Hi all,
Last week I went to a conference hosted by Creative Commons Australia http://creativecommons.org.au/australasiancommons. One of the talks was "Play at Powerhouse" by Sebastian Chan, the manager of web services at Powerhouse Museum. They are one of the institutions participating in Flickr's "The Commons" - http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerhouse_museum/.
A lot of their images have been transferred to Commons. I sat up in my chair fairly well when Seb raised this as an "issue". From his perspective, this is a problem, because once the images leave Flickr, they lose the ability to easily track and report usage. As an institution they use these stats to justify the effort of making their content digitally available (and geocoding it, and maintaining the Flickr community, etc).
There are some screenshots showing Flickr stats in this post: http://searchengineland.com/071213-161815.php
Making institutions feel more comfortable with their content appearing on Wikimedia Commons is obviously a good thing for us. We have pageview stats and checkusage and who knows what other exciting stuff.
I think we should develop an automated process for creating institutional stats reports and then contact the institutions whose works we use and offer them this report - starting with the Powerhouse Museum.
In fact, I don't see a reason not to make the reports public. They could be generated once a month (or day, whatever) and then sit on the toolserver for people to look at. Providing them as a public reference might actually serve as incentive for more institutions to actively engage with us.
Thoughts? Good idea or waste of time?
cheers, Brianna