Microsoft Customer SolutionCustomer Solution Case Study

Museum Uses Interoperable Technologies in Exhibition, Engages Community

OverviewCountry or Region: CanadaIndustry: Nonprofit organizations

Customer ProfileThe Museum of Vancouver (MOV) in British Columbia, Canada, presents exhibitions that interpret the city through a contemporary context. It employs 20 people.

Business SituationFor a recent exhibition, MOV wanted to combine open source technologies to encourage citizens to interact with digital exhibit content across desktop, browser, and mobile device environments.

SolutionMicrosoft Canada helped the MOV by migrating the solution to a Windows-based environment and integrating the desktop and mobile technologies to create a rich exhibit that transcends multiple mediums.

Benefits Quickly enabled a richer solution Contributed to an award-wining

exhibition Created reusable framework for

engagement

“It’s not often that nonprofits get to be on the cutting edge of technology, but the interoperable platform created by Microsoft Canada and RedBit transcended our expectations.”

Hanna Cho, Curator of Engagement and Dialogue, Museum of Vancouver

The Museum of Vancouver (MOV) had great plans for the technology behind its exhibition, Bhangra.me: Vancouver’s Bhangra Story. It wanted citizens to contribute to a digital archive or “living history” of bhangra stories. However, less than a month before opening, employees realized that the exhibit’s mixture of open source technologies running on Linux wasn’t working well together. MOV turned to Microsoft Canada and RedBit Development. The teams took advantage of the interoperability of Windows technologies to move the open source solution into a Windows environment and to better integrate its components. Finished in time, the new solution ran as a desktop application, a browser-based application, and a mobile phone app. Citizens could submit their stories through the website and see them appear as features on an interactive map of the city, exceeding everyone’s expectations.

SituationFollowing a rebranding in 2009, the Museum of Vancouver (MOV) in British Columbia, Canada, began focusing on exhibitions that engage the community and encourage dialogue about contemporary issues. Its exhibitions are Vancouver-centric, encouraging visitors to think not just about the objects on display but also their context as it relates to the living history of the city. In 2010, the Canadian Museums Association presented MOV with an award for Outstanding Achievement in Management. It was during that year that Hanna Cho joined MOV in the newly created position of Curator of Engagement and Dialogue. “I came on to animate exhibitions and the curatorial process with interactive digital technologies that would encourage community involvement with our exhibits and programs,” says Cho.

When Cho joined MOV, it was six months away from opening a major exhibition called Bhangra.me: Vancouver’s Bhangra Story. The exhibition examined the contemporary cultural landscape of Vancouver’s South Asian community through the experience of bhangra folk dance and music. Originating in the state of Punjab in northwest India, bhangra is a bold and colorful dance that celebrates the joy of life. During the 1970s in small towns and cities around British Columbia, Sikh and Punjabi people used bhangra performances to connect with residents in their communities. Since then, bhangra folk dance has been a part of the history of Vancouver, culminating in 2004 with the formation of the Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration Society (VIBC).

Bhangra.me

Bhangra.me sprang out of a conversation between Mo Dhaliwal, Director of the Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration Society, and Amanda Gibbs, Director of Audience Engagement at the Museum of Vancouver. “The museum’s new mandate mirrored what we had been trying to do in the city: tell the story about bhangra not as an ethnic folk art from a faraway country, but as a living phenomenon here in Vancouver,” says Dhaliwal.

MOV and VIBC partnered to chronicle bhangra music, dance, and politics in Vancouver, from dance teams in the 1970s to international DJs in 2011. Both groups envisioned an interactive experience for visitors, who could attend drumming workshops and academic symposia, listen to local DJ-curated playlists, read about bhangra’s connection to social protest, and dance in the Performance Lounge. Working with the Curator of Contemporary Issues, Viviane Gosselin, Cultural Researcher and Guest Curator Naveen Girn compiled more than 55 interviews and 100 hours of documentary footage.

A Platform for Community EngagementThe museum had interesting plans to use technology to merge the physical experience at the exhibit with an online experience. Visitors would be able to access the digital experience through an application in the gallery that featured touchscreens or through a browser-based application on the web. The key element of the Bhangra.me digital experience would be an archive of stories collected from citizens to form a living history outlined in an interactive “story map” of Vancouver.

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“We were running behind schedule, there was no clear approach to building the interactive map, and there were capacity issues with the way the solution was architected.”

Hanna Cho, Curator of Engagement and Dialogue, Museum of Vancouver

What MOV envisioned was nothing short of an IT platform for community engagement.

Cho needed to select the right technology to support the museum’s goals for the Bhangra.me exhibition. She turned to a Drupal open source content management solution that the museum had considered for a previous project. Cho thought it could be built into an application that would run on two touchscreen PCs at the exhibition. The Drupal application ran on a Linux Apache web server, was supported by a MySQL database, and relied solely on the PHP server-side scripting language. There was also a preliminary exploration of an interactive story map developed using Google Maps. Cho asked the solution’s creator to create an interactive touchscreen application, using the existing framework and the map, to accommodate the existing curatorial content and to enable citizens to make contributions through a website. But as the deadline for the opening approached, it became apparent that the solution wasn’t working.

“We were running behind schedule, there was no clear approach to building the interactive map, and there were capacity issues with the way the solution was architected,” says Cho. “I had to quickly find a way to marshal new resources to complete the solution before the exhibit opened on May 4, 2011, but I didn’t have the IT resources in house.”

SolutionIt was around this time that Cho attended a mobile technology event in Vancouver where she met Nik Garkusha, Open Platforms Lead at Microsoft Canada. “Nik was immediately interested in my story

because of his work with interoperability and open source platforms, and Microsoft Canada had been peripherally involved with the initial project we started with the Drupal solution,” says Cho. “Nik decided to step in as the primary partner on this project with the museum.”

Garkusha and his team worked with RedBit Development, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network with Gold competencies, to take the open source project and extend it with technologies based on Windows. Garkusha wanted the solution to enable citizens’ storytelling and work on multipleplatforms: the touchscreen-enabled interactive map running on top of the Drupal application at the museum, a web application with an interactive map available through the browser, and a mobile app that would recreate the interactive experience on Windows Phone 7. Tying open source and Microsoft components together across the different mediums would result in a powerful interactive experience for people viewing digital exhibit materials.

To reconfigure the solution, the Microsoft and RedBit teams migrated the existing Drupal framework to the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, replacing the Apache web server with Internet Information Services (IIS) version 7.0, a set of Internet-based services. With the Drupal application running on Windows, the teams from Microsoft and RedBit were able to extend PHP code with additional solutions based on Microsoft .NET as well as Microsoft Silverlight 4, a cross-browser implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework for delivering rich, interactive web applications—all powered by powered

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"Nik was immediately interested in my story because of his work with interoperability and open source platforms, and Microsoft Canada had been peripherally involved with the initial project we started with the Drupal solution.”

Hanna Cho, Curator of Engagement and Dialogue, Museum of Vancouver

by Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 data management software.

The same application captures stories from curators and from citizens, but now the stories are linked to a rich story map that is based on Silverlight. (See Figure 1.) The map was built with Microsoft Expression Blend 4 and is tightly integrated with the Drupal framework using open standards to exchange information. The same codebase was used for the website and the touchscreen application so that visitors can interact with the map at the museum by using touchscreens, or they can visit the Bhangra.me website through a browser. With a few clicks, users can use the website to contribute stories and upload text, pictures, and videos. Curators can then log on and create their own stories, and they can see citizen’s stories and even promote them as features on the site. Individuals can right-click on the map and choose “Install Bhangra.me on your Computer” to get the interactive map to run on their local PCs in full-screen mode. This is the same rich interface that visitors interact with at the museum.

The Microsoft and RedBit teams made sure that the solution had the capability to add location information for each submitted story to place it on the map. “When residents add stories, they can include their addresses, and we used the Bing Maps API [application programming interface] to search for and geo code that address and put a pin in the map,” says Mark Arteaga, Owner of RedBit Development and a winner of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for Windows Phone development. “That you could plug in Bing Maps APIs seamlessly into Drupal, an open

source PHP-based framework, is a good example of how Microsoft builds platforms that easily incorporate into open source technologies.”

“We were thrilled to see the application come together with the Silverlight-based map acting as a rich interface for the stories,” says Cho. “When you click on the arrows on the map, it brings up photos and videos that are part of the stories. The framework was a fantastic tool that the museum could give to the public to submit stories and use to curate its own stories—the combination of the two was a powerful solution for Bhangra.me.”

Just before the exhibit’s opening, the team from RedBit surprised MOV with a Bhangra.me app for Windows Phone 7. Arteaga used the Windows Phone 7.1 Software Development Kit (SDK) and Expression Blend to tailor the existing web application to keep the design of the phone app simple and clean.

“People can tap on the pins on the map to bring up the stories, and we used the Metro design guidelines in Windows Phone so that people can swipe the screen to see the pictures and read the stories,” says Arteaga. “We used open standards, such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) XML feeds, to connect the application, the website, and the mobile phone app. The Drupal application itself generates a feed that connects with the SQL Server database to retrieve story content, and the desktop, browser, and mobile phone take the content, presenting it accordingly. We get this level of interoperability because Silverlight, the mobile phone SDK, and the

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“When residents add stories, they can include their addresses, and we used the Bing Maps API [application programming interface] to search for and geo code that address and put a pin in the map.”

Mark Arteaga, Owner, RedBit Development

web pieces are all able to access and communicate via open standards.”

BenefitsIn less than four weeks, the teams from Microsoft Canada and RedBit re-platformed and integrated a collection of open source software with technology based on Windows to deliver a compelling digital experience to complement the Bhangra.me exhibition.

“It’s not often that nonprofits get to be on the leading edge of technology, but the interoperable platform created by Microsoft Canada and RedBit transcended our expectations,” says Cho. “We got a rich, interactive framework across desktop, browser, and mobile phone that was perfect for encouraging engagement and dialogue: a key part of the exhibition. We’ll definitely be using it again.”

Quickly Enabled a Richer SolutionThe Bhangra.me project showcased the benefits of Microsoft developer tools and technologies that work well in a world where standards, interoperability, and openness are key to delivering applications that meet customers’ requirements. By taking advantage of the interoperability built into Microsoft tools, the museum was able to create an application that went beyond the confines of a single vendor and complete its exhibit on time.

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“It was great that Microsoft and RedBit could take what we had and turn it into something better,” says Cho. “Because the open source and the Windows-based technologies worked so well together, and because the same set of code could be repurposed for each platform, we didn’t have to start from scratch and we had our solution on time.”

Contributed to an Award-Wining ExhibitionBhangra.me was so popular, that MOV extended its run through the holiday season to January 1, 2012, and it won an award from the Canadian Museums Association for its educational content.

“The award took into account the research, programming, education, and community engagement, and the Silverlight story map was definitely part of that,” says Cho.

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Figure 1. The interactive story map for the Bhangra.me exhibition features a collection of open source software working together with Windows-based technologies.

Dhaliwal was happy with how the technology blended with the museum space, merging the online and physical environments to encourage visitors to interact with the exhibit on different levels.

“We didn’t want the exhibition to be confined within the walls of the museum, but the technology framework allowed us to take it to the community where people could actually interact with the website and tell their stories,” Dhaliwal says. “It was impressive.”

Created Reusable Framework for EngagementToday, VIBC uses the Bhangra.me website to accumulate an ongoing, living chronicle of bhangra in Vancouver, driving visitors to the site to tell their stories through radio, newspapers, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages. It is currently using the site to generate buzz about its annual bhangra festival at the end of May. “We have more than 14 different programs and dozens of performers participating in the festival over 11 days, and we will be using the site to tell their stories and encourage others to participate,” says Dhaliwal. “Before Microsoft and RedBit helped to build the solution, we didn’t have a historical context for bhangra in Vancouver. Now we do.”

MOV has a reusable framework that is perfectly suited to supporting its new vision. “The open source collaborative solution created by Microsoft Canada and RedBit fits so perfectly with the museum’s approach to programming that everyone here is committed to reusing it,” says Cho. “We can see it working in so many contexts: story maps, online archival options, shared narratives with the community. All of these are made possible by this one framework. It was a gift.”

Windows PhoneWindows Phone 7 is a different kind of phone, designed to bring together what you care about most—easier and faster. It delivers captivating phone experiences across work and play, enables productivity without compromise through Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office Mobile, and

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about RedBit Development products and services, call (416) 907-3876 or visit the website at: www.redbitdev.com

For more information about Museum of Vancouver products and services, call (604) 736-4431 or visit the website at: www.museumofvancouver.ca

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published June 2012

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Standard Windows Phone 7− Windows Phone 7.1 Software

Development Kit Microsoft Expression− Microsoft Expression Blend 4

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Technologies− Bing Maps− Bing Maps API− Internet Information Services 7.0− Microsoft .NET Framework 4

Partners RedBit Development

provides a platform for compelling applications that can work across the phone, web, and PC. For more information on Windows Phone 7, go to: www.windowsphone.com

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