collaborative curating using del.icio.us, and encouraging online participation

http://del.icio.us/I_tag_you_tag_me is an interesting collaborative curating experiment, where lots of people (via various mailing lists) are invited to log into this del.icio.us account and add/remove tagi/re-tag links to web-based art.

From the originator’s blurb:

If taggingi creates meta-data about pre-existing content, it can be seen as the creation of a discourse about it. And if that content happens to be an online artwork, tagging both allows for a subjective juxtaposition of art works and the elaboration of a critical discourse about it. Curating then. But this isn’t new. This is regular curating done in a schematic way, using a different tool to get the job done. But since tagging is a social activity in its essence, giving birth to folksonomies, it allows for social curating, with social selection of works and social production of discourse about them. This is what this project intends to be. Rather than traditionally curating a show through tagging the projects with the name of the show, we will be asking people to tag some of their favourite Internet art pieces with a few defined tags and some that they can choose freely. The idea is that this device will then create a folksonomic net art exhibition done collectively by a group of people. It can be seen as a social experiment, aiming at finding out what will that second layer of meaning be like, or if it will work at all. A challenge then. I tag you tag me, or a random folksonomy of Internet art. Let the tagging begin.

However, from the looks of things, those who have participated so far have tended to be artists adding links to their own work – there’s a clear incentive for these people to get involved – to promote their work, but are they really meeting the brief set out above? (Admittedly, the nature of the I tag you tag me project means that the list could have completely changed by the time you click on the link)

Which leads me back to online participatory or collaborative projects in general – and how building in incentives to participate (and making people aware of these incentives) are vital to a project’s success – it’s all very well presenting a project and grand ideas about participation/collaboration, but without any participators, can it ever be successful? (c.f. our own Virtuali Creatures)