The Flickr Foundation

Short Version: Welcome to the new home of the Flickr Foundation! We are a new US 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the wonderful Flickr collection for 100 years. Big goals, small steps.

What's the story? In December 2020, Ben MacAskill (President and COO of SmugMug + Flickr) asked me to come back to the fold to figure out how to revitalize the Flickr Commons program. It took me very little time to think about it before accepting. I proposed a research project to assess what had changed in the program and in the wider sector over the last decade, so that a new strategy for the Commons could reflect contemporary practice and the needs of members current and future of the program

The research consisted mainly of interviews, literature review, focus group discussions and quantitative analysis, and it was a pleasure. I produced two documents that, for the curious, I linked here:

Research Report - Flickr Commons Revitalization and Strategy 2021-2023 - Flickr Commons Revitalization

Here are some of the highlights:

The start of this research was very warmly received by the public, with great hope for Flickr Commons. Current active members want better stats. Today, they can only access the last 31 days of activity, and some worked in Excel to create the comparisons they needed to justify their work. Current members remain concerned about the complete lack of governance the program has suffered from. Less active or dormant members we interviewed said lack of governance was the reason they walked away. There was no communication about future plans or the provision of a resource person, and no sense of direction or shared commitment to the program. The digital cultural sector has continued to forge ahead with open licensing and the technical, legal and procedural practices that come with it, but many still struggle to generate meaningful public engagement and near-universal reporting on digital culture. lack of time in the workplace persists. We find ourselves in a particular zeitgeist; a constellation of #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, workers' rights, epidemiology and a rise in nationalism. We need space for more complex historical perspectives.

A big part of the proposed strategy was to create a new organization, a foundation, to operate alongside the company. This organization would develop a longer-term perspective for the collection and study preservation strategies that could last for the next century. Ben accepted! So here we are.

The foundation's mission is to ensure that Flickr will be preserved for future generations. We are already working on the idea of ​​a very long-term perspective, while recognizing that we do not yet have enough voices in the mix. A major project will be the 100 year plan, and we have held several research workshops to begin to shape what such a plan should look like. It was interesting to start thinking about how the foundation can and should also partner with the company.

People and partners

A large group has been working together to establish the foundation for about a year now.

Right now, two people sit on the board: Ryan Merkley, longtime outspoken advocate and former CEO of Creative Commons and chief of staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, now CEO of Aspen Digital; and Stephanie McVey, CFO of SmugMug + Flickr. Ryan and Stephanie have already been extremely helpful and are a great compliment to the foundation. We plan to recruit more people to join the board, so please contact us if you have any recommendations.

The first executive director of the foundation is... me! George Oats. What a thrill and what a pleasure it is to do this; not just as a curious designer, but as someone who is very proud of Flickr and passionate about making our shared stories more accessible to more people. I am convinced that it is not acceptable to suppress such an important part of our common cultural heritage, and we have to face this risk now that we are dumping our cultural heritage on platforms of online business. Creating a new foundation is also new territory for me professionally, so I'm very happy for the expertise, support and guidance of Stephanie and Ryan, and I'm really eager to bring more...