Michael Edson - Scope, Scale and Speed (Smithsonian) 3/4
Channel: Rui Guerra
Date: 2013-11-16

Michael Edson 3 - Scope, Scale and Speed

I've been looking for patterns - - how to describe and think about what's working and trying different ways - - all of us who have been thinking about this have been trying different ways of explaining it to people, understanding it ourselves, to turn these ideas and these sensations that we have that the world is changing, citizens can participate, that our institutions can do more, ...trying to put words around that, so we can use those ideas as tools. And I keep coming back to these 3 ideas, scope, scale, and speed.
 
So, scope is what we choose to work on - - and we have choices, we have a choice. Nowhere is it written in laws of the universe that we must work a certain way. We come to work each morning, you and I, and we do a job, and that I could be different. Scale is how big that work can be - - not just in terms of many consumers reached, but impact in society, depth impact on individuals... and then speed is how quickly it can happen. And I think that fundamentally and constitutionally the world has changed in those three dimensions, scope, scale, and speed. The scale and the speed should come back and teach us a new lesson about the scope, what we dream of accomplishing.
 
So, much of my thinking and work - - when I wake up at night and have dreams and I'm spacing out on the train and reading and thinking about how these three things fit together, and how to build these concepts into a toolkit that you and I and our colleagues can use to do better, more, to accomplish more in society.
 
The scale piece is very interesting to me. I think our primate minds have evolved to think in a certain range of scale very comfortably. We can know about a hundred people, we can know a certain geographic area, we can think clearly about 1 or 100 or 1,000 of something, but when you get beyond a certain point the ideas are very abstract and they don't come naturally to us and we need to train to get good at them - - we need to practice. Was it Aristotle who said something like "we are what we celebrate." And a physical therapist I know said "we get what we practice." You get what you practice. So this thinking in new ways about scale is very challenging.
 
I mentioned the TED Talks earlier: the TED Conference has served a billion videos. That's a big number. There's nothing about the organization of Ted that a museum couldn't duplicate, couldn't have duplicated. It's a very simple concept short talks from great thinkers. The Ted team...I don't know that they understood the power of global video, but they had a hunch. They started experimenting with putting a few videos online in 2006 and now they've got a billion videos served. The Wikimedia projects have had almost 2 billion edits now, with no central control.
 
I'm very interested in the MOOC movement - - Massively Open Online Courses - - they're not so much known in museum leadership circles, it's an emerging idea. A Princeton University professor recently taught an introduction to sociology class that he's taught for many years at Princeton, but he offered it online, for free, to anyone in the world I don't remember the exact number of participants, but it was easily over [40,000] people signed up to take this course online. So that's a big number. The most interesting thing about it to me was that the professor said he got more useful feedback on the class in the first week or two than he had received in 20 years the teaching the class at Princeton University. Sociology, many of the topics that our museums and libraries and archives celebrate, benefit from a multiplicity of perspectives, global perspectives, cultural perspectives: the more people we involve in those conversations the richer the dialogue can be, the more quickly we can advance our understanding of these topics.
 
One of the great physicists, I think it was Richard Feynman, said "there's something different about big." And I'm not arguing that everything needs to be about bigness, but just that there's a lot beneficial work that can be done in society by thinking about big. I don't just want big: I want more of everything.