Are you ready for the Internet of Things?

Fellow Culturemondo-er Rob van Kranenburg (seen below at our 4th Roundtable in Taiwan), the Founder at Council, has come togeher with Tinker.it! to present: “Are you ready for the Internet of Things?”

A LIFT @ Home event on December 4, 2009, at Brussel’s Center for Digital Culture and Technology. See Launch.

Take homes from two Culture24 workshops – Social Media, Web Metrics, Evaluation by Seb Chan

Just finished a full-on week with Seb Chan from Powerhouse, delivering this years ever popular and inspiring workshops – the first on Social Media and the second on Web Metrics and evaluation.

Under Seb’s guidance, Powerhouse Museum has been consistency leading internationally on how museums can use digital tools to further engage and reach audiences. This fact, combined with Seb’s own passion for the subject and his ability to dissect, confront and interpret his own digital, made this years workshops better that ever.

Take homes for me from both were:

Tuesday 3rd November – Social Media

1. Start with what are you trying to achieve and who is it for. Sounds obvious but its harder than you think.
2. You have to know who your audience are to reach them (the more segmentation the better).
3. Your content is your marketing. If your messages are not your actual stuff, your stories, your views, the stuff that makes you who you are, then its just noise.
4. Your social media channels need curating just like your exhibitions (all the time).
5. You need to monitor what is happening in our social media channels – what are people saying about you – and you need to respond to them.
6. Digital strategy needs to really be the responsibility of the whole museum team.
7. One museums misuse is another person’s valid interpretation.
8. Websites are not social spaces so don’t try and make your one. Take your stuff out into the existing social spaces where your target audience already are.

The day was held at CILIP in central London, great venue for courses and good catering with real hot food (very important). The mixture of people was really interesting, some museums, heritage, photography, arts – and individuals with responsibilities for marketing, curation, publishing, technical.

Living proof of the huge range of ways that organisations are dealing with digital strategy. There was a marked different from last years workshop and people seemed to be further developed in their thinking and understanding of the key issues. You can see this clearly in the fact that this year at least third of those attending were in the process of writing a digital strategy for their organisation, whereas last year, about the same number left the workshop having realised this was something that needed to do.

Wednesday 5th November – Web Metrics

This subject is a particular hobbyhorse of mine as I am so often amazed by how many digital projects have not even considered the basic questions of what are they trying to achieve and who is it for – without this how do you know what to evaluate to tell if it worked?

The big issue here I think is the fact that some projects are clearly commissioned because people think they have to ‘do’ something about digital – have a website, have a facebook page, put their collections online – whatever it might be.

Seb has done a great blog post on what he calls the “five rules of museum content” Worth a read and definitely worth interrogating your own work to see if you can answer the questions well or not.

Next meeting up Seb at the New Zealand National Digital Forum where we will do the Web Metrics workshop again as part of the 5th Culturemondo roundtable. Looking forward to seeing how the NZ museums/galleries/archives are coping with all this.

Report from 4th Culturemondo International Roundtable meeting in Taiwan

The theme which framed the conference was ‘how the old feeds the new’ – how cultural heritage, artefacts, collections, objects can shape and nurture meaning in our ever changing online world.

There were 37 participants from 21 countries who split pretty equally into three groups:
- those (like me) running what were in the past called cultural portals
- people from the asia/pacific region who are involved in online cultural projects of various different kinds (some portals, some networks, some new stuff)
- theorists, artists, researches and developers from varies strands of the commercial, academic and creative sectors.

It was my first meeting as the new Chair and also the first time that we have had the resources to document the proceeding (thanks to our Taiwanise host TELDAP) as well as serious plan to disseminat them over the coming months.

These events are always best for their sociable nature and the inspiration you find in new people with other practices. The group were all wonderfully creative people, who are at the top of their fields and I felt a real honour at being their chair and coordinator for three days.

What is a cultural portal? It used to be a simple set of links, a kind of directory within which to find information. This model is dead. Search engines have replaced this functionally in ways that are quicker, more sophisticated and free to the public purse. Portals (if the word is to remain) now need to be doorways into an online architecture that is a curated space – much as a real doorway leads you into a building with different rooms, levels and interiors. They need to be published and at their best should allow their data to be filterd by others for republication.

The first generation of cultural portals have now either evolved or died. Those that have survived and grown are faced with the new challenge of how to have their own voice. How to build an architecture that draws people in and lay down ‘desire lines’ to new places.

Portal used to just be just the messenger, with culture itself – the art, the object as the message. The new generation of portals we are now seeing are, at their best, are both messenger and the message.

Portals need publishing and publishing is about curation, opinion, vision, style and content. The more we can publish, curate and integrate content for our audiences, the more meaning we can give it and the more value we add as the publishers.

This means not just knowing and defining our own voice as publishers (the role of the editor or journalist) but also finding ways to integrate both institutional culture (from our museums, archives galleries etc) with people’s own views of culture. This is a real challenge to do well and one I know the mumbers of the Culturemondo netwrok are rising to.

Some of those at the meeting were running a new generation of projects that seem to bypass the institutional view altogether. Things like Global Voices or Dirk Picture Library in Bangladesh are both examples of projects that fundamentally combine the message and the meaning inseparably in their architecture, methodology and delivery.

It was clear to me personally that the new Culture24 site that we have just spent two years building is already in need of another rebuild before we have even launched it. I am driven, inspired and depressed by this fact. I know that the new site is going to be loved and will generate a level of interest in UK culture not previously seen online but I also know that the best is let to come.

Roll on the next Culturemondo roundtable.

You can see full info on the participants, agenda and video clips of the roundtable on the Culturemondo website.

Working internatioanally with other non-profit cultural publishers: Culturemondo 4th Roundtable

This December will be the 4th international roundtable I have been involved in initiating and delivering as part of our rather romantically named Culturemondo project.

We now have a pretty serious three-day agenda full of keynotes, conversations, master classes and case studies covering issues from the UK and Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Africa and a diverse mix of Asian countries. I am travelling out to chair the event and present a case study about Culture24 that tracks our evolution from “portal to publisher”. We are lucky to have sponsorship from TELDAP part of the Academia Sinetica and supported by the Taiwan government) and the event is being held in a rather beautiful and nostalgic Culture park in the heart of Taipei that used to be a wine factory.

Being part of this informal network has been a real inspiration for me. The exposure to real international differences and intellectual perspectives always has something new to show me. I have also been the guests of Japanese, Canadian, Croatian, Cuban and Taiwanese hosts and know all about the value of some good face to face conversation and cold beer (not to mention the odd moment on a sun blessed beach).

To coincide with the roundtable we are reinvigorating the networks Google Group and our website and sending out the first in a series of regular posts (beginning w/c 17th Nov 08). If you would like to join the Google Group, you can find out more here.

We have also gone live with our third international survey of cultural portals and it is now open for completion by anyone who is running a cultural portal of some kind. You can find it on survey monkey here.

The survey will continue to benchmark the size, scope and development of our sector internationally but will also, for the first time, be collecting statistical information from which comparisons can usefully be made. This is because this is the first time we are only collecting stats from the same system – Google Analytics.

The survey will stay open online until after the roundtable in December and the results will be incorporated into the next published report summarising the roundtable that is being written by Katherine Watson from Lab for Culture.

One of the good things about watching something grow, organically from individual peoples passions, is that you have no shame about seeing it for what it is. Warts and all and if nothing else, Culturemondo has allowed me a perspective on the failures of Culture24 as much as it has helped our successes to shine brightly.

One thing that sticks out like a broken thing, is our use of the word portal. Intuitively, I always hated it (maybe it sounds better in French or Italian?) but it is a struggle to find a word that accurately describes the new model of cultural online publishers that some of us are becoming.

Culture24 Seb Chan Workshop – September 8th, London

I often refer to the fantastic work that Seb Chan has been leading at the Powerhouse Museum in Australia and am pleased to say that Seb is coming to the UK this September to work with Culture24 on our international project Culturemondo.

While he is here, I have arranged for him to run a one day workshop looking at how to make your collection work for you online (or in other words “strategic social media for the cultural sector”).

The workshop is at the DANA centre in London on Monday 8th September and is being coordinated in association with Collections Trust and NMSI. You can find out more and book a place here.

This is a unique opportunity to find out about Powerhouse’s pioneering work first hand, the issues it has raised and how they have dealt with those issues (with great results). After the workshop there will be a chance to network over a few beers

Working strategically with MLA and Collections Link on digital strategy

It has taken years of hard work, blood, sweat and tears to get to this place but I am pleased to say that the press release went out last Friday 6th June about the new Culture24 remit with MLA and our partnership with Collections Trust.

Read the story here.

Our chairman John Newbigin, trustee Ylva French, Secretary of State Margaret Hodge, colleague Jon Pratty and me.

MICHAEL conference: Perspectives on cultural sector resource discovery

Going to be joining colleagues from Collections Trust, Becta, JISC, The European Library and Nicholas Copernicus University, Poland to talk about the different perspectives and thoughts around how people find and discovery cultural resources online.

The event is at RIBA on May 23rd.

It’s Gold for Powerhouse Museum at AAM Muse awards

Deservedly, Powerhouse just one best online presence for its Collection Database.

Judges said:
The Powerhouse Museum’s new relational search and collections database is a model for organizing, exhibiting, and promoting museum collections. Alongside detailed traditional search functions, the site invites users to add their own metatags (folksonomy), search, and browse by tag cloud, by “relatedness” of items/objects, or by special collections in an easy-to-use, transparent interface that offers consistent and near-instantaneous feedback and results.

Twitter account and followers for sale on eBay

There is a guy on Twitter called Andrew Barron who is selling his twitter account, with its 1,395 followers, on eBay. Andrew is an interesting guy, in just a few minutes of web searching having found this lovely story on Twitter, I discovered he is the creator of Rocketboom, a daily vlog, a blogger and gets his own wikipedia entry, busy man.

The auction ends on 22nd April and already there are over 34 bids and a price of over $1,200.

These is a lot of debate on his twitter account about what he is doing and some people seem to feel that he is betraying the twitter community. Hmmm, not sure I agree here. It is certainly getting people thinking about what it all means, which I love and it is also getting him a lot more followers in Twitter (including me).

Am I condoning his exploitation by following him? Hey who knows, but I am keen to know if he goes through with it and what we will do with the cash…

Nesta: The Innovation Edge Conference

This one day event from Nesta on Tuesday, 20th May 2008, has got a great agenda, some good speaker and it is free. As they say … NESTA’s flagship conference, The Innovation Edge, will bring together a powerful mix of the world’s leading academic, political and industry experts to consider the latest developments in innovation.

Speakers are experts from industry, culture, politics and academia such as Bob Geldof, Lord Puttnam, Helen Alexander, Michael Birch, urban artist ‘Inkie’. Be a part of it. Register now here.