Digital Public Space - a challenge
At its simplest, the ambition of the Digital Public Space is to create safe digital havens that house our formal cultural
heritage on the web. It will be the foundation for the digital homes of our extraordinary sound, image and text archives
and the repository of contemporary cultural outputs. It will bring all the value creation of our great institutions – the
collections, the curation, the expertise, the knowledge and the stories – to the public wherever they may be, through the
web.
Yet, for all this, this paper contends that the discourse and outcomes of Digital Public Space thus far have not
been nearly ambitious enough on behalf of the public it seeks to serve. We have failed to address the fundamental
affordances of the open web as a Digital Public Space in favour of an overly pragmatic response to the challenges of
this early stage of the connected era. In continuing to do so, we fail to create the conditions for a generation to fully
understand, participate in and develop cultural, civic and entrepreneurial life in the connected era.
This paper seeks to outline a much more ambitious stage for the Digital Public Space, one that recognises the
affordances of the connected era. It imagines a new role for our cultural institutions that positions them as central to
public cultural life and positions the public as central to cultural production and understanding.
The Open Web is Digital Public Space
The Digital Public Space was born of years of failed attempts to make significant volumes of archival material
available on the web. Those of us working within efforts to provide digital access to the great publicly funded cultural
collections have time and again failed to crack the digitisation, rights, mission triumvirate. That is, we couldn't secure
the funds to digitise significant volumes without the rights to distribute and we failed to inspire institutions to prioritise
digitisation funding and rights negotiations when their mission statements did not reference nor have any awareness of
the opportunities of the connected era.
The Digital Public Space is designed to help overcome the challenges of this triumvirate by providing compromised
experiences. By designing the Digital Public Space as closed content worlds it is hoped rights holders will be
more inclined to allow access to their work by siloing it from the open, remixable web. By creating highly curated
experiences it is hoped it will fit more closely to 20th century institutional missions making them more comfortable
with participating; and by providing only small amounts of public funding we constantly downscale and rationalise
expectations around how much of our cultural heritage should be digitised.
However we are already seeing progress that should make us question the need to compromise. New copyright
legislation addresses issues such as orphan works and format shifting, both artefacts of the connected era. We are seeing
institutions declare themselves digital first and radically re-interpreting their missions in doing so. It is not yet enough
but it points to change. We must be designing a Digital Public Space that imagines a mature connected age. It must be
at the leading edge of its medium, and of the open web with all the possibilities and opportunities that creates. We must
not let our failures thus far design against the extraordinary opportunities of the connected era.
Making the Digital Public Space
In re-situating the Digital Public Space within the open web we tap into exciting new affordances: sharing as default
(right click download, linking, API services), access to the creative backbone (view source) and remixing as standard
(see Mozilla's Popcorn or Xray goggles as examples). These, along with what Mimi Ito et al describe as Connected
Learning, are compelling cultural, civic and entrepreneurial participatory tools and models that when situated in the
vast cultural context of the open web create powerful networks of public expression and participation. They ensure that
the public does not just consume the artefacts of the Digital Public Space but that the Public can make Digital Public
Spaces.
In this design of the Digital Public Space we can also imagine a far more participatory and central role for our cultural
institutions. They can become facilitators, mentors and guides to a public of cultural creators, curators, interpreters,
researchers and knowledge producers even as they are key participants. Our cultural heritage becomes part of the fabric
of the open web as the public discovers the power of quotable culture and embeds it within their digital discourse. Our
cultural institutions will demonstrate a new and powerful relevance as they are once again at the vanguard of public
learning, cultural appreciation and production.
Digital Public Space
The Digital Public Space has the opportunity to be the very best of the open web. As such it can inform, enrich and
accelerate the social transformation from public consumption of culture to public participation in culture. Significant
challenges remain before we can fully realise the Digital Public Space described in this paper. We must continue our
efforts to overcome those challenges and commit to the very best of Digital Public Spaces. If not, we risk a generation
for whom their cultural heritage is at best quaint and at worst irrelevant.
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