On the Assembly blog, Catherine Styles posted a paper she presented at the Austrailan Historical Association conference, How Web 2.0 will change history. It contains a brief introduction to Web 2.0 and some examples from mostly Australian websites. One concept (and term) in the paper that clearly stuck out was radical trust.

There is one aspect of the Web 2.0 landscape that is really significant for publishers, whether they are cultural institutions like archives or libraries or museums, or historians like yourselves. Web 2.0 demands a radical trust, on the part of publishers, of their users (Mazar, 2006).

That was the first time I had heard that term, so I decided to follow the source and found myself at Random Access Mazar blog written by Rochelle Mazar. She referenced a keynote speech by Stephen Abram which brought me to a post on Stephen’s Lighthouse blog. This post explained that the term originated with Darlene Fichter who, in her excellent post, Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and Radical Trust: A First Take, explains radical trust.

We can only build emergent systems if we have radical trust. With an emergent system, we build something without setting in stone what it will be or trying to control all that it will be. We allow and encourage participants to shape and sculpt and be co-creators of the system. We don’t have a million customers/users/patrons … we have a million participants and co-creators.

Radical trust is about trusting the community. We know that abuse can happen, but we trust (radically) that the community and participation will work. In the real world, we know that vandalism happens but we still put art and sculpture up in our parks. As an online community we come up with safeguards or mechanisms that help keep open contribution and participation working.

Many of the projects and discussions we’ve been involved in the museum realm have looked at this very issue. This is essentially the heart of what is “Web 2.0.” While it may seem obvious, it is nice to hear it so clearly expressed. It’s a big step for museum (or a library or achive) to trust (radically) the community online, but better understanding the issues involved certainly helps.

The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) will be hosting a 10-day online forum starting Wednesday, September 6th. I will be moderating the forum along with Kevin von Appen and Ken Dickson of the Ontario Science Centre (RedShiftNow), Bryan Kennedy of the Science Museum of Minnesota (Science Buzz), and Rick Bonney of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (Web Designs for Interactive Learning: WIDL). All of us contributed to the July/August issue of ASTC Dimensions magazine.

The forum will focus on how science museums and others can take advantage of “Web 2.0″ concepts and technologies. Participation is open to staff of ASTC-member organizations and individual subscribers to ASTC Dimensions. To participate sign up at ASTC Connect by September 1. Also, if you’re interested, my article, Museums and the New Web is available on the ASTC website.

There are some new items of interest on the ExhibitFiles development blog since my last post in early July. You’ll find the results of our Design Workshop held in Berkeley in June, a front-end study by Randi Korn & Associates, and a great post by Kathy McLean about the project which includes her article, We Still Need Criticism.

We’ve starting to get comments from the exhibit developer community, which is really helping the design process. The project itself is unusual in that we (as exhibit developers) are the primary audience too. Most of the projects that we develop are for the general public or targeted for a particular grade level, etc. The scale of the project is also unique, it is funded through a three-year NSF grant. It will be the first major application that we (Ideum) has developed with Ruby on Rails.

The site itself won’t be up until later this winter, but in the meantime we’re learning a lot through development process, and the blog is great way to share. While we’d love to take credit for this idea, we’ve been following another development blog; Bare Naked App, which has been sharing their process and progress building an application called “Amigo” since February.

The focus of ExhibitFiles is very different than Amigo which is “Bringing advertisers and newsletters together.” Another difference is that along with the development blog, we have a group of advisors who represent our core audience. However, like the folks building Amigo, we’re trying to be as responsive to the needs of our future members as possible. It’s hoped that our advisor’s participation along with a fairly transparent process (via the blog) will help guide the development of the ExhibitFiles. Stay tuned.

Today is the 61st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The event was marked as it is each year, with a moment of silence at the city’s Peace Park near “ground zero.”

Eleven years ago on the 50th anniversary, while I was at the Exploratorium, I was involved in producing a website, Nagasaki Journey (with Ali Sant, Susan Schwartzenberg and others) which included photographs taken the day after the bombing. A Japanese Army photographer Yosuke Yamahata captured the devastation in black and white.

The website had an active discussion area (long since closed) which clearly demonstrated the unique qualities of the Web to encourage conversation. We received comments from all over the world, including one from an eye witness of the bombing. At the time, having discussions on the Web was still a new concept.

This was the early days of the Web. We were designing pages for Mosaic and Netscape 1.0. We had to create the layout without even the benefit HTML tables.

Even though Nagasaki Journey website is now quite dated, the photographs remain powerful. In seeing these images we are reminded of just how terrible war is and why it is so important to seek peaceful resolutions to human conflict.

The Google Maps mashup we developed for the City of Torrance, “Where to Recycle,” is featured today on Google Maps Mania. (The permanent link is here.) This blog is the “unofficial” authority on everything Google Maps. The review briefly explains how our mashup works and ends with a very positive statement, “In my view, this kind of mashup should be present in every city website!”

We’d like to see that happen, too. As I mentioned before, the key motivation for developing the site was to make recycling easy and to make it happen more often. The goal was to help visitors to find out where they can recycle a product in the fewest number of steps and then guide them to the location.

I think most people know recycling is the right thing to do, but it needs to be more convenient. Our hope is that “Where to Recycle” does just that.