Sparking innovation, learning and creativity.
Defining Open Authority in Museums
Story: Lori Byrd Phillips
Photo: British Museum Great Court Roof by Andrew Dunn, CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
As part of my museum studies MA, I have been researching the potential of Wikipedia as a platform for museums to encourage accessibility and community dialogue. My research happened to coincide with an incredibly inspiring discussion about authority among museum professionals, which led me to propose a new model for authority in museums: open authority.
What is open authority? That’s a good question, which I can begin to explain by describing the parallel theories that frame my research. These theories are actually mirroring metaphors: The Temple and the Forum in the museum field and The Cathedral and the Bazaar in the open web community. In 1971, Duncan F. Cameron posited that the museum should be both a temple and a forum — an authoritative space and a place for dialogue that coexist within a museum but remain separate. In 1997, Eric S. Raymond wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar as a comparison between top-down software development and open source software development that is available for all to adapt and improve, with Linux as the quintessential example. The important conclusion is that, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” I believe that the future of museum authority lies in bringing these two metaphors together...
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