Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

We are very happy everyone is logging in to evaluate submissions for Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition, but our technical resources are a bit unmatched for this kind of traffic.  If you are trying to evaluate and finding that images slow to load, hang tight.  We are working on the problem and should have more news soon.  You can login at any time during the evaluation period to finish up, so you don’t have to evaluate everything in one sitting.

We are launching the evaluation interface for Click! today, so I wanted to take this opportunity to write about some of the choices behind the design. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki asserts that for a crowd to be wise, maintaining diversity and independence are two key factors. Both issues are talked about at length in chapters two and three of the book, but here is a small sampling to give you an idea:

“Diversity helps because it actually adds perspectives that would otherwise be absent and because it takes away, or at least weakens, some of the destructive characteristics of group decision making.”

“Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. […] Second, independent individuals are more likely to have new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. ” (more…)

One of the biggest challenges we face with an exhibition like Click! is getting the word out. Click! depends on two types of participation, initial submissions from the artist community and participation from the online community who will evaluate those submissions. Getting to word out to the artist community is critical and that means we’ve been doing a lot of leg work.

Physical card distribution is still a major method of communication throughout the Brooklyn communities. Many of the local mom-and-pop establishments like cafes and bookstores have a place for card drops and announcements. As you can see, we printed a lot of cards, so we’ve been working to get them into the neighborhoods. Happily and with the help of many staff who have taken a bunch to their local hangouts, we are now down to two small stacks!

Since this is a photography show, it seemed like a good idea put announcements in all the Brooklyn-based groups on Flickr. Instead of just posting, we wrote the administrators of each group to ask permission to do so. The admins were great about getting back to us and our postings are now in place. For those of you who have never seen the Brooklyn groups on Flickr, there’s a great online community there, so spend some time checking it out.

In addition to Flickr, there’s a strong blogging community in Brooklyn and we’ve been sending information their way. To get an idea of how large and active this community is, take a look at the blogroll at The Gowanus Lounge. Also of interest, the Brooklyn blogging community hosts a monthly blogade.

And that’s not all. There are many artist collectives in Brooklyn that we’ve been contacting and, in turn, they’ve been sending notification e-mails to their lists of artists. In addition, there are photo documentation projects for certain areas and we’ve been contacting the people running them. Take a look at What’s The Hook? and the Coney Island Documentation Project for great examples.

So, this post is a bit of thanks to all those who have helped us get the word out about our open call. If you’ve sent out e-mails, allowed us to post to your Flickr group, accepted cards, installed our widget, posted to your blog - thank you! We couldn’t do this without your help and we are happy to be neighbors!