The open museum project is in its early stages. The museum is looking for feedback and your ideas. Here is the basic mission statement:

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is host to the Open Museum, the first “open-source” museum collection. The Open Museum, currently in the early stages of planning and development, will be:

• A preservation repository for born-digital art works
• A public website that allows unprecedented access to these works
• An innovative legal, economic, and cultural framework for the digital arts

Building on the foundation of research resulting from past digital media projects pioneered by BAM/PFA – including an NEA-funded national consortium project to preserve digital art – the Open Museum project will develop systems that will preserve and provide open access to “born digital” art, that is, art that was created and exists in a digital format. What underlies all digital art is code; code that can be distributed online via the Open Museum. The digital art in the Open Museum will be open-source in the sense that, with the permission of participating artists, source code for art works will be free for others to download, study, or re-mix into new works.

Needs: finding alternative models for funding open art. Patrons for the arts could be used to open art up at donation levels.