Has anyone answered Frankie's original question yet? An 'elevator pitch' for
Creative Spaces would be useful for continued discussions.
On 09/03/2009 14:53, "Matthew Cock" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'd advise you all also to read Bridget Mackenzie's blog entry on
> Creative Spaces as well. http://bridgetmckenzie.blogspot.com/
> She makes some good points about the fact that the project costs were
> not limited to Creative Spaces at all, but Webquests, which did involve
> a lot of content development. Bridget also makes some interesting points
> about the relationship between the two sites.
>
> Matthew
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Jon Pratty
> Sent: 06 March 2009 01:04
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re 'Creative Spaces' - reposted
>
> [An MCG person asked me to repost this in full, to keep things on the
> list, rather than off list on blogs...fair enough.]
>
> I think this has been one of the best ideas threads we've had for a long
> time. Yes, it's been passionate, and that does indeed get people
> thinking, and firing up laptops in reply.
>
> I think voices who advocated tact in the exchange (Nick Poole, myself
> via Twitter, and others) did so because we're already engaged in working
> with museum people all over the regions, not always in the most
> glamorous places; we're all working for peanuts, doing about ten million
> things at once, including managing that puzzling interface between
> museum directors and the onward march of digital technology...and so,
> not surprisingly, people are sensitive about projects they put lots of
> time into.
>
> To me, that's one of the reasons there needs to be some tact in the way
> we review each other's projects; if you'd been behind the scenes of
> projects like NMOLP you'll have seen the sort of passion it arouses. I
> saw people (like Terry and Carolyn, and the teams of writers like Rachel
> and Rowena L) working like absolute stink to get the project done, and
> ploughing through all sorts of effluent to manage relationships across
> and through the project. Those who stuck the course deserve medals.
>
> I think the emotionality was also caused by the big fees funding the
> project - big ticket jobs like this cause a certain amount of envy, and
> that too, leads to comment that doesn't always please. One gets a
> picture sometimes of vast (National museum) battleships manoevring
> around a smallish patch of sea, each one guarding it's own flanks,
> carefully manning the bulwarks, in case a stray shell cuts the rigging,
> or someone jumps ship.
>
> Best things coming out of the Creative Spaces debate for me?
>
> A) The emerging discussion about 'the plumbing' (nice metaphor from Paul
> Walk) being the first job to tackle when working on these complex
> cross-collection projects. Yep. Of course the data scheme underneath is
> critical. The website (if there needs to be one!) should be sat on top
> of the database well down the line of projects like this. Sorting out
> how you get the data, on what (copyright) terms it's given, and how the
> data is related and relational is the first key task.
>
> B) Another plus has been the thread (from Frankie, Mike Ellis, Kate
> Fernie and others) about how social nets work in reality, and why you
> might want, or not want, to play for a while, culturally. This stuff
> needs to be explored more. Already one or two culture orgs have made
> abortive attempts at trying to get things going, and they mostly failed
> 'cause they didn't spot that sites get massive visits when they get the
> bigger publishing picture about mass audiences, massive budgets and
> massive human resources and tech support. That insight mainly comes from
> expertise that's mostly, at the moment, outside the museum sector.
>
> C) We're starting to get the idea too, that the cool culture venture we
> dream about here might not be a big project, but smaller-scale,
> evolutionary, more experimental, more informal. There aren't any more
> big pots of money (like ISB) now for this kind of work. We've got to be
> coming up with sustainable and scaleable ideas, so some wisdom about the
> scope and depth of project concepts needs to be found when ideas are
> still at the back of an envelope stage.
>
> My interests in this?
>
> I've long evangelised (and written about, in 2005) 'the inside out web
> museum.' At my former workplace, my enthusiasm for a more 'datacentric'
>
> publishing offer drove quite a bit of our re-design thinking, though the
> final realisation of those ideas is still in the pipeline. But look
> outwards at recent tech trends and think about how near we are to some
> sort of breakthrough. We're wrong to expect a 'killer app,' but
> continuous development and playful experimentation like the (Mike Ellis)
> Mashed Museum sessions at UKMW08 will get us nearer to some sort of
> nirvana.
>
> Where to go now, post-Creative Spaces? We ALL need and deserve (as a
> sector, everywhere) access to data channels that come to us, and do the
> necessary spidering and data mining to make the most of all the content
> we might choose to expose and share. And, importantly, let it be live
> data exchange, not a day old, or a week old, or some such OAI-harvested
> old hat.
> The next culture web must be live; after all we have come to expect that
> through our day-to-day fun with Twitter and FB.
>
> To get live, we need APIs; they are, of course, the way forward as
> Richard Light, Mia and Mike Ellis all say. API's need standards, and the
> Collections Trust work with DACS and towards new BSI data standards is
> excellent.
>
> Sharing freely and offering culture content to others for their own use
> opens doors to commerce and business models, so some movement there gets
> us towards a more commercially-geared culture web.
>
> And finally? The success of #hashtags on Twitter (check
> #fakeanimalfacts) proves people can come up with vocabs and impromptu
> syntax that bind humour, culture, conferences and news together using
> simple XML. My research interest now is to see how we can map some
> simple #-like tagging and vocab structures (and maybe the National
> Curriculum) so we can have cultural fun without needing to build big and
> expensive portalised web projects...
>
> JP
>
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