What is radical trust?
This is a term that has been used in study of online marketing to talk about organizations handing some of the power over to their users. Radical trust is necessary for user-generated content, because otherwise all user-generated content would have to be subjected to so much scrutiny that it would cease to be interactivity.
Radicaltrust.ca says:
In order to build a brand in the future, marketers must radically trust that consumers:
1. are best equipped to determine their own needs, and left to their own devices, are best equipped to get those needs met.
2. would rather be communicated with than spoken to.
3. require freedom of expression, but often require guidelines to create expressions in.
4. will self-regulate communities to a level that the guidelines suggest and that the collective group they comprise will accept.
5. will disconnect with a brand that silences them, and will align with brands that give them a voice.
6. (this one is the hardest) consumers are people and people are inherently good.
I could get into a philosophical debate about "people" and "good" and "inherent" and "are" here—for instance, I think it's more likely that what we call "good" is inherently "people". But the effect of holding these beliefs is to persuade for-profit companies that it is in their best interest to devolve some of the power to their customers, creating more equal relationships.
That is radical for corporations. But it's also radical, and useful, for nonprofits. Darlene Fichter has this to say:
Library 2.0 =
(books 'n stuff + people + radical trust)
x participation
Libraries have always been about books 'n stuff and people. The notion of radical trust and applying this to online library activities introduces a new dimension to the work that we're been doing in libraries.
You'll also notice that the scaling up factor in this simple formula is based on participation. Without the first three ingredients you can't start to scale rapidly and create new wealth(richness) and value for participants.
But radical trust, for libraries, and also for museums (who are as usual my preoccupation here), is a two-way street. There may be a limit to how much radical trust corporations can ask of their users, who are aware that the purpose of every interaction with them from the corporate perspective is to convince them to give more of their money to the corporation. But users interact with museums and libraries to learn and to participate in a community—and most realize that the museums and the libraries have identical goals. The potential for two-way radical trust is much greater.
In museums, the terror lies with the idea of devolving some responsibility for the content to people who are not directly responsible to the organizational structure of the museum. It's one thing to hire a guest curator for an exhibition or for a year of thematic programming. It's another entirely to invite five community leaders in and say "We'd like to build an exhibition with you. What would you like people to know?" And this is the direction I see museums heading in now. So, trusting that there are people out there in the community who, although not responsible to the organizational structure of the museum, are responsible to their own compatible mission and values, who can be valuable collaborators, is radical trust.
And it can't exist without radical trust in the other direction. Probably everyone has some reason not to trust museums. Maybe it's that your ancestors' bones have been stolen and are resting in a museum somewhere that refuses to give them back without first desecrating them a little more. Maybe it's more like you've been to modern art museums and there's nowhere to sit and no one to talk to who speaks in anything like a language you can understand; just incomprehensible objects floating in white rooms. Or maybe you've had a bad experience in a museum and given feedback that no one acted upon. Or maybe you've thought about going to museums, but you are certain that museums are not welcoming places for people like you. If you aren't involved in a museum in a way that creates a sense of ownership, you probably don't trust the museum to do the following things:
1) Represent things that you care about.
2) Include the perspectives of people like you.
3) Speak in a way that you can understand.
4) Hear and respond to your feedback.
5) Be responsible and ethical in interacting with your community.
In order for a museum to create that trust, an institution must do these things. Then it must show people that it's doing these things. But it's no good trying to do these things if you don't know how to do them—what your audience wants, what community members think, what their needs are. So from the beginning of the process, there needs to be a way for the museum to hear its community. Not coincidentally, the process of giving feedback and seeing action taken in response creates a sense of ownership and participation, which is a fast-track to trust. And for museums to respond effectively to community feedback, they must first trust that their communities know what they're talking about and what their own needs are.
So giving trust is necessary to build trust in return. And the people to make the first step will have to be people involved in museums.
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