What Does It Mean To Be Human by The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

CivicActions (CA) was approached by Chedd Angier Lewis (CAL) to submit a joint proposal in response to RFP issued by The Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) for website development to complement the Human Origins exhibition launching in April 2010.

The CA and CAL teams identified that the combined teams contained the complementary skills needed to produce a compelling bid.  CA brought our solid Drupal development, IT Infrastructure, process and PM skills, content strategy, social media and training and CAL provided existing knowledge of the Human Origins initiative and their deep design and interactive media development skills.

Desires for the website included:

• Provide the most inviting, responsive, useful, authoritative, and current resource for public information on the science of human origins, and the story of human origins that scientists have constructed from the evidence
• Develop an environment that supports users creating personal meaning through discovery and participation, and promote human origins research in ways that demonstrate how it is meaningful to society. Allow users to contribute to what they believe it means to be, and become, human
• Create a community of teacher users who participate in conversations with each other and NMNH experts, and share their work and findings on teaching human origins
• To highlight the Smithsonian Institution NMNH 3-D catalog of fossils and artifacts.
• Provide access to digital collections, two- and three-dimensional specimens and artifacts, databases, and primary literature to disseminate the evidence for human origins globally. Facilitate users who wish to share this content through their social networks (e.g. Facebook). Elicit questions and feedback from users using an “Ask an Expert” feature
• To enable nontechnical members of The Smithsonian’s Human Origins team to easily create and manage site content.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program website achieved both soft and hard launches on schedule, achieving a simultaneous physical exhibit and website launch, and presented a high quality, engaging and educational interface with details on the latest human origins information.  Educational content includes, 3-D viewer, interactive content, educators section including a teacher forum, lesson plans etc.

The website received 877,000 visits in the first 12 months after launch and over 151,270 visits in October 2011 (18 months after the launch).

In addition to the overall website development, CA and CAL teams worked with the NMNH team and associated departments to produce a social media plan to engage users using both online social networking tools and the physical exhibit.  Users have been able to vote for new 3-D content and participate with discussions taking place at the museum using online tools – taking the reach of this project to a world-wide audience.

Human Origins was the first Drupal website development project to produce documentation to The Smithsonian's Office of Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and successfully pass OCIO and Security Committee review and presentation.

The CA team worked with The Smithsonian Institution’s Information Technology Department to transition the site to their in-house servers and provided support and training to ensure the site could be easily maintained subsequent to launch.

After receiving training from CA resources, The Smithsonian continued development using the tools and framework provided by CivicActions and members of the NMNH Human Origins team continue to enter, update and manage content with confidence and ability to train new team members, as needed.