What an art museum can learn from the world’s leading open web champion
For a year and a half now I’m working with the Slovak National Gallery to find out how digital technology can help connect people to art in new and profound ways. We recently embarked on a learning journey by joining Mozilla’s Open Leadership programme, to help us get better at successfully running open-source projects. In this post I’d like to share a bit about our motivations to join the programme, what we have learned already and the kinds of things we are looking to work on.
One of the main ways we are connecting people to art at our R&D lab, is with the open collection platform Web umenia. On the platform anyone with an internet connection can explore more than 100.000 artworks from the collections of several public art galleries across Slovakia. Being funded by public money, it makes sense to us to contribute the work we do back to the public in the form of open-source code. This means that you can copy, study and remix all of the components that make the platform work. Want to see it for yourself? Have a look at our GitHub profile:
Working open also means that we would like our code to be useful to other art organisations (or anyone else really) who might want to publish their digitised collections in a similar way. However, making such an open-source wish a practical reality can be challenging. Although we have been open-source from the start, most of the work has been done by a tiny group of internal employees working closely together (I am only the second developer to join this effort).
Turns out, releasing your code is just the beginning of running a project openly…
Turns out, releasing your code is just the beginning of running a project openly. This is where the Open Leadership programme comes in: We want to get better at inviting others on our mission to let people around the world learn about works of art and the context they’ve been created in. This is exactly the way of working that Mozilla has been pioneering since the early days of the web. In the video below, Mark Surman tells the story behind Mozilla and their approach to working openly.
Besides providing tons of educational resources, the Open Leadership programme has connected us with a fantastic mentor Bastian Greshake who guides us based on his experience leading the Open SNP project. So far the experience is great and has already helped us to better communicate the values of our platform to those who might like to get involved.
In the next few weeks we are working on a structure to make it clear to interested outsiders how to get involved. We’ll share more details soon, but the areas in which we will be looking for contributions are roughly:
- Making it stupidly simply to get started developing Web umenia on your own
- Getting more content like articles and collections in English
- Making the entire platform accessible in Slovak, English and Czech
- Creating a ‘living pattern library’ to document our modular front-end design and make it easy to maintain and customise.
A key moment will be the weekend of 27–29 October, when we are showcasing Web umenia to potential partners and contributors at Mozilla Festival in London.
Are you working on similar issues? Would you like to get involved in any of the areas above? Would you like to know more about Web umenia or our involvement in Open Leadership?
We’d love to hear from you! Please open an issue on GitHub or leave a comment below!
