Awesome idea, Liam.
Sounds like something that NYC could be ripe for.
One thing we should consider also, is reaching out to those on the
artistic side of free culture (eg working remix artists), well as the
educational side which Wikimedia sits on.
BTW, I also have this weird inclination that we should have a prize
named after Albrecht Dürer as an innovator in spreading art to the
public through printmaking, or after his Rhinoceros :P
Thanks,
Richard
(User:Pharos)
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 11:46 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
(referring to previous thread: Yes, as several people
have described,
Wikimedia takes assiduous care about copyright but cannot be responsible for
contracts (formal or implied) between third-parties e.g. a museum and its
patrons.)
Continuing from the link that Sammy posted,
http://hyperallergic.com/photopolicy/
this has got me wondering if it really is viable to create a museum
photography policy list... but much more than that...
I think this could work globally, but first I'd like to see if it works in
one area and I think that New York is as perfect a place as could be found
for such a trial.
What I'm thinking is whether it would be a good idea for Wikimedia to
sponsor the creating of a "free-culture-compliant" rating schema for
cultural organisations. If it worked properly, it could be updated and
"announced" annually with the best organisations in different categories
(National/less than 5 employees/libraries...) winning some kind of
recognition/award.
Where I'm basing this off is Greenpeace's "Guide to Greener
Electronics"
which has been running for several years now:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/Gui…
The deal with this is to take the public statements/policies of the major
tech organisations and rate them against a set of objective criteria. Each
year the new edition produces quite a bit of publicity e.g.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/27/apple-greenpeace-greener-…
Why I like this system is that it only assesses publicly stated policies
which means it does not require a complicated/expensive assessment system or
checking compliance with those policies. Also, by reducing things to a score
it makes it easy to rate the companies which allows for simple reporting
phrases (that the newspapers and corporate management like) such as "Nokia
stays in 1st place with the same score of 7.5 [green]".
Now, imagine if we could produce an objective list of "free-culture
criteria" that are applicable to cultural organisations (including but not
limited to photographic policies) and give each criterion a weighting. We
could make the list and the assessment process public, as is the wiki way,
which would also enable other organisations to self-assess if they wanted to
(something that cannot be done with Greenpeace's closed system). Then, once
an assessment had been done on all the institutions, we would be in the
position to be able to make a press release saying (for example):
"in 2011 The Brooklyn museum is the most free cultural institution in New
York, with the Tenement museum being the most improved whist the Frick
Collection became less free over the same period." This also allows smaller
institutions to be able to "beat" the big guys at something for the first
time!
What do you think of the idea in general? What do you think of the idea
specifically for NYC in 2011? And...before you think I'm just trying ask you
to do work, I should point out that the WMF has recently hired me on a 1
year fellowship (not yet announced) to improve our GLAM
outreach/collaboration capacity and therefore I would definitely be up for
helping to do the hard work on such a project.
Sincerely,
-Liam / Witty lama
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
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