The Interledger Community 🌱: Lincoln Mullen

Web Monetization for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums — Final Grant Report

Lincoln Mullen — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 19:43:48 +0000

Project Update

The team at RRCHNM has worked hard on our project to bring Web Monetization to cultural heritage institutions such as galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). The fundamental insight we have is that institutions want to be mission driven, not funder driven. But the mission of cultural heritage institutions is their audiences. So if Web Monetization can turn users into donors, that allows GLAM institutions to better serve their audiences.

Progress on objectives

We have had some success and some struggles with completing our two deliverables for the project.

The first deliverable was to create a module for the Omeka S platform. Omeka S is widely used by GLAM institutions as a content management system. One of the challenges was to do this in a way that fit the values of cultural heritage institutions, including free, open access to materials. We created the module on time and under budget (despite, you know, a global pandemic). Here is the module, which we promoted among the Omeka S user community.

The second deliverable was to enable Web Monetization on RRCHNM's many public facing websites. We did a lot of work to understand how best to do so, and had a plan in place to roll that out to our users. Unfortunately, we were unable to actually do so. The problem lay in the immaturity of financial services around digital wallets. The only viable provider of a digital wallet could not offer a wallet which could be legally owned by our state-sponsored institution, nor one which could provide adequate reporting to meet our financial regulations. This was despite truly herculean efforts by our college's director of finances and the university comptroller's office. The consequence was that we were unable to accept donations.

The Interledger team was understanding, and offered to allow us to submit a report instead detailing the landscape cultural heritage institutions face when considering Web Monetization.

Key activities

Since our last report, we spent a fair bit of time waiting to see if the financial services industry could offer an account that met our needs. We also tried to better understand the landscape for cultural heritage institutions, through reading, research, and conversation. Finally, we wrote the report to submit to Interledger.

What’s next?

The Omeka S module continues to be available and will remain so. There are many, many cultural heritage institutions that have different financial regulations than ours.

RRCHNM will regrettably have to step out of the Web Monetization space for now. We will keep an eye on it, however, since as an institution we continue to find ways to allow our users to support us.

What community support would benefit your project?

If you work in cultural heritage, please use our Omeka S module! And drop us a line to let us know how it works out for you.

Micro-Donations for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums via Web Monetization and the Omeka S Platform — Grant Report #1

Lincoln Mullen — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 23:09:18 +0000

Screenshots

Some screenshots of our working Web Monetization module.

Project Update

We have been working on a module for Omeka S, which is a very widely used content management system for cultural heritage institutions. We have released the initial version of the module, available on GitHub and on the Omeka S module repository. If you use Omeka, we encourage you to try it out on your own site.

Progress on objectives

We listed four key deliverables in our proposal. Here is our progress on each.

(1) "We will create an open-source module for the Omeka S platform. This module will use the Web Monetization Standard and the Interledger Protocol to accept micro-donations from users who have web monetization enabled."

This deliverable is complete. The Omeka S module has been publicly released and is feature complete.

(2) "We will integrate the web monetization module into the Omeka S themes that we support."

We accomplished this at the same time. The most commonly used Omeka S themes should work with the Web Monetization module out of the box. There are a couple of ways to include a web monetization notice on the page: either as a block in a specific location on a page, or as a banner on all pages. Users can also customize the themes directly.

(3) We will produce documentation about both how to use the module and to integrate it into custom themes.

The [GitHub repository]((https://github.com/chnm/WebMonetization-module) contains detailed documentation, which is also available at the Omeka S module repository.

(4) We will implement web monetization on selected RRCHNM websites that either use Omeka S or are our most trafficked sites.

This deliverable is incomplete, but is under way. We have developed a banner which we will deploy on non-Omeka S sites, and have tested our module on our own sites. We will be ready to do this, but need to secure university permission to accept donations via Interledger.

Key activities

Our key activities have been developing the module and integrating it with the themes, as described above. We have also compiled a list of sites (we run many, many websites) and prioritized the ones we will enable Web Monetization on based on traffic. And we started preparing the code to do so on those sites.

Communications and marketing

We announced the release of the module on our website, and will begin publicizing it on social media. This will take some explanation to our community, and the right time for that will be after we have rolled out web monetization on our own sites.

What’s next?

What's next is rolling out web monetization to our own sites.

Please add me

Lincoln Mullen — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 15:38:58 +0000

Hi. Could you please add me to this project? Thanks!