Merge pull request #376 from hyphacoop/convert-case-studies-to-dripline

Convert case studies to dripline posts
hyphacoop · Sep 11, 2024 · 01ea494 · 01ea494
2 parents 5560c4c + fc72ec7
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diff --git a/_layouts/default.html b/_layouts/default.html
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@
 
   {%- include head.html -%}
 
-  <body class="sans-serif antialiased debug {% if page.title == 'Dripline' %} dripline-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Work' %} network-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'People' %} mushroom-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Home' %} root-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Co-Creation Lab' %} c-lab-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Friends of HEK' %} hek-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'CultureStake' %} furtherfield-and-lines {% else %} footer {% endif %}">
+  <body class="sans-serif antialiased debug {% if page.title == 'Dripline' %} dripline-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Work' %} network-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'People' %} mushroom-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Home' %} root-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Co-Creation Lab' %} c-lab-and-lines {% else %} footer {% endif %}">
     <a href="#maincontent" class="skip-link absolute top-0 left-0 z-max pa2">Skip to main content</a>
     {%- include sections.html tag="header" path="header.html" class="pt4 flex items-baseline mw9 center justify-between" -%}
     <main id="maincontent" class="mw9 center">

diff --git a/_layouts/practice_area.html b/_layouts/practice_area.html
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@
 
   {%- include head.html -%}
 
-  <body class="sans-serif antialiased debug {% if page.title == 'Dripline' %} dripline-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Work' %} network-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'People' %} mushroom-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Home' %} root-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Co-Creation Lab' %} c-lab-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Friends of HEK' %} hek-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'CultureStake' %} furtherfield-and-lines {% else %} footer {% endif %}">
+  <body class="sans-serif antialiased debug {% if page.title == 'Dripline' %} dripline-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Work' %} network-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'People' %} mushroom-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Home' %} root-and-lines {% elsif page.title == 'Co-Creation Lab' %} c-lab-and-lines {% else %} footer {% endif %}">
     <a href="#maincontent" class="skip-link absolute top-0 left-0 z-max pa2">Skip to main content</a>
     {%- include sections.html tag="header" path="header.html" class="pt4 flex items-baseline mw9 center justify-between" -%}
     <main id="maincontent" class="mw9 center">

diff --git a/_posts/2024-09-11-friends-of-hek.md b/_posts/2024-09-11-friends-of-hek.md
@@ -0,0 +1,163 @@
+---
+image: "/assets/images/posts/2024-09-11-friends-of-hek.webp"
+title: Friends of HEK
+author: Hypha
+date: 2024-09-11
+acknowledgement: 
+excerpt: "Helping Basel’s HEK build digital community with the world’s first tokenized museum membership"
+---
+
+<figure class="pb4">
+    <div class='flex items-center justify-center' style="width: 100%;">
+
+<img class="w-100" src="{{ 'assets/images/posts/2024-09-11-friends-of-hek.webp' | relative_url }}" alt="Friends of HEK logo in bold black text with stylized letters, overlaid on a flowing, dotted, multicolored abstract background."/>
+    </div>
+</figure>
+
+### {{ page.excerpt }}
+
+Switzerland’s [HEK (House of Electronic Arts)](https://hek.ch/en) has been the leading museum
+for digital art, media, and culture since 2011. As a center of creative
+technology, HEK aims to be at the forefront of what’s relevant,
+willingly pushing into areas that are unknown and undefined — areas that
+include blockchain and Web3.
+
+
+###  Turning standard museum membership into an experiment in digital community engagement
+
+
+Even though HEK had done [Web3-related projects](https://nftshop.hek.ch/collection/1/) by 2023, the team had the
+feeling that they were behind on the community-building potential of the
+technology. At the same time, HEK wanted to evolve its membership
+program beyond simply offering free museum entrance for 25 francs a
+year. Putting these two opportunities together, the vision for [Friends
+of HEK](https://friends.hek.ch/), a museum membership that gives HEK members online experiences
+and decision-making power, was born.
+
+> “Friends of HEK is an attempt to break down the usual hierarchies between institution and consumer.”
+
+Friends of HEK was going to be the biggest tech implementation HEK had
+done in years. And if they pulled it off, HEK would become the first
+museum to tokenize its membership program. HEK needed a tech development
+partner to make their ambitious vision a reality, but not any company
+would do. Beyond being a logical experiment in Web3 technology, “Friends
+of HEK is an attempt to break down the usual hierarchies between
+institution and consumer into a community space that’s still structured
+and facilitated, but where members really feel ownership,” says HEK’s
+education coordinator [Isabella Maund](https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabella-maund-7091b7136/?originalSubdomain=ch). HEK needed a partner that didn’t
+just build technology, but that would do it with care.
+
+### Hypha’s culture of balanced technical expertise for the arts and culture community
+
+HEK met with different companies specializing in Web3 development, but
+none of them engaged with the museum’s mission, goals, or mindset,
+instead focusing only on cost. Then they spoke to Hypha, who came
+recommended by HEK artist [Sarah Friend](https://isthisa.com/).
+
+
+> “In the first meeting with Hypha, it was quite obvious that they were
+the right partner for us as a cultural institution.”
+
+Hypha understood HEK on a deep level. “In the first meeting with Hypha,
+it was quite obvious that they were the right partner for us as a
+cultural institution,” says [Ugo Pecoraio](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ugo-pecoraio-a2344493/?originalSubdomain=ch), HEK’s Head Of Communications.
+“They were open to new ideas and different approaches, but could also
+bring art, culture, and technology together in an uncomplicated way.”
+
+### Close collaboration to get years of thinking pared down and off the ground
+
+As the partnership kicked off, Hypha worked with HEK to condense their project proposal, which had taken HEK
+“months, years even, of internal discussion” to create. Identifying HEK’s key motivations meant:
+
+* Deepening the team’s Web3 knowledge beyond the basics into its technical
+aspects and culture
+
+* Asking questions to uncover true needs, priorities, and hidden assumptions behind HEK’s project proposal
+
+> “It was quite refreshing for Hypha to say, ‘That’s a great idea, but
+maybe we have to do it in a different way.’”
+
+Ugo elaborates: “We had a lot of ideas that were just that — ideas, not
+things that could be done fast and within budget, would let us evolve,
+or that really benefited the community.” Through Hypha’s process, “We
+naturally came to understand what’s possible for the community. It was
+quite refreshing for Hypha to not just say, ‘That’s a stupid idea.’
+Instead they’d say, ‘That’s a great idea, but maybe we have to do it in
+a different way.’”
+
+### Guiding HEK through the challenges of introducing its community to Web3
+
+
+Once the plan for Friends of HEK was finalized, it was time to build the
+technology. But every custom project comes with problems and changes.
+One of the issues that arose was making purchasing a Friends of HEK
+membership work with HEK’s existing payment systems. Blockchains let
+communities engage in new ways, namely [community voting that’s more
+experiential and transparent](https://hek-house-of-electronic-arts.gitbook.io/friends-of-hek-handbook-1/decision-making-activities) in Friends of HEK’s case. To unlock these
+capabilities, each Friends of HEK membership is associated with a
+digital asset called an NFT, which are usually purchased using
+cryptocurrency. It was important to HEK, however, that members could
+still pay with “a good old credit card” in addition to Ethereum.  
+
+There are many providers that enable the sale of NFTs via traditional payment methods, but none of them worked
+well with the payment systems HEK was already using. To find the most reliable way forward, Hypha presented
+different options while informing HEK about the tradeoffs they entailed so the HEK team could make the best choice.  
+
+> “The Hypha team had the expertise to solve roadblocks, both
+conceptually and technically, which really gave us a sense of
+security.”
+
+Another challenge Hypha helped HEK navigate came from a public comment
+that questioned HEK’s motivations in creating Friends of HEK. Would the
+direction of the program really be decided by voters instead of the
+museum? Or would the HEK team be pulling the strings? Again, the Hypha
+team helped HEK think through how to approach the problem, structure
+solutions, and in this case, how to handle the public messaging. As a
+result, HEK ended up putting its own influence over the program up for
+community vote. No one voted against HEK team members being able to vote
+or make Friends of HEK proposals, so the team was able to continue on
+with confidence that it was working in harmony with the community’s
+interests.  
+
+Of Hypha’s problem-solving abilities, Isabella remarks: “The Hypha team
+had the expertise to solve both conceptual and technical roadblocks,
+which really gave us a sense of security. We had a lot of shifting
+timelines, but they were able to keep us on track.”  
+
+### Providing a model for community tech for the art world
+
+After 3 months of development, Friends of HEK launched in July 2023 to
+much buzz. Says Isabella, “Friends of HEK’s role in helping us gain a
+new awareness and respect has been clear from how much other people talk
+about it and how many times we’ve been invited to talk about it.”
+
+The interest the project received told the HEK team that they had
+fulfilled their goal of making Friends of HEK a model for other
+community-oriented arts and culture institutions. “Hypha helped us hit
+many milestones for Friends of HEK, and in a way people could
+understand,” Ugo shared. “That was the goal — to be the first museum to
+launch a tokenized membership, and to be helpful to other institutions
+who want to do the same.”  
+
+> “Friends of HEK’s role in helping us gain a new awareness and respect
+has been clear.”
+
+Building holistic tech that is accessible to users and sustainable for
+clients is core to all of Hypha’s work. To serve those ends for HEK,
+Hypha was active in the creation of the [Friends of HEK Handbook](https://handbook.hek.ch/),
+providing feedback on making the structure and language friendly to a
+general audience. Hypha also left the HEK team with thorough
+documentation they could reference as they took over the tech for
+themselves.  
+
+Reflecting on HEK’s partnership with Hypha, Isabella reaffirmed HEK’s
+belief that art and technology aren’t separate: “I’ve been guilty of
+thinking Web3 was just for people who want to make a bunch of money, but
+that’s only one side of it. There’s so much more to Web3 that can be
+recontextualized for the art world. That’s our focus at HEK — opening
+these doors.” Adds Ugo, “The art world shouldn’t be so scared of new
+technology because it can be beautiful, especially for communities.”  
+
+
+> “The art world shouldn’t be so scared of new technology because it can be beautiful, especially for communities.”  
+  
diff --git a/_posts/2024-09-11-furtherfield.md b/_posts/2024-09-11-furtherfield.md
@@ -0,0 +1,113 @@
+---
+image: "/assets/images/posts/2024-09-11-culturestake-logo.webp"
+title: CultureStake
+author: Hypha
+date: 2024-09-11
+acknowledgement: 
+excerpt: "Putting the “public” back in “public art” in one North London park and beyond"
+---
+
+
+<figure class="pb4">
+  <div class='flex items-center justify-center' style="width: 100%;">
+    <img class="w-100" src="{{ '/assets/images/posts/2024-09-11-culturestake-subtitle.webp' | relative_url }}" alt="The phrase 'Collective Cultural Decision-making' is displayed in all uppercase, using a monospaced font."/>
+  </div>
+</figure>
+
+### {{ page.excerpt }}
+
+
+[Furtherfield](https://www.furtherfield.org/) is an art gallery that’s been uniquely located in the heart
+of North London’s Finsbury Park since 2011. When COVID made its indoor
+space unmanageable, the Furtherfield team took it as an opportunity to
+reset its relationship with the Finsbury community. As a result, they
+not only brought their work outdoors, but also created CultureStake, a
+blockchain app that lets any cultural organization open up decision
+making to the public.  
+
+### Co-creating with the local community via information-rich voting on blockchain
+
+Formed in response to the celebrity and commercialization of [London’s
+YBA scene](https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/y/young-british-artists-ybas) in the 90’s, for almost three decades Furtherfield has embodied the grassroots DIY culture of the early internet for artists. Even though the pandemic was the catalyst for CultureStake, the team had been ready to make a change. “We had a growing feeling that bringing art from our international network into this public space was us bestowing ‘good culture’ on a locality, and we were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with it,” co-founder [Ruth Catlow](https://ruthcatlow.net/) explains. “We wanted to work more with the different communities that used this space to see how they might shape our programs and our organization, and realized we could ask them directly about what was important to them.”  
+
+≥ “We had a growing feeling that bringing work from our international
+network into this public space was us bestowing ‘good culture’ on a
+locality.”
+
+As longtime followers of open source and peer-to-peer technologies, and
+as explorers of how emerging tech impacts society, the Furtherfield team
+knew they wanted to incorporate two specific decentralized tools into [CultureStake](https://www.furtherfield.org/culturestake/):  
+
+* Quadratic voting (QV), which in contrast to one person, one vote and
+ranked choice systems, lets voters express both their preferences and
+how strong they are. QV does this by giving voters a set of credits to
+“spend.” Voting for the same choice multiple times “costs” more and
+more credits with each vote, so if you feel very strongly about
+something, it’s reflected. The benefit, Ruth says, is that “QV
+provides nuanced information about why voters want something instead
+of just which outcomes they want.”  
+
+* Blockchain to record the votes, which Ruth characterizes as “an
+immutable public record that lets people know we haven’t messed with
+their votes.”  
+
+### “Without Hypha, we would’ve been at the end of the road and had to put the project to bed.”
+
+For CultureStake’s first iteration, Furtherfield commissioned artist and
+developer [Sarah Friend](https://isthisa.com/) and later brought in fellow co-op [Common Knowledge](https://commonknowledge.coop/practices/) to work on its design and frontend. But when it came to the
+more challenging backend work of connecting the app to the blockchain,
+both Sarah and the firm recommended Hypha. At first, Furtherfield was
+nervous about handing the project to a new partner. Says Ruth, ”We were
+a little bit freaked out because we didn’t have a bunch of extra funding
+if things went wrong. We had to be sure this would work.” But then
+Furtherfield met with the Hypha team. “They asked really good questions.
+That’s how we came to feel, ‘Yes, this is doable.’”  
+
+As the work began, Ruth loved Hypha’s rigorous approach: “After every
+meeting, Hypha’s notes would reflect back to us everything we described
+along with anything that was still unknown, that they wanted additional
+information on, or had questions or comments about.” Through this
+process, Ruth says, “They kept asking questions until they knew
+everything. This made us feel very secure because we could see all the
+remaining gaps.” In addition to making the app functional — making the
+frontend do what it was intended to do — as planned, Hypha helped
+improve the design of CultureStake’s frontend as well.  
+
+> “They kept asking questions until they knew everything. This made us
+feel very secure because we could see all the remaining gaps.”  
+
+As Furtherfield “turned the gallery inside out,” bringing art from the
+gallery to the park, they used CultureStake to cede creative control to
+the people. Calling the project [People’s Park Plinth](https://www.furtherfield.org/peoples-park-plinth/), Furtherfield
+commissioned a series of small extended reality artworks. Finsbury’s
+50,000 visitors a week could then use CultureStake to scan QR codes and
+view the works throughout the park. They then could use CultureStake to
+vote on which piece they wanted to see realized at full scale. As part
+of CultureStake’s design, votes cast from within the park were weighted
+higher than ones made from outside it. That year, Furtherfield tripled
+its local engagement and heard feedback like, “I’ve been talking about
+this with my friends for months.”  
+
+When asked about her overall experience working with Hypha, Ruth
+responded, “I trusted them. I always felt like we were working with good
+people. Without Hypha, we would’ve been at the end of the road and had
+to put the project to bed.”  
+
+
+### Confirming the usefulness and untapped potential of blockchain for art and culture
+
+Because of recent changes to the Furtherfield team, Ruth is now seeking
+funding to support CultureStake’s continued growth. Even though
+CultureStake’s future is uncertain, Ruth says the project confirmed for
+her the “massive and still underexplored value quadratic voting has in
+the cultural setting.”  
+
+Reflects Ruth, “In trying to make a connection with our local community
+to understand our shared interests, CultureStake allowed for a radical
+inversion of how you usually run a gallery. It responded to a pragmatic
+issue with COVID, but also the desire for more authentic relationships
+with the public around us.”  
+
+“Testing all the promises of democratization in the blockchain space
+against reality” was something Ruth had been wanting to do ever since
+Furtherfield board member [Rhea Myers](https://rhea.art/) started “issuing provocations on decentralized autonomous organizations that were impossible to ignore, long before the NFT boom.” To her, blockchain may not be essential to making cultural democracy happen. But Ruth feels it’s important to keep the spirit of DIY experimentation alive for this generation of the internet so blockchain isn’t only used for financial extraction. Hypha’s Co-Creation Lab gives organizations like Furtherfield the expertise they need to safely explore these possibilities.  
diff --git a/_sass/_hypha.scss b/_sass/_hypha.scss
@@ -137,26 +137,6 @@ mark {
       background-size: 40%, 20%;    
     }
   }
-  .hek-and-lines {
-    background-image: url(/assets/images/trollius.webp),
-      url(/assets/images/footer1.png);
-    background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat;
-    background-position: top right, bottom right;
-    background-size: 30%, 20%;
-    @media screen and (min-width: 1600px) {
-      background-size: 25%, 20%;    
-    }
-  }
-  .furtherfield-and-lines {
-    background-image: url(/assets/images/new_canopy.webp),
-      url(/assets/images/footer1.png);
-    background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat;
-    background-position: top right, bottom right;
-    background-size: 30%, 20%;
-    @media screen and (min-width: 1600px) {
-      background-size: 22.5%, 20%;    
-    }
-  }
 }
 
 .block {

diff --git a/_work/culturestake.md b/_work/culturestake.md
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ logo: /assets/images/logos/culturestake-logo.png
 preview: true
 excerpt_separator: <!-- more -->
 practice_area: Co-Creation Lab
-case_study: furtherfield
+dripline_post: furtherfield
 ---
 Hypha collaborated with [Furtherfield](https://www.furtherfield.org/) to launch an enhanced version of the CultureStake app, a tool for promoting inclusive and equitable cultural decision-making through a unique quadratic voting system. <!-- more --> [CultureStake](https://culturestake.org/) is a quadratic voting app deployed on the Gnosis blockchain. Using a simple mobile-responsive interface, voters can express their choices and indicate how important each option is, resulting in an outcome that considers not 'just what people care about, but how much and why.'