(referring to previous thread: Yes, as several people have described, Wikimedia takes assiduous care about copyright but cannot be responsible for contracts (formal or implied) between third-parties e.g. a museum and its patrons.)
Continuing from the link that Sammy posted,
http://hyperallergic.com/photopolicy/this has got me wondering if it really is viable to create a museum photography policy list... but much more than that...
I think this could work globally, but first I'd like to see if it works in one area and I think that New York is as perfect a place as could be found for such a trial.
What I'm thinking is whether it would be a good idea for Wikimedia to sponsor the creating of a "free-culture-compliant" rating schema for cultural organisations. If it worked properly, it could be updated and "announced" annually with the best organisations in different categories (National/less than 5 employees/libraries...) winning some kind of recognition/award.
Where I'm basing this off is Greenpeace's "Guide to Greener Electronics" which has been running for several years now:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/Guide-to-Greener-Electronics/
The deal with this is to take the public statements/policies of the major tech organisations and rate them against a set of objective criteria. Each year the new edition produces quite a bit of publicity e.g.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/27/apple-greenpeace-greener-electronics-rankings
Why I like this system is that it only assesses publicly stated policies which means it does not require a complicated/expensive assessment system or checking compliance with those policies. Also, by reducing things to a score it makes it easy to rate the companies which allows for simple reporting phrases (that the newspapers and corporate management like) such as "Nokia stays in 1st place with the same score of 7.5 [green]".
Now, imagine if we could produce an objective list of "free-culture criteria" that are applicable to cultural organisations (including but not limited to photographic policies) and give each criterion a weighting. We could make the list and the assessment process public, as is the wiki way, which would also enable other organisations to self-assess if they wanted to (something that cannot be done with Greenpeace's closed system). Then, once an assessment had been done on all the institutions, we would be in the position to be able to make a press release saying (for example):
"in 2011 The Brooklyn museum is the most free cultural institution in New York, with the Tenement museum being the most improved whist the Frick Collection became less free over the same period." This also allows smaller institutions to be able to "beat" the big guys at something for the first time!
What do you think of the idea in general? What do you think of the idea specifically for NYC in 2011? And...before you think I'm just trying ask you to do work, I should point out that the WMF has recently hired me on a 1 year fellowship (not yet announced) to improve our GLAM outreach/collaboration capacity and therefore I would definitely be up for helping to do the hard work on such a project.
Sincerely,
-Liam / Witty lama
wittylama.com/blogPeace, love & metadata