.

Sharing interesting stories, and facilitating conversations and debates is a great way to build and develop social networks. Rather than just sharing stories from traditional sources people are more likely to follow and share your posts if they are creative and provocative. This is a list of useful sources for interesting, quirky, fun and challenging stories and digital content (videos and pictures).

.

.

Guardian Culture Professionals Network 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture-professionals-network
Lynn Gardener Blog
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog
The Stage
http://www.thestage.co.uk/
The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/
Brain Pickings
http://www.brainpickings.org/
Letters of Note
http://www.lettersofnote.com/
Ideas Tap
http://www.ideastap.com/
Punchdrunk
http://punchdrunk.com/
Hide and Seek
http://www.hideandseek.net/
Explore
http://exp.lore.com/
PFSK
http://www.psfk.com/
Cultural Learning Alliance
http://www.culturallearningalliance.org.uk/
Arts Professional
http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/
We are What We Do
http://wearewhatwedo.org/
The Great Discontent
http://thegreatdiscontent.com/

>>>>>>>

Do you have any suggestions to add to this list? Comment below, or tweet me @OonaghTweets

<<<<<<<

In March Blick Studios asked me to run their successful annual Creative Camp. In previous years Creative Camp has taken an unconference format – this year we decided to have 3 creative industry lunches. Styled on conversation dinners, good food, lovely people and interesting speakers were key to making this event a success.

Copyright Simon Mills

Copyright Simon Mills

Event Blurb: “Blick Studios would like to invite you round for lunch. Not just any lunch, but one of four themed creative industries lunches. Good food, nice people, and an opportunity to meet others working in your field. We have styled these events on conversation dinners, so sign up, come round, find your name card at the table and get chatting to other creative professionals. After lunch listen to one of our invited speakers as they share their work and then if you like, take the opportunity to share your work with the group. So whether fashion, design, games or film are your thing we’ve got the perfect programme for you”.

These events were designed to be intimate with a capacity of 20 people at each lunch, attendees got a chance to chat with speakers, grab a cup of tea, eat some cake, and make new connections in a friendly atmosphere. Small events like this are a really good way to encourage even the quietest people to get involved in the conversation and exchange ideas. The feedback we received after the events was great, and I look forward to hosting similar events in the future.

Our Fashion Lunch was hosted by Taggled TV – a really exciting local tech start up who have developed a platform that supports video bloggers by allowing them to earn profits from click through sales driven by their posts.

Our Design Lunch was hosted by Get Invited – a local tech start up which provides a platform for event managers to quickly publish and manage event sales, designed to be quicker and simpler to use than eventbrite it is also the ticketing platform I used for the Creative Camp Lunches. Alongside a great platform – Get Invited comes with some really stellar customer support!

Our Film Lunch was hosted by Aislinn Clarke and Lisa Keogh two mid career film makers working in Belfast but increasingly attracting international attention.

John Shevlin #Museumnextsketch

I’m just back from Museum Next in Amsterdam, it was a really really good conference – coming less than a month after Museums and the Web I was slightly worried there might be a lot of overlapping presentations and ideas, but I was pleasantly surprised at how both conferences complemented each other. This blog post is a quick run down of interesting ideas and conversations that have stuck with me:

1. Be of and for the internet

I really like the work of N8, they are a marketing and audience development style agency that work with museums across Amsterdam . They have an interesting organisational model, all the staff are in their 20’s, and can work at the organisation for a maximum of 3 years. This ensures that they remain relevant to the people they are trying to engage. One of their key events is running Amsterdam’s Museum Night – this event is a key fundraiser for the work that N8 does throughout the year.

What really stood out for me was that N8 are both ‘of and for’ the internet. They not only created digital content, digital content and digital culture shaped what they program. They aren’t people who have studied ‘digital culture’ instead they live their lives online – they are part of digital culture. In their presentation they discussed how the Rijks Museum had opened to bikes for the first time in years the night before the conference – this was really exciting for them and Sarah Berckencamp made a video of her and her friends cycling through it for the first time. The video was shot on her phone after a few beers in the Van Gogh Museum, the production quality is pretty bad and she is screaming the whole way through it – but the immediacy of the video and the experience is what makes it valuable. It really takes someone that is ‘of and for the internet’ to see the value of showing a video with such low production value to a few 100 museum geeks. I loved it!

2. Adapt and Adopt existing models i.e. residencies

N8 talked about digital culture and bringing different voices into museums. One example they showed was a break dancer taking a tour of the Rijksmuseum and chatting about the collection in his own words (which, shock horror included swearing), and ended with him break dancing in the museum. Can we have more rappers and break dancers in residence, please? The idea of wikipedians in residence is still quite a revolutionary one for most museums – but lets face it, wikipedians in residence are not cool. Sorry, I know that might sound harsh. I do recognize the value of wikipedians in residence, but I think there is a lot of potential to utilize the long established ‘xx in residence model’ to engage with young visitors in more exciting and dynamic ways.

GIF maker in residence

YouTuber in residence

Geeks in residence – something Culture Sync have already done very successfully

you might get something as wonderful as this video which features 211 works from the Rijksmuseum collection

Javier Celaya suggested that museums should ‘host start up companies’ and talked about the potential to develop mutually beneficial relationships. Javier advocated hosting start ups that were working on areas that could provide museums with solutions to the problems that they are facing. I was interested in the idea of hosting start ups, but for me greater success would come by hosting start ups through a ‘residency model’ for example providing them with space for a couple of months and asking them to host a few training sessions for staff and or visitors. The residency model would be easier and quicker to implement – going down a partnership route, or hosting a start for a year or more would lead to difficult conversations around intellectual property and would be much more difficult to get up and running.

Museums have the potential to catalyst innovation and support the development of creative companies. It doesn’t have to be complicated, the residency model is pervasive and prolific because it works.

3. People not Technology lead

The most interesting talks for me were the talks about people not technology. There was a noticeable move towards ‘digitally mediated solutions’ at Museum Next this year, and a move away from shiny digital projects that had no lasting impact. Science gallery, Dublin and Dallas Museum of Art both exemplified this with a strong ethos of ‘visitors add value’.

Science Gallery *needs* visitors to make it’s exhibitions work the gallery has for example collected blood, sweat and stories through experiments as part of themed exhibitions – the data from these experiments have provided the grounding for key academic articles. Indeed rather than seeing participation as an end point, Science Gallery places participation at the core of its design process. They showed a really interesting process map that placed visitor engagement at the centre of their design process – I wanted to include a copy of it here, but I’m told it’s a work in progress – but I look forward to discussing it further when they do publish it.

DMA recently abolished admission charges and instead invited visitors to become a ‘friend’ for free. The logic behind this move is that Visitors add value. I actually didn’t attend this talk as I had heard Rob Stein speak in Portland a few weeks ago – this paper explains more about DMA friends within the context of business model alignment. I managed to have a brief but very insightful chat with Rob at Museum Next about how digital projects impact museum operations, in essence if the aim of your digital project is to increase the number of visitors to your museum then you have then you need to work closely with your Front of House department. It might seem basic, but actually its really important to ensure the success of your project – but also, and perhaps more importantly dreaming up digital projects that impact upon your business model provides digital departments with the opportunity to break out of their ‘digital silos’ and demonstrate the value of what they do across the museum.

5. Use what is already available

There was a lot of love for Google at Museum Next. From google docs to hangouts and surveys …. you get the picture. Why reinvent the wheel. If it already exists use it!

6. We won at Tumblr

Museum Next and Tumblr teamed up to run a competition to create the best ‘Tumblr’ we – myself, Mar Dixon and Claire Ross won with Immersive Serendipity

I actually really enjoyed this competition, I’m normally a wordpress kinda gal – but having a specified platform was really useful – it meant I had to learn. I’ve used Tumblr before – but learning some of the more advance settings at Museum Next was great, any time I got stuck I was surrounded by a couple of 100 geeks who could help. Through this competition I also learnt how to use another really interesting app Paper a drawing app for iPad. John Shelvin created a really beautiful Tumblr using drawings from it

I love learning something new – and having the competition run through out the conference was a lot more interesting than attending a workshop.

…………………………………………………………………………….

In the spirit of sharing I’ve posted my slides on slideshare my Museum Next presentation was based on ‘Museums and Digital Engagement: A New York Perspective‘

Museum Next was amazing, a great conference, well organised, great talks, good food, good people, good beer. Well done to all involved!

Last week I went to a really great workshop on Crowdfunding with Patrick Hussey, which was organised by Arts and Business NI. I promised @Bolster and @CilarisMedia that I would blog my notes – so here goes:

Crowdfunding isn’t new: Back in the day it was called public subscription – and it paid for most of the older statues in our city centres, and to set up Trusts and Foundations, like the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

There are lots of different platforms, Kickstarter is the most well known, indiegogo is also popular (one that Patrick didn’t mention but might be useful to people in Northern Ireland is Fund: It. which is an Ireland wide platform run by the Southern equivalent of Arts and Business)

Each of these platforms has different terms and conditions. Each takes a different cut of the money raised. On some you only get money if your project is fully funded, others let you pay the platform a higher percentage to keep the money raised even if your project isn’t fully funded.

One of the things I really took away from this workshop is that people don’t care about the in’s and out’s of a project – they want to make an emotional attachment to it. As Patrick put it think of Crowdfunding as ‘Charity uncoupled with tradegy’

…. a note: Crowdfunding isn’t easy. Half of projects fail. So you have to compel people to act. To fall in love with your project. How?

Cats!

Yes cats – the internet loves cats, cats are viral, people share them. Before you start a crowdfunding campaign you need to build your social network – otherwise no one will know you exist and no one will fund your project. Creating interesting visual content is a great way to build your social network, don’t be boring, be funny, and when you don’t have time to be funny, be interesting, share stories about other organisations. Don’t just talk about yourself!

Once you’ve built your social network, your ready to launch your crowdfunding campaign. If you have a self righteous campaign that would look good on an Arts Council application form, its probably not going to do well on the internet. People want videos, and funny images and internet memes that they can share with friends. How can a small, poor arts organisation afford cats and videos and shiny internet content that will make people fall in love with their campaign? Students! Is the answer Patrick provided – he showed us a number of brilliant campaign videos from cartoon to stop motion on Kickstarter and explained that these did not require fancy equipment only a bit of imagination and some media production skills. Something students on digital and interactive courses have lots of.

Go and watch videos, see what gets funded and the stories behind these projects.

Be funny and clever – orchestrate your content. Indie GoGO has an algorithm called the GoGO factor – this basically picks up on any projects that are getting lots of attention. Exploit this! When you are about to launch a project get everyone to tweet, and post about it on Facebook at the exact same time say 12:01, send an email get everyone you know to do it. If you can set off GoGo factor then there is a good chance they will pick you up on your blog or tweet about your project – which means you have a much higher chance of succeeding.  Don’t forget print media, get the Newspapers talking about your project that will also drive traffic to you campaign.

So in conclusion be cool, be popular – and put some spin on it. People won’t fund you to go and look for dinosaur fossils for an academic research project – but they will fund a ‘Dinosaur Hunt’

Hopefully I haven’t done Patrick to much of an injustice in this blog post, it really was a great session, I know I learned a lot from attending and this blog post is really just a very short summary of the bits that sparked my attention.

On a side not – if your interested in creating a compelling ‘call to action’ the thing that makes people fund your project right there and then, rather than coming back later this is a great talk:

http://vimeo.com/27056169