If you’ve made it here, you might have come across something about museums on the Fediverse “seeking a specialized technical consultant.” I was the one who wrote the post at Brasiliana Museus announcing the public call to hire two specialized consultants: (1) a Web Communication Consultant and (1) a Web Technology Consultant (“Building Bridges: From Museums to the Fediverse“).
I work at the Brazilian Institute of Museums (Ibram), a government agency in Brazil. This public call for consultants emerged from our work developing a digital repository tool for publishing digital collections as a WordPress plugin—Tainacan. Over the past 10 years, Tainacan has grown significantly, with versions available in 12 languages, over 1,000 active instances, and more than 40,000 downloads. This is a testament to its success and the strength of its community in the field of cultural heritage digital memory.
Recently, at Ibram, we’ve been adapting Tainacan for new applications, such as event registration on the “Visite Museus” website and the registration of memory institutions on the “MuseusBR” service. Additionally, this year we plan to launch a Tainacan plugin extension for process management—a feature highly requested by our partner institutions. We believe now is the right time for the Tainacan community to embrace the Fediverse and explore how memory institutions can make the most of the open social web.
Nine months ago, we learned about the launch of the ActivityPub plugin by Matthias Pfefferle. It was a surprise to us how seamlessly we could select Tainacan post types for publication on the Fediverse directly through the plugin’s interface. Suddenly, Tainacan had a direct channel for the targeted dissemination of cultural heritage content to subscribers. This breakthrough inspired us to imagine new applications for Tainacan in decentralized social networks, and Matthias became a key reference for our team.
The year 2024 was challenging for Brazilian museums, and we weren’t able to make as much progress on our Fediverse plans as we had hoped. The social.museus.gov.br instance went live, but we struggled to get ElasticSearch working, which slowed things down. At the beginning of 2025, we secured the resources needed to hire the two consultants mentioned in this public call. This is the push we need to formulate a plan for integrated service operations, properly configure the instance, and ensure it works in connection with posts made through the plugin. Ideally, we’d like to integrate the new features into the plugins themselves.
When we published the call on the Brasiliana Museus Blog this week, the Fediverse quickly mobilized an interested audience. We were pleasantly surprised when Matthias Pfefferle himself responded to our post. This prompted me to document the initiative more thoroughly, as other perspectives could join the movement. Our goal is to provide museums and other memory institutions with a tool that facilitates the exploration of decentralized social networks as a platform for cultural dissemination. As I mentioned in the Brasiliana post, “We realized that, for museum collections published in Tainacan, each item could become a post or even a new profile on the Fediverse—especially for museum assets of broad interest.”
This idea of turning a collection item into a social network profile was inspired by the incredible experimentations that Aaron Cope (@[email protected]), from the San Francisco Airport Museum, have documented in his blog:
“So imagine a set up akin to the Pen where every wall label embeds not just an object ID but an ActivityPub address for that object which can be subscribed to, in the application of your choosing, by scanning it with your phone. And that’s it. That’s all you have to do. You can sit back and wait for that object to start talking to you or, if a museum has invested in an Ask Brooklyn style infrastructure, you could even start talking to it.”
Talking about the Pen without talking about the Pen – Aaron Cope – 26/04/2024
The purpose of this post is to share elements I consider useful for those interested in following, participating in, or apllying for this initiative. The public call involves hiring two professionals: one for web communication and one for web technology. Qualified candidates have until February 10 to apply. The timeline is short—three months—and I think the compensation is fair at 40,000 Brazilian reais (aprox. US$ 7.000). Teams presenting integrated projects will be well regarded, and we are particularly interested in technology consultants who can propose and implement new functionalities for the plugins.
One aspect that interests us with this call is to draw the attention of web developers and communicators to the significant opportunity, right now, for exploring and engaging with the world of applications for the ActivityPub protocol. From the perspective of civil service—and here we speak from the standpoint of museums—we understand that we are just at the beginning of a long and promising socio-technical journey.
