VanGoYourself: One year on

This is an except of an interview about VanGoYourself on Europeana Pro, you can read the full text here.

Q: The project is now over a year old. Taking a moment to look back, what have been your main highlights during the year?

The biggest buzz has actually been seeing the recreations coming in from all over the world and realising that people have been inspired enough by the idea to actually take action and be creative. Sometimes people go to a lot of trouble, you can see that they have really thought about it and that makes me happy as it’s what the project is all about – connecting emotionally to art in a personal way.

Being invited onto the BBC’s Breakfast TV is also one of the high points. I was interviewed at the start of the show and we asked people to send in their recreations – and they did – dinner ladies, students, couples, all ages and all sorts. I also managed to get the two presenters to have a go with a rather good result.

Q: Can you tell us about some of the influential supporters you’ve attracted since you started out? How have different organisations and individuals reacted to the idea?

We now have 29 different museums from 13 different countries and more joining all the time – from big nationals like the Rijksmuseum, National Gallery of Denmark and National Gallery of Ireland to smaller ones such as Royal Pavilion Museums, Villa Vauban and Stadtmuseum Simeonstrift Trier. The key thing is that all the paintings from these different collections must be open licenced so we are restricted in what we can take and it is a slow process to convince the museum and gallery community that taking a more open approach to their content is the right one. But I do think we are helping to shift peoples thinking in this area and people are realising how the possibilities for the reuse of collections can be really exciting and engaging. I’m really proud that in our own way we are helping to make the case for this kind of open approach and my belief is that this is only a temporary problem. In five to ten years the benefits of openness will be well understood and there will be more institutions allowing people to get creative with their content than not.

Q: What advice would you give to a creative or other similar kind of project starting out? What do you know now that you wish you’d known in May 2014? What might you do differently, if anything?

It’s hard work trying to build something new from scratch, grab people’s attention online and convince them to go and do something (in our case recreate a painting). Having an idea that you genuinely love, that you enjoy working on as the producer and that you have a connect too is really important. If you are going to pour your soul into something it has to be something that really moves you or going the extra mile just won’t happen.

Q: What were the biggest technical challenges to overcome when building the tools and website?

The biggest challenge was not to over complicate it. There is always a tendency to think we could add this and that and link to this information etc. But all of this just complicates the core idea and often confuses the user. The need to add more is often about meeting the needs of the organisation making the thing, and not the needs of the audience. I am really pleased that we managed to fight off this urge and keep the ideas really simple and focussed.

Q: There are all sorts of people on VanGoYourself, from the very young to the more distinguished. Do you gather any statistics about who is using it, where and when?

One of the great things about the project is that you can literally see your audience in the recreations they submit and there really is a broad range of ages and types of people – teenagers, kids, hipsters, groups of friends, business colleagues, couples and of course the many selfies!

Each month the site gets around four thousand visits and other than those that just come in from somewhere to view one page and leave, the rest on average stay for five minutes and look at four to five pages each. The percentage of people who then go on to VanGoThemselves is about 2% which is kind of average percentage for this high level of engagement required.

Q: What does the future hold for VanGoYourself? What’s in store for it next?

Our ambition is to get 100 more paintings onto the site from across Europe and to champion the value of releasing cultural content on open licenses. We want to create a shift in how museums and galleries think about their digital collections and show them that they can have more value if they are open to reuse.

But most of all we want to get more people VanGoing themselves and would love to see the project become synonymous with having fun with art. I’d like to see museums all over the world holding their own VanGoYourself events and inviting the public to recreate their art in any way they want to.

Q: Last of all, there are almost too many brilliant recreations to choose just one, but if you had to pick, which is your all-time favourite?

I love the ones that I have been a part of, either helping to direct a big group into a complicated scene (I’ve done quite a few of these a different events) or being in a recreation myself, in particular the one I did in Rome of the Sarcophagus of the Spouses. It really is a lot of fun to recreate a painting, play around with the meaning and put yourself into the picture.

But if I had to pick one out of the others that I haven’t been part of it would be the Dying Adonis vangod by Jordan Assi. I love the contemporary twist on this and the comment “This is a modern day “Dying Adonis”. He is surrounded by all the technology available in today’s society and it has consumed him.”

Check out the VanGoYourself crowdfunder

Let’s Get Real conference 2014

Our third Let’s Get Real conference took place on 18th September 2014 and is part of my work leading a cycle of collaborative action research projects that has resulted in Culture24 working intensively with over 50 organisations from across UK over the last 3 years.

See the Flick pictures

Read the Storify

Culture24 is on a mission to get cultural sector to get real about digital change and we believe that change can only happen from within each organisation, one organisation at a time. The key to this change is the people inside them. People like those at the conference.

But it isn’t really the organisations that struggle with digital change it’s the people in them.

The conference was curated to get everyone thinking, to provoke and to get them talking. Talking about the way they work, the challenges, failures, successes and stories they all have. The title of conf is – Is your content fit for purpose? But what does this really mean?

Well, content = the stuff, the cultural assets we have both raw (objects, artefacts, documents) and cooked (videos, articles, interviews).

Purpose = the mission of our own organisation – specifically!

Fit = technically, editorially and accessibly.

Digital is now a part of everything. It is not something separate and we are all *finally* starting to accept this. But what is still difficult is understanding both:

– the changing nature of user behaviours online, in particular because of the growth of mobile

– getting our content ready to respond to those behaviours. To be where people are looking, to be shareable, reuseable, meaningful, useful, relevant, intelligent and loveable.

Key to this for cultural sector is accepting that the more we create content in deeply human ways – for real people – their needs, demands, dreams – the better. To do this culture24 believes we need to be open about our vulnerability, our humaness. We need to be in the centre of society, part of our communities, offline and online.

That’s what Let’s Get Real is all about.

If you knew some platforms weren’t working, would you shut them down?

Well, that’s exactly what Brooklyn Museum have done with Flickr, History Pin, iTunesU and Foursquare.

Read about the ‘path breaking experiments in digital outreach‘ by the brilliant and talented Shelley Bernstein in the New York Times. Shelley’s work at Brooklyn Museum is internationally recognised for its creativity, community value and openness and as she rarely travels to speak outside the USA we are *very* lucky to have her keynote this year’s Let’s Get Real conference (18th September 2014, Brighton).

The full line up of speakers is now confirmed and we will be welcoming international keynotes from Shelley Bernstein and Michiel Van Iersel (Non-Fiction), plus the talents of Jessica Riches (@littlemisswilde), Tanya Cordrey (Chief Digital Officer at The Guardian), Joanna Jones (V&A), Matt Matheson (NixonMcInnes), Adam Gee (C4), Anna Rafferty, Matt Locke, Anra Kennedy and Charlie Davies.

There will be provocations, in-conversations and our unique Crit Room where we offer personalised problem-solving guidance on your websites and social media channels in a friendly and supportive environment.

Throughout the day we will be ”Finding the Audience’, ‘Trusting the Audience’, Learning from Brands’, ‘Learning from Failure’, hearing about the ‘Death of the Organisational Voice’ and ‘Why I Love Money’. We even have a raffle to win a suitably witty Modern Toss print. Most importantly, we will be having fun and getting real about digital change in the unique Culture24 way.

You can book your ticket for the conference now and don’t forget to sign up for the Church of Fail pre-conference evening event on Wednesday 17th September: it’s free to attend but you must book separately as places are limited.

Let’s Get Real Conference ‘Is your content fit for purpose?’

The programme so far … more coming soon…

We are *really* pleased that our keynote this year will be from the brilliant and talented Shelley Bernstein whose work at Brooklyn Museum is internationally recognised for its creativity, community value and openness. Shelley rarely travels to speak outside of the USA so we are *very* lucky to have her. Talking about failure is going to be a big theme for us this year with a compelling keynote from Michiel van Iersel entitled ‘Learning from failure’ drawing parallels between disfunctionality in architecture and digital systems. Plus a series of provocations to challenge and get your thinking. There will also be a separate evening event for those of you that are in town called ‘Church of Fail’.

There are 99 earlybird tickets available on a first come first served basis at the price of £99.

Find out more and book now.

A provocation: Are you COPEing* with digital?

*Create Once and Publish Everywhere

If digital cultural assets were food, we would all be eating a very restricted diet full of ingredients that were difficult to know how to cook, were often not ripe and were hard to digest. If only we could be the spice, the substance, the flavour necessary for anything delicious. The fundamental ingredient that could be reused in different recipes, with a host of different results, in a million kitchens.

Why is our digital stuff so often lost in the vast ocean that is the google search results? It is out there somewhere, tumbling in the raging SEO surf, only visible every now and then as the shifting tides of user behaviour wash on the shores of our ever increasing time online. How can we hope to COPE as cultural institutions with this digital landscape that is so changeable and where the taste of our own creativity is drowned by the dominant flavours of the big brands? To COPE better (Create Once and Publish Everywhere), what would that actually be like?

COPEing is a simple idea where you separate the process of creating digital content from the specifics of how it might be delivered. This means that those inside an organisation create digital content that is capable of being repurposed in different ways by others and is created to be fit for that purpose both editorially and technically. You might say that this is a bit like being able to offer up your home-grown, handpicked organic strawberries to the best pâtissier in every city to conjure a dessert heaven…

But, enough of the metaphors, I want to ask you a direct question: Is your institution’s content fit for purpose? What I mean by this is, can you define a specific clarity of purpose and a desired audience response and look yourself in the eye and say “yes, I have what is needed for this.” Are your digital assets ready to be shared, searched and found? Are you curating and publishing in ways that directly address a genuine audience demand, not just your own supply need? Is your content responsive to mobile and are your staff ready to respond to your audience?

If you are not sure about any of this, then either join me for an open session in Bristol at the No Boundaries conference next Tuesday 25^thof February 2014, or message me here/on twitter to share your story and cry together over our spilt milk!

A think piece on digital

This is the longer version of a think piece on digital that I did for the new Audience Finder project. It was published to coincide with a whole set of extremely useful new (free) resources that were produced by Culture24 and address some of the most commonly shared digital sticking points such as: mobile change, SEO, Google Analytics segmentation and social media evaluation. They were commissioned by The Audience Agency as part of their Audience Focus project. Get them here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I am a digital immigrant and I am fluent in webtalk. I love sci-fi, nerdy conferences and Lord Of The Rings. I have an online presence on Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Flickr, Linkedin and edit five different WordPress blogs. I daily use Basecamp, Dropbox, Google docs, iplayer, spotify, photoshop and skype.

I am also a woman and I am fluent in my own ideas. I love sushi, conceptual art, and Italian architecture. I go to a gym, a bookclub, a singing group, flamenco classes and I know how to edit super8 film. I talk to my friends, my kids, my husband, my colleagues at work, around the UK and overseas, my family and random strangers in the street who I think look interesting.

I have a laptop, a desktop computer, an ipad and an iphone. I have a bike, a bank account, an office and my feet. I live one life, am one person and don’t really have an online or an offline Jane anymore. It is just me, doing what I need to do and trying to do it the best that I can and I dip in and out of the digital world without thinking about it anymore.

I’m not saying I am always online, or that I have sorted my work life balance (not!) but just that it’s become a fluid thing. This realisation has been dawning on me for the last few years as my interaction and behaviour with technology has become integrated and impossible to separate from what I used to call my real life. I haven’t decided if I like it, or even if it is a good thing but nevertheless it is true and I don’t think there is any going back for me – or you.

This article is a think piece on how this fundamental shift is touching everyone and in particular the impact it is having on cultural organisations trying to understand, adapt and embrace the change. Don’t think I am suggesting that I have all the answers but I hope that you will agree I have some of the right questions.

Let’s talk about digital

Digital is not really something separate. No one under the age of 20 even talks about ‘digital’ anything anymore. It is simply a part of everything – communications, transport, retail, manufacturing, entertainment, education, medicine etc. So why when it comes to cultural policy, the arts and heritage sector and building its digital capacity are there separate strategic policy areas and funding strands? As the Arts Council are now moving to integrate arts and museums, why not digital too? Wouldn’t it be better if instead of a digital strategy, a gallery or museum thought about the use of digital tools, channels and technologies simply within its wider mission, existing content, exhibition, touring, education and audience development plans? Could you even go further and start with digital?

If we look at the development of the Guardian newspaper they moved from setting up a new media lab in 1995 and a separate supplement called OnLine, to an online branding as Guardian Unlimited separate from the newspaper, before in 2008 integrating and rebranding everything under one name guardian.co.uk, followed by guardian.com as they became increasingly international. They went further in 2011 announcing their plans to become a digital-first organisation, placing open journalism on the web at the heart of its strategy. Their evolution has been a fight for survival and also a response to changing consumer behavior and expectations.

I wonder what a digital-first museum, gallery or arts venue would look like? I’d like to see that. In fact I’d like to run it!

The fluidity that has evolved in my personal life in recent years and that digital natives take for granted, is I believe, largely missing in the organisational development of the cultural sector. To quote my introduction of the second Culture24 Let’s Get Real report:

For many cultural organisations the online world and digital tools are still unfamiliar and unknown. They are aware of the knowledge gap between them and those (often younger) individuals who feel fluent in this new language. This tension is made worse by the fact that although digital technologies are understood as tools that need to be used and shaped to a purpose, they also change the very nature of their users’ behaviour – allowing access to information on the move, facilitating connections between sets of previously separate data and offering a multitude of opportunities for sharing and participation.

As such, the shift needed for an organisation to feel confident in understanding these changes in user behaviour and then to integrate the use of digital tactics into their overall strategic mission in useful ways requires a significant shift in internal thinking at all levels. The time, space and commitment needed to do this well cannot be under-estimated.

Many cultural organisations also face a raft of internal pressures sparked by expectations such as:

Online developments will significantly improve audience reach
Online developments will provide access to new audiences (especially younger ones)
We need to be seen to be using digital tools and not getting left behind
Senior management (directors/trustees) wants us to build a big, shiny new showcase digital ‘thing’ that will show everyone we are cool (app, kiosk, game, etc.)
Digital will help us earn more money
Digital will increase participation

These expectations are often unrealistic and are strategically the wrong starting place for thinking about any new business development of any kind, but especially any using digital technologies. The starting point should, instead, be the mission of the organisation and the needs of the target audience. You need to know what you want to achieve and who it is for. A useful entry point for each cultural organisation to explore how their organisational missions can connect with the needs of their target audiences online is to examine the question ‘what is digital engagement?’

Let’s talk about engagement

Engagement is fundamentally about attention, inspiration or connection. For the arts and heritage sector this means our public and their relationships to our stuff. Trying to understanding this public and reach them is not a new problem. The reality of inventing, making or producing something that other people don’t relate to, value or understand has been something cultural producers and organisations have faced forever. It sits alongside the other big audience issue of the supply (this is what I have) vs. demand (this is what you want).

Audiences for anything can be broken down by demographics (where people live, how old they are, how much money they have and what gender they are). But you can also look at peoples motivations (what they want to know, what they need to buy, where they want to go) and their behaviours (searching, browsing, facilitating, learning, watching, contributing).

When looking at digital engagement behaviour is a key factor as the very nature of many digital platforms, channels and devices fundamentally changes the users behaviour. Mobile technology is accelerating this rate of change at a pace that is now unstoppable as we keep moving between screens, books, websites, shops, tv, exhibitions, apps and cafes in a seamless and continuous online and offline dance. The touch points for our experience/information vary based on our motivation at any one time or the serendipity of our curiosity. Understanding these consumer experiences as a whole is crucial to curating our messages to our audiences.

Statistics tell us that people in the UK are spending as much as 21 hours a week online, more if you live in the USA and up to 40 hours if you are aged 18-24. But what are they doing? Isn’t the internet just full of rubbish? Of course it is, but that is a human issue not a technological one. For all the pornography, gambling and trivia, there are many well documented stories of community empowerment, educational revolution and world changing projects that were only possible because the technology facilitated people to behave in a different way and do something different. Projects such as the Ushahidi Platform, Tedx in a box, change.org, Flickr Commons [8], or kickstarter. They all plug together communities of users. Writer Clay Shirky defines the channeling of this community capacity as Cognitive Surplus or “the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles which means while we’re busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (or even making LOLcats), we’re building a better, more cooperative world”. The cultural sector is only on the very edge of exploring how they might do this for the arts.

There is also a new generation of vloggers and bloggers out there, independent voices that are original and intelligent. People like charlieiscocoollike who is sharing his love of ‘fun’ science with an absolutely huge fanbase of over nearly 2million subscribers he has built from nothing. If you are ever wondering where all this obsession with things like YouTube is going then check out Jamal Edwards at the 2013 TedX Houses of Parliament asking if the next prime minister could come from YouTube? Possible.

As cultural institutions we need to be one of those voices, sharing what we have, exploiting the depth of our knowledge and – crucially – our authenticity. This, along with our creativity, are our two greatest assets as a sector.

Let’s talk about evidence of engagement

While I am writing this 23 people, one of whom is in Madrid, are looking at the culture24.org.uk website. Three are reading a new article about how a master perfumer is recreating the fragrance of Jacobean London, two are looking at the address of the Pankhurst Centre in Manchester (one of them on a mobile phone), one is reading an oral history shared memory of the Scotswood Road in Newcastle, another is searching for museums in Tunbridge Wells. I could go on…

Anyone with a Google Analytics account can do this and watch in real-time as people leave a digital footprint from their visit to your website in your GA software. It is very compelling and ultimately quite satisfying as you actually see for yourself something happening live online. But what does it tell me about the level of engagement on our site? How can I know if people are even finding what they want? Google Analytics will allow me to measure the degrees of engagement but not the ‘kinds’ of engagement (see Avinash Kaushik’s books and blog Occams Razor). The truth is that the right kind of engagement is the one that meets your own business outcome and so will be slightly different for everyone. There is no one size fits all with analytics.

Identifying the outcome you desire, in a way that is measurable, is not as simple as it sounds. Sometimes it is hard to even know the questions to ask to start asking the right questions. The Let’s Get Real action research work I lead has focused on these issues with a range of UK cultural organisations over the last three years and the two reports published are a good place to read case studies of how a range of cultural venues have approached this challenge.

The Tate talk about their work in this area and say: “Understanding our audiences and evaluating the impact and value of their digital experiences is a vital element of Tate’s digital transformation. One of the aims is to establish a digital culture within Tate that is audience centred, responds to the audience needs and that is also iterative and evaluation lead”. Part of this work has been the creation and sharing of a digital dashboard template that offers a useful starting point for others to format their data into meaningful shapes. Other cultural dashboards can be found online at the Museum of East Anglian Life and the IMA. What I like about both of these is that they mix off and online statistics that have been chosen as they represent what the organisation values, not simply a collection of what they are able to measure in any one platform.

Getting this right inside your own organisation is a process that takes time and it is a long way from the kind of top level digital metrics that are collected by Arts Council from their National Portfolio Organisations (NPO’s). These are almost useless without applying some relevant audience segmentation, benchmarking your stats overtime and a contextual framework for defining success against your mission.

Let’s talk about content

A good question to ask yourself is – is your content fit for purpose digitally? Are you using the analytics from your current digital activities to better understand the success and failure of your content to engage? Are these insights being used to drive internal change? Are you approaching this with honesty and openness? Do you have confidence in your content and knowledge? Can you try and think differently about what you have and then do differently? Maybe you could try a small scale action that combines examining a quantitative (metric) with qualitative (ask the user) evidence? Perhaps this might help you to consider ways to adjust your editorial strategy or content plans? Could you fail fast and get better faster?

The very talented team at the GOV.UK have produced some excellent Content Principles as a style guide for their site. These combined with their Design Principles make an excellent set of reference points for improving your own digital output.

Remember that online everything is content, your site architecture, navigation, headers, alt text metadata and URL’s and they all play a key role in maximising your SEO (search engine optimisation) and therefore the discoverability of your stuff with audiences.

Sadly at the moment, the cultural sector does not have the attention share online we deserve. We are not good at big. Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution talks about the fact the world has changed in three ways: scope, scale and speed and that some GLAMS (Galleries, libraries, archives, museums) haven’t noticed yet. In his brilliant Age of Scale presentation he makes it clear that there is lots of room at the top. He asks “Can we supersize our mission? Can we go to 11?”.

It can happen. Look at the phenomenal 23,000% boost in DVD sales that Monty Python received when they choose to giveaway all their TV shows on YouTube for free. Or the 1.3 billion views of the Gangnam Style music video with its 8 million dollars of advertising revenue, made possible by ignoring all the copyright infringements and rip-offs. This is scale, but not as we know it in the cultural sector yet.

The Rijksmuseum are perhaps the closest with their recent step of offering downloads of high-resolution images of their collection at no cost. Through the new online Rijksstudio, the public are encouraged to copy and transform the museums artworks into stationery, T-shirts, tattoos, plates or even toilet paper. The ultra-high-resolution images of works can be freely downloaded, zoomed in on, shared, added to personal ‘studios’, or manipulated copyright-free. The scale of this use is yet to be seen but the ripples have been noticed.

All of these examples share a very progressive open approach to content ownership that I believe the cultural sector should watch and learn from. Let’s set our content free.

To conclude

Personally, I am a culture addict who loves the physical experience of walking into a gallery, watching a live performance or handling an object but my digital experiences are gaining momentum as digital tools become more useful and support me. I wonder when, if ever, digital culture will hold my passion on its own? Perhaps only with a relentless focus of quality and a commitment to turning our organisations relationship with the audience, inside out.

A few caveats:

This article takes the word digital in terms of the web based platforms, channels and digital collections of non-profit museums, galleries, heritage sites and arts organisations. There is a bias towards cultural venues who are content holders such as museums. It does not address digital art or the use of digital technologies as an online creative medium in its own right. That would be a different story.

Jake Chapman, Museums at Night and the Exquisite Corpse

A picture story of Jake Chapman and the making of a mass exquisite corpse for the Museums at Night festival at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings.

The public arrive. It all started with Jake and Dino’s playing a game together. The Exquisite Corpse. Inspired by the Surrealists. An edition in b/w and loaned to the Jerwood for the event. On the floor for the night a pile of huge paper ready for the audience to play their own game. Without any encouragement, the energy levels rise and the paper gets taken. Each group take a fold then turns over and passes it on. The room is buzzing. Many pencils need sharpening. The final fold and the drawing is over. Time for the judging. Jake and the curator make a shortlist. The finalists are laid out on the floor. A winner is chosen. The lucky crew are on a promise of a studio visit and a night out with the brothers. Thank you Jake, the Jerwood and Culture24.

Museums at Night on board the Cutty Sark

If you haven’t been on the Cutty Sark yet, do it now.

I got my chance last night as I gave a speech in the huge vaulted space that is underneath the ship to mark the launch of our 2013 Museums at Night festival. I was standing below the hull which is suspended over you like a vast golden whale and it really is a breath-taking experience.

It was also a brilliant, brilliant evening and it was great to see so many colleagues and friends all sharing the love for this magnificent vessel and for our campaign.

The Museums at Night festival is all about doing something different. By opening late and doing something different, you can attract different people. It is all about the experience. Creating a unique moment that is much more than money can buy. In 2013 this might be joining the Chapman Brothers at the Jerwood in their home town of Hastings to take part in what the surrealists called an ‘exquisite corpse’ – a drawing that is passed on, without looking, from person to person. It might be a taking part in a 1920’s murder mystery in Somerset or sleeping over on the Golden Hynde or even (for the 1^st time ever) in Kensington Palace or Hampton Court.

2013 will be the 5^th festival Culture24 have run. The first was in 2008, had 55 events and came together in just 9 weeks. Now it is a part of the cultural calendar and is earning its place in the hearts of the public. It exploits the best of what Culture24 does: our publishing platform, website and editorial expertise, the active network of thousand and thousands of UK venues, our marketing skills, our PR contacts, our understanding of what is it that people love about arts & heritage.

This year there are more author’s events than ever before plus of course the 10 highlight events where an artists has created a special event at a specific venue who won them in an online vote by over 30,000 people.

These include:

Julian Wild helping people construct a new art work out of ½ km of plumbing pipe and then turning it into a glow in the dark abstract installation at Iron Bridge in Telford
Julia Vogl building a chandelier from 2,500 recycled bottles in the great hall of the Discovery Centre in Newcastle
Susan Forsyth conducting a group of volunteer members of the public in a singing procession through Rochdale ending with a performance at the Pioneers Museum
The Random International Collective staging the UK début of a new interactive light installation at the Horniman Museum (which is going to be very cool).

Last night, in true Museums at Night spirit, we put on something special for everyone by way of performer and actress Joyce Falconer who gave a unique rendition and interpretation of the famous Robert Burns poem ‘Tam-o-Shanter’ from which this ship derives its name.

And how Tam stood, like ane bewitch’d,
And thought his very een enrich’d;
Even Satan glowr’d, and fidg’d fu’ fain,
And hotch’d and blew wi’ might and main;
Till first ae caper, syne anither,
Tam tint his reason ‘ thegither,
And roars out, “Weel done, Cutty-sark!”
And in an instant all was dark:
And scarcely had he Maggie rallied,
When out the hellish legion sallied.

I feel well and truly connected now to my seafaring ancestors (yes really) but only wish we could have sailed her down the Thames and round to Brighton!

In Conversation at The Guardian with Melissa Denes and David Sabel

The Guardian culture professional network is a year old this September and yet it feels somehow like they have always been here. They slipped so neatly into the online hole in the sectors own communications and networking activities that it was a natural fit.

That’s why when the super dynamic Nancy Groves asked me to step up and be interviewed onstage by their ‘mainframe’ arts editor Melissa Denes I said yes without hesitation. I am also a fan of David Sable’s work with NTLive and being onstage chatting with both him and Melissa seemed like a pleasure.

The conversation touched on several ideas that I’ve been pondering recently and thankfully came together into a rather interesting discussion. Here are my reflections of what we talked about:

there is little or no instructional memory now in the Arts Council. The leaking and plundering of staff has left then forgetting the lessons of their own failures and having to learn them all over again. Anyone remember ArtsOnline…? Reminds me of that wonderful line that Merlin utters in the movie Excalibur ‘it is the doom of men that they forget’.

the ongoing lack of attention share online for cultural institutions (the actual branded sites from museums and galleries etc) does not automatically apply to artistic rich sites where there is no ‘brand’ between the audience and the stuff. They seem to have a more immediate relationship with the content that is outside of any institutional identity and is based on shared passions and interest. I wonder, are institutions ultimately hamstrung by their own internal need to justify themselves and build brand? If you are not a popular brand (NT, Tate etc) then can you ever break through this? I would love to do some deeper research into the successes of artist sites in the same way we have done for museums in the Culture24 Let’s Get Real work. Lois Keidan from the Live Art Development Agency had some great comments to make on these issues.

as the funding cuts slowly destroy and undermine the arts funding infrastructure, they will not necessarily destroy creativity or creative output. Individual institutions may close but I believe that by far the biggest problem will come from having a political culture that is risk adverse and fails to value education and learning. As time passes, this is where we will fail to achieve the spaces for free thinking, provocation and genuine debate. Without those maintaining sustainability and relevance in any sector is pretty hard.

there is nothing wrong with being an institution and having an internal need to justify your existence and build your own brand – if – you can be up front about that and stop trying to couch your online activities in a language of participation.

trying to imagine the future is impossible as we can only ever construct it out of our understanding of the past. As such it is always a shiny, bigger version of what we had yesterday and can never be the fundamental behaviour changing experiences that we will in fact come to know. Check out the seriously mindblowing podcast of James Burke talking at dConstruct 2012 conference and read the transcript of Warren Ellis’s talk at the equally awesome Inspiring Reality conference entitles ‘How to see the future’.

There is a great Marshall McLuhan quote that sums it up “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future”.

Thanks to Nancy, David and Melissa for a great evening and to the audience for being so friendly.

Culture24 need a Research Manager

Do you have a background in research, love culture and the web and want to be part of an exciting new European project that Culture24 are leading? Is so, then here is the low down on a new exciting job based at our office in Brighton
__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Research Manager
Salary: £26k to £28k pro rata depending upon experience
Hours: part-time, 3 days or 22.5 hours per week, one year contract.

Culture24 is looking for a dynamic and experienced Research Manager to join our small, friendly team at our busy Brighton office. You will oversee a programme of research as part of a multi-partner international project promoting digital cultural content to tourists. You will also support an in-house project on tracking and measuring user engagement online and offline.

Culture24 is leading one of several work packages within the three-year ‘Europeana Awareness’ project. Our role is to establish new partnerships and distribution services to channel content from Europeana into existing, established mass-market tourism-facing services online.

The Research Manager role will encompass planning, project management, research, analysis and report production. You will be researching user needs across several project constituencies – tourists, public sector tourism bodies, commercial tourism publishers and non-commercial cultural data aggregators. You will also manage related research work being undertaken by partner organisations in Croatia, Ireland and Luxembourg.

In addition you will work with our senior management team to plan and implement an in-house project identifying, tracking and analysing a range of measures around user and partner engagement with Culture24’s products and services. There will also be opportunity to support the senior team in the delivery of multi-partner collaborative action research projects into user engagement with online cultural content.

Your skills and experience will include
– Excellent, proven research skills
– Excellent, proven project management skills
– Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
– The ability to work in a self-motivated, thorough way

More about Culture24 here

More about Europeana Awareness here

A full job description, person specification and application form is available for download here:

How to apply:
Download and fill in the application form and return it along with a covering letter telling us why you are the right person for this job to: tessa@culture24.org.uk.

Sorry, no CV’s will be considered.

Deadline for receipt of application form and letter: 10am, Monday March 26th
Interviews will be held at Culture24 offices in Brighton on: Friday 30th March 2012 (subject to availability)

Jane Finnis

my thoughts on digital, culture and change

Author: Jane Finnis