Back in 2012, I was taking the fledgling "QRpedia" project to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We had a cool little invention - stick a QR code on a museum exhibit and when a visitor scans it, they're automatically taken to the Wikipedia page in their native language. Nifty, huh?

The project was still in beta, but was gaining traction with museums and galleries around the world. We were also getting good press!

More importantly, our project worked. Not only had we demonstrated that the technology was viable, but we had proof of it succeeding.

So I entered QRpedia into a UKTI backed competition to find the best UK mobile technology. We went through a couple of rounds of judging and ended up as one of four finalists!

Look how excited (and young!) I was!

We were up against a nanotech firm, an augmented reality app, and a company bringing low-cost Android tablets to the developing world. All impressive competitors!

We all did our presentations, then had TV cameras pointed at us while we waited for the announcement. QRpedia didn't win.

I think I managed to hide my disappointment on screen. The winner - DataWind - had done a great presentation about how they were going to bring "Aakash" a $50 Android tablet to India. But I thought there was something "off" about it.

What happened to DataWind?

Back in 2011 - well before the competition - DataWind made headlines by offering a $35 tablet to India. At the time, lots of sensible people questioned whether a laptop with suitable functionality could be made that cheaply. Spoiler alert - it couldn't!

Contemporary reports branded the Aakash device "a dud".

Despite wining a $4 million contract from the Indian Government, DataWind couldn't deliver what it promised. Reportedly, a third of the laptops wouldn't boot at all.

There was, I thought, ample evidence that the company wasn't able to deliver on its promises. But, wow, they did give a great presentation.

Over the next few years, it all came crashing down.

• Today, the Aakash tablet is no less than a subject of mockery (2012)
• The disastrous Aakash project has expunged India's dream of developing the world's cheapest computing device (2012)
• Datawind $35 Aakash 2 – A Cautionary Tale (2012)
• It has become increasingly evident that DataWind are unable to deliver on most of their ambitious promises (2012)
• Aakash tablet project comes a cropper (2013)

DataWind and the Aakash tablet were also the subject of an academic look into the failures of the project - "The Aakash tablet and technological imaginaries of mass education in contemporary India".

Their success wasn't a part in my failure

I know a few things about my personality. I love starting new projects, but I'm hopeless at pushing them out to market. Like the mathematician putting out a fire, I'm content to go "Aha! A solution exists."

A few years after the competition, the QRpedia project was given over to Wikimedia UK. Without a dedicated "sales" team to promote it, the project languished. Partly it was QR codes not being quite mainstream enough, and partly it was my failure to recognise that museums and galleries wanted to point to their own content - not Wikipedia.

Would winning the award have changed anything?

I can't remember what the prize money was - not a life changing amount, I suspect - but the legitimacy that it conferred on the project may have been useful in helping us get more uptake.

I'm happy to say our other competitors from that day are doing well. P2i are still selling waterproof nanocoating. And Blippar had a bit of a tumultuous time, but are still doing great AR work.

QRpedia codes still work - and I occasionally get sent photos of them in the wild.

Perhaps the resurgence of QR codes means that QRpedia will finally take the world by storm.

The lessons that I took from all of this? Winning prizes doesn't matter. The prize wasn't enough to stop DataWind from failing.

Judges aren't omniscient. At the time, I saw the loss as a direct rejection of our vision, and I couldn't understand how the judges had picked such an "obviously" flawed winner.

The power of story telling. Looking back, it's easy to see how DataWind had a much more compelling story and roadmap for real world impact.

Finally, holding on to bitterness isn't helpful. We lost, so fucking what? I should have used that emotion to spur me on rather than knock me back.

That said, I've not been able to devote as much time as I would like to - nor have other project members. We'd like to see it blossom and grow but, sadly, our resources are too limited to be able to make much impact.

So, it with great pride that we're happy to announce that QRpedia has been acquired by Wikimedia!

As much as I'd have loved this to have been a Silicon Valley exit with billions of dollars being splashed around - we agreed that the sensible thing to do would be to grant all the IP to Wikimedia and have them operate it in perpetuity.

Over the next few days we'll be transferring the website and all the other assets to the new owners - so there may be a little down time. But I'm confident that this will QRpedia to grow and grow.

The source code remains open for anyone who wants to see how it works and/or implement a similar system.

I was talking about the QRpedia project I co-founded. During the course of the interview, a phrase fluttered into my head - "The Engagement Economy."

It wasn't a phrase I'd heard before - although Jane McGonigal wrote an excellent paper in 2008 with the same name. McGonigal's paper talks about getting people to work on a project. My idea of the Engagement Economy is around how to keep someone's attention in a world full of distractions.

Let's take a typical museum visitor - Alice. When she decides to walk in to a museum she experiences a range of possible distractions.

Her friends may want to chat, there's a movie playing down the road that she wants to see, Twitter keeps buzzing in her pocket, she wants to find out more about the exhibit she's looking at, noisy school-children are annoying her, there's a new podcast she wants to listen to, the list goes on.

Each exhibit in every room, throughout the museum has to compete for Alice's engagement. She may be standing in front of the Hunterian's collection of pickled penises yet her eyes are on Facebook, her ears are listening to the Pod Delusion, and her mind is in a state of Continuous Partial Attention.

How do we snap Alice back to make the most out of her museum visit? We could use the ideas of the Attention Economy - but this often means crudely interrupting Alice and forcing her down a path she wasn't willing to travel.

The "Engagement Economy" suggests that we place ourselves in the channels that Alice is already using.

Let me take four very good examples.

Social Networking

As well as making sure you're reading the tips and notes left by your visitors on FourSquare and FaceBook, you also need to respond to people talking to you on Twitter. Be proactive - catch them while they visit, engage with them on their platform of choice.

Dublin Zoo do this incredibly well:

Siobhán Gearty

@shivyg5

Looking forward to going to @DublinZoo tomoro. First time in it in about 10 years :-)

---

Dublin Zoo

@DublinZoo

@shivyg5 Hope you are enjoying your day here!

---

Video

Alice walks over to see the elephants in Dublin Zoo. Sadly, they're all asleep - which makes for a slightly dull few minutes. Engagement lost. Silly elephants - letting down a visitor like that.

Luckily, Dublin Zoo has uploaded some video of the elephants onto YouTube:

From the looks of that, it was probably shot with an employee's phone - or a cheap digital camera - then uploaded to YouTube. Almost zero cost to the zoo - but a great way to engage with visitors who may otherwise be left frustrated.

It's also "blipvert" length. Long enough to be interesting, but short enough to download on a phone and watch quickly.

Audio

Produce your own audio - let visitors download it. Everyone visiting your site will have a mobile phone. You don't need to rent out audio guides - give people the MP3 to download.

I saw this done last year - the Tracey Emin retrospective gave away an MP3 audio guide. Those who want to listen can do so using their own equipment (which will automatically pause if they receive a phone call, etc).

Wikipedia

What can Alice do if she wants to see more information on an exhibit? Most cultural institutions have a few lines on a card and, if you're lucky, a curator who can give more detail.

Alice is just going to go directly to Wikipedia on her phone. That's where QRpedia comes in. QRpedia puts QR codes on exhibits which then link to mobile Wikipedia.

The really clever part is that QRpedia codes do language detection, so Alice sees the English Wikipedia, no matter which country she is in. Similarly, Jacques sees the French Wikipedia even if he's at Dublin Zoo. Your staff should be editing Wikipedia, improving the articles, uploading photos.

Wikipedia run an outreach programme for Gallaries, Libraies, Archives, and Museums (and pretty much anyone else!) which can help you make the most of Wikipedia.

It's the Engagement Economy, Stupid

Participating in the Engagement Economy doesn't mean disrupting people, it doesn't mean forcing them down a specific path, and it doesn't mean that you have to interact every visitor on every channel.

The Engagement Economy means you have to know what is diverting the engagement of the majority of your visitors. Find a subtle way to insert yourself in that channel, and produce content which will hold their engagement.

Now, I've no idea why I was the headliner - but I certainly wasn't going to complain!

Museums Showoff is a spin-off from the popular Science Showoff. The idea is that ten speakers come along and show off. They chat about what they're doing, things they've made, stuff they've built, or anything that gets their juices flowing.

With the permission of the participants, I recorded the event. Here are the videos:

Subhadra Das - UCL Pathology

A touching and hilarious talk about all the grim and icky stuff found in formaldehyde jars.

Terence Eden - QRpedia

This suspiciously good looking chap chatted about QRpedia

Brian Macken - Dublin's Dead Zoo

A high speed history of Dubin's Natural History Museum. I really regret not visiting it when I was last in Ireland.

Rosie Clarke - Museums at Night

I love the idea of Museums at Nights - this was a great explanation of the effort it takes to put on the event each year.

Ayla Lepine - Architecture

How do you get kinds interested in architectural drawing? Alya Lepine explains all.

Steve Lloyd - Physical and Digital

A fascinating talk about digital signage in the modern museum.

Gordon Cummings - Fry Gallery

Did you know about the Fry Gallery? Gordon gave an entertaining talk about the gallery and the stories behind it.

Catherine Walker - Handling Objects

Who wants to squeeze a brain? Or see how a shrunken head is made?

Overall, a fascinating event with a great turn out, and a lot of money was raised for Arts Emergency.

I spent the morning at The British Museum doing the first public experiments with QRpedia.

This is a video of the historic occaision.

So, here's a quick run down of what this volunteer-lead project has acheived in a single year, in no particular order:

• Derby Museum installation
• UK National Archives installation
• The Children's Museum of Indianapolis installation
• Sofia Zoo installation
• Juan Miro installation
• Monmouthpedia - covering Monmouth with hundreds of QRpedia codes
• Over 42,000 scans of the codes
• Named one of the top four most innovative mobile companies in the UK
• Become part of the "Occupy" movement
• Received scans from over 100 different countries

Wow! What a ride! From a few comments on Wikipedia and blogs, to project launch, to global domination :-) QRpedia really emphasises what a team of commited volunteers can do if they work together.

I'll be demoing QRpedia at Museums Showoff on April 25th in Camden.

If you work with a museum, gallery, archive, library, zoo, garden - or any other cultural institution - and want to use QRpedia, visit the website to get started.

We are searching for the UK's Most Innovative Mobile Companies. Our aim is to celebrate UK innovation and showcase the best examples of UK mobile innovation.

We'll be presenting at the competition in January - if we make the final six, we'll be off to Mobile World Congress.

Look out world! Here comes QRpedia!

One of the most requested features in QRpedia is to have custom URLs.

For example, the British Museum may want a URL of "bm.qrwp.org". This has two main advantages.

1. Better analytics. Although the British Museum is the only place likely to have the Rosetta Stone, many museums will have exhibits about "Ancient Egypt" or "Gold". By differentiating museums, their statistics are easier to view.
2. Branding opportunities. A user will know that they've scanned a code belong to a specific museum.

From a technical perspective, this is fairly easy to implement. Assuming that a museum is only generating codes in one language, we simply map $museum.qrwp to $language.qrwp - and record in the logging database as per usual.

However, there are a number of challenges around the naming of museums which means considerable thought is needed before we implement this.

Length

QR codes work best when the URL inside them is as short as possible.

This means, we don't want a URL like "BritishMuseum.qrwp.org" or even "PrestongrangeIndustrialHeritageMuseum.qrwp.org".

So, we need to choose suitable abbreviations.

Language Clashes

We could create a custom URL for the British Museum of "bm". However, that's also the same language code as the Bambara language.

There are several Language Codes in use - covering two and three letter combinations. There are currently 282 different language versions of Wikipedia.

Those mostly use two or three letters to distinguish between languages - but there are the occasional surprise like "bat-smg"

Abbreviation Clashes

Suppose that the British Museum wanted a custom URL of "brit.qrwp.org" - that may clash with the (fictitious) Brazilian Institute for Technology.

We Need...

We need to meet these aims for custom URLs:

1. Short
2. Unique
3. Recognisable
4. Fairly distributed

How on Earth do we do that?

On your marks... Get set... Discuss!

Here's a great video showing off the exhibit:

You can jump straight to the two-minute mark if you're just interested in the QR action.

A great article discussing the role of the Wikipedian in residence and how QRpedia codes have taken off there.

Derby Museum using multilingual QR codes from Andrew James Sykes on Vimeo.

In 2011 Wikipedians wrote and translated 1200 new articles to allow the museums objects to read in over a dozen languages using QRpedia codes.

You can see all the articles (and their QRpedia codes) - there is also a list of articles which need translating.

QRpedia's Name

There is some confusion about QRpedia's name.

Торчковій музонъ

@dslrave

Replying to @QRpedia@QRpedia please answer me, QRpedia = QR + wikipedia or QR + encyclopedia? I need it as a prooflink for [[ru:QRpedia]].

---

The answer is very simple. The "pedia" isn't from "Encyclopedia". It isn't from "Wikipedia". It's an acronym.

• P - Potentially
• E - Every
• D - Device
• I - Interlanguage
• A - Access

The "QR", of course, standing for "Quick Response".

I hope that clears up the matter ;-)

This project has been the brain-child of Àlex Hinojo - the Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Museu Picasso. He first mentioned it to us in May and we've worked hard to deal with the challenges of the Catalan language.

Congrats to Àlex and the whole team for a successful launch.

Press release in Catalan.

Video by DanGEMurphy

All these languages are valuable and hugely important to their communities. Many have a Wikipedia version written in their language.

Unfortunately, very few phones support these languages.

This poses a problem for QRpedia. They way the system works is this:

1. Read the phone's language
2. Look for a suitable translation in Wikipedia
3. Return the correct article
4. If a translation doesn't exist, return a list of available articles

Suppose The National Library of Wales has a QRpedia code for the Black Book of Carmarthen. A Welsh speaker will probably wish to go to the Welsh version of the article. However, their phone does not support the Welsh language (unless it is a Samsung S5600) and is set to English.

QRpedia, therefore, redirects them to the English version and doesn't give them a chance to read in their native language.

This is a problem we have faced with both Catalan and Norwegian.

Catalan

Catalan faces the very same problem as Welsh does in the previous theoretical example. Many people speak it but, because it's rare for a phone to support it, their phones are set to Spanish.

This was how we solved the problem:

• If the QRpedia code was for a Catalan page (ca.wikipedia)...
• If the phone's language is Catalan (CA) take them to the Catalan Wikipedia.
• If the phone's language is Spanish (ES) take them to a language choice screen - they can then select between Spanish, Catalan, or any other available language.
• If the phone's language is anything else (say EN) take them to the article in their language.

QRpedia doesn't store the user's language choice - so the user has to choose every time the scan which language they want.

The reasons we don't store the language choice is that it would be very hard to undo if the user made a mistake, or ever wanted to change their language.

Norwegian

The Norwegians have two languages - Bokmål and Nynorsk.

The standard language codes are NB and NN. However, most phones only support NB - with the language header of NB-NO. To complicate matters, the NB Wikiedia is located at NO.wikipedia!

So, after much discussion with some Norwegians, I discovered that comparatively few people read NN. So, we came up with the following fix.

• If the phone's language is Bokmål (NB-NO) take them to the NO Wikipedia.
• If the phone's language is Nynorsk (NN-NO) take them to the NN Wikipedia.

However, very few phones support NN (none have ever used QRpedia) so I'm not sure if this is the correct approach.

Others

There are lots of other languages with Wikipedia supports, but which aren't well supported on phones. Wikipedia is available in nearly 300 different languages - from Scots and Simple English to Esperanto and Latin. Although, curiously, there's no separate Wikipedia for British English - or other regional English variants, nor is there one in Klingon

The Future

So, what should QRpedia do in the future? How should it handle all the thousands of languages in conjunction with the hundreds of Wikipedia languages?

That's where you come in.

If you've got a good idea on how we handle your favourite language - drop a comment on this blog.

If you're a coder, QRpedia is open-source. Check out the code and leave a comment, or raise a bug.

We need your help to determine what we do next.

© Caroline Mockett

As I stepped onto the stage at OverTheAir 11 to present QRpedia, I was buoyed by the overwhelming reception that it received on the Interwebs over the last few days.

Here's a quick roundup.

• It all started with a blog post on Wikimedia.
• ReadWriteWeb called QRpedia Probably the Coolest QR Thingy Ever Made!
• This was syndicated into the New York Times.
• Gizmodo gave QRpedia a great write up.
• The Hipster Effect talks about how QRpedia enables rapid access to knowledge.
• A small but positive write up in Forbes.
• Lots of blog posts in languages I can't read.
• And, finally, Quominus cuts through the hype with some well reasoned criticisms.

That, and a whole avalanche of tweets, certainly put a smile on my face!

The Domesday Book

From their press-release:

As part of this project to increase digital engagement we have used the QRpedia service to link some of our museum exhibits to articles on Wikipedia. In the on site museum at Kew, visitors can use their smartphones to scan QR (quick response) codes next to the exhibits. QR codes are barcodes that can be read by smartphones to link physical and virtual documents.

The QR codes will allow visitors to the museum to explore more information on particular displays than can physically be provided on written captions. They can also deliver pages (where they exist) in the language of the user’s handset.

Visitors to the museum will also be invited to contribute their knowledge to The National Archives-related articles on Wikipedia.

There are 13 QRpedia codes dotted around the museum – here are some photos of a few of them.

Declaration of Independence

Grant of Arms

The team have done an amazing job. They placed codes in prominent positions and made sure they are well lit.

They have also created a display to explain what the QR codes do. They even include instructions on how to get on to the free WiFi if your phone doesn’t have a strong signal.

So, now legions of school-children and visiting tourists can get highly detailed information about the National Archive’s exhibits with a simple scan of a code.
Where next…?

So, a few days ago, he popped down to The Children's Museum of Indianapolis to see the work the museum is doing with its Wikipedian in Residence - Lori Philips.

What else did he do while he was there? Why, scanned some QRpedia codes!

You can see all the photos of his visit on Wikimedia Commons.

My highly placed sources tell me that Mr Wales was highly impressed with the work the museum had done, and loved their innovative use of QRpedia.

If you'd like to get started with QRpedia - visit the main site to get started. It's free, fast, and fantastic!

The New Media Consortium has produced a report entitled Technology Outlook: UK Tertiary Education.

The full report (PDF) specifically mentions QRpedia Codes as "smart objects" and predicts a time-to-Adoption of four to five years. I think we can do it sooner than that, though! The report is CC-BY and well worth reading.

One of our friend in Indianapolis, Angie Mcnew, was interviewed by the radio station WFYI (mp3).

We now have our own Wikipedia entry - in 8 languages - which was recently featured on the Wikipedia homepage.

Finally, Álex Hinojo was interviewed in EL PAÍS.

Things are ticking along nicely. I hope to make a announcement about a significant new installation next week...

The most common question about QRpedia is "What does it do if the article doesn't exist in my language?"

Consider the following example...

• A French user is in a German museum.
• They scan a code - which points to de.qrwp/Nelahozeves
• Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't have the "Nelahozeves" article in French
• What should QRpedia do?

Choices

This has been a matter for much debate in the QRpedia team. I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on the subject.

As we see it, our choices are...

1. 404 - Tell the user that the page doesn't exist.
2. Wrong Language - Show the French user the German page
3. Choice of Language - Show the French user a choice of German, English, Dutch, etc.
4. Smart Search - Search French Wikipedia for the term, display the results to the user.
5. Latin - Omnis intelligit Latinum. Si non sunt barbarus!

At the moment, we do the smart search. In this case, we point to the French Wikipedia search for Nelahozeves - which has a couple of relevant results.

This isn't ideal. Often there are no suitable results - especially as we are searching French Wikipedia for a German word or phrase.

So - over to you. What should we do? Please leave your comments and suggestions.