Museum Strategy

Monumenta 2011 opens next 11 May

Hello everyone,

Here is a blogpost to remind you that Monumenta, a very special artistic Tour de Force will be opening next 11 May in the Nef du Grand Palais in Paris.

The concept is simple, yet it poses an incredible challenge: a gigantic, 13,500 sq meters place, the Nef du Grand Palais, welcomes an exclusive piece made especially for the event by one of the most renowned contemporary artists. This year Indian born, British artist Anish Kapoor known among other works for his iconic Cloud Gate, has worked on producing an object to confront the space of the Grand Palais.

In his most recent interviews, he has evoked how it is not just about being gigantic -and it will, with a piece that will be about 61 088 m3- but also about infusing all this space and volume with meaning.

It will be thrilling to see the process of building the piece, which has already started, as you can see on our Facebook page:

        

 
To follow the whole building/mounting process, we invite you to check regularly our Facebook and Twitter page. Several surprises and bonuses will also be added in the following days so the good thing will be to keep posted to see how you can - if you are in Paris - experience Monumenta and Anish Kapoor in many different ways and forms...shhh!

Keep an eye on the following days and see you at the opening, hopefully!

 

Lately, in the World of Museums #1

Hello there!

Here is a handpicked selection of news that made museums exciting lately - according to Museum
Strategy.

>>IN YOUR AGENDA

Museums and the web : the seminal conference exploring the relationship between museums and the profit they can draw from technical advances has been in existence since '97 and offers this year again an edgy yet accessible programme of worshops and keynotes. I am particularly excited on "Ebooks and Museums Publishing" chaired by Dana Mitroff Silvers from the SFMOMA and "Social Media and Beyond" with Gail Darbin from the V&A. If not yet done, follow the hashtag #mw2011, as the conference is already on!

Everyone is already getting ready for the European Museum Night which will take place next 14 May 2011.
Time to get closer to museums and to see what the ones in your vicinity have got up their sleeves to make you look at them in a different way. Some French speaking readers here? Take a look at the website and blog powered by the French Ministry of Culture

 

>> LARGE SIZE SPONSORSHIP

We are not unfamiliar with the VIP-type sponsorship in an arts venue in France, this is the least we can say, but Janet Jackson coming to perform under the Pyramide du Louvre next 14 June still makes quite an impression. This will be a highly private, not at all broadcasted event to gather funds for the museum, and as such, quite crucial for its financial health nowadays. While we are fully aware that among the range of experiences that make venerable art venues what they are, prestige occupies an important place - and then again this is fundraising- we have been more excited at the prospect of some other crossovers in the chic department, using the museums's potential to be a glamourous boost, and to reach out to different audiences.  We remain impressed still.

>> VOTE

Are you a proper geek? In which case you can't really avoid casting your ballot to decide which video games should be featured during the upcoming exhibition aptly named "The Art of Video Games".
The deadline has been extended until 17 April so it's time to put forward your favourite one, maybe after one nice heated debate.

>> IN THE MoMA APP STORE

The MoMA has just released a new IPad free application called the MoMA books IPad App. With your app  you can purchase and read a vast collection of MoMA books made into ebooks, some of them out of print. Five of them will be offered at discount prices as a starting offer. While you read, you will be able to zoom on the artwork and, get a virtual visit of the exhibition thanks to included audioguides and take a photo of a piece to be sent as a virtual postcard via IPad. High time to invest.

 

 

Upcoming Glam-Wiki and Rencontres Wikimedia on Arts and Shared Knowledge

Dear All,

Here is a post to inform you of two conferences that will take place at the end of November and beginning of December, one in London, one in Paris. Both are organised by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with arts institutions who will be presenting and discussing their experiences on knowledge sharing and partnerships with Wikimedia in that regard.

Behind the Wikimedia Foundation are Wikipedia as well as most notable wiki-something projects that have developped and made popular the idea and practice of sharing information freely, and making knowledge and culture an experience that is done in common, valuing everyone's voice. As structured organisations with a deep sense of hierarchy and copyright protection of their pieces and collections,  arts organisations tend to present themselves as essentially resisting these notions, although avid readers of Museum 2.0, Museum 3.0, and French speaking readers of Mixeum are fully aware that the picture of museums today on these issues is a fragmented one.

Discussing how institutions envision their strategies in that matter goes further than a mere internal/external policy issue, it tackles subjects such as the digital divide, how one sees information in our societies and the part visitors should take in the museum experience. So let's discuss.

Interestingly, GlamWiki 2010, the British leg of the conference will be a two day format divided into a "policy" and a "practice" part which given the importance of filling some  blanks in the understanding of both arts organisations constraints and free information sharing implications, as well as in "just doing it" seems quite valuable to me. The French leg - 2 days too-  offers for its part a very rich and interesting programme of return on experiences mixed with some debates and technical updates. If combined, the outcome of both appears quite wholesome.

See you in London next 26-27 November or/and in Paris next 3-4 December.
Common hasthag #GLAMWIKI

Multiple Failure Lead us to New Accounts...

.....And to let you know via this blog which would normally not be the case.

After a Twitter tragedy wher we lost our Agenda account, followed by multiple widget problems featured on this very blog, we figured it would be useful to let you know we do have

- A new Twitter account: @agendaparis

- A new Facebook page :Agenda, International Agency for the Arts

Our accounts feature our news, exhibition and trips, and news about the events we organise.

And, this is it so far.
Stay tuned! 

 

2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition, Close to Home and a little Further

Hello everyone,

I have finally taken the time to read newly-published -quite newly, mid-September 2010- Horizon Report on Museums by the Marcus Institute for Digital Education in the Arts (MIDEA), the arts branch of the New Media Consortium. 

This is an excellent, well-documented and useful read on the future impact of technological trends within museums and their global outreach.

The report offers a useful timeline estimating the moment when each of the mobile, social media or AI-based techniques picked and presented in the document are most likely to make a lasting impact and be fully adopted and integrated by museums. The reports picks 6 of them as being the main key-trends for tomorrow. 

Within a year or less     

- Mobiles

- Social Media

Within 2-3 years

- Augmented Reality techniques (Digitally added content, QR Codes and their like)

- Location -based services (dynamically customized content according to customer's location, some of the most popular to date are Foursquare at MoMA and the Museum of London new app, Streetmuseum)

Within 5 years (attention everyone)

- Gesture-based Computing >>The IPhone, IPad type of experience developping interaction between the Collection and the visitors, simplifying, while at the same time enriching the experience on and off-site, like the fun and already well-publicised Sea Monster exhibit in Lisbon.

- Semantic Web >> everything that has to do with enabling computers and search engines to actually understand the meaning and context of the key-word search, not such to mechanically return the most mainstream results. Says report: "The promise [of semantic aware] applications is to help us see connections that already exist, but that are invisible to current search algorithms" 

In other words, intelligently -processed software allowing less time-consuming, more targeted and meaningful research leading to substantial workflow improvement. Check the "Modigliani test" , it extensively goes through the semantic-based process. 

The report  also identifies the key-interest of each technology falling into three categories: Education & Interpretation, Exhibitions and Collections, Visitor Services and Accessibility.

>> It is really worth-reading the 35 page full version enriched with the examples quoted above as well as many others if you haven't already of course.

L' Adresse Musée de la Poste, a Collaborative Project for New audiences

In late 2009, the Musée de la Poste decided to take a radical ste p in its digital and online strategy, moving  from one institutional and aging website to an aggregative and collaborative space hosted by an entirely free software created by French webdesigners Netvibes. Laurent Albaret, who spearheaded the project at a museum dedicated to philately and the history of the French post, willingly acknowledges the potentially provocative nature of this initiative but has been able to respond to the mission statement of the entire Museum.The Netvibes account of the Musée de la Poste is what we perceive a digital strategy to be nowadays : collaborative on the intern and flexible and reactive on the extern, extending the museum’s outreach and ultimately triggering interest from non-visitors.

Laurent Albaret shared his thoughts on this, and here for French speakers only.

How does a Museum give up on its website?

« There was no real conscious effort within the museum to develop our presence online. It was more a question of context. When we changed the museum’s visual identity in October 2009, the museum’s institutional website was already 6 years old, rigid and far from user-friendly. It was basically impossible to offer real-time info about the museum and its events » Laurent Albaret recalls.

« With this problem in mind, a Facebook group was created with a very positive feedback, earning us more than 500 friends within a few weeks. This was my initiative and was essentially led by the « History and prospective studies » department. This got us thinking at the museum. But the actual implementation of the Musée de la Poste Netvibes came from a well-structured initiative in partnership with an agency called rfcpatrimoine.

« Their idea was to place the museum at the center of an intelligent internet environment, creating an aggregator to ultimately get more people to come to the museum ».

« Other new networks came about quite naturally too: a Wordpress blog, a Twitter page with 414 followers, a Flickr account and a Facebook fanpage were added to the already existing tools. »

« The decision to use Netvibes, an open-source software, was made with the interests of the museum management in mind: why not use a free tool which could help us to promote our museum? »

Netvibes - how it works and keeping it alive.

« Netvibes is an aggregator which allows us to add entries to our main digital tools in a single portal, be it our website, our blog, or a database on philately, as well as the main social networks.The idea was to keep an institutional website hosted by the global group La Poste which would remain the museum’s official showcase and adding a blog and using Netvibes to develop flexibility and reactivity thus allowing the users to take a direct look at all the social networks while offering an unusually large scope for interaction, such as through smartphones. » 

« Keeping all of this up and running is no mean feat because these many different ‘sources’ have to be updated quite regularly’

« We have resorted to internet users, mostly philately lovers, who suggest websites and blogs that they themselves use, which in turn enriches our content and makes the Netvibes a reference portal for all the themes connected to the museum.

« Internally speaking, we have a monthly calendar available to all members of the publishing committee which allows us to manage information and deadlines.

Teamwork

« Last January, two months after the portal was launched, I came to realise that I could not manage all this on my own because a tool like this requires an input from all the Museums’ teams.Whilst continuing the collaboration with rfcpatrimoine, we set up a monthly publishing committee. We were then able to assign the information-gathering and writing tasks to each committee member. Our main task is to build up content within the museum as well as being in touch with recent events, for example the going on sale of a special stamp in solidarity with Haiti on January 19th which we published on our networks just one hour after the official press conference.

Aggregator Vs Website

« Going for Netvibes is a risk we wanted to take and which caused some apprehension among…. The museum staff ! The previous website was seen as safer territory because the information was not so layered and there were fears that the new project would require some further specialised knowledge brought about by a new form of internal dialogue.

« We have had valuable feedback from our internet users’ side of things. In the majority of cases, they were not confused but somewhat pleasantly surprised and curious about our new online image, which is something they were not expecting from us.

Visitor’s feedback

« We made a survey of our audiences as early as December 2009 on their online practices as well as asking them to share their thoughts on the museum’s digital evolution.  The returns we had were mostly very positive, notably as regards to our modern approach, which was seen as refreshing in contrast to the old-fashioned and outdated ways of your typical middle-size Parisian museum. 77% of the users said the content was ‘rich’, providing them with information to improve their understanding of the museum (55%). 67% considered that our new online services sparked their interest to come and visit the museum.

« I think that the ‘transition period’ is now over and our new online environment seems to be quickly growing on our internet users. We have also started attracting a new type of audience, the 18-25 age group, who are of course very much in touch with the latest technology.

Small Museums Vs Big Museums?

« Middle-size museums like ours who are seeking more visibility have also gone for this online strategy which is, to be honest, very cost-effective.  When the big museums get on board, the weight of their staff and financial means will assure them a seat at the foreground. But I hope that institutions like ours will retain their status as web 2.0 pioneers and be able to engage in other innovative initiatives. We already have a loyal audience that is growing by the day »

Engaging Audiences Offline and Online at Monumenta, France

Last Tuesday I  was at the normally closed Grand Palais for a bloggers meeting I helped organise along with indie music reference French blogger Charles Dufresne.

 The meeting gathered a panel of bloggers from different backgrounds but with a shared interest in contemporary art around Marc Sanchez Artistic Director of the CNAP –the National Center for Fine Arts which organisesmajor cultural events for the Ministry of Culture - and Aurélie Lesous, who is in charge of mediation and educational programmes for Monumenta.

  On at the moment is a piece much talked of : Christian Boltanski’s installation entitled « Personnes » for Monumenta, a widely acclaimed yearly artistic confrontation between the 13,500 squ. meters of the Nave of the Grand Palais and a internationally renowned artist creating a piece for the occasion.

 

Monumenta’s main focus is to promote contemporary art beyond its usual fanbase, reaching out to wider audiences to fullfill the gap in understanding that  exists between audiences and contemporary art, changing typical reactions such as  « How should I interpret this ?», or « I could do that myself ! » into a dialogue.

 We were all gathered to discuss the reception of contemporary art amongst audiences and the work Monumenta achieves in this respect and had a very thought-provoking exchange on the conditions required to engage audiences online as well. 

 We first discussed the philosophy of cultural mediation, Aurelie insisted that the first goal of mediation is to propose and not to impose. The interesting thing about initiatives like that is that the Grand Palais is not filled with guards at the moment but with mediation-trained agents, not a familiar sight in a usual museum in France. If the visitor wishses to, he can then engage in a dialogue with mediators about the particulars of the work presented and thus start to work on his own impressions. 

 With that in mind, a discussion about the online translation of  this belief in dialogue started.

 Why not extending these precisous dialogues and personal impressions beyond Monumenta ? Why not having a blog to communicate on this, or more genrally a job done with participation of staff to enhance Monumenta?

 The reason why Monumenta has chosen not to engage in a full online development says Marc Sanchez is because he does not necessarily feel comfortable with talking  about an arts event while organising it. What is the role the staff would endorse ? Could it be perceived as mere advertising ? In this regard,  Marc Sanchez discussed some past experiences, some of them when he was a manager of the Palais de Tokyo which spoke in favour of his doubts, typically some mediators who took part to the dialogue being quite violently bashed for being bound to  be biased and do sheer promotion of the work. The way I personnaly see this issue is about finding your own voice. If staff engages in a conversation about Monumenta and are criticised for that, it can be because they haven’t yet their own space of expression where they would be asolutely legitimate in launching and framing debates and collecting some testimonies. In Monumenta's case, creating a space where the mediation-trained staff can interact with audiences seems more relevant.

 What are your thoughts on the subject ? Are those fears legitimate  and how do you swiftly accompany the change in the way staff and audiences interact ?

You can follow Monumenta on The Monumenta Twitter thread as well as on the dynamic Monumenta Facebook group.

Thanks to the Cnap for receiving us and for being open to discussion, this is much appreciated.

Photo credit : Alexandra Rigaud

 

Save your Date for MuseumNext 2

Let me first wish you a happy and eventful new year full of arts, visits and discoveries, experiences and learnings from your fellow workers, students, journalists or institutions.

Museum Strategy has been sleeping a bit after CultureBusiness and will be back with a detailed account of our forum, a new focus on a French museums and much more.

 For now on, the news I want to share with you is about the second installment of the conference initiated by leading consultant and lecturer Jim Richardson: MuseumNext.  

Unlike the first successful edition which took place in Newcastle, it will be set in London this time around.  The foundations of Museum Next lay in the sharp analysis of how technological progress reshapes the way the audiences want to experience their museums today and tomorrow. Jim, founder and Director of Newcastle-based design company SUMO has lectured across Europe to encourage arts organisations to embrace this radical shift in the way an institution communicate with their public.

 At Agenda we are convinced that being able to bring about this change is key and will make not only a difference between organisations but that developing a  knowledge, a taste and an adapted practice of Web 2.0 tools is a crucial point for their development.

                                                                                       

At the end of 2009, I wrote a post on the first edition of MuseumNext and later had a guest post by  AliceLebredonchel reporting on her experience of  MuseumNext original and forward thinking format.

Staged at the Wellcome Collection conference center, MuseumNext 2 will explore story sharing of successful Web 2.0 campaigns thanks to an impressive line-up : Gail Durban from the V&A, Victor Samra from the MoMA,  John Stack from the Tate, Elyse Topalian from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that we had the pleasure to hear this summer at Communicating the Museum and freshly announced Jan Willem Sieburgh from the Rijksmuseum to talk about Iphone apps devices. Museumnext will also greet Diane Drubay from France, which we are very happy about as it seems that our country is going international in this field.

To attend, all the information is on Museum Next website. Don’t forget to visit it, as well as the blog and Twitter thread.

See you there!

Being a French Webmaster - and Making it Happen- A Crossed Interview

Hello everyone! After a long time of technical difficulties of all sorts, I am more than glad to announce that Museum Strategy is alive and running! It was a long-time wish to be able to give our readers a taste of how it is about working online for a French museum. You would think that to get there we had to go interview the staff of the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay or the Centre Pompidou. Well whatever your expectations were if you had some, you probably did not think two of the most active webmasters in France are to be found in the beautiful and thriving southern city of Toulouse. Samuel Bausson - The Museum de Toulouse, second biggest natural history museum in France - and Alain Romang, - Les Abattoirs, a leading contemporary art museum - are some of  the people you want to talk to to get valuable insights. Discover their impressions on being proactive in the French museum world, committing oneself to a public institution and dealing with your private/public persona online. French version available very soon!

1. Where are you from initially and how did you come to be museum webmasters? 

 Samuel: I am originally from Brittany and came to Toulouse to take part in the grand reopening of the Museum de Toulouse. The museum had been fully refurbished and its direction entirely rethought, putting the focus on visitor experience. The museum’s approach was fresh and new, implementing a non-centralised managing pattern and expressing the desire to give audiences a more proactive role, which in turn was very much in tune with  how one works online. This was an opportunity that allowed me to continue working as a cultural editorial  webmaster as well as to get back in touch with a line of work that really matters to me : I majored in  Cultural Anthropology -Grinnell College- where I originally studied ethnology.

Alain: I have lived in Toulouse for fifteen years and thanks to les Abattoirs I have had the opportunity to put my technical skills in website management and DTP into practice, as well as new technologies and contemporary art, at the service of a wider audience.

2. You work for two regional institutions that do not rank among the most important French museums. However, you remain as a major presence on the web. How can you explain this?

Alain: Both our institutions recognised, from a pretty early stage, the importance of exploiting online social networks as they have proved to be very time-effective in circulating information and creating interactivity with audiences. Given that larger museums do not tend to venture into these unchartered waters, our own initiatives naturally draw attention in the same way that some Anglo-Saxon institutions do.

Samuel: I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about us, except that perhaps we were able to migrate and articulate the museum’s offers to differents platforms and online services quite early on. When major French museums decide to invest in a real presence and strategy online, they will no doubt take over with their wider-reaching influence. It also has to be said that in comparison to the larger Anglo-Saxon museums -The MoMa, the Brooklyn Museum or the Tate-, our presence online remains relatively insignificant. Those museums lead the way and I'm very impressed by their online offers.

Alain: We are also in the habit of thinking globally, keeping an open mind and constantly looking to build closer ties between the museum’s website, blog and social networks. This has probably had a lot to do with our relatively significant online influence.

3. What are some of the common difficulties that you have to deal with on a daily basis?  How do you feel about your role within the museum?

Alain: The museum places a lot of trust in me and so I have a lot of freedom. I need to take great care in my daily organisation as I am also in charge of printed communication media - leaflets, banners and so on.

Samuel: It’s certainly true that we have a lot of freedom and I appreciate the fact that the museum trusts us. This being said, I don’t think that we are integrated enough into the structure of the institution. Being cut off from the rest of the staff is pretty normal for a lot of webmasters, who tend to end up doing their own onlin e strategy rather than that of the museum.

 

Over time I have met with other museum staff who were willing to work with me and I was able to translate many of their job experiences online, such as the records department on Netvibes and Twitter and the museum’s conferences on Facebook.

 

I think that it is important to add that I’m not working alone: Maud Dahlem, a sciences mediator at the museums, works with me and is in charge of the contents. This has enabled us to delve into a lot of other areas, especially FlickR.

 

The museum’s organisation is currently in the process of being completely restructured and this will change the way in which we work. For the moment, the plan is to work closely with the department dealing with audiences which is a rather positive step, in view of the work we have accomplished so far. Ideally, I would like to form a real team of people committed online. 

5. You both have Twitter accounts. What are they about and what do they say about you? Do you run them alongside your Museums' Twitter accounts? Do you think more generally that you have to devote your entire self online when you’re a webmaster?

Alain : @alainromang, I take information that might potentially regard my job as a webmaster and circulate it. Twitter has proved to be a very useful daily tool to both monitor and share information. Thanks to ‘direct messages’ I can also send and receive message through another account other than just my job email address. Last but not least, @alainromang allows me to focus on and clarify any details or requests originally coming from the official museum’s Twitter @lesabattoirs so as to avoid disrupting its coherence.  

Samuel : On @samuelbausson, I tweet almost exclusively on museums and the web. I do a considerable amount of monitoring and find the platform quite a pleasant way to get to know people and engage in conversations with them.  On the museums account, I tweet about the life of the museums and more generally, I take part in the museum ‘conversations’. Elodie Guiraud, who works as an archivist, is my ‘ally’ on the board: she enriches the museum’s threads with a daily scientific monitoring. Sometimes our paths cross but not too often fortunately.

I personally think that you should never devote yourself one hundred percent to an online persona. I use my real name because it is far simpler for professional contacts to find me if needed though I think that it’s understandable to have different pseudonyms online. The frontiers between professional and private life are becoming more and more blurred, as they are inscribed in a conversation flux and so it’s difficult to completely separate things, places and time. Perhaps, my point is best exemplified by the fact that I am answering your questions on a Saturday afternoon!

Alain : That is a tricky question and I don’t really have a proper answer. One part of the solution lies in creating an online identity which is halfway between your work-self and your private persona. This way, you can really give as much of yourself as you want online, with due protection. However, the question of what one can and cannot say remains a burning issue, especially when one works for a public service. In some cases, this seems quite incompatible with personalising your interactions online. 

6. In terms of the museum’s image, what real changes have you brought about through your work? Did your work create bonds between the two institutions?

Samuel: I really have trouble perceiving the museum’s image from an outsider’s perspective and I am well aware that the internet users who follow us closely form a very minor part of the museum’s audience. I have bonded with fellow webmasters and people in charge of media in museums but at the institutional level these relationships prove harder to establish, as institutions are rarely able to concretise bonds made online. Despite very tough conditions, the institution’s online presence as I know it owes its success to the small few who are willing to work on it.

Alain: I have had a lot of positive feedback but I agree that it’s hard to measure the real impact of our work on the web without resorting say, to an in-depth survey of a large population sample. But we can safely assume that these new ways of informing and interacting with people contribute to creating a positive image of the museums. As regards the bonding with the institutions, I would agree with Samuel.

7. So, what’s on the cards for the near future?

Alain: Well, we started dabbling in social networks in 2007 and 2008. Ideally, we would like to take the work that we’ve already started and make it durable, before moving on to the refurbishing of the new website and the circulation of information through mobile phone devices. We need to attract a greater audience in our communities and improve the quality of our interactions with them, drawing inspiration from the Museum on Flickr. We will continue to closely monitor what we are doing because in this relatively new arena, you never know where the work is going to take you. The constant evolution in this field of work means that we need to think of new approaches all the time.

 

Samuel: As far as we -the museum- are concerned, our main goal is to continue strengthening the museum’s online community. I am also working hard on a project for mobile phone apps that for accompanying museum visits. But it’s still early days….

Interview by Claire Solery

 

Guest post no. 2 , Alice Lebredonchel, My Museum Next Review

As you may have noticed, I was finally not at the Museum Next conference last 22 -23 October, but present and thus giving us the opportunity of a second guest post was Alice Lebredonchel, French consultant in cultural communication and owner of Innovart, a blog specialising in innovations in culture, particularly dedicated to the theme of growing audiences through marketing. She provided us with a full account of her experience at Museum Next that you can only read with profit. The layout slightly differ, so you can find the original post at Innovart.

"Back from Newcastle, here is my report on Museum Next, a conference for worldwide museum professionals based on a great interaction between its participants through workshops, “unconference” sessions  and other debates, that is to say two intense days of sharing, exchanging and brainstorming among the participants. Approximately 70 professionals of the museum world were there among whom artists, curators, institutions directors, members of  education departments or consultants, an eclectic mix to think together about tools and strategies for involving audiences in museums in order to make them more lively and interactive.

This event was held at the Great North Museum  for the first day and at the Center for Life  for the second day

 

 Day One :

For the first moments of exchange between participants of Museum Next we went to a space specifically aimed for the young audiences of the museum imagined by the collective [re] design   , a sustainable exhibition designer group. Each participant was asked to test the scenery in groups,  from the design of a monster with a sock or a sculpture with paper cups.

 

  After these first moments of chatting and “creative stimulation”, we got to work with a presentation of every "wild ideas"  submitted by some participants

 Once these presentations were made, work could begin and groups were formed  each treating on one of the 6 “wild ideas”

Day two :

The second day began with a fascinating presentation by Nina Simon (slides available here ). The content of her inspiring remarks , relevant examples that she has contributed to, and the conceptualisation of ideas she presented - and the quality of the layout of her power point presentation:)-  have been, I think, an inspiration for all participants until the end of the conference.

Then followed 8 “unconferences” submitted by participants during the previous evening, two sessions of approximately 45 minutes held on topics as diverse as:

- How can we measure success?
- How to manage  visitors who came because they had to?
- How can social interactions be facilitated by digital devices in museums and so on and so forth

Then we got back to our  “wild ideas”.

During  lunch break I had the chance to visit the exhibition “Democracy” with some attendees accompanied by its designer Jim Richardson. This exhibition aims at being  as democratic as possible, with works chosen through a voting system which is continuously updated. You can visit the website of this incredible exhibition here  or listen to Jim himself :

 

 

Back to the Center for Life, we had the opportunity to finalise our proposals before presenting them to the rest of the participants.

All the videos are available here.Congratulations to Jim Richardson and Nina Simon for giving us the opportunity to think and create together and to leave Newcastle with our head full of ideas!"