Category: Museums

To kick the week off I completed the mandatory Recruitment and Selection workshop. The day itself was an enjoyable mix of scenarios and role playing to help us know about recruitment ‘The Bristol City Council Way’. However the pre-workshop homework was an exercise in frustration. The previous week I set aside an afternoon to read the policy and related guidance but the intranet was down. I took the work home for the weekend and low and behold I needed the intranet as practically ever reference was buried in the intranet which isn’t available from home. Why use the web if you force staff to be on-site you may have heard me cry. The only solution was to head to the office for much of Sunday which didn’t make me popular at home. I would pick apart the workbook but the trainers say we are the ‘last’ cohort of the current process. I will say that throwing a bunch of barely related questions together without hyperlinks or consideration for the user in a Word document doesn’t cut the mustard in 2013. My e-learning inner-self had to button it!

Tuesday was largely catching up with the team and me introducing Trello for the whole team to see what major activities we are all working on, myself included. Although we are a nominally a traditional Council team, we are all remote from each other so we need to operate with a proper remote team mindset and use tools to help us achieve our mission (grand eh). This is why I’m looking forward to the new book from 37signals remote office not required out this coming Tuesday.

Wednesday had me wearing my digital fund-raising hat and looking at a magic 8-ball to see what the future of crowd funding might look like. Once I was able to slip this hat I quickly donned my ‘future of digital in a museum’ hat and wrote a 1 page ‘Digital as a Platform’ piece for the senior management team. It included remote working, wearing technology and the museum as publisher. Once it has been used for its intended purpose i’ll throw it up on the blog. As an aside I suggest listening to And the Crowdfund Goes Wild with Yancey Strickler (Episode 42) to hear from one of the kickstarter co-founders.

On Thursday I squeezed in a tour of the Bristol Records Office and got to see a book that has been given to the service. It is a lively diary of a four month trip and we will be running a social media campaign to tell the story which is pretty exciting.

After the tour I got to sink my teeth into some plate spinning around all of our existing online properties, unearthing some projects that require reviewing.

On Friday I enjoyed a lunchtime talk I wrote about the other day and met with a Council directorate that I hope to work with in 2014 as they do some pretty interesting stuff around infrastructure, Green Cities and innovation. Unfortunately the day had to end with a problem pre-dating me joining that I hope can be resolved very soon.

Alex Rankin, who works at the museum service wrote a little bit about the talking cranes project we are breathing new life back into over on his blog which is worth a read.

This week was pretty ‘social’ and therefore flat out with meetings and social media!

I kicked off the week with an introduction for one of our casual staff about museums on the web and the opportunities for the service. I used this as a way to see what level of support I could roll-out to a large group of people who are curious about the web but are very much digital visitors or who rarely use the web. The lesson I took away from this session was to make NO assumptions about how others view the web and to listen to each member of staff THEN I can slowly provide the right responses, hopefully at scale but i am fully prepared to go one to one if I need. A seed of an idea also arose around producing guidance under a creative commons licence that perhaps other museums could re-purpose (sounds like Jisc for the museums!).

Next I had to grapple with a project that would have me pulling out my hair if I had any….

Tuesday was a visit to the Safety team for my part 1 Health and Safety for Managers training. I feel confident about our process but there isn’t any room to be complacent and I have several minor things to iron out.

On Wednesday I met with several others to finalise our Museum Social Media principles which should give staff the guidance and confidence to begin helping us use our social media and importantly know who to turn to. A blind spot for us is the weekend but several weekend staff have agreed to cover the fort which i feel is worth a ‘fist pump’. I met Stef Goodchild  for lunch as I wanted to hear how his mind-blowing work on music stages could perhaps be used for temp exhibitions. Think lasers, sound, smoke, LEDs and projection. If you want innovation, experimentation for engagement and R&D Dear funders let me and Stef cook up something!

In the evening M Shed hosted a debate called ’50 years since the bus boycott – what has changed?’ which was enjoyable and packed. The event was live broadcast to a local radio station too so a recording will appear very soon. I played roving mic ha.

On Thursday I spoke with Apple about the finer detail of purchase vs leasing of iPads which I need to expand out into a post on its own. Needless to say I am being very cautious as I don’t want one of those famous cupboards full of obsolete devices in 2- years. Khio Vinh wrote about this in Build not to Last.
I met with two different potential partners for 2014-15 projects around digital engagement.

In the afternoon I headed over to Sift Digital for the regular ‘South West social media meetup’ and really enjoyed hearing Jukesie ranting about the social media landscape. Slides and details are over on his weekly post.

Friday morning I had the pleasure of hearing a visiting resident to the museum talk about how we can help Chinese visitors enjoy the museum. Lots of food for thought around international tourism to the region.

Then I spent the rest of the day at the Watershed REACT heritage sandbox which was an opportunity to network and learn from others in the digital sector beyond the local authority. There was some interest in collaboration and partnership which i see as fundamental to getting things done whilst including Bristol people.

Looking back it was a packed week ending in the bonus Sunday afternoon preparing for my recruitment training in the office!

I think I may have even found a little bit of time to pop home.

30th Sept – 4th Ot

An important part of this week was taking the time to listen to the team. By this I mean I sat in their environment for half a day and in between disturbing them just got to ‘listen’ to what requests came in and see a tiny bit of the detail within their roles. I think there is a lot to be gained from better understanding the fine detail within any job role – i was even jokingly offered an official polo shirt to blend in. What became clearer is what tasks I should maybe take off their plate and what other things I could delegate. One of my tasks is to clear the way for the team to work and to better allow them to contribute to the future activity across the service.

A key activity throughout the week was to join planning sessions on exhibition and service delivery for 2014-16. Much of this I can’t speak on other than to say i’m glad I can be in the mix. Related to this is my need to be thinking more about what ‘digital transformation’ might mean to us. Doing what we do now physically and merely shifting it online is only one side of the dice. I really liked reading ‘Digital innovation in the arts must be about the art‘ and will be revisiting this with the programming team. One tangible outcome was confirmation that although I can’t affect some of the exhibitions that are very well developed for the first quarter of 2014 we NEED to start tinkering around the edges. By this I mean from a technology point of view that we need to start experimenting with RFID, Raspberry Pi, sensors, data and more so that we can build up to contributing meaningfully for later in 2014.

I drafted in Stephen Gray to demo virtual reality using the Oculus Rift headset and as a result we need have 1 project idea to pursue.

I have been tasked with looking at digital signage in the foyer of the City Museum, which basically means a large TV on a stand. However said TV stand is the head-scratching part. The stand must be movable yet safe for the public who may knock/run into the TV. Somebody pointed me to the set-up at the nearby Colston hall and I think this is the kind of setup we need (photo of the tv).

What else… oh, I met a group of local partners about a project we have agreed to bid on which will really be interesting digitally if we are successful. More on that should it come off.

A final highlight was a telephone call with Kevin Bacon from Brighton Museum. We are comparable museums and so was a welcome discussion about keeping each other in the loop about our plans and working together. As my role is the only one of its kind in the service, working with similar posts elsewhere will be essential to bounce ideas and learn from others. For example I shared my draft ‘digital principles’ for feedback.

If others would like to chat then do get in touch as i’m very approachable.

Monday was the tail end of our holiday so the working week began on Tuesday to a mere 128 emails. The emails were largely CC messages and so were dispatched in 10 minutes. I have been making it clear to everybody that email is great but I don’t need to know everything – if you need a reply from me then send it but I don’t need ‘reference/covering’ emails. The rest of the day could be spent clearing a path for activities in October.

Tuesday and Wednesday were both used to catch up with various staff about their projects and for me to better understand some of the detail a few of our roles deal with. The devil really is in the detail and I feel the more I can understand the better for future working together.

Thursday was a social media oriented day. First I met with the Bristol Records Office to see how they run social media and where my team could be of assistance. Then I checked in on the Red Lodge as they are doing an outstanding job and have plenty of ideas for continuing over the winter. In the evening I attended “This Happened Bristol” at the Empire Theatre which had three enjoyable speakers (John Durrant, Dan Efergan, and Lizzie Ostrom) talk about past interaction projects, one of which was about smell.

On Friday I got to tinker with a small website project and had an important meeting regarding a project i’ll keep quiet about for now.

Bonus day. On Saturday I attended a raspberry pi bootcamp run by uob at the @bristol site. The event was spilt between 90min sessions on a broad range of introductory topics and some drop-in areas to ask questions and see some very interesting uses of the kit. The event had a lot of help at hand and was well attended by school children and a few oldies like me. I attended a non-pi session on using twine, a easy to use tool for making interactive if/else type stories that spits out html. I think this could be pretty handy for lightweight public facing games and stories.It was great to see kids coming to events at the weekend like I used to.

Attending local events in the evening and weekends not only helps keep me in the loop but i think is crucial for raising our service profile. I know that these things are hard for many to attend but I really hope I can convince a few others to start doing likewise.

This will I got up to the following:

• Welcomed our new team member, an apprentice who will be helping with our digital marketing including social media and storytelling across our collections
• Shared internally our 7 service digital principles for feedback
• Investigated leasing tablets
• Explained our digital plans to central ICT for the Council
• Continued writing our expression of interest for the Big Data call
• Discovered it takes 1.5hrs to read and digest the average report (thanks to harvest timer)
• Caught up with my old team (cheers!)
• Started to think about how we should tackle our websites
• Floor walk of two sites to watch the public use our interactives and see how they move around the building