The Open Source Museum

Picking up on the open source theme of my recent post on the upcoming release of the Raspberry Pi computer project, I’d like to expand a bit on the important role that open source hardware can, and I hope will play in museums and other cultural institutions in the future. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and can’t help feeling that there are huge opportunities available to institutions right now that most have not recognized — opportunities that extend beyond electronic interactives into some basic infrastructure elements as well.

First, let’s define open source. It’s a broad term, but perhaps the Wikipedia definition is as good a place to start as any:

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials.

Translated, this means that the creation of open source hardware follows quite a different path than traditional commercial processes where key information is closely guarded and protected from copying by the patent system. The open source ethos in fact goes the opposite way, sharing development information and embracing collaboration from all quarters in the belief that it produces a better end result. It most certainly encourages and enables innovation and improvement. The other thing that happens is that costs get driven down remarkably close to zero. This has the happy consequence of making things that were once inaccessible to many potential users suddenly incredibly inexpensive. The best example of this in recent years is 3D printing. It’s been around for years, but the cost for a “printer” had always been in the tens of thousands of dollars even at an entry level. Then along came the open source RepRap, Makerbot and a host of others, slashing the price of entry down well below $1000, and opening the floodgates of innovation and accessibility.

So what does all this have to do with museums? An article about the Arduino microcontroller that I’d originally read when it appeared in Wired back in 2008, popped up again recently in a Google search. It’s really a great read and really captures the excitement that attended the introduction of the Arduino. One of the examples cited of business models about to be disrupted by the Arduino was that of humidity/temperature monitoring devices for museums. Conservation requirements make it essential that museums and galleries tightly control temperature and humidity to protect artifacts and artworks from deterioration, so museums tend to have lots of these devices. It’s possible to adapt the Arduino quite easily to this task with some widely available components, and to capture the data in a graphical form with a simple data logging program. The cost for parts to create a unit like this were cited as $20. I think that’s probably a bit low, but even if you double it, it’s a huge savings over units sold by Masterpak or others.

So why aren’t museums using Arduino powered devices and pocketing the savings? I think there’s several factors at play here. First, the museum community is not known for being early adopters when it comes to technology, and has traditionally taken a pretty conservative approach to innovations, especially ones that might have an impact on the conservation imperative, probably rightly so. Second, most museums are starved for resources, both human and financial, and are often just trying to get done what has to be done. Ironically, the embrace of open source hardware would provide some relief of the strains on financial resources, but it would take some work to get past the hump of resistance and development effort to do it. In other words, it requires enduring some short term pain in exchange for some long term gain. In the end though, it really comes down to leadership — somebody or some institution needs to take the lead in defining this as a project worth doing and has to commit some resources to it. It requires some effort to build support for such an initiative, and to promote it to the broader community. It requires leadership to steer the development efforts, cooperation to test it in many different environments and the courage to set the project free when completed, to allow the rest of the community to use it and improve it. I think this last bit may be the hardest of all to sell to organizations. The idea of putting a lot of effort into something and then just giving it away will seem like madness.

As much as it feels wrong to people used to buying commercial solutions, it’s this letting go that allows open source to work its wonders, to have others build on the basic project. In our example, once a basic unit had been devised, tested and set free, it’s easy to imagine others building in wireless capabilities that allow remote monitoring of many stations at once. It’s also likely that somebody else might devise a way to graphically superimpose that onto a floorplan so that patterns could be recognized and HVAC adjustments be made to correct them. With open source, and enough users, these improvements just naturally and spontaneously occur.

The example I’ve used in this post is just one, there are other equally applicable technological bits in use in museums, galleries and other cultural institutions that are ripe for an open source shake-up. Perhaps I’ll outline some of them in future posts if there’s interest. I’ve raised all this now because I feel that we’re at an important moment in open source hardware. The Arduino, in all its many variants is a proven piece of enabling technology, and it’s about to be joined by the Raspberry Pi, an ultra low-cost credit-card sized computer with incredible AV capabilities. There’s a growing contingent of smart people doing really amazing things with these technologies, and I strongly feel that museums need to become aware of the possibilities that are all around them. So… museum community — how can we make this happen? Maker community — are you interested in being part of it?

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