The curatorial role is an interesting one. It is already present, to some extent, in places like Wikipedia, Google Earth/Sketch-up, and any social media that includes a rating system, a tagging system, or a flagging system.

The issue at hand is trust, and the key to a well-functioning end-user curatorial system may be to have all user-created information linked to its author. This allows/forces users to take both credit and responsibility and may be the best regulatory mechanism in user-generated spaces. This trust and ownership system is essentially a social network, where users work to create and maintain their online identity, which is associated with the information they produce. This would be interesting to explore within the umbrella of this project.

Sophia Liu, an ATLAS PhD student, is doing work on Grassroots Heritage in social media. Currently, she is creating tools to collect, share, and display digital artifacts. A sub-project in this space could look at her emerging dissertation work as an example of a potentially vast information space, where these curatorial design decisions are currently being made.

This project has significant overlap with the Wikipedia/KNOL project as well. An interesting comparison would be between Wikipedia, Google 3D Warehouse, and KNOL. Personally, I would like to explore how the user's online identity affects his or her interaction with the system, and hypothesize about which model is the most sustainable by users alone (without supervision by paid staff).

Erickson, T. 2006. Trust among strangers. (Position paper for CSCW '06). Retrieved from: www.visi.com/~snowfall/index.html