The following is a talk I gave at the American Alliance of Museums conference in Seattle on May 20, 2014. It was part of a panel called Crowd Sourcing to Community Sourcing: Engaging Visitor Input.

Hi. My name is Jeffrey Inscho and I lead digital and emerging media efforts at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. For the past two years, my museum has been experimenting with new approaches to programming designed to harness community input, elevate visitors from passive viewers to active participants, and inform/disrupt our institutional concept of what gallery experiences can and should be.

My goal is to highlight two specific projects — one complete and formative, the other in-progress — that exemplify just how transformative this type of approach can be for an institution.

Before we get into the details of these particular projects, I think it’s important to begin with a bit of institutional context. The image you’re looking at now is from 1896. In it you can see artworks being delivered to the museum via horse-drawn wagons. I think this image says a lot about our institution. On one hand, it’s just that: an institution. And not only that, it’s one with more than a century of institutional tradition — processes, workflows and operations that have been ingrained into the fabric of the place. CMOA certainly isn’t alone in this respect, and I’m not speculating on whether this is good or bad. It’s just a fact and I’m just annotating it as an accepted truth.

On the other hand, my museum also has aspirations of achieving relevance in the lives of non-traditional museum-goers and diverse audiences. This increasingly means CMOA must operate in sync with — not in competition against — the fast-moving world around us.

Exhibitions not excluded.Reimagining our programming so it resonates with people on their terms and on their turf — that’s where these concepts of community sourcing and open authority come in for us.

This story begins in the fall of 2012, when we were presented with an interesting challenge by Lynn Zelevansky, our director. A slot was made available in our Forum Gallery for an open-ended experiment. The goals and specifications set forth for us were this:

1. Create an experience where visitors would engage with real artworks in a personally meaningful way. We had to use collection objects; This was an insistence of our director.
2. Make new connections and forge meaningful relationships with a target demographic (in this instance 20- to 40-year-olds), particularly by connecting real-word & online experiences.
3. Open up the museum to true dialog with the public and have that public actively impact content/display in the gallery.
4. Be clear that this was not an exhibition in the traditional sense, but that it was an experimental project.

And with those four directives in hand, a cross-departmental, cross-hierarchical group of colleagues were off to the races.

The working group tasked with making this project happen was diverse and broad. It included not only technologists like myself, but also museum educators, editors, art handlers, curatorial assistants and representatives from our registrar’s office. We met regularly over the course of approximately six months to wrestle around with our ideas, explore the adjacent possibilities, pursue what we thought were invigorating concepts and ultimately refine those concepts into a cohesive and full-featured project.

On the other side of all this ideation, we emerged with a concept we were all very excited about. The premise for our proposal was this:

• We would utilize 13 recent acquisitions from our photography department as the launchpad for the project. Decisions about which works would be made democratically by the working group and we would display these objects in the gallery.
• We would invite visitors to respond to these artworks in a visual or photographic capacity — via their smartphones or computers. - - We would use these responses and feedback to inform the presentation in the gallery during the run. While photos would be submitted and accepted digitally via the web, they would be physically represented in the gallery by their tangible, real-world manifestations.
• We would make every attempt to bridge the digital and physical components of the project, from event programming to the submission experience. It was important to us that this project have real-world impact.
• And finally, we would be institutionally okay if this project flopped. We were aware it was a substantial risk and we were (somewhat) cool with that.

All of this sounds super lofty and conceptual and full of museum-speak. We realized that for this project to succeed, we needed to accurately and effectively communicate the concept to our audience. Strike that, our co-creators. Our partners.

We settled on a short and memorable name: Oh Snap! We employed bold colors and fonts in the graphic design, and we made it as easy as possible for people to participate. Acknowledging the Oh Snap! concept was somewhat non-traditional and a bit abstract, we borrowed a page from the playbook of tech startups, and we produced a brief trailer to effectively convey the project’s personality and process. It’s about two minutes long and quite humorous, so I’ll play it now.

We built a responsive website that served as both the project archive, and also as the photographic submission vehicle. This was mainly an accessibility decision, but it also had budget implications because CMOA had the skill set to develop internally. Once we realized that the major mobile operating systems were loosening up to allow mobile browsers to access camera rolls, it was a no brainer. No app needed.

The rest was akin to a digital Rube Goldberg experiment. We daisy-chained several 3rd party services to facilitate the submission queue, approval process, website upload and participant notifications. Wufoo fed into Dropbox fed into IFTTT fed into WordPress fed into Mailchimp. Super hacky. A lot of variables were at play and I’m frankly surprised it worked.

But it did and the result was a participatory, community-sourced, open authority-infused project that blurred the digital and the physical.

I guess you’re probably interested in the results and how we determined whether or not the Oh Snap! project was a success.

During the 2 ½ months of the project, we received a total of 1,264 submissions. All of them, except for one, made it onto the walls of the gallery and the website. Some of them are really great. You should definitely have a look for yourself. They’re all archived on the project website: ohsnap.cmoa.org.

41% of all participants fell into our target age demographic of between 20–40 years old. That was by far the largest demo group, so I think we were successful in reaching the intended audience. The lion’s share of submissions came from the western Pennsylvania and tri-state area, but we did receive a good number of submissions from locations around the world such as Europe, South America and Asia.

We gave all participants (via email) a free pass to the museum to come see their work in our galleries. Approximately ten percent of those passes came back to us. That may seem low, but when compared to our average return rate of 3%, we were very happy with that percentage.

Fast forward one year. Oh Snap! was so transformative for us as a proof-of-concept and an institutional precedent, that we were able to leverage some of the velocity we created with it into an extremely large-scale project called the Hillman Photography Initiative. An incubator for innovative thinking about the photographic image, the Initiative aims to present a new programming model for the museum and revolutionize the notion of what a museum can be and do in the digital age.

Just to be clear, research and planning for the Initiative had been occurring for some time, but the notion of community sourcing became a valid option for us rather recently, only after the first cycle of projects had been solidified and the successes of Oh Snap! had been realized. You can learn more about all the projects that make up the Hillman Photography Initiative at nowseethis.org. For now, though, I’ll focus on a specific project that embraces this philosophy of community sourcing.

One of the projects in the initial cycle of the Hillman Photography Initiative is A People’s History of Pittsburgh. This is a very compelling project that parlays many of the things we learned with Oh Snap! into a cohesive experience that blurs the physical and the digital, and has its thesis rooted in community.

Through A People’s History of Pittsburgh, the museum is asking people to send in their Pittsburgh memories and become a part of a collective photo album for the people of Pittsburgh. Fueled by those who still live in the city, or those in the “Pittsburgh Nation,” this project invites people to contribute family-owned, found, or anonymous photographs. We’re also asking participants to share their unique stories about life experiences from the Pittsburgh region. A People’s History of Pittsburgh exists as an ever-growing online archive — filterable by date, geo tag, and theme — as well as an eventual print publication.

A People’s History of Pittsburgh has only been live for a few weeks, however we’re already starting to see some great participation.

Like this image, submitted by Matthew Newton, which depicts his grandfather manning his desk (broken arm and all) at the Mesta Machine Company, in Homestead, an industrial suburb just outside the city, in 1972. Matthew notes in his story about this photo that the back is inscribed with the affectionate description, “Sad Ass Hank.”

Or this photo from Kurt Tint depicting the Carnegie Danceland in the 1950s. His dad was the original proprietor.

Or even this recent image, circa 2011, from an anonymous user who captured a popular street musician known for performing in the Strip District.

A People’s History of Pittsburgh also manifests itself on-site at the museum. Because that’s the point of all this right? To impact the experience when someone is here with us? Throughout the run of the project, the museum will be displaying the images on-site, as well as hosting a series of “scanning days,” designed to help community members with little or no internet access be a part of the project.

I’ll leave you with this image. It’s one of many hand-written notes from visitors we received during the Oh Snap! project. Validation like this was important to both the working group as well as the museum, and it went a long way in affirming to us that we made something that meant something — not only to us, but to a community of participants who actively partnered with us to make the thing happen. Community sourcing projects are impossible without an engaged and invested community.

Thanks for listening. Everything I showed and said today can be found on my site at this link, and if you have questions please do holler on Twitter or email. Thanks!

For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve been enamored with artists who operate with authenticity and create work that I consider to be remarkable. It started early on for me with the likes of Fugazi, the beat poets and Jean-Michel Basquiat. During the pre- and early-Internet days it seemed like there was no shortage of musicians, writers and visual artists who were creating work of staggering genius. It took a great deal of effort on my part to discover, but that effort was worth it to me because the work was remarkable.

Since then, the Internet has taken hold. And due to the creative paradigm shift spurred by the web, I’ve found it difficult to discover post-Internet artists of the same authentic and remarkable caliber. While the benefits of the connected world (democratization of media, the enabling of real-time publishing, etc.) are regularly touted, I feel these same benefits are also the fundamental detriment of the world wide web.

The signal-to-noise ratio is completely inverted. There is too much collective and regressive output. Everything is instant and temporary. Meme culture and SEO and pay-per-click and the incessant self-promotion that comes along with the premise of social media is drowning out the amazing art I’m sure is out there. Somewhere. Beneath the din.

I am not alone in this view. Writer JD Bentley feels the same and is taking action. He writes in his fantastic essay, Our Secret Handshake is Not an Algorithm:

Medi­oc­rity reigns supreme, the noise exceeds the sig­nal, the best are drown out by the loud­est because being loud is much eas­ier than being remark­able. While sites of the past felt like secret clubs which demanded a secret hand­shake (that human con­nec­tion), today’s sites are often mass-produced mar­ket­ing non­sense, their secret hand­shakes being noth­ing more than an effort­less algo­rith­mic assump­tion on Google’s servers. It is this with which I’m fed up.

Quite a statement. And Bentley is walking the walk. He’s pulled his site from search engines, removed all social sharing features and is relying solely on reader referrals to grow his audience base. This emphasis on quality vs. quantity allows him to completely focus on his mission: Making remarkable art.

As someone who’s intimately involved at the intersection of mission-based messaging and new media, this approach is so refreshing. I’ve written about digital authenticity in the past. It’s something I’m borderline-obsessed with. I’m constantly thinking about ways to honestly, innovatively and authentically connect with audiences. It always boils down to the mission. Everything is driven by the mission. Aspire to be true with your message, not loud.

I’m excited to see a writer like JD Bentley take this step and I hope more artists and mission-driven organizations follow suit.