Category: Museums

By the end of this week I could see the light at the end of the tunnel for two of our major project bids. I still managed to get up to some mischief:

• Had a great chat with future cities to see how we may be able to work together. The museum should have a strong role to play, being one of the few free public indoor spaces left…
• Dipped in and out of Arts Council bid stuff
• Met with the University of Bristol and aardman to develop our joint Nesta bid. Great to have folks to bounce ideas off
• Discussed what the folks at the L Shed needed from me to help them – scanning equipment, staying out of their way and putting in some wifi were the main areas of focus
• Chopped it up with David from the Watershed to find out all about their digital work
• Attended bathcamp 44
• Attended a lunchtime talk at the pervasive media studio from Daniel Meadows
• Two post-doc students from the University of Bristol demo’ed a prototype combining motion tracking and a clever way of interacting with objects. I really hope we can test this approach soon
• Fought bravely for a digital budget…

Pretty hardcore work due to the pending major bid deadline BUT still managed to keep these little plates spinning:

• Attended day two of the No Boundaries conference
• Neck deep in final Arts Council bid work…80 percent of my week
• Got permission to purchase replacement IT kit
• Discussed how IT and digital might support the Moved by Conflict exhibition. Particularly the use of sensors for interaction
• Discussed how I could contribute to our third and final year Paul Hamlyn Foundation project
• We conducted a half day user testing session for the new website with real visitors.

Luke Wright, Poet

Wednesday 26th February, Watershed

I attended day two of a packed house for the no boundaries conference #nb2014. I stumbled across some great folks and made a few loose notes. If you want the detail then check elsewhere as these are just random bits that interested me. Any errors about what was said is entirely my bad translation.

Simon Meller, Arts Council, spoke about the case for public investment:

• Need to improve engagement and inequality of access
• Lots of potential for partnerships with higher education – need to measure impact and support continuing and lifelong learning
• Show the links between arts, the creative industries and employment
• We need longitudinal study to show impact
• We can work globally by opening up our collections
• Four key themes are Culture (insights, citizens, identity), Education (Primary/secondary, continuing, higher education), Society (wellbeing, health, engagement), Economy (Creative industry, regeneration, tourism)
• Question from the audience making a plea for arts to focus on the “outside” where folks are e.g. Primark

Tom Morris, Bristol Old Vic said:

• spoke of the power of narrative
• Listening to the stories the public want to tell as its happening with or without u
• Trust our artists

George Ferguson, Bristol Mayor said:

• spoke about the arts being able to bring the City together and its our duty to give a sense of belonging
• Need to sell ourselves better to the public and the politicians
• When asked what kept him awake at 4am he said it was the need for us to “provide a catalyst

York Council boss said:

• we needed to foster the creative potential
• Internationalism and diversity go together

Walter Richard Sickert prints and drawings in need of digitising

This week was pretty busy:

• More Arts Council bid work…
• Skype chat about how we can use tablets to improve the visitor experience
• Discussion of how the new website can support the learning team
• How we can take online bookings – hoping we can use shopify for the heavy lifting
• A visit to M Shed to see how we can combine a tablet and flat screen to enable interaction with our ‘contributing wrap’
• Got permission to spend some external grant money to purchase a portable audio recording setup
• Visited the Office of National Statistics to give a talk on how we deal with intellectual property, make digital media, and make use of a digital asset management system (DAM)
• Hosted the monthly Social Media South West meetup and gave a talk with Claire Royall called “Reasonable doubt – how the museum us getting social”
• Helped Paul Sullivan get blogging over at www.pauldsullivan.com which let me see that wordpress has some poor accessibility quirks
• Briefly joined Trevor and David discuss digitisation requirements for 2014 which includes digitising a bunch of Walter Richsrd Sickert and Bristol Suspension Bridge prints and drawings (see above photo)
• Chopped it up with Adam about the progress of the new website navigation
• Rolled the dice on budget requirements for 2014-2015

Next week I really hope I can find somebody to help us take online payments…

This week was slightly less hardcore than the previous few weeks:

• Community support by taking on a student for his  year 10 work experience for a week
• Moved from discovery to alpha phase for the website project
• Agreed how we’d do advanced ticketing for the next temporary exhibition online
• Got to grips with eventbrite
• Came up with way to start getting digital in the houses
• Met with Ian from aardman to discuss our full proposal for the Nesta Digital fund
• Reviewed another draft of our Arts Council bid
• Discussed how marketing and PR would help with the website project
• Confirmed my apprentice into the post – she has been a real asset
• One of our collaboration partner teams from the University of Bristol gave their beta demo of the volunteer database they have been making for us
• Started to get excited about our wikimedia proposal with the Bristol Record Office
• Swore that next year’s budget will be ruled with an iron fist ha!

 

 

This week was primarily focused on meeting internal teams to update them on the website project. I’ll have a student on work experience next week and dealing with the Arts Council bid so this week I tried to clear the decks.

• I met with members of the Natural Sciences team who are keen to build their team online activities. This won’t make phase 1 but anticipating future needs is vital. I’m assuming the BBC Nature History Unit will be a good baseline to start with
• The Public programme team’s needs are straightforward but the devil is in the detail. Their user needs will be met in the ‘plan your visit’ user journey. Also they need the website to deal with online ticketing.
• I met someone keen to volunteer for archives. We need hands at the pumps in that area so hopefully we can work together very soon
• The World cultures collections team are eager to blog for the new website. They were receptive to being user focused too
• The Development team are responsible for fundraising so we met to iron out possible user needs. We spent time reviewing other museum journeys and think we have a direction.
• I met 6 students from the University of the West of England (UWE) we photography students who will be snapping away between now and may. Although we have lots of marketing images I think there is lots of scope for ‘behind the scenes’ and documentary style photos. They help us do this and in return we act as a real client.
• We have started to see if a raspberry pi computer can replace some aging mac mini computers that are showing their age.
• We have a lot of kit in need of replacing so me and Zahid spent half a day preparing the list. This need to go to a panel to agree.
• Dan from fffunction wrote about his website research review for the website project
• In two weeks i’ll be talking with Claire Royall at Social Media South West so had to start on our talk
• Wrote a blog post about IT Services and my frustrations that will stay in the vault for now!

The next few weeks activity will be a similar pattern of Arts Council bid preparation, the website project  AND squeezing in the rest of the day job.

• I wrote the first draft of possible plans for activity under the heading of ‘digital strategy’ which you can see on Google drive. This hasn’t been widely circulated but i’d love any feedback around clarity, style and vision. This will form part of the 2015-2018 Arts Council Bid for major funding. The headline is that digital should be a service.
• I had an introduction with Jess from the SS Great Britain about both of our digital work. Local collaboration will be key to our future survival.
• I did a tour of our IT/digital infrastructure for Redland High school for girls second year A-level students. They were mostly excited about visiting Nando’s afterward but hopefully they enjoyed it ha.
• Much of Wednesday was dedicated to working with Dan from fffunction interviewing staff about their interactions with the public. This is part of the discovery phase work for the new website.
• Submitted a business case for using external funding to purchase portable audio recording kit
• Agreed to trial eventbrite for our upcoming Private view ahead of the launch of the Jeremy Deller exhibition in April. In theory this should claw back at least two weeks worth of apprentice/volunteer time per event.
• Discussed using SquareSpace to run a small three year programme of work
• Had a great meeting with Patrica Santos from University of the West of England about using research to better understand using mobile technology in and around the museum sites.
• One of our student projects did an impressive functionality/alpha demonstrate of their tool for displaying our online collection over a Google map with filtering.
• Spent an evening hosted by the Pervasive Media studio hearing three great talks about open data projects. Thanks Tom!
• Ran a short session with Bristol Record Office on the benefits of using social media for their service.

This week marks the start of two major projects that will run until late March (and forced me to cancel my trip to New Zealand – sorry bro!).

• Both of our two major websites are failing to deliver results for either our business or customer needs. We finally got the nod to begin addressing the problems and this week we started the project with a kick-off workshop day. Myself, four colleagues and the external agency fffunction spent the day finding out the scope of the problems and the opportunities. We are employing the GDS project phases of discovery, aplha, beta to live. January and early February will be “Find out what your users need, what to measure and what your constraints are“. For much of the remainder of the week I met with staff from across the service to hear what their needs were and to hear how we could best find out how we could meet real users/customers. The list of ideas are captured in a public trello board. I need to fire up our labs blog in the coming weeks to write about the project in the open.
• I met with our marketing officer to discuss plans for 2014
• I had a productive Skype call with a researcher at UWE and hope that we can collaborate on researching the use of kiosks at our M Shed museum.
• I contributed to a City wide planning meeting about an HLF digital project. I co-wrote the HLF digital guidance so it was slightly strange to hear folks quoting words I’d written a few years ago.
• A potential volunteer got in touch to offer his web skills for February. I’m hoping he can experiment with RFID and Raspberry Pi as I just haven’t found the time.
• The most important strand of work until Mid march is our Arts Council bid for 2015-2018. I had 3 minutes to pitch my thoughts on our digital activity road map.
• I managed to attend the always enlightening Social Media South West #SoMeSW event
• Finally I had a really nice chat with the curator responsible for Nature Sciences about possible digital activity
• A bonus work day was attending the fantastic govukcamp 2014 on Saturday in London which i’ll blog about soon.