OpenCulture

I was invited along to the offices of We Are What We Do the other day for a get-together to discuss the launch of HistoryPin.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with HistoryPin, it is essentially a web-based and mobile application which encourages young people and old people to ‘pin’ their photographs and the stories they tell to a map of the world. The web platform and iPhone app will be ‘launched’ (the web platform’s already been available for a while in a basic form) on the 11th July.

In a sense, it’s a Google maps mashup, like a 1000 others. So what makes HistoryPin different?

Well, first of all, it comes from a very different place from the normal run of tech projects. Instead of starting with a cool technology and looking for a problem to solve, We Are What We Do (and their partners at Antidote) start with the ‘big problems’ – social cohesion, intergenerational respect, environmental responsibility, and try to imagine better solutions to them.

The problem HistoryPin is trying to solve is ‘problem 36: intergenerational relationships’. Older generations have stories to tell, and young people have tech, and the aim of HistoryPin is to get them to collaborate to get the most out of both.

Secondly, its different because HistoryPin has been picked up by Google, who have put at WAWWD’s disposal their entire infrastructure. This means that not only do the apps run creamy smooth, but they have also helped HistoryPin towards a global reach.

And so it was with eager anticipation that I headed down to the WAWWD offices just down the road from the Collections Trust’s Old Street office. Ushered into a typical startup meeting space (multicoloured bean bags) I settled down with a beer to do some serious chatting.

First up, I spoke with someone from the Gulbenkian Foundation about their work. Being a museum person, I always associate the Gulbenkian with the prize, but listening to the range of their social programmes it was a really interesting insight into the way Foundations like Gulbenkian and Soros are trying to solve the big problems too. Gulbenkian has put money into HistoryPin for their community programmes as a way of getting younger and older generations to work together.

Next up, I spoke with Henry Chilcott from Antidote, who helped conceive and brand HistoryPin. A really interesting bunch – all 4 directors were formerly with one of the ‘big 4’ ad agencies, and formed Antidote to imagine a better way. And imagine one they have – they are the team behind the hugely successful ‘I am not a plastic bag’ campaign, which helped reduce usage of carrier bags in UK supermarkets before going global.

Now listen to this – every project they do starts with a budget of £0. That’s right. They achieve hypercool global viral marketing campaigns with a zero capital outlay. It really brought home to me the fact that technology has now put this kind of smart anti-media campaign in the hands of anyone capable of thinking laterally enough to use them. One of the Antidote people asked me, flat out, which of the world’s problems museums are solving. Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

A couple more conversations and more beer later, and it was time for the presentations.

First up was Nick Stanhope, CEO of WAWWD and all-round HistoryPin evangelist. I don’t know if you’ve met, or had a chance to hear Nick speak before but if you do, it’s well worth a listen. He speaks with great conviction, not about technology, or data, but about people and the need to create better connections between them. His line ‘HistoryPin is not about data, it’s about relationships’ is one I wish I’d had drummed into my head the first time I ever got involved in a Digitisation programme.

Nick presented the different ‘faces’ of HistoryPin. He started with the web platform, which does really cool things like overlaying photos onto Google streetview and then letting you toggle the transparency so you get a kind of hallucinogenic ghosting of the present and the past.

He spoke about the HistoryPin communities project, about the API, which lets people repurpose the data from HistoryPin as, yes, Linked Open Data. He spoke about the engagement with kids, and the money from the Future Jobs Fund (sponsored by New Deal of the Mind) to get volunteers in, many of whom have now stayed on to work with WAWWD.

It was, in a weird kind of way, all really familiar – this is mashup/visualisation stuff, a combination of image and story, curated ‘tours’ – all the kinds of things museums have been doing for the past few years. But the whole effort is suffused with a kind of freshness and energy which is born from wanting to change the world – the same impulse that I think gets museum people out of bed in the morning and that I see in the faces of the museum studies students I teach - but unsullied by the years of wading through institutional process, lethargy and underfunding.

What was different about HistoryPin, then, is not that it represents an earth-shattering innovation, but that it feels like a distillation of the essence of the kind of difference which I think most of us want to make in the world. It’s a pure experience of the fusion of contemporary and historical narrative which lies at the heart of why people go to museums. In short, it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a digital version of the cultural experience and it points the way towards a really exciting time when we get past the ‘browse collections online’ model and into the next era of interface and experience which are based around real-world, everyday needs and behaviours.

HistoryPin is also interesting because it makes almost no use of canonical ‘social’ media. There may be ‘tweet this’ or ‘like this on FB’ somewhere, but they’re very well hidden. The point is not to use other social platforms, but to create an experience that is, itself, inherently social and collaborative.

I also had a great chat about moderation. Moderation of large datasets is about to really kick off as an issue, led partly by the discussions around Europeana and censorship, but also because let’s face it – we just don’t have the staff time or capacity to moderate datasets that are starting to number in the millions. HistoryPin takes a really interesting approach – they are essentially permissive, in the sense that moderation is ‘light-touch’, but the default view is to images no later than 2001, on the basis that people won’t automatically be shown more recent stuff. Of course, users being users, they find ways around this. The guy from HistoryPin showed me an extraordinary picture, pinned somewhere in France of two Tom of Finland types naked on a snowmobile in the early 80’s. It’s history, I’ll give you that, but is it art?

On a more practical note, WAWWD is really into collaboration – so much so that they are making the entire HistoryPin toolset openly available. The applications for cultural institutions are very exciting – make your collections available to HistoryPin, and you will get an Android and iPhone app of your very own. Or better – make them available to the Culture Grid, and we’ll make them available to HistoryPin (and you’ll still get an app of your very own). We’re entering a tremendously exciting time, with an almost daily flowering of applications and platforms designed to cultural content into the mainstream (and even to generate revenue with it), and the great thing is that museums can participate in all of them simply by taking an open and informed approach to publishing their data.

A quick presentation of the app, and a catchup with Richard Wallis from TALIS about their wonderful work on RDF and triple stores, and it was time to go. (Not before an amazing chat with @miaridge, but that’s a whole nother post). As I hefted my Boris bike out of the rack and headed of to Waterloo, I was left with an overwhelming sense of having seen a glimpse of the future. It’s just like the present, it seems to me, but better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2011 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Business Models, Digital Agency, Digital Inclusion, Digitisation, General, Grid, Linked Data, Nick Poole. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.