Public engagement meets social media
Found this idea about how to intertwine a ‘collection’ - in this instance of the Blue Plaques with Flickr, Twitter and potentially Wikipedia. The project is called Open Plaques and here’s a bit of a techie explanation but if you don’t mind a bit of that (or can skip through it) you’ll see that the concept is a really accessible and potentially limitless (yet focussed) example of Public Engagement.
The idea develops again, as these things do, into a more collaborative publicly owned programme for the future here. Showing really how an innovative idea for public engagement can actually come full circle and start to be able to inform policy and decision making at national levels, which I think is the point - or one of them anyway.
I think there’s a wider discussion to be had about the purpose of publicly managed digital collecting, which no doubt leads to the whole discussion about the roles and ethics of curating, not to mention copyright and creative commons… for another day…
image: Agnes Archer Evans, Fiery Fred
