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Proposal from knightcontest.com

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The MIT Museum Without Walls:Today, MIT; tomorrow, the World

Primary Contact Name

Professor John Durant Ph.D.

Describe your project

Once there were guidebooks; then there were audio-guides; now, we have the means within our grasp to create a revolutionary 21st century navigation, guidance and information system that will simultaneously serve and strengthen the wider community that shares a presence on the MIT campus. We propose to combine locative and WiFi technologies with a multi-media content aggregation system to create an electronic resource that will deliver location-specific, continuously updated stories to users’ hand-held devices. The near-term goal is to enrich the life of the extended MIT community by transforming the MIT campus itself into something approaching a locative wiki, to which all can contribute and from which all will benefit. The long-term goal is to create an open software system and content aggregation resource that other campuses and communities can use to create their own location aware guidance systems – a gift, if you will, from MIT to the wider world. The MIT Museum Without Walls will enable entirely new kinds of community life to blossom on the MIT campus. An individual walking through the campus will be able to explore MIT’s achievements, traditions and values; to contribute his or her own experiences for others to enjoy; and even to locate other individuals nearby who are willing to meet over coffee to discuss issues of common interest. In these and similar ways, the project will combine mobile technology with community building. The project will break new ground technically, by combining location-awareness, wireless hand held devices and the Web to enable users to contribute and access information flexibly as they move through complex indoor and outdoor environments; and it will break new ground interpretively, by creating a continuously evolving body of location-specific stories about everything from history to breaking news, collecting and making available the accumulating memories and experiences of an entire community.

Primary Contact Email

jdurant@mit.edu

Organization or Business Name

MIT Museum

Who would want to use it and why?

We see two broad categories of users: the MIT community; and the wider community within which MIT is located. The MIT community includes students and their families, faculty and staff, and alumni. Within this community, there are many groups, including: Living Groups (e.g., dorms, fraternities & sororities); undergraduate and graduate student clubs and interest groups; and organizations supporting specific activities (e.g., publications, radio stations, academic and professional conferences). The wider community includes: academic and other professional organizations and individuals; commercial organizations (service providers, research partners, etc.); school teachers and students regionally and nationally; MIT’s neighbors in Cambridge and the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area; and travelers and tourists to the a

Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project?

MIT is uniquely well placed to support this project. The campus is small enough to be manageable but large enough to be of interest from the point of view of locative mobile technologies. In addition, the campus is equipped with an extensive WiFi network; it is the home of many research groups and labs with relevant technical expertise, including: the MIT Media Lab; the SENSEable City Lab; and 'Living the Future', an emerging inter-faculty initiative led by the School of Engineering. The MIT Museum is developing rapidly in pursuit of its mission to make MIT’s research and innovation accessible to all. Recent initiatives such as the Cambridge Science Festival (which included a unique 2-mile 'Human Genome Trail' through the City) and the opening of the 'Mark Epstein Innovation Gallery' at its headquarters facility are the beginning of an ambitious program designed to engage MIT more closely with its extended community – faculty, staff, students and alumni, on the one hand; and MIT’s multiple external audiences and visitors, on the other. MIT Museum Director of Technology Allan Doyle is an MIT alumnus (EECS, '80) who has been working in the field of open source geospatial systems for more than a decade, has developed open standards for web mapping and is currently working on GeoRSS and GeoJSON. Additional team members include: Associate Professor and SENSEable City Lab Director Carlo Ratti who holds a dual appointment at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the MIT Media Lab; award-winning author and broadcaster Bruce Gellerman, 3 time recipient of the prestigious AAAS science journalism prize. He is recognized as a pioneer in location aware content creation and currently hosts Public Radio International's environmental program Living on Earth; and MIT Museum Director and Adjunct Professor in the MIT Science, Technology & Society Program, John Durant, who is a specialist with extensive international experience in public engagement with science and technology.

U.S. State

Country

United States

What potentially bigger thing might happen if everything went perfectly and the stars all aligned?

Our fundamental goal is to alter the way individuals can interact with their cultural and social environment, with particular emphasis on science and technology aspects. Much as Web 2.0 social networking has changed the notion of interconnectedness among individuals, we aim to change the understanding of the relationship of place and culture. We believe MWOW is among the first to experiment with new forms of science and technology communication based on a holistic understanding of a specific community. MIT is a rich and complicated place with a unique culture. The experience of getting to know MIT is challenging, especially for newcomers and visitors. With MWOW we want to make a leap from social networking to cultural networking, from Web 2.0 to Culture 2.0. By way of example, those of us who are frequent travelers are literally dropped into different places on a monthly or weekly basis. How often do we yearn to spend the small amount of time at each location connecting to the local culture? We develop little tricks, like going to the same place for breakfast each day, learning a smidgen of the language, brightening at the merest hint of recognition by the locals as someone who is more than just a tourist. With MWOW, we hope to fast-track that experience. Our experience so far with the process of teaching digital storytelling is that the act of assembling personal and community stories, is itself a powerful community building exercise. Getting a group of people together, teaching them how to tell stories, and having them interact while they construct their stories provides an unparalleled bonding experience. If all the stars align, we will provide an example of how to strengthen a large, diverse community through the collection and telling of stories; and how to connect newcomers to the community to its culture. But more importantly, we will help develop tools that allow other communities (esp. other science and technology communities) to do the same thing for themselves.

How will you be able to measure whether or not your project has really made a difference?

We believe there are three key measures of success for MWOW. First, we want to measure the ways MWOW becomes part of the communal discourse at MIT. Do people talk about it, with it, and through it to each other? The intention is to create a kind of ubiquitous technology and cultural asset that is always present and available. Second, we believe that ultimate success is measured by the degree to which the project is emulated and adopted by other organizations or communities. We want to make MWOW a practical communication technology. While we hope this becomes a global phenomenon, we anticipate expanding initially into the communities of Cambridge and Boston. Third, we intend to measure the success of our own contributions to MWOW using the means typical to museum and visitor studies specialists.

* The first measure is the most difficult to create. Initially, indirect information about usage levels or communal awareness will be used. Ultimately, if we are successful, the community will take MWOW for granted in the same manner it takes electricity or telephone service for granted. The creation of content for MWOW will require extensive communal participation. We intend to develop instruments that allow participants to evaluate their specific programs, test their overall awareness, as well as educate them about the larger goals of the project.
* The second measure is a matter of testing, counting and review of the outreach programs we develop. For each software and hardware element, specific tests to evaluate the technology will be developed. For example, how quickly is the system able to determine user location? Does the system deliver the appropriate content for that location and user?
* Third, we intend to create a set of data or stories that will be used to study user interests in the type of content and style of presentation as well as investigate the considerable challenges of user interface design.

Web site

http://museum.mit.edu

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge

$1600000

What unmet need does your proposal answer?

MIT's campus comprises 157 buildings with over 11 million square feet of space on 156 acres. If you search Google for "MIT", you get over 500 million hits. MIT's own Google search engine indexes over 3.5 million documents. The Institute Archives has tens of millions of items, the Libraries' catalog more than 5 million items, the video production group has thousands of hours of digital video and thousands more of older analog video. The MIT museum has 1.5 million objects. Together this is an astounding amount of information about science and technology – and about our community. There are other communities that have more stuff, others with far less. Every community has a history and a culture shaped by its environment and its members. So where do you go to learn about a community such as MIT? How do you find the stories that infuse life into the Institute’s material culture? Can you remove the intimidation factor that many feel towards MIT, towards science and technology more generally? You can visit MIT's web site and find MIT Facts at http://web.mit.edu/facts/ - filled with important details, but those facts don't even begin to tell our story. Online you can find the news releases announcing a Nobel prize or other noteworthy discovery. Dig deep and you will find quirky bits such as the first Baker House Piano Drop in 1972, human-powered airplanes or the world’s largest hologram collection. You can delve into the course materials for everything from calculus to “Godzilla and the Bullet Train: Technology and Culture in Modern Japan.” And, of course, you can learn about the admissions process, student activities, and every department. But it is not the same as being here, walking around the campus. Learning about any new cultures is not easy. Our street address is 77 Massachusetts Ave. but truthfully there is no obvious entry point. MWOW aims to change that for MIT. We want to become the 21st century gateway for MIT. We want to provide the tools that help others build their own points of entry, exchange and community.

Total cost of project, including all sources of funding

$3200000

What specific, unique opportunity do you see that will make this project more successful than others trying to fill that general

MIT is a hothouse of creativity, one of the world’s most prominent science and technology research universities. It is a future-minded community that relishes its embrace of some of the world’s greatest challenges. Anticipating considerable attention when it celebrates its 150th anniversary in the spring of 2011, MIT has been planning projects for several years. The MIT Museum started MWOW as part of our mission to foster public engagement with science and technology. MIT’s anniversary—when the eyes of the world will be on the Institute as we reflect on our past and look towards our future—is an incredible opportunity for our project to provide the storytelling medium. Our plan is to use the momentum generated by this celebration to spur the MIT community (faulty, staff, students, and alumni/ae) to provide the stories. MWOW is more than a pan-Institute StoryCorps. It is also a research project drawing on the results of many labs and research groups at MIT. And, it is a research platform that will be an Institute-wide resource for testing new components, software and other technologies that often lack a critical mass of content to work with. As has been often noted, MIT is an environment that encourages partnerships. Unlike previous efforts, however, MWOW features collaboration between a museum and university-based research labs. We anticipate that this relationship will be a model for other museum/cultural organization partnerships with scientists and engineers that combine technical achievements with high quality content. Finally, we have the recent example of MIT’s highly successful Open CourseWare initiative. By working with MIT's service providers such as Information Services and Technologies, Facilities, and the Academic Media Production Services, we can develop the infrastructure to sustain the project. Thus we ensure that MWOW doesn't remain a laboratory curiosity but instead becomes a lasting gift to the world.

Expected amount of time to complete project (in whole years):

4years

How will people learn about what you are doing?

As one of the premier places in the world for invention and discovery MIT has developed a vast network of digital and traditional multi-media resources to promote its accomplishments. As part of MIT’s 150th anniversary commemoration, MWOW will make use of this cutting-edge infrastructure to inform the public of the project’s possibilities and promise. In addition, we intend to continue our current outreach efforts, and those of MIT including those of its News Office and publications such as Technology Review. Project members will continue to participate in a variety of national and international conferences as well as local user groups. We will expand the number of public meetings to report progress, discuss new ideas and solicit support. Our website (http://museum.mit.edu/mwow) would be expanded. However, we believe MWOW will itself become a unique resource that will promote awareness of the project in ways we can only imagine. When they invented the car bumper, no one had yet dreamed of the bumper sticker. Likewise, MWOW creates a new space where the community can invent entirely new ways of communicating and connecting. We will provide members of the MIT community and the wider public with the tools to create mobile media content and the context in which to place and access their stories: the MWOW database. MWOW is an ambitious experiment to develop a large-scale, location-aware, mobile media environment. As people contribute stories to the project, we will also encourage them to develop innovative methods for creating (and using!) them. The goal is to get our content creators to collaborate across disciplines and time zones, form wiki-mobile media communities, and develop widgets that can be wirelessly collected and connected. The effect will be viral and historic, carrying on the time-honored MIT tradition of creating a place where science and serendipity uniquely combine to build something that is far more than the sum of its parts.

Do you have any other funding or investment? We’re interested in knowing who else is interested in your project.

The following MIT groups have provided $100K in seed funding for this project:

* MIT Office of President
* MIT School of Architecture, Office of Dean
* MIT Media Laboratory, SENSEable Cities Group
* MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Office of the Dean
* MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society
* MIT Association of Alumni and Alumnae
* MIT Academic Media Production Services

The MIT Museum has provided $100K in in-kind contributions of staff time. Outside MIT, we have received two grants totaling $100K from the Lord Foundation of Massachusetts. We have developed a partnership with the Nokia Cambridge Research Center, who have provided handheld devices, and with Cooper Perkins, a Boston-area product engineering firm who have provided project planning services. We have been working with MIT's Office of Corporate Relations to form additional technology development partnerships.

Are you working with anyone else to complete this project? If so, please give names and what they would do?

We have already developed relationships with several key research groups at MIT, many service organizations at MIT, and some outside experts. We highlight the two most important of our current partnerships here. We're working closely with the SENSEable Cities group at MIT, led by Prof. Carlo Ratti. This group is known for its work in high-profile demonstrations at venues such as the Venice Biennale and the 2008 World Expo in Zaragoza. Included in Carlo's group are software engineers, designers, and architects. His group has experience in indoor location using WiFi technology and is currently working with the MIT Museum to produce a "second generation" demonstration of an MWOW handheld device. The SENSEable Cities group will provide continued engineering and design expertise to the MIT Museum. Our partnership with Bruce Gellerman, currently producer of the NPR show, Living on Earth, and principal in a venture to produce location-based audio content called SoundTreks will continue. Bruce brings expertise in high production value audio content to the MWOW project. Jackson Braider, also a SoundTreks principal, as well as a folklorist and musicologist will be part of our team. Other MIT groups that will contribute expertise and/or content to our project.

* Center for Reflective Community Practice – Digital Storytelling
* Media Lab's Media Fabrics Group – Storytelling technology
* Urban Information Systems Group – Spatial databases
* Teacher Education Program – Augmented reality games
* PlaceMap – User interfaces, instrumentation
* Academic Media Production Services – Video library & services
* MIT World – Video library of major lectures at MIT
* Information Office – Tour planning
* Libraries – Institute Archives & Special Collections, Lewis Music Library
* List Visual Arts Center – Art collection, artist biographies

Who else is working in this area? How does your work fit into the larger context of work in this area?

MWOW is an amalgamation of many technologies. We are actively monitoring, engaged in, and learning from the efforts of others in many different facets of our project, including the following. Under each topic we list some of the relevant players, organizations, or conferences.

* Location technology – MIT's iFind group, Skyhook Wireless, Where2.0
* Digital Storytelling – MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice
* Museums/non-profit organizations – Museums and the Web, Museum Computer Network
* Commercial locative tour providers – UnTravel Media, OmniNav
* Web platform developers/operators – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft
* Spatial Open Source Components – FOSS4G, OSGeo.org
* Database technology – Flamenco, PostGIS
* Research projects – MScapers.com, PlaceLab.org, DigitalHistory.UWO.ca

In addition to meeting with many representatives of these efforts, we are building a repository to such projects in the News section of our website at http://museum.mit.edu/mwow/news/ We envision our work as benefiting from much of the existing work in this area ("standing on the shoulders of giants") and as making instrumental contributions. In particular, we will focus intensely on developing relationships among projects that will enhance information exchange, software development, content reuse, and standards development. Our intent is to develop and foster a level of standardization and interchange that helps the overall growth and maturation of locative multimedia and digital storytelling. On the content development side, experiments in the development and long-term preservation of digital media that are focused on science and technology topics and communities are harder to find. One animating passion for the MIT Museum has been the care and dissemination of digital information. However, MWOW is more than an electronic archive (MIT's DSpace is an example of a pioneering effort.). It is an experiment in the cutting edge of information dissemination by museums allowing the transcendence of the physical limitations of bricks-and-mortar galleries.

What do you guarantee will happen if you complete the activities in this proposal?

We guarantee that a novel multimedia platform will be created, comprising the following key components:

* a digital database designed to efficiently index and retrieve multi-media content on a scale sufficient to do justice to MIT – past, present and future;
* the capacity for individuals to upload new content to the digital database;
* integrated locative technology capable of operating indoors and outdoors across the MIT campus;
* software to enable users equipped with hand-held devices to conveniently and intuitively access the digital database, in ways that are responsive to individual interests;
* an initial repository of approximately 200 multimedia stories sufficient to support a first phase of ‘MIT Museum Without Walls’ use;
* a supported tour service, based in the MIT Museum and the MIT Visitor Information Center, to enable visitors to the campus to experience the ‘MIT Museum Without Walls’ during the Institute’s sesquicentennial year (2011);
* open source licenses and creative commons licenses to enable others to use the ‘MIT Museum Without Walls’ software and content without charge.

The grant requested from the Knight Foundation is sufficient to secure the multimedia platform and an initial repository of stories; further funding is being sought to greatly enlarge the repository of stories. However, true functionality is guaranteed with Knight Foundation funding alone. The truly innovative point of this project is that we simultaneously create a transformative resource for the MIT community and offer a scaleable platform that is freely available for use by other communities – here in Cambridge, throughout North America and worldwide.