voice that the products and audience experience stinks? SB)  If your goal is to empower visitors' voices or to encourage conversation, your curatorial touch should be as light as possible, and you should spend your design time focused on how to display the contributions so they work well together rather than trying to cut down to a few models. The Signtific game is a good example of this; instead of developing a curatorial or monitoring system, the designers focused on developing ways to explicitly require players to respond to each other and build arguments together, so that every new voice had a place in the growing conversation.

    Even inane visitor comments are important to include when your goal is visitor empowerment. When people write on each others' walls on Facebook or MySpace, they are often just saying hi and asserting their affinity for the other person or institution. The same is true of the people who write, "Great museum!" in comment books in the lobby. These statements are a form of self-identification, and while they may not make very compelling content for audiences, the act of expression in a public forum is important to those who contribute their thoughts, however banal.

    Of course, there are many cases in which creating a high quality output for subsequent audiences is more important than serving the identity needs of participants. Using phrases like "contribute to the exhibition" as opposed to "join the conversation" can help signal to visitors that their work may be subject to more stringent criteria. People will not be less motivated to participate if it is perceived as difficult to get their work featured on display. (Worthwhile to go bold. Thinking of the great Beach Art project with V&A. SB) That perception activates different motivations--the pleasure of competition and the desire to be marked as special. These motivations can be equally powerful, but they also alter the way visitors perceive the activity and the profile of visitors likely to be drawn to participate.

    There are many contributory art projects that combine necessity with creativity, using a range of curatorial models to embue the contributory platforms with values that perpetuate high-quality submissions. Postsecret is a well-known example; the project could not exist without the postcards, and yet Frank Warren curates the incoming postcards very tightly for public consumption. The Postsecret project could easily devolve into a display of the most prurient, grotesque, and exaggerated fears and desires people share, and yet Frank's curatorial touch puts cards with  authentic, creative, diverse voices on display, thus encouraging people to keep their contributions honest and artistic. There are other examples, like the Museum of Broken Relationships, which collects and displays objects and stories related to breakups, in which the invisible curatorial hand keeps the quality of audience-consumed exhibits high, even as they receive unsolicited submissions on a continual basis.

     And one quick note on the top issue that most museum staff worry about regarding curation of visitors' contributions: moderation of inappropriate content.(Is this really the top issue? Or is the key issue the challenge to control by staff curators, the need to maintain image and curatorial intent? SB) On the web, people who make offensive comments or terrorize other users are called "griefers," and fortunately few museums suffer from participants who use contributory platforms to actively attack other visitors. But they may use the platforms to share content that is considered offensive from the perspective of the institutional mission. The US Holocaust Museum is a very interesting example of this; their highly active online comment boards frequently attract Holocaust-deniers and anti-Semitic individuals. The Museum devotes significant staff resources to moderation, and prefers to engage directly and quickly with commenters who express views they deem inappropriate or potentially inflamatory. But the comments are still there, on their site, and that makes some people uncomfortable. David Klevan, Education Manager for Technology and Distance Learning Initiatives at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, reflected on this issue, saying:  “No matter what disclaimer we put up about posters’ views not reflecting the views of the institution, we know that content on our site reflects upon us.  There’s the double-edged sword of wanting to make it a welcoming and safe place for free expression—without making people feel threatened.”   

    While acknowledging griefers’ detrimental impact to other individuals’ experiences is important, the fear about their impact often outweighs its harm. Museums already have developed ways to deal with griefers of a different type—the ones who vandalize exhibits and disrupt other visitors’ experiences. When it comes to people who want to vandalize the community spirit, the same techniques—proactive staff, model users, encouragement of positive and respectful behavior—can prevail. There are many ways to block curse words in particular. One of the most creative of these was produced by the interactive firm Ideum for The American Image exhibition at the University of New Mexico museum. Ideum replaced all curse words contributed with cute words like “love” and “puppies,” which tended to disincentivize misbehaving visitors from swearing.

    Interestingly, while staff tend to be most concerned about content that uses curse words or hate speech, these kinds of offensive contributions are usually vastly outweighed by submissions that are inappropriate (Calling them inappropriate is pretty judgmental. Are they just not useful? Or not aligned with curatorial intent?SB)   in other ways: off-topic, devoid of content, or unintelligible. The best way to tackle all of these types of inappropriate behaviors is to develop asks that are genuine, so that the contributory platform is treated with the same respect visitors confer on other exhibits. (This is an important statement, but does it actually have anything to do with curation by staff or visitors? If so, what? Maybe this should be positioned in the first paragraph as a reminder of the role of the curator? SB)

There are also some sneaky design decisions you can make to persuade visitors to behave well. At the Ontario Science Centre, there was a digital comment kiosk in a quiet area that was constantly receiving off-topic content related to body parts. The staff moved the kiosk to sit directly in front of the entrance to the women's bathroom in a very central location. Once in the proximity of more visitors (and moms in particular!) the bad behavior on the kiosks disappeared. (Suggest that this is not sneaky, but intentional design, and part of what every exhibit designer should consider. What is the best location to achieve the desired result? What comes before and after it?  Important not to downplay these design decisions as lucky accidents, even if this is how they were learned in the first place. SB)

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