Rhizome's future discussed more...

Ivan Pope wrote:

> But there is no context. There is no critical discourse and almost no
> online discussion.

> Works are added to Rhizome, but there are no tools to analyse what is
> added. No way to take the pulse of production. There is not even a way
> to explore the store of works. You can't search by genre or keyword. You
> can't search by date. There is no linkage between works and discussion.

> Rhizome claims a community, but you can only click randomly on names to
> see who turns up. You can't spin off specific discussions. You can't
> form sub groups with specific interests.

Tough, but fair. A lot has happened at Rhizome in the past 12 months.
We did a major site redesign, we came out with our first set of
commissions, membership went way up, the funding climate went way down.
Major transition period. Rhizome's still standing, but right now it's a
bit wobbly from the effort.

All these new members are a mixed blessing. We doubled our membership in
2002, and growth is good, but really fast growth also has a way of
highlighting strains in a community's designs. Some parts have held up,
but some parts haven't scaled well at all. Today, Rhizome.org has more
than 22,000 members: Does it do everything that it could to unleash the
critical and artistic energy of its individual members? No. We've
accomplished a lot, but there's still lots of room for improvement.

Some specifics:

+ Art & text are meant to be two sides of the same coin, but as Ivan
points out, they can feel very separate at times. We've already made
modest steps towards having the two relate to each other; for example,
new artworks now show up on the front page, and on the Rhizome Raw
mailing list. A better search engine and interface will help a lot, as
will linking related texts and art works (we used to do this through the
Xref feature, but that got lost in the redesign).

+ The interface for text discussions is atomized and clumsy. It's too
difficult to participate in the discussions through the web site, so
I'm hoping to rewrite much of that interface in the next six months.
I've got my totally awesome Design/Production intern, Emily, working on
new designs for this, and together we should be able to come up with
something much more elegant and useful.

+ Rhizome should be more Rhizomatic. Now that we are requiring our
members to support us financially, we need to give members an even
greater stake in our operations. Examples include turning the ArtBase
selection process over to SuperUsers, involving members in the process
of selecting commissions through online voting, and making the Rhizome
code available as open source software.

+ There are parts of this site that are being vastly underutilized
because not everybody understands how they work. That's a shame, and
hopefully we'll be able to fix that soon – not by ornamenting, but by
reducing and distilling.

So that's my agenda for the future, in very broad strokes. Rhizome
offers a valuable community experience right now, but I'm hoping to
unlock more of its potential in the future. I hope people are going to
stick around to see what comes next.

Francis Hwang
Director of Technology
Rhizome.org
212-989-2363