digital public spaces

Contents

We Are Digital Public Space - Introducing Digital Public SpacesDrew Hemment and Bill Thompson

Why the Digital Public Space MattersTony Ageh

The Library and the ForumJames Bridle

Modelling the Digital Public Space: The New RenaissanceNeville Brody

Creating the BackboneJill Cousins

Digital Networks, Public SpacesSteve Crossan

Digital Public Space - A ChallengePaula Le Dieu

Culture Unlimited - New Interfaces for CultureDrew Hemment

Personal Learning in Organised Complexity: Navigating the Digital Public SpaceAndrew Hiskens

Taxonomy of the Digital Public SpaceNaomi Jacobs, Bill Thompson, Jeremy Myerson, Kasia Molga

Building a Digital Public SpaceMo McRoberts

Reverberations of the Digital RenaissanceEmma Mulqueeny

Digital Common Space: RemixabilityJussi Parikka, Paul Caplan

The Measure of SuccessAaron Straup Cope

Public Domain 4.0Marleen Stikker

A Short Meditation on a Cartography of Hybrid Space and How to Intervene Within ItMichelle Teran

Constructing a Digital Public SpaceBill Thompson, Drew Hemment, Rachel Cooper, Charlie Gere

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AboutFutureEverythingPublications

Each year FutureEverything proposes, develops and responds to particular themes. These themes are provocations, designed to open up a space for debateand practice, made tangible through art and design projects. FutureEverything Publications seek to contributeto an international dialogue around these themes.

The Digital Public Spaces publication has been developedby FutureEverything working with Bill Thompson of theBBC and in association with The Creative Exchange.

Drew HemmentFounder and CEOFutureEverything

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This publication gathers a range of shortexplorations of the idea of the Digital PublicSpace. Together they provide insight intothe future development of the internet as azone of engagement as web technologiesmature, mobile access becomes dominantand new devices allow us to consume,learn, create and share with each other.

The central vision of the Digital PublicSpace is to give everyone everywhereunrestricted access to an open resource of culture and knowledge. This vision hasemerged from ideas around buildingplatforms for engagement around culturalarchives to become something wider, which this publication is seeking to honeand explore.

Contributors include some of the peoplewho are working to make the Digital PublicSpace happen. But this is not the story of afew people. This is everybody's culture, we are all Digital Public Space.

The Digital Public Space initiative beganlife within BBC Archive Development andis now being investigated by the BBC, BFI,Tate, British Library, Arts Council England,FutureEverything, The Creative Exchangeand many more.

The Digital Public Space is in one sense anew perspective on the international effortaround open technology and open culture.It mirrors the work of Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) around open standards, and strivesto do for digitised cultural content what theOpen Data campaign is doing for publicly-funded datasets. It does not replace theopen Web, but demonstrates what it mightdeliver if its full potential were achieved.

This represents a sea change in thinkingabout expertise and ownership of culturalheritage. The gatekeepers of knowledgeand culture, the 'experts', realise the needto open this effort up, and to actively

engage many actors and citizens. Two of the early architects of the DigitalPublic Space – Tony Ageh and BillThompson – have seeded the idea beyondthe confines of the BBC.1

The truly deep shifts are now happening toculture from the bottom-up. This can beseen in the collaborative code ethic ofGitHub – an open source code repository –and the communities of coders and artistswho share code and effort online. This isradically different to the traditionalapproach to building and refining code –or any form of culture – in a closed andinaccessible way.

This publication and events such as theFutureEverything Summit are helping toframe and expand the debate. Here weplace Digital Public Space alongside relatedinternational initiatives, from the GoogleCultural Institute to Europeana. These arepart of the international effort to constructthe underlying infrastructure and standardsthat are a precursor to a Digital PublicSpace.

The Digital Public Space is made up ofnetworks of technical infrastructure, datamodels and standards for authentication,rights management and identity, digitalassets such as images, video andinformation, data trails, software layers,coders, designers, museums, broadcasters,galleries, corporations, and thecommunities who share their interactionsonline.

Work to build the Digital Public Space is already widespread, through efforts at BBC Archive Development including the recently-announced Research andEducation Space, alongside Europeanaoffering a model for a comprehensivecatalogue of digitised cultural assets,ResearchSpace showing how linked datacan transform academic research and The Space (thespace.org), the Arts Council

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England/BBC experimental service,delivering digital art to multiple devicesduring summer 2012.

FutureEverything has been engaged withthe ideas behind the Digital Public Spacesince its inception. As a result the idea ofthe Digital Public Space has been colonisedby artists and makers as well as curatorsand technologists, and the resulting fusionhas demonstrated yet again the enormousimpact of this creative approach totechnology and culture.

FutureEverything has helped to make theDigital Public Space come alive throughadvocacy and discussion forums, and byleading workshops, developing artworks,prototypes and experiences, which canpush at the possible, to chip away at thebarriers, to show that it can, and must, be done.

The Creative Exchange (CX) knowledgeexchange hub is also building on this andaims to create new products, experiencesand business opportunities which empoweranyone, anywhere to access, explore andcreate with the newly accessible collectionsof media, public information and data trailswhich form the Digital Public Space.

If this were design science fiction, Bill Thompson and Tony Ageh at the BBC would have us each travel through n-dimensional space of discovery in aTardis of our own making, a sentientsensing device able to parse any place ortime, with a soundtrack by DeliaDerbyshire like the warbling of a timetraveling modem.

In one commission for The Space by BlastTheory working with FutureEverything –I'd Hide You (2012) – the archive was areal-time stream of video, chat and imagesgenerated by players in the street andonline. The innovation was a novel form of interface and performance, a new

space-time-experience.

The emoto (2012) data visualisationartwork for London 2012 Festival set out to create a new interface to the Olympicsout of the stuff of a new limitless context,the interactions of millions of peopleonline. Chattr (2013) developed byFutureEverything with the CreativeExchange looks at the ethical and socialdimensions when personal conversationsare leaked and become public online.

This is a process of critical design thatenables us to interrogate the limits of theDigital Public Space. It is also participatoryinfrastructure and policy, creating theconditions for the Digital Public Space toexist. We are building and testing as we go,working to bring more people along,putting into play networks of people,things, protocols. Ask not where the DigitalPublic Space ends, ask which part we canmake.

An approach FutureEverything haspreviously employed (Open Data Cities,2009-11; DataGM, 2010) is to address theentire ecosystem at once, by engagingdevelopers, rights owners, public bodies, all the intermediaries, on many differentlevels, as agents of change.

Over the coming years an ambition is tomake and demonstrate FutureEverything asa prototype for the way that culturalorganisations need to evolve to exist withinthe DPS.

Contributors were asked to respond inwhatever way they feel appropriate to thequestion, what could a Digital Public Spacecontain, and how might it be created, used,explored?2 We hope this publication willprove to be a useful benchmark as we movethe Digital Public Space forward.

Drew Hemment and Bill Thompson - for the editors.


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Drew Hemment is an artist, curator and researcher.He is Founder and CEO of FutureEverything,Associate Director of ImaginationLancaster atLancaster University, and Deputy Director of TheCreative Exchange (CX). His work over 20 years indigital culture has been recognised in awards includingLever Prize 2010, Big Chip International Award forInnovation 2010 and Honorary Mention Prix ArsElectronica 2008. Drew is a member of the ManchesterInnovation Group and the Leonardo Editorial Board.In 1999, awarded a PhD at Lancaster University, in2009 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts(UK), and in 2010 an Eyebeam resident (USA).

Bill Thompson has been working in, on and aroundthe Internet since 1984 and spends his time thinking,writing and speaking about the ways digitaltechnologies are changing our world. A well-knowntechnology journalist, he is Head of PartnershipDevelopment in the BBC's Archive DevelopmentGroup, building relationships with museums, galleriesand other institutions around ways to make archivematerial more accessible, and a Visiting Professor atthe Royal College of Art.

References:

Blast Theory (2012) I'd Hide You [Performance]. The Space and FutureEverything 2012, Manchester,17-19 May.

Dalton, B. et al (2013) Chattr [Art Prototype].FutureEverything 2013 and The Creative Exchange,Manchester, 21-24 March.

Hemment, D. & Tait, J (2010) DataGM: The GreaterManchester Datastore [Data Policy]. FutureEverything& Trafford Council, Manchester, 21 February.

Stefaner, M., Hemment, D., Thiel, S., Fiedler, S (2012)emoto: Visualising Online Emotion [Data Visualisation and Art Installation]. London 2012 Festival, London, 27 July-9 September.

1 The term Digital Public Space was coined by TonyAgeh but the concept owes much to earlier work byothers. For example, that of Neville Brody on modelsfor digital engagement based on his work with theBBC and other broadcasters.2 Constructing a Digital Public Space' was firstpublished by FutureEverything in May 2012.

Extracted from The Digital Public Space: What it is,why it matters and how we can all help develop it. ,delivered by Tony Ageh Controller, ArchiveDevelopment at the Economies of the Commonsconference, Amsterdam Thursday, October 11, 2012

Since its formation in 1922 as the BritishBroadcasting Corporation the BBC hasplayed a key role in shaping broadcasttechnology, initially for sound and morerecently for vision. It remains heavilyinvolved in their further development.Now, with online distribution andengagement such a key part of the ways inwhich the BBC fulfils its public purposes,we are working with many otherorganisations to shape the Digital PublicSpace, helping to define a roadmap or ablueprint for an emerging digitalenvironment whose definingcharacteristics are openness, persistence,engagement, partnerships, access andpublic benefit.

The Digital Public Space is not a product or a service, but an arrangement of sharedtechnologies, standards and processes thatwill be collaboratively developed andcommonly applied, to deliver a set ofprinciples, objectives and purposes againstwhich collective enterprise can beevaluated.

Nor is it a ‘better Internet’ or an alternativeto the Web but rather something thatemerges from the full and properapplication of Web technologies, currentand under development, to address theproblems that face organisations andindividuals that want to share theirdigitised assets in a structured way.

The model of the DPS emerged from thegrowing realisation that the environmentwithin which broadcasters, memoryinstitutions and individuals were creating,distributing and storing the things theymade or curated was being transformed bydigital technologies, and that certain keyissues were not being properly addressed.

For example, our approach to permanence,or at least of potential permanence, was notwell thought through. Things no longer‘need’ to disappear after a certain period of time. Material that once would haveflourished only briefly before being lockedup or even thrown away — can now bemade available forever. At the BBC werealised that Licence Fee Payersincreasingly expect this to be the way ofthings, and we will soon need to have a verygood reason for why anything at alldisappears from view or is not permanentlyaccessible in some way or other.

That is why the Digital Public Space hasplaced the continuing and permanentavailability of all publicly-funded media,and its associated information, as thedefault and founding principle. Everythingelse then becomes possible.

Then there is the issue of the cost andcontrol of distribution. Before the advent of the Internet, all anybody needed wasaccess to a suitable receiving device andsome form of electricity, in order to beconnected to a broadcasting network thatbrought them an unmetered supply ofinformation, education and entertainment.

The Internet brings many benefits, but itbrings additional complexity, with moredevices, different controls, new charges and a potential loss of privacy, and theBBC’s history as a broadcaster does notnecessarily give us the expertise needed to deal with these challenges.

In the UK the search for some of thesesolutions may have started within the BBCbut we soon embraced partners includingArts Council England, the British FilmInstitute, the British Library, The NationalArchives, Jisc (formerly the JointInformation Systems Committee) and a number of other libraries, archives and memory institutions.

Why the Digital Public Space MattersTony Ageh

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Outside the UK we’ve talked to theEuropean Commission in Brussels and in particular to Europeana, we’ve gotconversations going on with potentialpartners in Australia, and there is a genuinerecognition in America that such anapproach has the capacity to help drivegrowth across the creative economy.

Achieving what we have in mind will take a collaborative effort, on a global scale,between all interested parties to organisetheir currently disorganised resourcesaround a common purpose. This is whypartnership, one involving the broadestpossible coalition, with partners from allover the world, is so key – it is only byworking together that we can possiblydeliver on our ambitions at scale.

It has been the BBC’s aspiration from thebeginning to be not merely universal butavailable equally to all. The benefits of thebroadcast medium were to be shared byevery single citizen of the UK. In founderLords Reith’s own words, the BBC’smission was “To bring the best ofeverything to the greatest number ofhomes”, free from direct political orcommercial considerations, and ensuringan equivalence of opportunity – regardlessof status or income or doctrine or ability –to be informed, educated, entertained.

The DPS is a way to deliver the most wepossibly can from our vast and pricelessarchives, and in so doing to remindourselves of all that the BBC has achievedto date and position it appropriately for theDigital Age and, in doing so, stimulate thecreative industries to inspire innovationand deliver growth throughout oureconomies. This will have profoundimplications for how we all, across Europeand beyond, experience and participate inculture, education and citizenship.

It will also stimulate the wider creativeeconomy. Digitising cultural assets anddeveloping an ever expanding range ofways legitimately to access and exploitthem will create entirely new industries,providing for highly skilled jobs and newopportunities for entrepreneurs.

Tony Ageh has held various roles at the BBC since2002. As Controller, Internet he was responsible for thecreation and delivery of the BBC iPlayer. He iscurrently Controller, Archive Development, deliveringthe BBC’s strategy for making the programme archivemore available and developing the Digital Public Space.

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The public library is often put forward asone articulation of public space: access toknowledge for all, equally, with anemphasis on personal agency and privacy. If we are to consider digital public spaces,then what qualities would it share with thespace of a public library? What, indeed, aredigital products and services doing to thelibrary?

On the face of it, ebooks should be a boon to libraries, encouraging wider reading andsharing, reducing costs, and increasingprovision for poorer, older, and differentlyabled people. Digital books can be sharedmany times at once, effectively increasinglibrary stocks. Catalogues can beexponentially, if not infinitely, larger. While there are many good arguments toretain ebook prices on the open market atlevels which allow publishers and authorsto continue to make a living - and this istrue too of library editions, which oftenform a significant proportion of publisherrevenues - accommodations can certainlybe made in the name of the public good, as they always have been. Digital texts canalso be turned into speaking books for theblind, or large format editions, at the touchof a button. But in practice, this is not theway ebooks have been affecting libraries inthe real world.

Digital books actually return a huge amountof agency to the publisher, and publishershave been using this leverage to controlhow libraries stock and issue their books.Ebooks are often stocked on the conditionthat they continue to be loaned in the samemanner as physical books: many librariesstill mark a borrowed ebook as "out" (andtherefore unavailable to other readers) justlike a paper book, despite the electroniccopy's infinite reproducibility. Others insistreaders visit the actual building todownload and "check out" ebooks. In 2011,HarperCollins tried to stipulate that itsebooks could only be borrowed 26 times.

After this, the file would self-destruct, inaccordance with the belief that this is theaverage lifespan of a worn-and-torn paperlending copy. Finally, many ebookproducers are attempting to destroy the"first sale doctrine" which states that thosewho purchase a book (or many other items)have the right to sell it on, loan it out, andso on. First sale is one of the "traditionalsafety valves" of copyright laws, ensuringthat reasonable copyright is not over-extended. When a library cannot controlthe conditions of loan of their books, andwhen they are prevented from selling onoverstocked or out-of-date holdings, theylose an ongoing source of revenue, as wellas their own autonomy. All of these effectsare direct consequences of the political,corporate control which it is possible toembed into digital systems.

While libraries retain many important usesthat make them important to retain, it mayturn out that many of the book-centricoperations of the public library are simplyincompatible with digital books. Librariesare not just places to read books, they arepublic spaces providing a range of services.These are essential to people on lowerincomes, beneficial to all, and they areadjusting to different roles. Manycontemporary institutions are learning toemphasise the library as a space to work,think and connect. Plenty of physical mediacan be retained, but their use might well besecondary, while much of visitor’s activityis conducted online and with one anotheras with the collection.

What this tells us is that libraries as publicspaces are conditional on them beingphysical spaces, as all other values areslowly reabsorbed back into corporate,private space. The problems with ebooks in the context of the library are amicrocosm of the problem of all concepts of digital public space. The form of publicspace articulated by the library cannot exist

The Library and the ForumJames Bridle

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online, which is always subject to corporateand geographic pressures which may bedistant from, and obscure to, its users. The post-geographic conception of theinternet is a fallacy, exposed by itsinteraction with other systems, includinglegal and meteorological ones. It is notoutside geographical influence if it issubject to the weather, as in the majordisruption to Amazon's cloud services by severe storms in June of 2012. It is notoutside political control if it can bedisrupted by legal demands, whether that is cryptographic control of ebookaffordances, or judicial oversight ofphysical servers and data facilities. Digital space is always owned in some way:there is no true commons online.

This should not be news. Out with thelibrary, the wrath visited upon attempts at asserting the right of public protestacross multiple interests and locations inthe last few years should show to whatextent the concept of public space has beendegraded. True public space has beenunder attack from every direction in the UK and elsewhere for far longer than theinternet has been around, and it would benaive to think that this trend is notcontinued online, in a space that emergesfrom military research and governmental-corporate administration.

The only truly public space of books is and always has been the space of theimagination. This would appear to be trueof digital spaces as well.

James Bridle is a writer, artist and technologist basedin London, UK. He exhibits and speaks worldwide onthe subjects of literature and technology, networks andculture. His work can be found at http://booktwo.org.

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The Digital Public Space, a BBC-initiatedcollaborative project involving the BFI,British Library, National Archive of Birthsand Deaths, Tate, Arts Council and manyothers, stands as an amazing andunprecedented opportunity to develop newtools to store, share, exchange and develophuman knowledge.

It arrives at a critical juncture in thedevelopment of the internet, the fourthmajor leap in our capability to spreadhuman knowledge after the flowering ofcave-painting, the birth of writing and thealphabet, and the invention of printing withthe Gutenberg Press. It potentially heraldsa new renaissance, leading to a period ofunprecedented enlightenment and access.

What started as a process to understandand define what an archive is in the 21stcentury, is evolving into something muchmore significant, the core for developing aunique and powerful project, a cultural andliving genome of the UK.

A digital archive is not a closed space, nor amuseum of dusty objects, but, through thepremise that digital data is fluid, is an activeand dynamic one, wherein everyinteraction with any piece of content, plusthe paths, journeys and connectionsthrough the content space itself, will bestored as part of the growing pool ofknowledge. How a piece of data is used is asfundamentally significant as the piece ofdata itself, and reveals dynamic, responsiveand powerful shifting patterns ofinformation that grow and evolve.

Whilst a book, DVD or linear broadcast arefixed storage and delivery forms, the abilityto store how any piece of content isinteracted with, and information about anyother piece of content that the item isconnected to, is the catalyst that pushes thisspace into a whole new level, that of livinginformation.

The ability to store information about usagein a header that sits within any piece ofinformation allows each item to beconverted into the equivalent of a livingcell. The line of code monitoring the actionof a piece of data is active, always on, andcan be designed to form responses thatchange the nature of the cell. This allows usto build a self-organising knowledge space,a living organism, one that is constantlyresponsive, capable of producing new ideasand solutions. Built-in sentience wouldallow Swarm Dynamics, leading toknowledge clustering through adjacency-awareness.

This space enables anyone to access anyinformation anywhere at any time on anyplatform, and anyone else accessing thatspace, akin to the growth in the availabilityof information and the spread of knowledgethat immediately preceded theRenaissance.

The DPS is essentially a protocol, acommon compression algorithm anduniversal metadata language, meaning anypiece of information can be cross-referenced and accessed from any point.This allows new forms of evolving narrativeto be told. Artists will construct livingnarratives through this interconnectedspace: the future Dahl, or Adam Curtis, orOrson Welles, Jane Campion or Warhol willcreate dramatic scenarios utilising text,moving image, sound, information, design,interaction and synthetic sense to createdramas and art.

One direct consequence will be thedissolution of disciplines. Not anti-discipline, but post-discipline. Da Vincicombined science with art, anatomy withpoetry, engineering with invention,architecture and design. No longer will we be limited by a socio-industrial modelrequiring us to adhere to a particularrestricted skill or craft.

Modelling the Digital Public Space: The New RenaissanceNeville Brody

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This venture will have a massive impact onevery facet of our lives, from new forms ofgovernance and community to newmethods for learning and teaching; newtrading mechanisms and economic models;new forms of culture, new dynamics ofaudience participation, new narratives, new ways to solve problems.

What are the appropriate models forbuilding the necessary catalogue andanalytics? Yahoo’s cataloguing system, with trees and branches, was replaced witha more fluid engine. The next search andreference model will use contextual criteriaincluding time, relevance and usage. Howshould a discovery engine work, and howdo we create filters and controls?

Should we personally interact with thisspace through avatars, vessels or robots? Is the DPS an embryonic AI organism thatshould be allowed to develop an apparentlevel of sentience and act as a unique being?

How should we imagine this space, whatare the visual and experiential metaphors?Should we build dynamic 3-dimensional or4-dimensional models? What does a maplook like in this space? How should wemake sense of our journey lines? Who willbe the farmers, shepherds and librarians?

In the search for the appropriate physicsmodel, the dynamic for this knowledgespace could be fixed and regulated, or self-regulating. We could utilisequantum principles of probability, or usemore familiar, recognisable and analoguestructures. Are we building a new brain, or do we just want a library or Blockbuster?

Digital is to a potential KnowledgeRevolution what Steam was to theIndustrial Revolution. The process ofbuilding massive synthetic intelligencestructured on an organic model raises asignificant number of critical and urgentethical issues: Memory, Identity and

Privacy; Governance, Democracy andAccess; Control, Ownership,Commercialisation and Copyright; Workand Life.

This is an extraordinary time andopportunity, and the challenge ahead is toensure that the DPS remains dedicated tothe public good, is democratic and notinstitutionalised or commercialised, worksfor humanity, and is allowed to evolve fullyand limitlessly, helping us to take the nextleap in the development, growth andsharing of human knowledge.

World-renowned graphic designer and art directorProfessor Neville Brody is Dean of the School ofCommunication at the Royal College of Art, and isPresident of D&AD. He currently sits on a number of committees with a specific remit of furthering thereach, access and quality of education for all. Brody’sResearch Studios, with offices on London, Paris, Berlinand Barcelona, was responsible for designing TheTimes newspaper and the BBC website, and hasrecently carried out a redesign of the RCA brand. In 2010, the studio produced the Anti Design Festival,and has been responsible for the production of FUSE,the typographic laboratory.

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‘Public Mission’was a reason given by theMuseums, Libraries, Archives and Audio-Visual collections for allowing Europeana to apply a CC01 license to their metadata. This discussion and outcome withEuropean cultural heritage institutions wasfundamental to be able to move from anarchive that gave limited access to theirdigital content to creating a repository thatcould be distributed and used in newdevices and creative compilations, for newand old web audiences. It took 3 years butculminated in the release of over 20 millionmetadata records into the public domain inSeptember 2012. This has since climbed to26 million and is set to continue to rise.

As cultural organisations and theiraudiences move to an age of mass-participation and social media, our sector is increasingly challenged to find a new wayof expressing and delivering our publicprinciple. If consumers have the right toaccess and participate in their culture, how can we deliver a cultural offer that is best-suited to the needs and expectations of an always-connected, always-on, multi-platform digital world? What would thismean for our institutions and theirpositioning in the cultural landscape - the way they relate to their usercommunities, to other stakeholders and toeach other? Is there an opportunity for newtypes of relationship with privateenterprises in the cultural sector, supportedby some form of open content, i.e. contentin the public domain or bearing a creativecommons license? How would suchproducts and services relate to thecommercial offer of publishers and othercontent companies?

In a series of meetings with strategists,policy makers and content owners withinthe Europeana Network2, the concept of a‘commons’ or a ‘ public space’wasacknowledged to be a potential mechanismto address some of these questions.

The vision of a common principle thatunites the digital programmes andambitions of both Europe's cultural andcreative industries - a Cultural Commonsfor Europe.

The key values of a Cultural Commons areparticipation and reciprocity, which couldgive the key to how organizations enhancetheir creativity and grow potentialinnovation3 and to the future of visions suchas the Digital Public Space or Europeana asa European Core Service Platform.4

The idea of the Commons is fundamental tothe successful operation of the web ecologyof content and services. Underpinning thefoundation of the commons is a set ofresources in the public domain that areowned collectively or 'held in common' and shared openly among a community.The key feature is that, unlike privateproperty, the ownership of resources heldin common is inherently inclusive.However such a commons need not be onlyabout content. It can deliver protocols,ontologies, open source software solutions,linked open data, open data models………Core services that allow for sharing andreduce the cost of developing the requiredunderlying infrastructures, building onwhat we have done already.

Europeana and the UK’s Digital PublicSpace5 –which is defined as a set ofprotocols, services and resources unifiedunder the public domain to raise publicawareness and power new forms ofengagement- are very similar in conceptand vision. They both started out with theidea of creating access to archives but nowalso provide core services to give openaccess to resources and technologies forothers to innovate and to develop. They reconcile rights for content owners.They develop interoperability andstandards and multilingualism to make this possible.

Creating the BackboneJill Cousins

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They can be the backbones for sharing andcommunity.

2013 will see 3 pilots at Europeana thatmake use of the principles conceived by theEuropeana Network for a CulturalCommons. The idea is to find out if theEuropeana core service platform can liveup to these principles and deliver thecontent, tools and services needed to createthe pilots in mutually beneficial ways. Is the Digital Public Space a fourth? Can we provide the underlying platformsand technologies to enable others tomanipulate, transport, remix and reformthe archival content. It means that we arenot sexy but we are publicly available andnecessary.

With thanks to the work of Charlotte Hess,Michael Edson, Merete Sanderhoff, NickPoole, Harry Verwayen and LouiseEdwards and the Europeana NetworkCultural Commons task force members.

Jill Cousins is Executive Director of the EuropeanaFoundation. Her responsibilities includeEuropeana.eu; the flagship portal of the EuropeanUnion that brings together and distributes the contentof the Archives, Audio visual collections, Libraries andMuseums of Europe. She has many years experience inweb publishing including the commercial publishingworld as European Business Development Director ofVNU New Media and scholarly publishing withBlackwell Publishing.

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1 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/2 The Commons: from Concept to Action.

European Cultural Commons, Cyprus, October 20123 Understanding knowledge as a commons:

from theory to practice. Edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007

4 http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/cultural-commons5 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2011/10/

digital_public_space_idea.html

Digital networks can connect people anddata on a very large scale. One consequenceof this connection is the opportunity forrelatively small actions undertaken by largenumbers of people in a loosely co-ordinatedway to have a large impact. Wikipedia isperhaps the canonical example withininformation management, but in other wayssocial movements like the Arab Spring orthe Occupy movement demonstrate thesame idea.

There’s an obvious parallel here with theidea of the agora, the public space where towhich everyone has access, where it’spossible to meet anyone else, and whereeveryone’s voice can be heard. Except that,if the internet is a city, it’s one with aplethora of public spaces rather than asingle one. These spaces are very flexible,adapted to particular tasks, and can becomepopular and widely known thoughsometimes only for short periods.

The question then is how do we create abigger, more permanent public space? With city planning, the task is morestraightforward. The city has a centre;typically you want to put your public spacethere. Once you’ve built the infrastructure,and identified it, everyone knows where itis. Most people will come across it everyday. It will only go away if you knock itdown and build something else instead.

But on the web, that public space could beanywhere. There isn’t an obvious centre tothe city. Anyone can decide to build ashared space, and many do. By definitionno-one is in charge (a good thing in mostways) so no-one can decide which is thepublic space.

There are a bunch of solutions to this issue.One is partnership; if a lot of (probablypublic) organisations can come togetherand put their weight behind a single space,they can get some traction perhaps within

a particular vertical like culture -thespace.org is a great example of this.

The Computer Science solution to this kindof problem (multiple incompatible ways ofdoing the same thing) is typically to pushthe means of doing it further down thestack. This of course is why the web worksat all; it’s based on a standard set ofprotocols for publishing and readingmultimedia content, and for linkingbetween that content. This ‘protocolisation’ of the problem is agreat solution - if it gets adopted. That theweb is in many ways one big public space is down to the success of a few simpleprotocols like HTML and HTTP.

HTML though doesn’t protocoliseeverything we might want to do in a publicspace. It’s great at making anyone apotential publisher and anyone else apotential reader - but it’s less good on waysof connecting people socially, or onstandardising the structure of information.This is exactly why Tim Berners Lee andthe W3C have spent the last 15 yearsevangelizing for the semantic web: toexpand the capabilities of the public space.There’s a direct line of inheritance fromthese efforts to the Linked Open Datamovement within cultural organisations.And of course when the 2 come together(partnership and protocolisation) you cancreate some very large federated publicspaces such as Europeana.

Shared Context, Big History

To realize the promise of the public spacethough, there’s something else that’sneeded: you want to be able to look ateverything that’s going on in the samecontext.

A Geographical Information System candisplay a huge variety of information in

Digital Networks, Public SpacesSteve Crossan

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the same context (a map) because thatinformation is georeferenced. This provides a very intuitive way ofunderstanding a wide variety of data, but more importantly a way of comparingdifferent datasets, and starting tounderstand the relationships betweenthem.

With historical and cultural data we need to do the same thing, but adding theelement of time - call it spacetimereferencing.

As with maps, once all the evidence isregistered together, and publicly available,new comparisons become possible thatwere not possible before. Scholars andstudents can build on this referencedevidence to create interpretations that canbe navigated and compared (not to mentionmined for statistical correlations) in looselycoupled ways that are very powerful. By analogy with Big Data, you might termthis Big History, or Big Culture.

Coverage and the Commons

The final piece of the puzzle is coverage. A public space is only interesting if thegood stuff can be found there.

Libraries have the same problem - whencethe idea of a copyright library.Governments pass regulations whichmandate that any time anything ispublished a copy needs to be sent to one of a small number of reference libraries -ensuring that these collections cover asmuch as possible of the universe ofpublished information.

So what’s the analogy in the digital sphere?How about a Digital Copyleft Archive. This would need to be somethinginternational. Let’s say that participantsagreed that, any time a public institutionundertook digitisation of some of their

heritage (or paid for digitisation withpublic money) a copy of that work must besent to the Digital Copyleft Archive (itself a publicly funded organisation). The Archive would have a long term digitalpreservation remit, but also the remit tostandardise to a basic set of metadata(place, time, people) based on W3Cstandards to enable discovery, comparison,visualization etc.

A Digital Copyleft Archive - all of ourdigitised culture, referenced to the sameframe, connected to our conversations -would be a public space worth dreamingabout.

Steve Crossan is the Head of Google's CulturalInstitute, and prior to that helped build out Google'sfirst R&D centre outside the US in Zürich, Switzerlandand spent 2 years in California as a Product Managerfor Gmail. Before Google he founded 3 startups in theUK (2 still exist ..) and studied History at Oxford andComputer Science at University College London(studying the history of technology took him from oneto the other). He grew up in Africa, France and the UK.

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At its simplest, the ambition of the DigitalPublic Space is to create safe digital havensthat house our formal cultural heritage onthe web. It will be the foundation for thedigital homes of our extraordinary sound,image and text archives and the repositoryof contemporary cultural outputs. It willbring all the value creation of our greatinstitutions - the collections, the curation,the expertise, the knowledge and thestories - to the public wherever they maybe, through the web.

Yet, for all this, this paper contends that thediscourse and outcomes of Digital PublicSpace thus far have not been nearlyambitious enough on behalf of the public itseeks to serve. We have failed to address thefundamental affordances of the open webas a Digital Public Space in favour of anoverly pragmatic response to the challengesof this early stage of the connected era. Incontinuing to do so, we fail to create theconditions for a generation to fullyunderstand, participate in and developcultural, civic and entrepreneurial life inthe connected era.

This paper seeks to outline a much moreambitious stage for the Digital Public Space,one that recognises the affordances of theconnected era. It imagines a new role forour cultural institutions that positions themas central to public cultural life andpositions the public as central to culturalproduction and understanding.

The Open Web is Digital Public Space

The Digital Public Space was born of yearsof failed attempts to make significantvolumes of archival material available onthe web. Those of us working within effortsto provide digital access to the greatpublicly funded cultural collections havetime and again failed to crack thedigitisation, rights, mission triumvirate.

That is, we couldn't secure the funds todigitise significant volumes without therights to distribute and we failed to inspireinstitutions to prioritise digitisationfunding and rights negotiations when theirmission statements did not reference norhave any awareness of the opportunities of the connected era.

The Digital Public Space is designed to helpovercome the challenges of this triumvirateby providing compromised experiences. By designing the Digital Public Space asclosed content worlds it is hoped rightsholders will be more inclined to allowaccess to their work by siloing it from theopen, remixable web. By creating highlycurated experiences it is hoped it will fitmore closely to 20th century institutionalmissions making them more comfortablewith participating; and by providing onlysmall amounts of public funding weconstantly downscale and rationaliseexpectations around how much of ourcultural heritage should be digitised.

However we are already seeing progressthat should make us question the need tocompromise. New copyright legislationaddresses issues such as orphan works andformat shifting, both artefacts of theconnected era. We are seeing institutionsdeclare themselves digital first andradically re-interpreting their missions indoing so. It is not yet enough but it points tochange. We must be designing a DigitalPublic Space that imagines a matureconnected age. It must be at the leadingedge of its medium, and of the open webwith all the possibilities and opportunitiesthat creates. We must not let our failuresthus far design against the extraordinaryopportunities of the connected era.

Digital Public Space - A Challenge Paula Le Dieu

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Making the Digital Public Space

In re-situating the Digital Public Spacewithin the open web we tap into excitingnew affordances: sharing as default (rightclick download, linking, API services),access to the creative backbone (viewsource) and remixing as standard (seeMozilla's Popcorn or Xray goggles asexamples). These, along with what MimiIto et al describe as Connected Learning,are compelling cultural, civic andentrepreneurial participatory tools andmodels that when situated in the vastcultural context of the open web createpowerful networks of public expressionand participation. They ensure that thepublic does not just consume the artefactsof the Digital Public Space but that thePublic can make Digital Public Spaces.

In this design of the Digital Public Space wecan also imagine a far more participatoryand central role for our culturalinstitutions. They can become facilitators,mentors and guides to a public of culturalcreators, curators, interpreters, researchersand knowledge producers even as they arekey participants. Our cultural heritagebecomes part of the fabric of the open webas the public discovers the power ofquotable culture and embeds it within theirdigital discourse. Our cultural institutionswill demonstrate a new and powerfulrelevance as they are once again at thevanguard of public learning, culturalappreciation and production.

Digital Public Space

The Digital Public Space has theopportunity to be the very best of the openweb. As such it can inform, enrich andaccelerate the social transformation frompublic consumption of culture to publicparticipation in culture. Significantchallenges remain before we can fullyrealise the Digital Public Space described inthis paper. We must continue our efforts toovercome those challenges and commit tothe very best of Digital Public Spaces. Ifnot, we risk a generation for whom theircultural heritage is at best quaint and atworst irrelevant.

Paula Le Dieu has worked with many media andcultural organisations such as the BFI, BBC, Guardian,Fairfax and Ofcom as well as international digitalactivism and film making communities. Herexperience spans making digital products &experiences, shaping the future of public service media,shaping the role of archives in the digital age andleading international communities of volunteers. Shealso sits on the executive boards of Sheffield's Doc/Festand the Open Knowledge Foundation. Most recentlyPaula was the Digital Director at the BFI. Paula iscurrently working with the Mozilla Foundation ontheir Webmaker programme in the UK as well ascontinuing to develop her own projects.

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The central vision of the Digital PublicSpace is to give everyone everywhereunrestricted access to an open resource ofculture and knowledge. It is an ambitiousplan to create an entirely new dimension tothe way we experience culture.

This idea can sometimes sound infinite andlimitless – as opposed to a reality embeddedin the messy details of rights and royalties.So how far do we yet have to travel to get tothis vision of open culture and knowledge?To what extent is today's social web apublic space? What limits do we face todayif we want to access, reuse, collaborate andco-create online? What kinds of new publiconline experiences of culture can we buildtoday?

We were able to take a reading of thisduring the biggest global event there is, the Olympics.

The emoto (2012) data visualisationartwork for London 2012 set out to create a new way to experience the Olympics as a global online event. This was an artexperiment in making tangible theinteractions of millions of people online,and it enabled us to examine how 'open', or closed, is today's online world.

The Internet is a new and apparentlylimitless context for our activities. There are the interactions between tweets,comments, 'likes', photos and video uploadsfrom the online audience and themultitudinous products of traditionalmedia activity, from shared headlines andimages, the stats and stories on sportfederation sites and the medals table andother data streams. This is a new form ofliving collective memory that lives in theshared online space – the sensorium of theOlympics as a global online event.

emoto set out to create a new interface toLondon 2012 out of the stuff of thislimitless context, the ever-expandingdimension of data which overlays our

everyday, a novel way to engage in andsense the drama of the sporting events. It was the first project to capture andvisualise the online sentiments towards a major global event in real-time.

From the get-go we looked where and howwe could detect the online 'public' responseto the Games. In the early stages we madethe case for open data to the New Mediateam at the London Organising Committeeof the Olympic Games (LOCOG). In the endLOCOG data was released on the LondonDatastore. But to us, the most interestingcontext to the sporting events was theengagement of ordinary people online, and we turned to social media.

We wanted to read and make visible theattention, emotion and interaction of theaudience, the athletes and everybodyparticipating, not just in the stadia, butaround the world. But when dealing withsocial media, there is no global space. There is a patchwork of territories,platforms and connectivity. We limited our focus to the online response on a singleplatform, Twitter.

emoto tracked Twitter for themes related to the Games, analysed the messages forcontent and emotional tone, and visualisedthe dynamic audience response as eventsunfolded. It sculpted message content,associated metadata and derivedintelligence into a real-time web-basedvisualization. After the Games a tangibledata sculpture served as an aggregatearchive of the collective response toLondon 2012.

There is nothing outside the archive. We did not integrate the stream of medalsdata, but the 'real' events could be seen as a shadow on the social graph. Everythingleaves a shadow and anything can be lookedat anew from the perspective of thenetwork.

Culture Unlimited - New Interfaces for CultureDrew Hemment

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Part of the promise of the Digital PublicSpace is that it will be n-dimensional. Once the underlying data structures andstandards are in place there is an unlimitednumber of user interfaces that can belayered on top, each one opening a uniqueperspective and vista.

In the Digital Public Space everythingbecomes context for everything else. When we can infinitely discover threads of connected things then culture becomesunlimited too.

But emoto came up with a bump upon thelimits of the corporate version of the DigitalPublic Space as it is being built today.

Two weeks before launch, Twitter turnedoff the tap. We had access through one ofthe two resellers to the 'Firehose', themassive, real-time stream of all (100%) the Tweets flowing through the network. Then Twitter changed their Terms ofService, and they moved to pull Tweets offthird party platforms, so they can monitorand monitise the flow of data. Tweets werepulled off LinkedIn, so what hope we, asmall arts outfit! We spoke to Twitter in theUSA, in Germany, to their Olympics lead inthe UK. To no avail.

Only two weeks before our launch duringthe Olympics Opening Ceremony, we had todevise a workaround. We built newinfrastructure, and turned to the "PublicAPI", giving us access to 1% of Tweets. In the end, our artwork was a success. We could derive the intelligence we neededfrom the sampled, statistically valid streamof the 'Spritzer'. In that difference – that99% –we see how far social platforms likeTwitter are from a true Digital Public Space.

For a long while Twitter was the posterchild of the social media age. But emotomay prove to be the last Twittervisualisation of its kind if they stay on thiscourse. Whole ecologies of businesses andprojects thrive around the APIs of such

platforms, and can be destroyed on a whim– a phenomenon we are exploring in theAPI Economy session in theFutureEverything Summit this March.

emoto pushed at the limits placed on accessand creative reuse when the social web isdominated by a small number of closedplatforms. The opportunities for cultureand for commerce are infinitely moreprofound when the technology, and theintelligence, is open. Where the walls arepermeable, collaboration and value co-creation becomes easier and the parts,services and experiences become scaleableand sustainable. This is a space for freeculture which can also enable new businessmodels, digital marketplaces and valuesystems, where for example, citizens cancurate and trade their own datatrails.

The Digital Public Space is cultureunlimited. The DPS must be built, or youmay be turned off too.ReferencesDerrida, J (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Hemment, D. & Tait, J (2010) DataGM: The GreaterManchester Datastore [Data Policy]. FutureEverything& Trafford Council, Manchester.Law, J (1992) 'Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network'. Systems Practice. Vol. 5 No. 4.Stefaner, M., Hemment, D., Thiel, S., Fiedler, S (2012)emoto: Visualising Online Emotion [Data Visualisationand Art Installation]. London 2012 Festival, London,27 July-9 September.


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Like any well-occupied public space in thereal world, such as a city, the Digital PublicSpace exhibits all of the characteristics oforganised complexity – the dynamic inter-relationships of systems, of processes,of emergent self-organisation.

And like cities, there are those who want to bulldoze the complexity and everydaymessiness, and replace it with somethingnew and slick and with nice clean lines. As Jane Jacobs, the author, urban theoristand activist once memorably noted:

“The trouble with paternalists is that theywant to make impossibly profound changes,and they choose impossibly superficial meansfor doing so.” (Jacobs, 2000)

You see this tendency in the online world,often disguised as ‘doing good’. A proposalto filter the entire web coming intoAustralia to keep us safe from childpornography and terrorism was onlyrejected relatively recently. And, in schoolsin particular, the ‘digital school fence’,cutting off access to social media and a hostof other things which could genuinelysupport learning is commonplace.

But the truth is that, if you want people tolearn road sense, it is better for them toexperience crossing the road than remainsafely indoors. And the same is true of theDigital Public Space.

Over the past several years, the StateLibrary of Victoria has run an onlineprofessional development program forteachers and school library staff calledthe Personal Learning Network or PLN. The genesis for the program was awonderful model created in 2006 by Helene Blowers called 23 Things, which we adapted as a platform for shared sociallearning around technology in education.

In part this was designed to counteract thereceived wisdom that students – Prensky’s

(2001) ‘digital natives’ –were uniformlygreat at technology and that teachers allneeded remedial classes. The reality is thatteachers are experts in learning and, giventhe opportunity, most will model how to begood online learners for their students. We also wanted to do something whichdidn’t focus on the early adopters oftentargeted by tech companies for their specialprograms, but on the group in the middle of the bell curve who are typically timepoor and just a little anxious abouttechnology.

The beginners’ program covers – gettingstarted, organising information, buildingnetworks, teaching and learning tools,making the most of resources, changingpractice in a digital environment and thefuture of learning. The course structure is constantly changing, as we reconsideroptions from beginner to advanced andspecialised programs on topics dear tolibraries such as research skills.

The program not only exposes people to arange of technologies from social media toresearch tools, but it has purposefullyutilised quite different delivery platforms,ranging from a Wordpress blog, to Lore andEdmodo. Choosing the right tool from alarge and constantly changing pool ofoptions is also part of the learning; it islearning how to navigate the digital publicspace in action.

The results have been phenomenal. We surveyed participants in late 2012against a set of characteristics based onpeople’s best learning experiences andfound:

• 90% had a sense of having learned• 88% felt that there was an audience

for their learning• 95% felt supported• 83% felt that it was social

Personal Learning in Organised Complexity: Navigating the Digital Public SpaceAndrew Hiskens

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We were also interested in people’sexperience of flow and found that 81%found the program ‘tough’ and only 4%‘too tough’• 23% felt ‘a bit’ of personal progression,

14% ‘quite a bit’, 27% ‘a lot’ and 32% ‘heaps’�

• 55% were ‘excited’ and 18% ‘passionate’about the program

• 93% said they would recommend it to colleagues.

This was an older cohort – 63% had beenworking in education for more than 15years. And that made it all the moreremarkable that, when asked how the PLNaffected their professional practice, 21%said it changed it a little, 50% said itchanged it somewhat, and 19% said itchanged their practice completely. For agroup who had been in the workforce thatlong, that 19% is a remarkable result.

We have had a new community developeach year the program has run. One yearpeople will flock around Facebook, anotherrally around Twitter, or Diigo, or a range ofother options. It’s messy, there are multiplechannels and there is no ‘neat and tidy’. If you give people their head to explore thedigital public space, you will see organizedcomplexity and the creation of emergentvalue.

As one participant described the program:

“Brilliant. Comprehensive and fun. I am nowin contact with educators from all around theworld.”

You can’t simply build communities, butyou can help people work out how toconnect.

References:Jacobs, J. 2000. The death and life of great Americancities. London: Pimlico. p284.Prensky, M. Digital natives, digital immigrants Part 2:Do they really think differently?. On the horizon 9.6(2001): 1-6.

Andrew Hiskens is the Manager of Learning Servicesat the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne,Australia. The Library runs a range of programs insupport of digital literacy, engagement with books andwriting, the history and culture of Melbourne andVictoria, and discussion about the future of learning in rapidly changing world. He is interested in theintersection of learning, technology, ideas andcreativity.

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When talking about connected spaces,traditional terms used include thefollowing: Personal, Private, Public, Social.These are not necessarily mutuallyexclusive terms, but a space, object orinteraction exists along each of thesespectra. They can be perceived as referringto the assumed degree of control in eachsituation. Personal spaces or objects arespecific and tailored to the individual. Anitem that is personal may be shared or not,but personal spaces may be invaded byintrusion of others who are not explicitlyinvited to do so. For example a notebookused for keeping notes is a personal objectthat the owner might not wish to sharewith others, whereas one might own apersonal copy of a book and lend it toothers to read. Control is centred on anindividual. Private spaces have a restrictedaccess list; there is a high degree of control.This does not necessarily mean limited to aspecific small number – a private party mayhave a large attendance but the key factor isthat not everybody is able to attend. Publicassumes that access and usage is open toall. This may mean that no one particularperson has ownership over the space oritem – usage is shared, such as a bench in amunicipally owned park. It might be arguedthat public and private are opposite ends ofa spectrum. The final term underconsideration, social, may be defined asreferring to the amount of interactionbetween persons, either in terms of a spacethat is shared or an item that is designed foruse by many people at once or to facilitateinteraction. An example of such a spacemight be a café.

Social or cultural factors may influencesuitability and usage of the above terms forany particular example – for example whatcounts as a personal space may varybetween cultures, and although a parkbench is ‘public’ and can be used byanyone, the social constructs of interaction

mean that rules govern who sits on a benchat a particular time – if there are severalempty benches and one occupied, anapproaching person will not generally sitnext to the stranger and if they do sounwelcome conclusions may be drawn.

The digital space requires new paradigmsto represent these aspects. The table belowprovides suggested equivalent terms toreflect the nature of the new spaces:

A personal digital space or object is onethat is created by an individual for theirown purposes and usages. This may becreated for many different purposes. If thisis private, then it must be encrypted andlocked so that use is restricted to aparticular set. This in some cases may berestricted to one person (the creator) or inother cases to a group of users – either alarge or a small group. The critical aspect isthat it cannot be accessed by all, or at leastthe perception must be there that it is notwidely accessible. It may be the case thatthe ‘locked door’ is notional only, thatpeople could walk around the door but donot go through it because they perceive theway to be barred. The opposite of this is apublic object which is indexable and canthus be found by anyone and is connectedto the rest of the digital space. Socialobjects are sharable, they can be easilylinked and transmitted to others who maybe able to pass them on to others, or co-create and change the nature of the objector space before sending it out again to beshared by others.

Taxonomy of the Digital Public SpaceNaomi Jacobs, Bill Thompson, Jeremy Myerson, Kasia Molga

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Personal Private

Created Encrypted

Public Social

Indexable Shareable

The notion of findability is critical in aspace where so much data and content isbeing created. If something cannot be easilyaccessed then to some extent it does notexist for those who cannot find it. This mayin some cases be desirable if the item inquestion is desired as private, but forcontent which is produced as being open itis critical that users can find it. There arerelated issues regarding serendipity andhow people can ‘stumble across’ items thatare of use to them. Serendipity does notoccur simply because many things are laidout available to find, they must be closelyenough related that they are likely to appealto someone who was actually looking forsomething else. There are issues with theway that search engines such as Googlefunction in that they ‘design out’serendipity by only returning exactly thething that was being sought.


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Jeremy Myerson is an academic, author and activistin design. He is based at the Royal College of Art wherehe holds the Helen Hamlyn Chair of Design. He is aCo-Investigator of the Creative Exchange.

Kasia Molga is a media artist and interaction designerwhose practice is concerned with changes in ourperception and relationship with the planet in theincreasingly technologically mediated world.

Naomi Jacobs is a Senior Research Associate inImaginationLancaster. Her general research interestsinclude knowledge exchange, interdisciplinarity, andexperimental psychology; the latter area being the fieldof her PhD which looked at the role of hand gestures inconversational speech. She is currently working as partof the The Creative Exchange.

The most valuable things in the world arethose which can be bought and sold bynobody but are accessible to everybody.

Parks and commons, roads and walkways,works of art held on behalf by publicinstitutions all fall into this category andhelp to define our public space, but so doesthe ability of anybody to send a letter to anyrecipient they wish. For while public spacesare physical environments, “the publicspace” is a more ephemeral term, capturingthe conceptual nexus of the public and theresources that are readily accessible for itsbenefit.

Throughout human history, society (and as aconsequence the public space) has beenshaped by new means of communicatingwith one another. The movable-typeprinting press put the power of massdissemination into the hands of the many, to the dismay of the establishment, while auniversal postal service did much the samefor one-to-one communication.

Although there have been variousexperiments, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century, it wasn’t until theexplosion in popularity of the publicInternet in the 1990s that there was abroadly-accessible medium which allowedfor both mass and peer-to-peercommunication in one swoop. We are still adapting-slowly-to this new-found capability.

A key part of this adaptation is that ofevolving public expectation. The Internet-savvy public is now in the majority inBritain, and the age of being surprised by the ability to accomplish something on theInternet has long since passed us by.

The public expects to be able to catch up ontelevision and radio that they’ve missed, andbrowse the catalogues of libraries, museums,and galleries. Meeting (or exceeding) theexpectations of the public is the currency bywhich public institutions are valued, and soif those institutions are to remain relevant to

the public, it is vital that the interactions inthe public space evolve as expectations do.

Meeting these expectations is not withoutchallenges, and many of them are not amatter of technical capability. The evolutionof the public space to embrace the Internet-the emergence of a digital publicspace-carries with it some significantpitfalls, but it also some of the greatestopportunities that society has had within its grasp.

There are many applications built on theInternet, but the World Wide Web has so far eclipsed all others, not least in terms ofaccessibility and flexibility. The Web haschanged the way that we communicate withone another: not only in the mechanismsthat we use, but in what we say and the waythat we say it. It’s not at all uncommon topass comment on something happening in“the real world” by annotating a link to apage describing it. And although we don’tnecessarily often think of it in those terms,every time somebody “likes” a page onFacebook or leaves a comment on it, shares a video on YouTube or a photo on Flickr,that’s what we’re doing.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee intended the Web to be incredibly flexible. A great deal moreflexible than most people realise, in fact. One feature built into nearly web server inexistence is the ability to provide differentrepresentations of content depending uponwhat the client’s capabilities are. Often thatclient will be an ordinary web browser(although of course the range of devices onwhich an “ordinary web browser” runs is sovast that the term is almost meaningless)and so the most useful representation will be a web page written in HTML that thebrowser can display. A few years after creating the Web, Sir Timrealised that the identifiers we use inbrowsers to locate web pages-URIs-couldalso be used to identify things which aren’t(or even can’t be) on the Web. The chairyou’re sitting on, for example; or the person

Building a Digital Public SpaceMo McRoberts

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who sold you a cup of coffee this morning; or a radio broadcast for which no survivingcopies exist.

Just giving things a name (or in many cases,an additional name) which happens to takethe form of a URI only achieves so much.The power of the Web lies in links: the namewe give to a page or other digital resourcealso tells a browser everything it needs toknow about how to retrieve that resource.

While the chair you’re sitting on isn’t adigital resource which can be publishedusing a web server, information about thatchair can be. That information could be aweb page, a photograph, or it could be rich,structured, machine-readable informationabout it.

While there are lots of ways of producingthis machine-readable information, the mostexciting is the Resource DescriptionFramework, or RDF. RDF provides a genericway to express structured data in a uniformway, regardless of the specifics of that data.It even provides the means to expressindividual vocabularies which are used tomake up that data. Like the Web, RDF usesURIs to identify things, including otherthings being referred to in a given piece ofdata—this means that a description of onething can link to the description ofsomething else in much the same way as anHTML page, but in such a way that the linkshave context and meaning to softwareprocessing the data. By creating andpublishing RDF, and making it available atthe URIs used to name things, we create aweb of data which sits transparentlyalongside the web of documents we’re usedto using in our browsers.

A web of data is immensely powerful. Itallows us to express relationships betweenthings in an unambiguous fashion: forexample, it allows us to say that thistelevision programme features Brian Cox(the physicist) while that televisionprogramme features Brian Cox (the actor).

With structured data published in this wayand indexable, we can create new kinds ofjourneys and experiences around the thingsthey describe. The use of resolvable URIs (that is, URIs youcan retrieve data from) as a kind of name forsomething also carries with it someprovenance information. As only a person ororganisation who controls a domain namecan publish data on that domain, youknow—for example—that data published ata URI beginning with“http://www.bbc.co.uk/” is data publishedby the BBC.

Because provenance is conveyed in this way,anybody can say anything about anything;the authority lent to the publisher on a giventopic is determined by the applicationconsuming that data, and could depend upona great many factors. As a user, you mightnot care what the British Museum has to sayabout a television programme, but you mightwell care what your close friends have to sayabout it.

This degree of flexibility represents afundamental shift in the relationshipbetween institutions and the public. Ratherthan a traditional publisher/broadcaster and audience split, all parties become peersto one another in a space from whichanybody can contribute-and everybody canderive value.

Mo McRoberts works in the BBC’s ArchiveDevelopment department, which develops partnershipprojects in conjunction with other publicly-fundedinstitutions as well as other parts of the BBC seeking toget the most out of the BBC's vast (and rather varied)archives and ensuring that the next hundred years ofincreasingly-digital archives are built to last. Fromlate 2011, he has led the technical design and overseenthe development of The Space, a digital arts servicecreated in conjunction with Arts Council Englandwhich brings more than sixty separate commissions ofvarious shapes and sizes to a technically and culturallydiverse international audience.

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The Renaissance we are most familiar withstarted in the 14th Century and continuedits trail of disruption for hundreds of yearsaffecting language, art, design,understanding, belief, fashion, celebrity,politics and brought with it recognition fornew types of talent and refinement of skill.It affected the lives of everyone in Europeat the time, although many argue that itsaffects were felt worldwide in connectednations.

I would argue that we are experiencing a second Renaissance now, a digital one if you take the time to explore the 14thCentury Renaissance and research thedocumented writings and musings of thetime, as well as reflective tomes, you will be able to find comparable stories beingwritten now, by many people of all walks of life - from the academics to the tribes inAfrica, photographing their land andborders for Google.

This is not the place to explore in detailthose comparisons, but you might like to gooff and have a bit of a play in your own timeand come to your own conclusions, there ispossibly several lifetimes of research outthere already! However, for the purpose ofthis piece, I wanted to have a quick look atthe affect this is having on education.

For me, the two greatest things that link the 14th Century Renaissance and this oneare the dramatic change in the connectivityof people regardless of boundaries: be thatland or capability; and the endlesspossibilities for peer-to-peer learning.Indeed these two things are one: theconnectivity of people enables evermorediscrete peer-to-peer education.

The disruption in how people learn andhow people share knowledge will again beprofound and seismic in its affect. I can seethe cracks in the chrysalis of modernformal education even now, and it isexciting as well as scary.

Education Nation

It is through education that we grow as anation, as an inter-nation. Take Ivan Illich'sbook: Deschooling Society (1971): written inthe 70s with a kind of hippy dream of whatit would be like if we could disestablishschools. It was seen as a great butimpossible work - even though the rhetoricmade sense in theory. Yet, I would arguethat we have pretty much stumbled uponthe environment he predicted we needed,in order to free the minds and talents of theyoung. He says at one point in the book:

“Such criticism leads many people to askwhether it is possible to conceive of adifferent style of learning. The same people,paradoxically, when pressed to specify howthey acquired what they know and value, will readily admit that they learned it moreoften outside than inside school. Their knowledge of facts, theirunderstanding of life and work came to themfrom friendship or love, while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers orthe challenge of a street encounter. Or theymay have learned what they know throughthe apprenticeship ritual for admission to a street gang or the initiation to a hospital,newspaper city room, plumber's shop, orinsurance office. The alternative to dependence on schools isnot the use of public resources for some newdevice which "makes" people learn; rather itis the creation of a new style of educationalrelationship between man and hisenvironment. To foster this style, attitudestoward growing up, the tools available forlearning, and the quality and structure ofdaily life will have to change concurrently.”�(Illich, 1971)

It seems to me that we have alreadystumbled upon this reality, and it is becauseof this ability to learn directly from livingscholars, as well as discover new thingsfrom long dead people within minutes and

Reverberations of the Digital RenaissanceEmma Mulqueeny

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without moving - discovering, as we go,current and active communities who areexperts and passionate in subjects wenewly discover, willing to share theirlearning and encourage ours.

Children are growing up in this worldgripped by change, and their expectationsare mighty: Open data, open borders, opensource. Open Education in schools mayseem a long way off from where we areright now - but I simply cannot see anyother future for learning. It has to open upto survive and in doing so, we really ramp-up the tangible changes of this modernRenaissance.

I believe that the reality of the size of thischange is the real reason why it is so hardfor anyone to properly tackle the issue ofteaching children modern day ComputerScience (in schools). Everyone knows it isan issue, everyone knows that there is littlethat can be done with it within the currentstructure of education: teacher impartsexpert knowledge to child; child learns inclassroom; homework is done at home toreinforce classroom learning.

The teachers in the classroom cannot hope,nor do they want, to keep up with therelentless march of technology andassociated skills. There is so much availablefor free and or structured online that reallythe only way to get the children coding isfor them to learn outside the classroom,then use the physical space to shareknowledge and solve challenges together,the teacher becoming the curator of theroom, not the fountain of knowledge.

But this is not only true for ComputerScience. It is true for History, Physics,Mathematics, Art, every (Renaissance)subject you can think of - the tools forlearning, and the communities and expertsare there for everyone in the digital space,regardless of location, borders, abilities - if we truly solve this problem for Computer

Science, we start to pull the thread ofeducation and then it gets interesting.

I look forward to a world led by ourchildren, experts in subjects we have noteven yet thought of, and sharing thatknowledge with each other, across bordersand maybe, who knows, across time.

References:

Illich, I., 1971, Deschooling Society, New York

Emma Mulqueeny is the founder of Rewired State andYoung Rewired State: Coding a better country. RewiredState is the largest independent developer network inthe UK with over 800 software developers anddesigners, bringing about digital innovation andrevolution through rapid prototyping events (hackdays). Young Rewired State is its philanthropic armand is the only developer network of youngprogrammers aged 18 and under who have taughtthemselves how to code. Both networks work togetherto prototype solutions to real world problems. Emmahas recently been voted onto the Wired 100 list, writesregularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph and on herown blog and is best known for her campaign to ‘Teachour kids to code’, relentlessly pushing the potential ofthe UK digital industry.

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The Digital Public Space is not really aspace. It is much more: it is a habit ofproduction, sharing, mixing and remixing.It is in this sense “an affordance”,something that enables us to communicateand produce in particular ways. It is less aquestion of what does the digital publicspace mean than what you can do with that.The idea of the public however is way toobroad and it has been contested with theidea of the common. The public is an emptyterm unless we make the public into acommon: something we share, care andproduce together. This applies to bothnatural things, like the environment, but itapplies to cultural production too. There issomething “ecological”, in the manner FélixGuattari (2000) used the term, about thecommon: it relates to those things that weshare and care for together but also whichhas an impact on how we think, feel andmould ourselves and our shared being. The common remixes the way we are.

The digital common space is in this senselinked to a particular mode of productionand this particular mode of production is a mode of social being. It is linked to thenotion of the archive, which, to be honest,is overused and inflated in the discourse of digital culture. Everything seems to be an archive, with an intentional oraccidental conflation of archives with anymode of (digital) storage. Storage does notmean archive: archives are based onprinciples of selection.

The media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst(2013) insists us to specify ourunderstanding of the archive in the digitalage, and avoid the fluffy inflation of theterm. For Ernst, the archive is a principleand in the digital age one where the archivebecomes “a function of transfer processes”(Ernst 2013, p. 98). No more delay betweenstoring and retrieving, the digital archiveintroduces a new temporality. Partly thishas to do with the technical support of

archives, partly it has to do with theusability introduced by instant-retrievability.

Digital common space is something meantfor participation by us: this sort of “space”exists only when it is operational, used andshared. This applies to archival thinking inthe digital age too. We are moving awayfrom the idea of the archive as the otherplace meant for specialists and theArchivist, to the archive as the commonuse-space. What does this mean inpractice? One way to approach thesequestions are through the practice of“remix”.Remix is usually seen as the province ofDJs, VJs and artists – Girl Talk and D JSpooky, artists sampling what MarkAmerika calls ‘source material everywhere’(2011) under the noses of the recordcompany lawyers, wandering through theirarchives like a digital flâneur, cutting andpasting IP. The archive is a contested space.For digital capital the archive is private,proprietorial and tightly (digital rights)managed. For digital remixologist: public,common and open. The archive as sourcematerial here versus the archive as sourcematerial everywhere. But that field ofstruggle extends beyond the artist. We are all remixers now, archive surfers.

We walk through physical space with aremixological device in hand. We sampleand remix everyday source material – ouremails and status alerts, maps and news,photos and messages and with thedevelopment of 4G audio-visual streams.Our phones are a window into the archives,those of the broadcasters and recordcompanies, those of the press and socialnetworks. Across that tiny screen wewander, pick and choose, save and grab,remix playlists and viewlists, read-laterlists. We read and write and read/write.Like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

Digital Common Space: RemixabilityJussi Parikka and Paul Caplan

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(2002) our iPhone collects fragments, the rags ‘n refuse of our time and ofprevious times, layered in their archivesand ours (sic). Because it’s not just theBBC, Sony and News Corporation’sarchives we remix. It is those of our‘Friends’. We dip into their timelines andlike and share the rags ‘n refuse of theirarchives. We remix them into our own orinto others as we reTweet.

The rhetoric of this everyday remix is thatwe are powerful, owners and artists of ourown archives and spaces: my Facebookpage, my Timeline, my Tweets. Here theeveryday act of remixology constitutes acommons. In reality however thosepersonal and personal-social archives andthe strange public-private spaces they set inmotion have a shadowy existence as part ofcommercial archives every bit as powerful,protected and proprietorial as those ofWarner Bros and MGM. Facebook’s serversare archives. They invite us to wander andremix, to sample and connect. The rhetoricagain positions this as run through with acommon power of selection – I Like, I Share… But as unhuman, uncommonalgorithms connect data points and everyaccess and every remix act is fed back intothe archive as a data trail and point to bemined for information and then servedback into the Archive as another object tobe sampled, shared and remixed, thecommon on which Friends meet is subjectto a form of enclosure.

Our phones as remixological devicesconnect us with that full range of archivesand enable us to remix in the public. But whether that creates a new digitalcommons or a new Enclosure is anotherquestion that needs to be addressed as partof every creation of the public – or indeed,the common.

References

Amerika, M., 2011, Remix The Book, University ofMinnesota Press, Minneapolis

Benjamin, W., 2002, The Arcades Project, Translatedby Eiland & McLaughlin. Harvard University Press,Cambridge, Mass.; London

Ernst, W., 2013, Digital Memory and the Archive,Parikka, J. ed. University of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis

Guattari, F., 2000, The Three Ecologies, translated byPindar and Sutton. The Athlone Press, London andNew Brunswick, NJ.

Dr Jussi Parikka is media theorist and Reader inMedia & Design at Winchester School of Art. He hasauthored several books on digital culture and mediaarchaeology.

Paul Caplan is Senior Teaching Fellow in DigitalMedia & Design at Winchester School of Art(University of Southampton). Former photographer,journalist and digital consultant, his current researchand practice explores remix and mobile media.

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How will the role of museums, archives and libraries and their measure of successevolve in a Digital Public Space?

In 2011, I was invited to speak at theExperimenta Design Biennale in Lisbon,Portugal. One day, I asked a question to apanel of product designers and as I wassitting down I realised that I had meant toask a very different question. What I saidwas:

"Would you discuss the impacts of just-in-time production� facilities and on-demandmanufacturing�?"

What I meant to say was:

"Would you discuss the impacts on your ideaof success as professionals of just-in-timeproduction facilities and on-demandmanufacturing�?"

The world of product design was stillrelatively new to me but during the course ofthe event I was hearing an awful lot ofcomments like:

"It was ahead of its time."

"People weren't ready for it."

"I had 90,000 of them manufactured andthen I had to figure out where to store them."

"I went bankrupt."

It occurred to me that historically thenotion of success for product designers has,by-and-large, been a binary one: Either, you had produced and sold four-millionchairs (so to speak) and were considered agod among men� or you were, basically, less than dirt. And right or wrong this haslargely been a function of the cost andaccess to the means of production.

Building and tooling a factory remains anon-trivial and expensive endeavour. In order for everyone to recoup their coststhe product needs to be sold at a premiumor aspire towards "blockbuster" status.

In order to offset a sale price that doesn'treflect its true cost. So, we tend to celebratethose who can guarantee a return oninvestment.

This is fine. There is nothing de factowrong with aspiring to, and having theopportunity to, create a product whosesuccess is celebrated far and wide. But that is not the only definition of successor, at least, it shouldn't be.

I do not expect that any time soon we willall own and operate professional-gradeautomated machine tools (sometimes calledCNC machines) in the basements of ourhomes. I do, however, believe that in timethere will be a variety of small and largescale commercial operations in both urbanand rural environments, whose servicespeople might contract to produce bespokeand high-quality objects.

What will that mean for product designers?How will they achieve financial success (or at least stability) producing and sellingitems in small batches? Will they be able toweather the financial cost of a failed oravant-garde product? And what will it meanto do all of this in the absence of massapproval and celebration?

Increasingly, we are no longer able to useaccess to the means of production and, inthe case of the internet, distribution as aproxy for either quality or authority, orultimately success. Which is not to suggestthe end of quality or authority but only topoint out that the measure we've used inthe past is no longer adequate.

Why didn�t the businessman David Walshgive his art collection to an establishedmuseum, instead of building his own theMuseum of Old and New Art (MONA) from scratch? MONA is the far end of thespectrum when we talk about what ispossible. By all reports, David Walsh hasmore money than the sky but squint your

The Measure of SuccessAaron Straup Cope

30

eyes a bit and you see not money but meansand desire.

Desire has always been present but is oftenabsent of an outlet (absent the means).Now, look at the Internet because that isthe ocean that museums, archives andlibraries are swimming in. The Internet isthe means that people are using to greaterand greater effect to perform the roles thatthe cultural heritage sector hastraditionally assumed.

Even if the subject matter of the things thatare being "collected" seems trivial to usnow. A comprehensive image catalogue ofVGA display adapters on Tumblr does notan archive, or an expert, make. But it is animportant piece of the puzzle. Particularlyso when that same person writes and thenpublishes the definitive history of thetechnological and social impact of thosedevices.

Equally important is the idea that mereinclusion in a catalogue automaticallyconfers merit to a subject. When catalogueswere synonymous with "books", this made a kind of sense. But that measure no longerholds in a world of databases connected to a global network.

The opportunity that museums, archivesand libraries have is to act as a zone of safe-keeping, as a place to preserve the presentfor some as-yet unknown interest in thefuture; for all that "stuff" we've simplynever had the means to collect.

Facebook is, today, the world's largestrepository of wedding photos, which at themoment amount to little importance andeven less interest. But come 50 years fromnow, they will be a wealth of hints and cuesand emergent patterns about the times inwhich they were taken. They are the rawmaterial of future scholarship. They arealso locked away inside a commercialenterprise whose only long-term obligationis to their shareholders.

The cultural heritage sector is more thanthe sum of its scholarly publications. It is apublic trust made possible by a communityof strangers � that is not limited to ourprofessional colleagues because it is seen asa common good. With that trust, comes notonly the question of access but increasinglyan expectation of inclusion andparticipation. It's not entirely clear to anyone what thatmeans just yet but if we, as a community,don't stop to consider it, we may find thatpeople simply take on the projectthemselves. Because they can.

Aaron Straup Cope is currently Senior Engineer(Internets and the Computers) at the SmithsonianInstitution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.Aaron spends a lot of time thinking about archivingsocial software and looking glass archives. He likesmaps and olive oil and does not normally speak in thethird person. The long version is:http://aaronstraupcope.com/about/

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It is not that long ago that a new publicdomain was discovered. In 1993 theinternet was a black screen with a blinkingcursor that only divulged its secrets if youtyped in Unix codes. With OReilly’s Unixbooks by my side, I discovered the endlesspossibilities this new territory offered. At that time we all searched for metaphorsthat could help to explain this new area.Those who wanted to emphasise the speedof exchanging data called it the “electronichighway”; adventurers who saw it as auniverse filled with planets and galaxiesnamed it Cyberspace. With a group ofpeople we chose for the metaphor of thecity and built the first Digital City, or DeDigitale Stad (DDS) as we say in Dutch. We created an additional public domain.Public Domain 2.0.

We chose the metaphor of the city not as amirror of a geographical city, as it is oftenused now, but because this metaphorincluded the diversity of interactions weenvisaged. It enabled us to play with thecharacteristics of private and public spacesand to establish a pluralist society ofcitizens and users. Both individuals andgroups, professionals and amateurs,citizens and politicians, controlled andopen. We were fully aware of the potentialof this virgin territory on a branch to becultivated and felt responsible for its openand public character. It is not an accidentthat the Digital City was built by the 80sgeneration. A generation that was used totake matters in their own hands and whohad shown initiatives that created a publicdomain in the ether, for example, withpirate TV and radio stations. And of courseby occupying empty buildings and startingindependent chains of production andinfrastructures. All fashionable terms now,applied then. The start of a public internetwas a DIY movement, a maker movementavant la lettre. Co-creation was the norm.The public aspect of the internet is abeautiful legacy of the No Future generation.

FAQ

The euphoria of the endless possibilitiesand the public character of the internet didnot last long. In 1997 the necessity rose todefend the newly discovered public domainagainst forces that tried to limit theopenness. DDS was already involved inseveral lawsuits around copyrightinfringement, freedom of expression anddistribution of child pornography. Thejudges were at a loss and the cases weredismissed, but the first signs of the longdispute about the open aspects of theinternet were clear. During the DocumentaX exhibition in Kassel, Waag Societypresented the “We want Bandwidth”�campaign; we also wrote a FAQ about thePublic Domain 2.0, which celebrated thisnewly discovered public domain and triedto ensure that the internet remained anopen place.

We are the cursor

The battle for the public domain in theinternet is still unresolved and requires ourfull attention. But there is a new frontier.Technology has transformed our physicalspace: Internet of Things, RFID, sensorsand advanced mobile technology. It nowoccupies the streets, our homes, our shops,our transport systems. We live in the timeof “interreality”, of mixed reality – there isinterference between the programmed andthe physical space. Only the mechanismsare no longer visible, you cannot observewhat is happening. We need to determinewhat to do with this dimension ofmeasurable things around us. It even affectsthe notion of our bodies and the notion ofthe self. The blinking cursor is not longeroutside of us. We are the cursor. It is internalised, as it were – as a third,additional domain.

Nowadays, these three notions of publicdomain coexists: the public domain in thephysical space, the public domain in

Public Domain 4.0Marleen Stikker

32

cyberspace and the third emerging publicdomain that extends cyberspace into thephysical space. Lets call this the codedspace.

Technology is an invisible force in our lives.Algorithms and code have become moreprescriptive than the law. And that bringsus to the awkward situation that, whilethere is a lively debate about theinterpretation of the law, we lack the abilityto discuss the meaning of technology.

To safeguard the public domain in all threedimensions we have to develop a commonlanguage. A language that enables us todiscuss the ethics and politics of technologyand the requirements for an open andinclusive society.

Marleen Stikker is the founder of De Digitale Stad(The Digital City): a virtual community firstestablished in 1994 to introduce free public access tothe internet. She is also founder of Waag, a socialenterprise that consists of: The Waag Society and aResearch Institute and Incubator for CreativeTechnologies and Social Innovation. She is chair ofPICNIC, an innovation platform and leadingEuropean event for the Creative Industries, which ishosted every year in Amsterdam.

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A container of stories depicted throughonline videoAn arrangement of multiple temporalitiesGeotagging online information back to thecityUnofficial archivesUnofficial mapsLocated narrativesEveryday performanceEphemera Forgotten historiesYouTubeThe personal made publicThe publication of the privateDigital Public SpaceTo inhabit both city and networkA tension between the online domain andthe domain of the city

Life as an online stalkerInvisible global audienceTo witness, categorize, collate experienceTo observe and interrogateTo appropriate, misuse and recycleCreating constellationsEmergence of the curatorialAn invitation to follow Sharing memories, sharing spaceA view withinIntimacy at a distanceDistanceCuriosityLongingDesireGetting lostLiving autobiographicallyHow we create identity in narrative

Performing excavations of the recent past Archeology of the everydayStopping flowFreezing timelinesSlownessMicro-historiesBiographyMemoirMemorialLife as an urban stalkerFollowing tracesA private detectiveA journalistA spyThe implications of observation Leaky mapsPilgrimages to the spaces of memoryBearing witnessThere's no such thing as an innocentbystander

An intimate encounter with a stranger

A Short Meditation on a Cartography of Hybrid Space and How to Intervene Within ItMichelle Teran

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Michelle Teran is a Canadian-born artist whosepractice explores media, performance and the urbanenvironment. Her work critically engages media,connectivity and perception in the city. Her performances and installations repurpose thelanguage of surveillance, cartography and socialnetworks to construct unique scenarios that callconventional power and social relations into question.Currently she is a research fellow within theNorwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programmeat the Bergen Academy of Arts and Design, 2010-2013.She is the winner of the Transmediale Award, theTurku2011 Digital Media & Art Grand Prix Award,Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention (2005, 2010)and the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life InternationalCompetition (Madrid). She lives and works betweenBergen and Berlin.

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This text was originally published in Hemment, D.,Gere, C eds (2012) FutureEverybody.FutureEverything: Manchester, UK.

The term Digital Public Space is being usedby a growing number of cultural bodies todescribe the online environment which willemerge as they make their digitisedcollections more available to each other and to the wider world. It expresses thegrowing desire to offer anyone, whereverthey may be, the opportunity to access,explore and create online. It will open upcollections of films, photographs, televisionprogrammes, books and much of the rest ofthe amazing material currently held in ourmuseums, galleries, broadcasters and othermemory institutions.

Looking beyond these cultural archives, it may include public information fromopen data stores, user-generated content,and data trails which individuals are able to control and trade. It will also include,where owners permit, material from thecommercial world too.The digital media we produce is 'out there' waiting to beaccessed and assembled in new ways. It creates threads connecting us throughtime. Our audience, or our collaborators,may be people looking back at us and ourcreations in twenty years time.

Within the Digital Public Space everydigital asset that can be shared will beshared, and as we digitise more of theanalogue past this could stretch toencompass the whole of recordedculture.The Digital Public Space will be a high street, not a shopping mall. It isintended to constitute a public space thatsupports many activities and can sustainprivate, political, cultural and commercialuses without being dominated by any orappropriated by one group or model.

It relies entirely on the open Internet andfull access to all it offers, on which will bebuilt the standards, tools and services

needed to create a commons, owned bynobody, accessible to all, outside thecommercial imperative and free of stateinfluence, an online space for interaction,engagement and experience, that can beused to inform, educate and entertain thosewho visit it.

It will be an online space that meets theneeds of the cultural sector and the arts and which offers unparalleledopportunities to find and engage withaudiences but it not be exclusively for thissector and will support and sustain otherareas of activity.It will not be primarily aspace for commercial activity but it willoffer opportunities for commercialtransactions and support all the necessarymechanisms and tools needed to makethese trustworthy.

Like the Internet itself the Digital PublicSpace will not be owned by anyone, but will be constituted from thecollaborative activity of all those who joinit, existing as the shared space betweentheir services, content and tools. It willgrow as its constituent membership grows.

It will contain all that its constituentorganisations wish to make available,whether born digital, fully digitised or adigital representation of a physical artefact,drawing on the world’s cultural heritage inall its forms and variety. The Digital PublicSpace will make new forms of collaborativework possible in ways that as yet are noteven imagined. It offers not just new meansof making the things we already make, but of developing new forms of culture,based around shared catalogues andmetadata and simple licensing of material.

The Digital Public Space has emerged as a framework for thinking about the ways in which the arts and culture will reshapethemselves in the screen-based, onlineworld that FutureEverything has foretoldand shaped for many years. The Digital

Constructing a Digital Public SpaceBill Thompson, Drew Hemment, Rachel Cooper, Charlie Gere

36

Public Space makes new paradigms forcultural engagement for creators, audiencesand institutions built around shared datamodels, open interfaces and standards forauthentication, rights management andidentity, but we do not yet have a clear ideaof what that will enable or how it will bedeployed.

The goal, therefore, is to look at the DigitalPublic Space from all angles, to challengeand refine the core ideas, explore thecurrent and future technologies that couldsustain it, and ask about its real value toartists, institutions and the public whom itis supposed to serve.

One question is whether it can releasepublic value or simply whether it offersanother way for larger institutions andcorporations that hold rights to assert theirhegemony, and lock the public out, andexplore the technological barriers thatstand in the way of delivering a genuinelypublic online service.



Rachel Cooper is Professor of Design Management at the University of Lancaster, where she is Chair ofthe Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, co-Director of ImaginationLancaster, and co-Directorof HighWire (Digital Economies Innovation DoctoralTraining Centre). She is also President of the EuropeanAcademy of Design, Editor of The Design Journal, anda trustee of the Research and DevelopmentManagement Association (RADMA).

Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media Research at theInstitute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University.He is the chair of Computers and the History of Art(CHArt) and was director of the Computer Arts,Histories, Contexts, etc... (CACHe) project which ranfrom 2002 - 5, and which was concerned with thehistory of early British computer art. He is the authorof Digital Culture (Reaktion, 2002), Art, Time andTechnology (Berg, 2006), co-editor of White Heat, Cold Logic (MIT, 2008) as well as many articles andpapers on aspects of the relation between new mediaand culture.

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Editors:Drew HemmentBill ThompsonJosé Luis de VicenteProfessor Rachel Cooper

Editorial Board:Professor Colin Fallows (Chair)Steve DietzJo KazuhiroGunalan NadarajanMel Woods

Editorial Assistant:Kevin Smith

Published by:FutureEverything, 39 Edge Street, The Northern Quarter, Manchester M4 1HW, UK

futureeverything.org

2013

The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Cover Image by KioskLayout by Joe White

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A British Library CIP Record is available

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