Hi Mike. You’re on the mailing list for Europeana so you should be able to find better figures for both phase 1 (now ended) and phase 2 (about to start). You’ve probably got access to the SharePoint site too, there’s plenty there. Just a pointer so you have the ammo when you do post your thoughts on the project 🙂 Probably quicker than an FOI request, too!

You know I’m all for lightweight as well, just as you know that I did something akin to hoard.it myself (both lighter and heavier at the same time, toying as it did with metadata and microformats). I’m simultaneously keen on the heavyweight, which I guess is where we tend to part ways. Big stuff is inherently harder to get flying, but maybe it flies better once it’s up there. Not always, I’m sure, and the risk is greater if the investment is bigger. But some of the things we want to see and have waited a long, long time for still haven’t happened by the lightweight route. I’d include the stuff Frankie sees as done to death – collecting stuff you like – because to my mind gathering objects is more than gathering images – which is why I built Gathery and you built hoard.it. NMOLP isn’t the answer to this one, to my mind – it’s too damn small – and even Europeana will be limited to a few thousand institutions, most likely. Too damn small, I said! But better than we have now. I got involved with Europeana because I wanted to see it be more than just a website, even a cool website – it has to be about plumbing, opening access to machines, democratisation, and cooperation between countries and institutions. These are the hidden benefits beyond the web apps you can see, I would argue, and whatever price you slap on you have to recognise that the payoffs may be more than the obvious. In the case of NMOLP, I’ve still not road-tested any part of it properly but I can see that these side-effects may actually be core to the value it produces, if the result is a partnership and plumbing to build other end-user stuff on top of.

Blah blah blah, I’ll shut up now. Lunch is over.