Frances Liddell

Fair remuneration is the foundation of equitable participation but often what is fair, compared with what is possible, makes it difficult for participants in museum community engagement work to be fairly compensated for their time (Giblin et al. 2023). This chapter explores NFT ticketing, live minting, and smart donation boxes as potential tools to recognize participant labor and create an alternative financial remuneration practice in community engagement work in museums. These proposals are founded on the concept of the “Distributed Museum,” an idea which envisions a museum as a space of circulation where value flows in and beyond the institution to support its wider community (Dewdney et al. 2012; Morse 2014; Liddell 2022). This chapter explores how NFTs and smart contracts might be the infrastructure that supports the “Distributed Museum” by incorporating ideas of care, reciprocation, and accountability into the process of collaborative exhibiting.

In this work-in-progress, we present ORAgen, as ‘unfinished software’, materialised through a demonstrative web application that enables participants to engage with a novel approach to media tokenisation – the ORA framework. By presenting ORAgen in ‘think-aloud’ interviews with 17 professionals working in the creative and cultural industries, we explore potential values of media tokenisation in relation to existing challenges they face related to ownership, rights, and attribution. From our initial findings, we reflect specifically on the challenges of attribution and ongoing control of creative media, and examine how media tokenisation, and underpinning distributed ledger technologies can enable new approaches to designing attribution.

The paper examines the possibilities offered by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) for supporting audience participation in the museum sector . DAOs, a type of digital infrastructure underpinned by blockchains and smart contracts, have been seen as informing a more autonomous, self-managing, transparent, and more efficient online organization, one capable of shaping how users participate and communicate with one another. At the same time significant questions have been raised over how DAO technologies complicate the human issues of democracy and shared authority. This paper explores and evaluates the impact of DAO structures in the context of museum participation, specifically viewing them through the lens of shared authority and democracy. It argues that these technologies are capable of offering evidence-based participation, but that this is contingent on access and trust.

This article considers the notion of shared guardianship in the context of digital museum objects and blockchain technology, arguing that this technology can contribute to the production of value in digital museum objects that goes beyond the monetary. Shared guardianship is understood to be a process of prioritizing the experience of others and forming a diverse set of stakeholders that transforms understandings around ownership; meanwhile, a blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology which can be used to identify digital files and so make them feel ownable and authentic. As such, this paper argues that blockchain technology could create a new layer of materiality and value in digital museum objects which could support the formation of shared guardianship. This question will be analysed in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of digital materiality and a case study project at the National Museums Liverpool, UK, which investigated how to implement blockchain technology in the museum context in order to produce collective ownership and meaningful, connected digital objects.