GLAMkit rebooted

As a technical information architect, seeing the amazing innovations coming from museum web teams worldwide, it’s obvious that there is a huge need – and opportunity – for a community technology platform for sharing those innovations without the huge cost of re-inventing the wheel and rebuilding the basics every time.

To help solve that problem, in 2010, my company, the Interaction Consortium (IC), started releasing some of the code it was writing for its museum clients as open source software. We called the collection GLAMkit. GLAMkit has code to handle the complexities of museum events, sponsorship, collections, images and media, blogging and content publishing, APIs and 3rd-party integration, and so on, leaving developers to concentrate on innovation.

We’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but we want GLAMkit to do much better. Our goal is for GLAMkit to become the best museum content platform in the world.

In order to do that, we have to grow the GLAMkit community. And in order to grow the community, we have to address the two biggest flaws that currently face GLAMkit:

• The architecture is fairly abstract, by design. This keeps GLAMkit flexible, but it’s still a lot of work to make a museum content platform from it.
• There aren’t many example projects or much documentation to help people to figure out how to use GLAMkit. This sets the technical bar too high for the target audience.

So here’s what we’re going to do:

In January 2013, with the support and encouragement of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, we’ll release the code for www.mca.com.au – minus the MCA-specific parts – as version 0.1 of the free, open-source GLAMkit CMS, for anyone to install, use, or contribute to. Based on the MCA site, GLAMKit CMS will provide a fully-fledged museum site out of the box, allowing museums to publish rich content (text, audio, video) throughout events, articles, blog posts, and collections, as well as proving a mobile site, search, analytics, APIs, metadata and tools for managing social media and visitor info. This leaves web teams to concentrate on what their museum does that no-one else does, and creates a platform for add-ons for ecommerce, memberships, visitor experience and so on.

This will turn GLAMkit from an abstract into a concrete architecture, and is the missing example project for the existing GLAMkit code libraries. The time between January and April will be spent building the community and improving documentation.

Longer-term we want to add, as standard, some of the exciting stuff going on in museums right now – crowdsourcing, loyalty frameworks, collection analysis, linked data, in-gallery and post-visit experience, and so on. If you have anything else you’d like us to include, we’d love you to get involved (even by making a supportive comment below :))

What do we need?

Developers! If you work in a museum web team, or if you are a Python developer who loves museums, the most awesome way to contribute to GLAMkit is to chip in some code, or testing, or feedback. If you’re interested to help, drop me an email and we can talk about the best match for your skills.

Designers! One of the things I have to take out of the MCA code is its graphic design. It’s a beautiful design (Apple used it in their Australian iPad ad), but it’s MCA’s. I’m not a designer, but I understand the importance of good design. I’d love to hear from any designers out there who can create a design for GLAMkit to ship with out of the box.

Thought leaders! So many of you reading this will be brimming with ideas and inspiration for museums on the web. If there’s something you’d love to see in GLAMkit, then speak up up. If we can make GLAMkit a bigger community, then more people can help make your ideas into reality.

Spread the word! Many of you have friends and colleagues in the GLAM sector, and even if you can’t contribute directly, I would love it if you passed on the fact that I am doing this to people who might be interested in helping.

Moral support! It’s just me, myself and I working on the GLAMkit CMS project at IC right now – it’s an exciting and challenging undertaking for me, and will require lots of energy and focus. If you’d like to see the project grow and succeed, then sign up to the newsletter, tweet motivational phrases to @glamkit or leave a comment of encouragement below.

Er, donations!? We don’t have a way to accept financial donations yet, but if you’d be interested in donating pizza money, or to a Kickstarter fund, then absolutely drop me a line. If enough people are interested, I’ll make it happen. Also, IC is always available for cultural web projects worldwide, and we use our projects as opportunities to improve GLAMkit if we can. Say hello to IC at [email protected].

Thanks for reading, and watch this space for updates!