Hi I’m Jenn Phillips-Bacher, the Flickr Foundation’s first-ever Research Fellow. I’ve been a Flickr user since 2007 when my first public photos were taken on a point-and-shoot digital camera. Oh, how the quality of photos have improved since then! It’s an absolute marvel to be able to trawl decades worth of (ever-improving) photography, still, in one place.

Before joining Flickr Foundation, I was most recently a Product Manager at Wellcome Collection, working to make its library and archive collections accessible to as many people as possible. I’ve also recently been a content strategist at the UK’s Government Digital Service where I focussed on tagging and taxonomies to help people find stuff. I’ve also been a web editor, project manager, reference librarian and technology trainer, all within the GLAM (that’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums) world.

My modus operandi for the 20+ years of my career has been to 1) find interesting work to do with kind people and 2) labor for the public good. That’s why I am delighted and honored to be part of Flickr Foundation’s efforts to preserve and sustain our digital heritage.

So what does it mean to be a research fellow?

Given my career history, I’d never considered that I could be a Research Fellow. I used to think research fellowships were reserved for academics (“real” researchers), which I resolutely am not. I’m still figuring out what it does mean to be a research fellow, but here’s where I’ve settled for now: a research fellowship allows me to take time out of normal life for learning and thinking while offering a practical benefit to the Flickr Foundation. That means I’ll use my research skills honed as a librarian and product manager to seek out existing knowledge and expertise, connecting the dots along the way, in order to help shape the Flickr Foundation’s work.

As the fellowship progresses, I’ll write more about what it’s like to move from a digital practitioner role into a Research Fellow role.

My research focus

My research is aimed at the Content Mobility program where I’m specifically interested in how we might design a Data Lifeboat. Not only the logistics of creating a portable archive of any facet of Flickr, but also how to plan for a digital collection’s ‘good ending’. I’ve always been interested in the idea of digital weeding—removing digital collections that no longer serve their purpose, as librarians do with physical materials. As we become more aware of the environmental impact of any digital activity, including online access and long-term preservation, we need to be even more intentional with what we save and what we let go.

As a complementary bit of research, I’ll be digging into the carbon costs of digital collections. I’m curious to see whether there’s something useful to do here that would help the GLAM sector make carbon-conscious digital collection decisions. (If you or anyone you know is already doing this work, I’d love to meet you/them!)

What else? When not working, I can be found nosing around galleries and museums and perambulating around cities in search of human-friendly architecture and good cafes. And like anyone who’s ever lived in Chicago, I have Opinions on hot dogs.

Photo by jordanfischer, CC BY 2.0.

We’ve known since Day 1 that we wanted the Flickr Foundation to make things, and not just talk about things. It’s an important way for us to express our mission and long term hope. We know it’s a huge challenge to make Flickr images visible for 100 years, and, while technology is certainly a big factor, meaningful future-proofing of our approaches and tools and documentation will also be key.

That’s why I was so excited when Alex Chan applied for the Tech Lead position. They’ve joined us from Wellcome Collection, where they have led software engineering for digital preservation efforts for several years. We knew we needed an engineer who actually enjoys documentation and creating code that’s clear, tested, and is designed to be re-run by someone else. The code we write today will become the foundational stones of our future approaches, and the Tech Lead must be very focused on that all the time.

Apart from writing great code, Alex is also into noodling about with complex cross-stitching, and we’re already working on a first “toy” we’re hoping to publish very soon, but I’ll leave Alex to tell you about that.

Welcome, Alex!

The Flickr Commons has been around since 2008, but hasn’t been looked after too well. There is still lots of activity, but the membership hasn’t grown for a few years, and there are no special tools for members, or for the volunteer researchers who help out by adding information about the photographs shared. We did a bunch of research in 2021 about how to turn things around, and I’m happy to say, bringing Jessamyn in to help is a fantastic power-up.

Essentially, the plan to resurrect the program has two main elements:

1. Stabilise the current membership – support community cohesion and communication, develop  aggregate/activity baseline views, fix out-of-date stuff on flickr.com/commons, reconnect with “sleepy” members, and
2. Grow the membership – we especially want to support small institutions who either cannot afford to pay for expensive collection management software, or don’t have enough staff to build out that kind of digital resource, help show/teach members about licensing, digitization, preservation techniques that we can support, build out partnerships and collaborations around the open web, open licensing, and, importantly, careful sharing (as opposed to batch throwing huge piles of cultural materials across the internet without appropriate care).

In her own words:

Hi I’m Jessamyn, and I’ve been a Flickr member since 2004. I’m the daughter of two serious hobby photographers (mom|dad) both of whom have legacy accounts on Flickr and I’ve put a few photos up there as well. I’ve really benefited, over the last two decades, from having a well-organized archive of at least some of my family’s digital heritage. Here’s my great great grandmother, and here’s my great great grandfather from the other side of the family.

I’m a big free culture fan, having done work for the Internet Archive and Wikipedia helping make more “stuff” available to more people online. I also help run MetaFilter, a large online community. My background is in librarianship and technology, so anything that combines those two things piques my interest and makes me happy. I write an irregular newsletter on the topic. I’ve been a huge fan of Flickr Commons since it launched in 2008, often using its images to illustrate Wikipedia or other digital projects.

When the Flickr Foundation came into view, I really wanted to help get more cultural heritage institutions get the tools they needed and wanted so that they could share their culture in a place geared towards longevity and community. I’m happy to be here.

You think you’re happy to be here, Jessamyn? YES! I’m so excited about it! We were on a zoom last week basically giggling at each other. I can’t wait to get started, so here’s a huge and happy welcome to you!

Oh, and while I have your attention, we’ve also just posted another position: Tech Lead. Please share in your networks, and apply if you’re interested!

Short version:
Welcome to the new home of the Flickr Foundation! We are a new US 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to keeping the wonderful Flickr collection around for 100 years. Big goals, little steps.

What’s the story?
In December 2020, Ben MacAskill (President and COO of SmugMug + Flickr) asked me to return to the fold to figure out how to revitalize the Flickr Commons program. It took me a very short while to consider it before I accepted. I proposed a research project to assess what had changed in the program and the wider sector in the last decade, so a new strategy for the Commons could reflect contemporary practice and the needs of current and future members in the program

The research consisted mainly of interviews, literature review, group discussion, and quantitative analysis, and it was a pleasure. I produced two documents which, for the curious, I’ve linked to here:

• Research Report – Flickr Commons Revitalization and Strategy 2021-2023 – Flickr Commons Revitalization

Here are a few of the highlights:

• There was a very warm public reception to this research starting, with a lot of hope for Flickr Commons.
• Current active members want better stats. Today they’re only able to access the past 31 days of activity, and some had labored in Excel to create comparisons they needed to justify their work.
• Current members remain concerned about the total lack of governance the program has suffered under. Less active or dormant members we interviewed said lack of governance was the reason they drifted away. There was no communication about future plans or provision of a contact person, and no shared sense of direction or commitment for the program.
• The digital cultural sector has kept moving forward with open licensing and accompanying technical, legal, and procedural practice, but many still struggle to nurture meaningful audience engagement and almost universal reports of no time in the workplace remain. 
• We find ourselves in a particular zeitgeist; a constellation of #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, worker’s rights, epidemiology, and a rise of nationalism. We need space for more complex historical perspectives. 

flickr.org

A big part of the strategy proposed was to create a new organization, a foundation, to run alongside the company. This organization would  develop a longer-term outlook for the collection, and investigate preservation strategies that could last for the next century. Ben agreed! So here we are.

The foundation’s mission is to make sure Flickr will be preserved for future generations. We are already working on the idea of a very long-term outlook, while acknowledging we don’t have enough voices in the mix yet. A major project will be the 100-year plan, and we’ve held several research workshops to begin to shape what such a plan should look like. It’s been interesting to begin thinking about how the foundation can and should partner with the company too. 

People & Partners

A large group has been working together to establish the foundation for about a year now. 

There are two people on the Board of Directors so far: Ryan Merkley, long-time open advocate and former CEO at Creative Commons and Chief of Staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, now Managing Director at Aspen Digital; and Stephanie McVey, SmugMug + Flickr’s Chief Financial Officer. Both Ryan and Stephanie have been hugely helpful already, and are a great compliment to the foundation. We plan to recruit more people to join the board, so please reach out if you have any recommendations.

The first Executive Director of the foundation is… me! George Oates. What a thrill and a pleasure it is to be doing this; not only as a curious designer, but as someone who is very proud of Flickr, and passionate about making our shared histories more accessible to more people. I feel very strongly that It’s not OK to delete such a huge piece of our shared cultural heritage, and we must address that risk now that we’re pouring our cultural heritage into online corporate platforms. Creating a new foundation is new territory for me professionally too, so I am extra happy for Stephanie and Ryan’s expertise, support, and guidance, and I’m really keen to bring more people into the team.

SmugMug + Flickr Volunteers

We certainly couldn’t have come as far as we have without the medium-sized flotilla of SmugMug + Flickr, Inc. volunteers and collaborators who have contributed their time and minds to bringing this new organization to life, including Ben, Cabb, Seville, Dimi, Veronica, Jill, Erin, Shannon, Leticia, Ves, Emily, Liz, Christine, Sarah, Stads, Rode, Andrew, Shane, Sean, Nikki, Craig, Navnit, Phil, Nathan, and more!

Advisory board

We have already enjoyed valuable input from lots of people, and we have plans to build our advisory group gradually. We also expect to form an advisory committee from within the Flickr Commons membership. It’s important to have people from all kinds of backgrounds and ages thinking together about this 100-year challenge we’ve set ourselves.

Our first group of advisors includes:

• Commons and libraries specialist, Jennie Rose Halperin, 
• HCI/CogSci research leader and director of UX, Elizabeth F. Churchill, and 
• Strategist and co-founder of Foundation for Public Code, Ben Cerveny.

Funding partners

Our work to date has been directly funded by SmugMug + Flickr. We could not have come this far without it, and look forward to continuing to build this central relationship in the coming years.

Research partners

We have begun building an intersectional scholarly group involved in researching history, library science, gender studies, critical race theory, digital humanities, and archival practice. The group is already meeting monthly online and cooking up our first in-person meeting.

Our academic partners are:

• University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh Futures Institute, particularly the Design Informatics cluster led by Professor Melissa Terras, which explores digital humanities, big computing, the value of arts and culture, and the creative industries.
• Dr. Temi Odumosu is at the University of Washington Information School, and we’ll be exploring long-term thinking, archive excavation, and historical and colonial representation.
• The School of Advanced Study in London, with Professor Jane Winters, looking at web-native archiving, images, ideas, and society.
• Photographer and social practice artist Eliza Gregory is at the Department of Design, Sacramento State, and we’ll be collaborating about social practice art, community development, a century of exhibitions, and photography curricula.

Our programs

It’s probably obvious but also important to note that these programs are nascent. They’re a first pass at what we think the key elements of a long-term piece of cultural infrastructure could and should be addressing. One of our first key hires will be a program manager to help develop these programs.

1. Flickr Commons
   Our flagship program, and current priority, we will work to restore and then grow the Flickr Commons, stabilizing and reconnecting with the 100+ international member organizations, and then looking to expand membership, particularly inviting institutions from the Global South, the Majority World. What could a 21st century Commons be?
2. Content Mobility
   Flickr is a huge image waypoint online, and has had interoperability at its heart since it first started in 2004. This program is about researching and showing the life of an image before it lands on Flickr, when it’s on the platform, and where it goes once it’s published elsewhere.
3. Creative Archives
   Flickr can do things traditional archives cannot. It’s made by millions of people from across the world, and holds billions of things. Its cataloging is socially generated, not standards-based. The consumer-grade technology is robust and the user base is international. And finally, the Flickr API was one of the first public APIs ever. Discuss.
4. New Curators
   Flickr is already full of curators. Its curatorial tools include albums, galleries, tags, groups, and more. It’s a great online place for conversation too, and we hope this program can gather new influences and knowledge around historical collections and future epistemologies.

We’ll hiring in early 2023

Yes, that’s right. We’re just finalising the job descriptions on four roles: Program Manager, Tech Lead, Producer (community & events), and Archivist. Our plan is to let this first crew of five people settle in together, and then decide as a group how we should grow the team after that. Do keep your eye on our mailing list or @flickrfdn on Twitter for announcements about when the jobs go live.

Exciting!!!!!!!!!