Content and Curation for Nonprofits

As the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Thomas P. Campbell thinks deeply about curating—not just selecting art objects, but placing them in a setting where the public can learn their stories.

Steven Rosenbaum has an interesting article on Fast Company, outlining the reasons why curation is here to stay and the importance that curators will play in your information consumption diet.

He writes: "...So anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task.

They're going to stand between the web and their readers, using all of the tools at their disposal to "listen" to the web, and then pull out of the data stream nuggets of wisdom, breaking news, important new voices, and other salient details.

It's real work, and requires a tireless commitment to being engaged and ready to rebroadcast timely material.

While there may be an economic benefit for being a "thought leader" and "trusted curator," it's not going to happen overnight.

Which is to say, being a superhero is often a thankless job.

The growth in content, both in terms of pure volume and the speed of publishing, has raised some questions about what best practices are in the curation space."

He also has some pretty straightforward advice on what, as a curator, you should never do:

"1. If you don't add context, or opinion, or voice and simply lift content, it's stealing.

2. If you don't provide attribution, and a link back to the source, it's stealing.

3. If you take a large portion of the original content, it's stealing.

4. If someone asks you not to curate their material, and you don't respect that request, it's stealing.

5. Respect published rights. If images don't allow creative commons use, reach out to the image creator--don't just grab it and ask questions later."

And he definitely has a point on all of these. 

Recommended. 7/10

Read the full article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1834177/content-curators-are-the-new-superheros-of-the-web?partner=rss 

Robin Good selected this post, well worth reading the post and Howard's book as well.

Robin Good: Participatory culture writer and book author Henry Jenkins interviews cyberculture pioneer Howard Rheingold (Net Smart, 2012) by asking him to explain some of the concepts that have helped him become a paladin of the  and "new literacies" so essential for survival in the always-on information-world we live in today.

This is part three of a long and in-depth interview (Part 2, Part 1) covering key concepts and ideas as the value of "community" and "networks", the architecture of participation, affinity working spaces, and curation.

Here is a short excerpt of Howard response to a question about curation and its value as both a “fundamental building block” of networked communities and as an important form of participation:

Howard Rheingold: "...at the fundamental level, curation depends on individuals making mindful and informed decisions in a publicly detectable way.

Certainly just clicking on a link, “liking” or “plussing” an item online, adding a tag to a photograph is a lightweight element that can be aggregated in valuable ways (ask Facebook).

But the kind of curation that is already mining the mountains of Internet ore for useful and trustworthy nuggets of knowledge, and the kind that will come in the future, has a strong literacy element.

Curators don’t just add good-looking resources to lists, or add their vote through a link or like, they summarize and contextualize in their own words, explicitly explain why the resource is worthy of attention, choose relevant excerpts, tag thoughtfully, group resources and clearly describe the grouping criteria."

In other words, "curators" are the ones creating the metadata needed to empower our emerging collective intelligence.

Curation Is The Social Choice About What Is Worth Paying Attention To.

Good stuff. In-depth. Insightful. 8/10

Full interview: http://henryjenkins.org/2012/08/how-did-howard-rheingold-get-so-net-smart-an-interview-part-three.html

Robin Good curated this article and provided the following summary and commentary:

: Maria Popova has just launched a classy and laudable initiative, focused on increasing awareness and in highlighting the importance of honoring always where or via who you have got to a certain article, report, video or image.

Credit and attribution are not just a "formal" way to comply with rules, laws and authors but an incredibly powerful emebddable mechanism to augment findability, discovery, sinergy and collaboration among human being interested in the same topic.

She writes: "In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency.

A form of authorship, if you will.

Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights."

For this purpose Curator's Code was created.

Curator's Code is first of all "a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web" as well as a web site where you can learn about the two key types of attribution that we should be using:

a) Via - which indicates a link of direct discovery

b) Hat tip - Indicates a link of indirect discovery, story lead, or inspiration.

Each one has now a peculiar characterizing icon that Curator's Code suggests to integrate in your news and content publication policies. 

Additionally and to make it easy for anyone to integrate these new attribution icons in their work, Curator's Code has created a free bokkmarklet which makes using proper attribution a matter of one clic.

Hat tip to Maria Popova and Curator's Code for launching this initiative. 

Whether or not you will sign Curator's Code pledge, become an official web site supporting it, or adopt its bookmarklet instantly is not as important as the key idea behind it: by providing credit and attribution to pieces of content you find elsewhere, you not only honestly reward who has spent time to create that content, but you significantly boost the opportunity for thousands of others to connect, link up to, discover and make greater sense of their search for meaning.

Read Maria Popova introductory article to Curator's Code: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/09/curators-code/ 

How to use the Curator's bookmarklet: http://vimeo.com/38243275 

Healthy. Inspiring. 9/10

Curator's Code official web site: http://curatorscode.org/ 

N.B.: Too bad that the Curator's Code bookmarklet doesn't work with Scoop.it, as the one excludes the other. But you could save the two codes for the special attribution characters in a text note and copy and paste whicever you need. Given the need for simplicity and integration this is not an ideal solution but I am sure that between Maria and Guillaume at Scoop.it they will find a way to make this work easily for all. Maria and Guillaume: what do you say?

Note from Beth Kanter:   I originally discovered this post ᔥ Barbara Bray but traced it back to the original source Robin Good to rescoop it because I think it is important to give credit to the curator who discovered it.   To do this takes a little bit of extra time but it slows me down so I read the post, understand it, and give credit to the curator and source.  

What about you?   Do you rescoop it from the collection where your found it or do you look for the original curator who discovered it and give credit there?    

This great piece was written by Tim Kastelle - it is one of the best articles on curation, the observations and insights take this to a whole new level. So much to digest, lots to ponder about the possibilities that await us in 2012 and beyond.

Here are some of the highlights:

**"We create economic value out of information when we figure out an effective strategy that includes aggregating, filtering and connecting." 

**"Filtering is what helps us deal with the vast amount of information available to us."

"...the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information?

****And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody." (Clay Shirky)

**We try to filter information so that we end up with something that is relevant to us – it helps us learn something, it helps us solve a problem, it helps us develop a new hypothesis about the world around us.

**These are all connections – and this is what really drives value creation.

**However, we can’t connect without some filtering going on. So filtering is important, and it’s a term that includes several different sub-types. I can think of at least five forms of filtering.

...we can use these ideas about filtering to help with business model innovation by changing where it takes place in the value network.

**One of Shirky’s points is that since Gutenberg, the economic logic of publishing required publishers (of books, music, movies) to act as filters in order to maximise their investment.

**As publishing and filtering has shifted out to human networks, publishers no longer need to fill this role.

**Someone (or some network) needs to, and since that creates value, it’s something that can perhaps be monetised.

This piece was curated by Robin Good brief commentary by Jan Gordon

Check this video: http://vimeo.com/8748509 

Read the full article by Tim Kastelle: http://timkastelle.org/blog/2010/04/five-forms-of-filtering