A proposed framework for collaboration

This week the Directors of institutions in Balboa Park were actively considering the terms of an invitation they received to participate in the Balboa Park Online Collaborative. It read:

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Invitation to Participate in the Balboa Park Online Collaborative

We propose to launch the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) in January 2009 (assuming that a sufficient number of institutions participate to make the project worthwhile). The current commitment of the Benbough Foundation is for three years funding with a budget approved by the Foundation based on the plan described here. We invite the institutions in Balboa Park to indicate their intention to join by December 19, 2008 so that activity scheduled for the first quarter 2009 can proceed.

The Balboa Park Online Collaborative will initially be formed as a project under the aegis of The Benbough Operating Foundation. A Policy Advisory Board consisted of the Executive Directors of each participating institution will help guide the project. The Director BPOC will be appointed by the Benbough Operating Foundation...

BPOC will be staffed by consultants with expertise in Content Management Systems, Databases, Museum Systems and Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) services, and with specialties in Web Analytics/business intelligence, technical RFP and Grant Writing, Contract Negotiation and Archiving. BPOC consultants and outside experts will offer training to staff of BPOC participant institutions through monthly (or more frequent) workshops and by funding certain outside training courses and conference relevant to the needs of specific working groups. All services and support offered by BPOC consultants will be free to BPOC participating institutions. From what we have learned about the Web operations of Park Institutions, there are considerable short-term cost savings that can be achieved by working together. Any savings realized to BPOC institutions through shared infrastructures and services will be retained by them.

All participants will be expected to participate in a study of the baseline situation of their online presence, including inputs (current levels of funding and staffing), and outcomes (online income generation, community building and visitation) so that we can report achievements against that baseline. In addition, participants will be expected to fully participate in one or more of eight initial working groups where requirements will be identified and solutions implemented to meet requirements in the following areas:

1. Membership, development, and shop sales
2. Ticketing
3. Course registration and online teaching support
4. Intranet, user contribution and community building
5. Collections digitization, education and public access
6. Connectivity, hosting and networking
7. Marketing and business intelligence
8. Archiving

Participants in these working groups will be expected to contribute staff to plan and implement collective solutions developed by the group. Their staff will be expected to engage in training provided by BPOC that is identified as important to the success of their efforts. Specifically participants will be offered regular workshops with internal and external experts, and funded registration for remote training when these are deemed important to skills acquisition. Participating institutions will also be offered partial offsets of costs for some professional conferences and seminars of less immediate relevance that will build staff skills and professional contacts.

Institutions participating in working groups will not incur a charge, per se. If working groups agree to select third-party licensed systems, institutions implementing those systems will share in any negotiated license fees. If working groups implement income generating systems and services, institutions will contribute 10% of new income (above 1st Q 2009 baselines) to the BPOC shared budget. The time schedules, commitments and deliverables of each working group will be defined by the participants in that group, assisted by BPOC consultants.  Institutions will be asked to track and report time contributed to working groups as well as the time spent on internal implementations, using project management systems that will be provided on the BPOC Intranet.

Year 1 Plans:

We would expect each of the working groups to convene in January 2009 and to have initial some implementation ready for participants to launch during year 1. Although each group will be defining its own schedule, and what implementations it desires, we expect roughly the following roll-outs in the first year:

1st Q     
Baseline study
Information will be collected from all participating institutions on current inputs and outcomes of their online activity. Participants will implement Google Analytics (Web metric collecting instrument) on their Web sites.
Intranet, user contribution and community building systems.
An Intranet capability will be launched. Training will be provided in how to use it for staff, for outside communities of interest, and for BPCP.
Connectivity, hosting and networking.
Cost effective, higher speed telecommunications links to Park institutions will be installed, shared hosting explored, and an outdoor MESH network will be implemented on an experimental basis
2nd Q    
Collections digitization, education and public access systems.
An artifact digitization facility will be opened at MoM for BPOC institutions to use. Requirements for a Web-based public access system for collections will be defined. Migration and interfaces between existing (and new) collections management systems will be explored.
Membership, development and shops.
Basic capabilities for each institution to define an inventory of membership, donation, shop inventory items, and open seated event registrations will be implemented, with a shared payment gateway, using the CMS. Sophisticated functions will be explored.
Course registration and online teaching support.
Capabilities for online registration including collecting registration fees, and for online teaching support, including course specific sites for students to read/view/listen to course material, post assignments in text, audio or video, collaborate on assignments, and receive confidential instructor feedback will be implemented. Further functions will be explored.
3rd Q   
Marketing and business intelligence.
Institutions will be able to take advantage of Web metric collecting scripts placed on their pages by the consulting teams, to build CMS “dashboards’ with real-time reporting of important institutional success measures for their executives and track user behavior on their sites.
Archiving and media conversion
Digitization of analog archives (film, still image, sound, text) will be investigated to provide back-end, archivally sound, storage solutions serving all BPOC institutions.
4th Q
Ticketing.
Institutions with ticketing requirements specific to performance/seat level and including seasons subscriptions and other multi-performance options will implement joint solutions using licensed or developed systems.

Future plans:

In December 2009 and 2010, membership in BPOC will be open, on these same terms, to any BPCP institution that did not join in December 2008. New working groups will be struck in areas identified by the BPOC Policy Advisory Board on an on-going basis. Solutions developed by working groups will be open to institutions that did not initially participate in those groups under the same terms as to those who did. Assistance will be offered by BPOC staff and earlier participants to ensure that late joiners can take advantage of previously implemented collective solutions.

Income from grants received through BPOC, and from the tithe on new earnings generated by online systems implemented by BPOC will be directed back to BPOC programs with the advice of the BPOC Policy Advisory Board. At this stage it is envisioned that BPOC activity may expand beyond the areas of the initial working groups and could come to embrace all Web activity of members. Since many IT applications in the future are projected to become Web services, it may come to embrace other IT functions over time. It is now intended that the BPOC will cease to be a project of The Benbough Operating Foundation at the end of 2011. Its structure, governance, and mission will be redefined by member institutions at the end of 2011. The BPOC will plan to be sustainable after 2012, with income from new grants, services to non-BPOC institutions and the tithe on new income from BPOC enabled income generation.

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The Directors of the institutions met Wednesday to  raise questions. Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday, initial meetings were held with staff throughout the Park who might participate in seven of the Working Groups (over 100 individuals) to review the scope of their activity,  how the WG's might go about their work, and the reasons and institution might want to send, or not want to send, a representative to take part in that group. It was recognized that most institutions should not try to participate in more than a couple of working groups an that they needed to be at the table when their requirements were distinctive, and hence would not necessarily be satisfied by hasving other institutions writing specifications.

Next week, Directors will decide whether to participate, and if so, on which Working Groups they will be represented. Plans are to begin recruiting a Director and staff for the Balboa Park Online Collaborative right away, with hopes of being fully staffed by the end of the first quarter of 2009. We'll be drafting job descriptions in the coming week and will post them here and more broadly until the collective consulting team is in place.