 Kia ora, Tatu. I'm Courtney Johnston. I'm the director of The Douse. The Douse, for those of you who don't know, is Lower Hutt's Public Art Gallery and Museum. We are based in the centre city out there. We were opened in 1971. We focus on contemporary art and craft. We have a collection of about three and a half-ish thousand objects. We're the really strong focus on contemporary craft, ceramics and jewellery in particular, mostly because we have little budgets and they are cheap. So we're, you know, 15 minutes out of Wellington, but we're very much a regional institution. So that's one of the things that I actually really enjoy about it. The talk that I'm giving today is about a project that we've just embarked upon. I don't have a presentation, but I'm stealing one of Tim O'Reilly's. Tim O'Reilly, the head of O'Reilly Publishing, an advocate in the States for transparency and digital innovation and the things that the web allow us to do as a culture and as a world. His ideas around creating value are kind of something that I have used a lot to shape my thinking about what I'm trying to achieve at The Douse and looking outwards in that. This is an ancient presentation. It's from 2009. He gave it at the Twitter Bootcamp back when Twitter was kind of still a bit of an upstart and new and shiny. And here he's talking, Anadine kind of touched on it yesterday in her social media presentation. He's talking about generosity, I think. He says the secret of social media is that it's not about you, your product or your story. It's about how you can add value to the communities that happen to include you. Not surprisingly, the more value you create for your community, the more value they will create for you. So that's something I think about all the time at The Douse. How are we creating value? Who are we creating value for? Who do we work for? And the two groups that we really work for are our ratepayers who fund us and our artists without whom there is no point for us to exist. So that's kind of the biggest context that I'm operating in, this idea of creating value. This context down for this particular project is that some funding became available. So maybe before I went out to The Douse, I was running a web company called Boosty Media and before that I was at National Library. I came from a really, I was a board member of NDF, I came from a really digital background and I think when I went to The Douse, everyone expected that the first thing that I would do would be to start a whole bunch of digital initiatives. And I think maybe the only new digital thing that we've done is set up an Instagram account and I didn't even do that. When I look at our audiences, our collection, our city and our place in the country, digital has actually ended up being quite low on my level of priorities when it comes to diverting an existing operating budget into new projects. So when a new piece of funding came up that allowed me to test some ideas around what I'd like us to do digitally, but also this idea around creating value, I kind of jumped on it. So in 1992, this is a little bit of a lesson in the history of the craft sector. The Craft Council got dissolved and the Craft Council sat alongside the Arts Council. New Zealand craft scene in the 70s and 80s was incredibly vibrant and innovative and outward focused. Potters were over in Japan and people were being brought over here and they were doing amazing things and the Craft Council kind of underpinned all of that. When they got dissolved, it happened in kind of a hurry. The archives came to the Dowson. We're still dealing with that legacy because we don't have a librarian. And the kind of the oomph went out of the sector. So a trust was formed, Ngataunga Heinei iwi iwi, who tried to continue the work of the Craft Council in the terms of building the profile and therefore the market and exhibition opportunities for craft artists. As with many of these organisations, the people who set it up in 1992 were senior in the field at the time and now they're very senior. So they were looking to wind up the trust and disperse its assets. So they sent out an expression of interest around that. And they had a small number of assets. They had a piece of taonga by Rani Kepa, which has come into the Dowson Collection. They had some filing cabinets full of stuff, which have, I think, gone into the tumble, thank God. They had a website that was built in the early 2000s on the back of a major fundraising campaign and hadn't been updated since 2006. And they had this much money. $13,000. And so I responded to the EOI and I said, I don't want the filing cabinets. We're not equipped to deal with those we'd love to house. Rani Kepa, that makes a lot of sense. And then I said, I know you want your website to be looked after and redeveloped and taken on by someone else, but we're not going to do that. But would you like to give me $13,000 to do something else with entirely? And they were really open-minded and receptive to that and that's how we've ended up launching this summer's Wikipedia project. So the point of the project is to write 100 biographies of New Zealand craft artists and load them onto Wikipedia. The more we explore this, the more we realise we're going to end up researching and documenting a lot of other things like major exhibitions, major publications, critics and curators who worked in the area. I really didn't I didn't want to take on their website because I couldn't commit to the ongoing care of it. We could have spent $13,000 updating it and replenishing the content but I couldn't commit to the ongoing upkeep. Wikipedia is not only the place where we're horribly underrepresented in terms of our history but it's also a place where I can in good conscience hand over to the community and say you help us keep this up to date rather than just creating another problem that would be perpetuating the one that the trust had already found themselves in. $13,000 in the context of what the DALS spends, that for us is about how much we invest in a major exhibition. So this is actually quite a chunky bit of funding from our perspective and I've split it up I'm going to do this all openly so we'll be publishing the budget and how we're spending it. The bulk of it is being used to employ two post-grad students or two recent grads who will be doing the research and doing the writing. I've put aside a little bit of money for them to go to conferences and training and present on the project. A little bit of money to digitise some of the key resources that aren't online that we need in order to write these entries and keep them on Wikipedia with proper references and taking a little bit of advice from Digital New Zealand will probably be putting those into the shared repository and then I've taken $1,000 for Overhead basically a little a little bit of padding for all the stuff that we'll be putting into the project ourselves. So the plan is for 100 bios and at the moment progress so far if you want to take on quite a gnarly and weird bit of community management try to make a list of the 100 most important any things in an area that people are really, really passionate about I would recommend that for a fun undertaking so we've actually done quite a good job of that and it's been a really increased my knowledge hugely so we're there as well as having the trust review that list will also be sending it out to a group of external curators ensuring it in that way and it's not about saying these people are better than other people a lot of it is about these people who have had long careers which are documented well which will lend themselves well to this kind of project without the documentation we can't do the project I've got one intern on board, she started last week and another person who I'm eyeing up and we'll talk to when I get back to work tomorrow and Mackenzie and I our intern who's on board came along to Mike and Stuart's workshop on Monday and kind of got the nitty-gritty on what this is actually going to be like I have quite a lot of nervousness around this project and especially launching to people who don't necessarily who aren't existing Wikipedia editors into it because my reading of the Wikipedia culture is that it's kind of horrible that's one of my major nervousness about this project and I've reflected on this a lot inside museums we're spending so much time at the moment trying to meet our communities on their turf I'd like to walk across the bridge to them to not impose our values but to ask what do you value and how do you like to do things and my reading of it is that the Wikipedia community does not work like that at all and they're kind of scary like the first bit of advice we got given in the workshop was don't use your real name which you know to me that's actually not good enough so kind of an added layer of what I'm trying to achieve with this project now is maybe building up enough confidence in the sector that we don't feel like that that we've got the support that I don't open up a Wikipedia account and then really worry about contributing any of my knowledge to this worldwide encyclopedia because I'm afraid that someone's going to just yell at me and make me cry at my laptop which is a bit sad yeah that's alright I keep on adding things to it but for me the project's all about making each one of these dollars work like really really work and when you're in a smaller organisation you probably I think start thinking about this so the value that I'm hoping to create here and the reason that I have chosen to invest this bit of money in this project and not in digitising our collection which is not online at the moment I think we have about 100 items in the NZ Museum's website so apart from that we have no collection information online and it's a big gap and I think about it a lot but I've prioritised this instead because I think it'll create a bunch of different ways. It's going to raise the profile of craft artists someone said to me in the workshop why don't you not worry about Wikipedia if you're worried that you're going to spend all this time writing these entries and then people are just going to come and delete them and you're not going to have any say why don't you just start your own website and I thought wow that sounds appealing and easy and then I thought no that's not actually going to achieve it because we need to put the information where the people are we need to put it where Google first. So raising the profile of our craft artists and our craft history by filling Wikipedia up with a bunch of information that it's missing there's nowhere in New Zealand where you can go and study the history of New Zealand craft you know you can't go and sign up to an art history course and learn about what's happened in the last 50 years in this area which is actually really vibrant and interesting and it makes you know ongoing I'm going to have a recruitment problem as I try to bring in new curators who can deal with the collection that's primarily made up of object art so one of the bits of value that we're creating out of this project is that we'll have two young and enthusiastic arts professionals who suddenly have a whole new body of knowledge that there is pretty much no other way for them to access and that by also digitising these key bits of material we're putting some more of that history online. We're going to talk to all these artists or there are states about the project that we're doing which is an opportunity both to reintroduce the daus to them if they're artists that we've fallen out of contact with but also to talk to them about what's happening online. I mean there are a number of states we'll be dealing with there are a number of older artists we'll be dealing with and then there are a number of people who are fluent in the web so it's a real spectrum and it's an opportunity for us to do a little bit of education in this area. It allows us to reaffirm our position as arguably arguably is a word that we use a lot in the moment in this culture right? So arguably I think New Zealand's leading contemporary craft institution and this is an opportunity for us to kind of and for me to nail someone's clipping so that means I must need to wind up soon. Nail our colours to the mast in that area and it really allows us to enrich our collection knowledge the future of the project for me it's really not about just stopping with these 100 entries. We're going to document it and document the process, what we learnt, what happened how we spent the money and then we'll release all of this as we go. I would love to see other people going out and pitching for funding or reallocating a bit of what they're doing and doing 25 architects or 50 colonial artists or musicians or composers or whatever it is that we're missing in this area and helping that out. I'd quite like us to continue the project ourselves in different areas. Hopefully it will be successful and it will become a good foundation for making future pictures and then in a couple of years time when I do kind of managed to massage my budget into a place where we can get our collection up online I'll be looking to pull all this information back from Wikipedia and display it alongside our collection items without creating a whole bunch of biographical entries that we then have to keep up to date every time someone moves or dies or gets a new award or all of the things that happen all the time when you're trying to look after artist's reputations. So that's the project we'll have the first blog post up on the DALS website by the end of this week and we should have the first bios up before Christmas Do I have time for questions? Oh I really belted through that Sorry, I was aware that I was going at a super radio pace but I was working off these so there you go Any questions? I know it's a stunning project, I wouldn't have any questions either Yeah So the question is do I have any concerns about using the visual side Not about I mean it's not about necessarily communicating the art works so much as it is putting the information about the artists and their careers online or the big stumbling block around the way that Wikipedia treats images and this is something that I haven't made my mind up about yet when you load up an image into Wikipedia or Wikipedia Commons you have to give up everything and as a collecting institution and an institution that works with artists every single day we work with them around their IP and their copyright and I actually don't know if I'm comfortable going to an artist and saying we'd really love to have images of your work to illustrate this entry but in order to do that you have to give up everything that's it, I think that's a big ask and I think it could potentially be extremely alienating when we go to artists and say hey this thing that you don't really know anything about we want to give them some of your stuff and you're not going to have any say anymore Potentially I'll just put that into the too hard basket for this iteration and tackle it later on realistically what I'll do is start with the friendlies the people who we have existing really good relationships with who I know use the internet frequently themselves and we'll be most open to this idea and start there is an enormous gap in this culture between the knowledge that we have about copyright and about what audiences are trying to do and the knowledge that artists have about their rights and what the opportunities might be and I don't know how we fix that because artists don't do professional development the way that we do once you leave art school you're doing art you're not going along to workshops and courses and learning this kind of career stuff so maybe Bronwyn has some fascinating insights but I'm not going to dump it on you because that's not fair that's a long winded answer to quite a short question but I hope it kind of gets me to where you were at have I spoken to Stuart? Yes I have spoken extensively to Stuart and so for the benefit of the recording because we're meant to be using a microphone Bronwyn's point is around the dearth of online information particularly about younger artists and critical reviews and things like that and Wikipedia has very strict rules around what they believe to be reputable quotable material and one of the problems that we have to deal with in this project is that it's entirely likely that Wikipedia will look at our entries and say you have a massive conflict of interest and we're going to delete these all and in the workshop on Wikipedia on Monday I threw a complete speck about this like a total speck because I'm like if you cut us out there is such a small group of people in New Zealand who have the knowledge who are equipped to make this contribution and if you strike us out because we're somehow complicit or not objective by virtue of the fact that we know this stuff and work in the sector then it's all just kind of fucked you know like it's just it's not going to happen and this is what I mean about banging my head against the Wikipedia culture and also you know if Wikipedia is not going to accept exhibition catalogs as a reputable source because they're somehow biased on objective it's like well we don't have anything else but I guess my overall philosophy is either you give up and you don't do anything or you try to change it so we'll try to change it and if that doesn't work then I'll find something else to do but I don't know like do we set up a dummy website and publish material that doesn't appear to come from any of us so that we can cite it seems counterintuitive to me too but I don't know, I'm still figuring it out I'm sure you've thought that presumably you're going to be recording and building on the people that you interview? No Does that would provide another R-Caster? Yeah it would, I'm going to point at that number again and it's just not there are actually a lot of really great oral history projects that have been done with craft artists and Te Papa's archive Yeah it would be so lovely I completely agree with you I'm really talking about not lowest common denominator but just like this is building blocks stuff that we're really really lacking in this area and that will be icing to mix my metaphors up What was the money out there? But as a council it's probably hard for you to do that but the friends at the desk might be able to do that That's entirely possible So this is a really interesting thing that I've like a little philosophical thing that I've come up against since coming into this role Katrina and I Katrina's my coms manager and she's here critiquing my performance Really the crowd from the front row We go along to funding presentations occasionally and from people who are funding projects and we end up sitting between people who run emergency housing for women who are trying to escape violent partners and people who are working with elderly people trying to keep them in their own homes and I kind of sit there and I go I'm running an art museum I don't want to compete with you for that funding but at the same time Yes Creative Communities funding I don't think I sit on Creative Communities panel for Hutt City Council and I don't think we would be eligible I'm not entirely sure but I wouldn't sign it off as a person on the panel if it wasn't a big conflict of interest anyway We have a friends group and we have a foundation and we do occasionally use both of those to apply for funding that we otherwise because we're a council unit wouldn't be able to go for so I definitely am hoping that a successful project I would like to go to CNZ for funding around this actually I'd like to see them widen what they're doing in the digital space Brian Question about relationships and connections so if you're putting this stuff on here do you see a relationship between that being and Digital New Zealand what are your ideas What are your ideas link data is really not my area of expertise at all I would hope that it would be useful. I used to have a dream when I was at Digital New Zealand that those authorities would end up making these magical webpages where you would pull from Wikipedia so I could go there and I could type in Doreen Bloomheart and I'd get pictures from here of Wikipedia bio from there I would hope that it does become an authoritative source that people can use and reuse and reuse I mean it's one of the good things about Wikipedia being so trenchant about copyright and accessibility and reusability is that anyone will be able to take this content and use it on their collection website or whatever else they want to use it for so if Digital New Zealand wants to scrape it more power to them Hi Lisa I hope so I genuinely hope so I'm going to get off but I'm trying really hard not to be possessive about this idea you really want to hold a passion project close to you if this is successful then I would hope that other people take it on and do it better than we do better and faster and cheaper or more money or whatever but it is my turn to step up and do something for the sector so that's what we're trying to do thank you