What are the hidden costs when you attend an event?

I think quite hard about how to make Museums Computer Groups events as inclusive as possible, from the diversity of the speakers on stage, to setting dates and times as early as possible to allow cheaper pre-booked travel, to keeping event costs down and more, but there's always more to learn.

I've been thinking about the 'shadow' or hidden costs accrued when people attend events. For me, it's the cost of getting to London (up to £50 if it's at short notice) and the time it takes (up to 3 hours each way if I'm unlucky). For others, accessibility requirements add to the cost of events, whether that's sign language translators, taxis to accessible train stations, or someone else's time as an aide. For parents or people with other caring responsibilities, childcare costs may add to the expense of attending an event. This in turn affects our ability to put together a broad range of speakers for an event. So -

Hello parents in the UK! I'm thinking about hidden costs for speakers turning up to an event. How much does a day's childcare cost you?
— Mia (@mia_out) June 15, 2014

I'm asking parents in the UK for a rough estimate of childcare costs for a day. You can share yours by tweeting @mia_out or share anonymously via this form if 140 characters won't allow you to mention things like your location, number and age of kids: What are the hidden costs when you attend an event?* The second question on the form is more general, so if your costs have nothing to do with parenting, go for it! I'll share the answers so that other event organisers have a sense of the costs too.

Here are some responses to get you started - with thanks to those who've already shared their costs:

@otfrom @mia_out @JeniT £12 / hr for 2. A full day is usually 100 plus. Quite difficult to justify often esp w/ travel.
— Yodit Stanton (@yoditstanton) June 15, 2014

about £40 a day in the West Midlands.
— Andrew Fray (@tenpn) June 15, 2014

@mia_out childcare is £3/hr for a 5 year old. Was 330/mth as a child for 5 hrs a day.
— Mick Brennan (@lightzenton) June 15, 2014

We're a volunteer Committee rather than professional events organisers, and there's a humbling amount to learn from people out there. What hidden costs have I missed? Are there factors apart from cost that we should consider? We've got a Call for Papers for November 7's UKMW14: Museums Beyond the Web open at the moment (until June 30, 2014) - is there any language on that CfP or our Guidance for Speakers we should look at?

Update - more responses below.

@mia_out assuming you can actually find a reliable (qualified?) babysitter for a whole day or two, then min. wage c£6 per hour at very least
— Internet Archaeology (@IntarchEditor) June 15, 2014

@mia_out nursery (under 5s) costs might be between £30-50 per day but of course they won't do weekends
— Internet Archaeology (@IntarchEditor) June 15, 2014

@mia_out day would cost us £90 or so, but not always poss; last conf my wife presented at I took leave and came along to look after babies.
— Jakob Whitfield (@thrustvector) June 15, 2014

@mia_out @otfrom Nurseries in East Dulwich vary, but since they're all oversubscribed 1500/month isn't outrageous.
— JulianBirch (@JulianBirch) June 15, 2014

@mia_out That's 8-6 including meals. Costs typically go down after age 2.But plenty of people can't find childcare at all and give up work.
— JulianBirch (@JulianBirch) June 15, 2014

@mia_out About £50 a day. We’re lucky in that our nursery will usually have space if we need an extra day.
— suzicatherine (@suzicatherine) June 15, 2014

The daily childcare costs (£40 pc,pd) are usually factored into a working day @mia_out The early drop off and/or late pick up can be tricky!
— Kathryn Eccles (@KathrynEccles) June 15, 2014

I'd been thinking of single-day events and the impact on speaker availability, but I was reminded of the impact of childcare and other responsibilities for people wanting to attend residential programmes or longer events (or day events that require an overnight stay to fit the travel in). For example:

@mia_out can't bring pets to conf., and dog walkers are not cheap #hiddencost
— Scott (@moltude) June 16, 2014

The ability to attend residential events for career or research fellowships is obviously going to have an impact on the types of people we see in leadership positions in later years, so thinking about things like childcare (which might be as simple as providing space for someone who already helps look after the family) now would make a positive difference later. On the positive side, many fellowships provide honorariums, which could help cover the hidden costs many of you have shared with me.

* I'm experimenting with typeform but already I'm concerned that their forms don't seem accessible - how are they for you?

Lighting beacons: research software engineers event and related topics

I've realised that it could be useful to share my reading at the intersection of research software engineers/cultural heritage technologist/digital humanities, so at the end I've posted some links to current discussions or useful reference points and work to provide pointers to interesting work.

But first;  notes from last week's workshop for research software engineers, an event for people who 'not only develop the software, they also understand the research that it makes possible'. The organisers did a great job with the structure (and provided clear instructions on running a breakout session) - each unconference-style session had to appoint a scribe and report back to a plenary session as well as posting their notes to the group's discussion list so there's an instant archive of the event.

Discussions included:

• How do you manage quality and standards in training - how do you make sure people are doing their work properly, and what are the core competencies and practices of an RSE?
• How should the research community recognise the work of RSEs?
• Sharing Research Software
• Routes into research software development - why did you choose to be an RSE?
• Do we need a RSE community?
• and the closing report from the Steering Committee and group discussion on what an RSE community might be or do.

I ended up in the 'How should the research community recognise the work of RSES?' session. I like the definition we came up with: 'research software engineers span the role of researchers and software engineers. They have the domain knowledge of researchers and the development skills to be able to represent this knowledge in code'. On the other hand, if you only work as directed, you're not an RSE. This isn't about whether you make stuff, it's about how much you're shaping what you're making. The discussion also teased out different definitions of 'recognition' and how they related to people's goals and personal interests; the impact of 'short-termism' and project funding on stable careers, software quality, training and knowledge sharing. Should people cite the software they use in their research in the methods section of any publications? How do you work out and acknowledge someone's contribution to on-going or collaborative projects - and how do you account for double-domain expertise when recognising contributions made in code?

I'd written about the event before I went (in Beyond code monkeys: recognising technologists' intellectual contributions, which relates it to digital humanities and cultural heritage work) but until I was there I hadn't realised the extra challenges RSEs in science face - unlike museum technologists, science RSEs are deeply embedded in a huge variety of disciplines and can't easily swap between them.

The event was a great chance to meet people facing similar issues in their work and careers, and showed how incredibly useful the right label can be for building a community. If you work with science+software in the UK and want to help work out what a research software engineer community might be, join in the RSE discussion.

If you're reading this post, you might also be interested in:

• Paul Walk's 2011 posts on The Strategic Developer: How Local Developers Can Make A Difference and The Value of Local Developers raised many of the issues discussed at the RSE event and the DevCSI ('Developer Community Supporting Innovation') initiative. There's also a Developer Contact Google Group.
• On Ant-Lions and Scholar-Programmers by Doug Reside - the emphasis is on scholars rather than programmers and it's also interesting for the differences between academia in the US and UK (though it doesn't directly address them)
• Alan Liu's "Why I'm In It" x 2 – Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism and Stephen Ramsey's 'Why I'm In It' - if you haven't been keeping up with the digital humanities, dive into the deep end here.
• Michael Widner's Towards a Front Page for the Digital Humanities #dhthis, because it's one of many posts discussing DHThis and because I forget that not everyone lives and breaths this: 'software is a form of writing/making with its own assumptions and affordances, we have a responsibility to critique the software'

In ye olden days, beacon fires were lit on hills to send signals between distant locations. These days we have blogs.

'Engaging Visitors Through Play' - the Museums Computer Group in Belfast

Last week I was in Belfast for the Museum Computer Group's Spring event, 'Engaging Visitors Through Play', fabulously organised by Alan Hook (Lecturer, University of Ulster) and Oonagh Murphy (MCG Committee member and PhD Researcher, University of Ulster) with support from the MCG Committee, and hosted by the University of Ulster's Centre for Media Research.

Like other recent MCG event reports, I'm also writing as the Chair of the group, so you may think I'm biased when I say it was an excellent day with great speakers, but if I am at all biased, I promise it's only a tiny bit! I've posted my talk notes at 'Digital challenges, digital opportunities' at MCGPlay, Belfast.

The MCG's Spring Meeting is an opportunity to take a wider theme than our annual Museums on the Web conference (which as the name suggests, is generally about things that touch on museums on the web). This year's topic was 'Engaging Visitors Through Play', with presentations on playful experiences from site-specific theatre, rapid prototyping and hack days, big budget and experimental games. The event was an opportunity to bring museum staff and researchers together with game and interaction designers, and the 'regional showcase' of lightning talks about projects from local practitioners further helped introduce people to the great work already going on in Northern Ireland and hopefully start some local collaborations. As Alan pointed out in his introduction, it was also a chance to think about the impact of research and start conversations between museums and academia.

The first session after my talk was 'Play: A Northern Ireland Showcase' and began with Lyndsey Jackson (@LyndseyJJackson) of Kabosh talking about 'Immersive Theatre and Digital Experience' and their site-specific theatre company. Their material is the buildings, people and stories of Northern Ireland and they work with unusual spaces - anywhere but a theatre. They're dealing with two interesting constraints – the stories of buildings might be complicated, contested or difficult, and while they want to give audiences the chance to navigate an experience for themselves, they're aware that 'theatre is a game - it has rules, boundaries, you can bend them but it confuses people when you break them'. In a lovely departure from some museum experiences, they don't try to give their audiences all the answers – sometimes they want to give people some information in a way that starts them asking questions so they have to look things up themselves if they want to know more. I wish I'd had longer in Belfast to see one of their shows or try 'Belfast Bred'.

Oonagh (@oonaghtweets) presented some results from her audit of the online presences of museums in Northern Ireland and the question she set out to test: that professional development hack days can help the sector. Find out more at her MW2013 paper on 'This is Our Playground'; but one fascinating snippet was that museum studies students are quite conservative, 'museums have rules for a reason', and take a while to warm to the concept of prototyping. Alan (@alan_hook) talked about MYNI photo competition, asking 'is Northern Ireland ready for play in these spaces?', games that work with 'civic pride', the realities of designing mobile experiences around 3G coverage and expensive data plans, and shared some reflections on the process, including his questions about the ethics of crowdsourcing images and the differences between academic and industry timelines.

 The next session was 'Games: Best Practice and Innovative Approaches'. First up, Sharna Jackson (@sharnajackson), czar of Tate Kids, presented on the past, present and future of play at Tate. She pointed out that games can bring in hard-to-reach audiences, can be a gateway to engagement with deeper content, and can be a work of art in themselves. I loved her stance on web vs device-specific apps – while tablets are increasingly popular, their aim is to reach wide audiences so jumping into apps might not be right choice for limited budgets. Her lessons included: know your audience, what they expect; start playing games so you know what mechanics you like so you've got context for decisions and so you get what's great about games; your mission, content and goals all influence what kinds of games it makes sense for you to make; if planning to let users generate content, you need a strategy to manage it. Be clear about what games are - respect the medium.

Danny Birchall (@dannybirchall) of the Wellcome Collection talked about 'Truth and Fact: Museums and Public Engagement, including the High Tea evaluation's findings that 'piracy is the most effective form of distribution' so designing games to be ripped or seeded on portals can help achieve wider goals. He also talked about the differences between history and science games, as well as some of the unique hazards of working in museums with large, closely related collections - one memory game was 'punishing you with intense sense of similarity of items in Henry Wellcome's collection'.

The final presentation in the session was Alex Moseley on the educational potential of low budget games. His talk included a tiny taster of alternative reality gameplay and discussion of some disruptive, slightly subversive elements of ARGs you could use independently. His seven step process: identify key concepts or constraints want to get across; situate them in real activities; think of a real problem or challenge; add narrative to deepen the context; create a prototype; test it with colleagues/visitors; refine, retest and release. He also raised some challenges for museums: if players suggest something good in an ARG, it could be incorporated and effect the outcome - but this might be tricky for museums to manage with limited resources.

One interesting test that emerged from the panel discussion was whether something was 'Belfast good'. As Oonagh said, 'Is this good or is it 'Belfast-good' because if it's Belfast-good, then not good enough'. Asking whether a project is 'museum good' or 'academic good' might be a useful test in the future... The session also lead to 'chocolate covered broccoli' references overtaking 'gamification' as the new buzzword bingo winner.

The lightning talks covered a range of interesting projects from local organisations, in part with the idea of helping start local conversations. Some of the projects we heard about from @takebackbelfast, @stephentshaw, @designzoo and @Lancorz were really inspiring and just plain cool.  It was also refreshing to hear outsider's perspectives on what museums do: one guy said 'people bring their own knowledge, experiences and devices to museums - why do you need big interactive installations?'.
The day finished with a twenty minute play test of Alex Moseley's 'curate-a-fact' game then we headed off to the pub for some well-deserved #drinkingaboutmuseums.

The MCG usually holds its Spring Meeting somewhere outside London, but it's a long time since we've been in Belfast - it might have been a long time coming, but Belfast did themselves proud. I was really encouraged by the excellent work going on in the region and the creativity and energy of the people and projects in the room. Huge thanks to all the participants, chairs, speakers and organisers for putting together a great day!

Thanks to the university, we were able to (mostly) live stream the talks, and had people watching at their desk in Leicester or London and even from a train in New York! We also had a live tweeter @JasonAPurdy on the @cmr_ulster account plus loads of tweeters in the audience to help capture the day. Alex has also posted his thoughts on 'Engaging Visitors Through Play' - well worth a read.

'Digital challenges, digital opportunities' at MCGPlay, Belfast

These are my rough notes for my talk on 'Digital challenges, digital opportunities' at Museum Computer Group's Spring event, 'Engaging Visitors Through Play' (or #MCGPlay). My aim was to introduce the Museums Computer Group, discuss some of the challenges museums and their staff are facing and think about how to create opportunities from those challenges. I've posted my notes about the other talks at MCGPlay at 'Engaging Visitors Through Play' - the Museums Computer Group in Belfast.

Play testing Alex's game at #MCGPlay

I started with some information about the MCG - our mission to connect, support and inspire people working with museum technology (whether technologists, curators, academics, directors or documentation staff) and how that informs the events we run and platforms like our old-school but effective mailing list, whose members who can between them answer almost any museumy question you can think of. As a practioner-led group of volunteers, the MCG can best fulfill its mission by acting as a platform, and with over 1000 members on our mailing list and hundreds of attendees at events, we can help people in the sector help and inspire each other in a mutually supportive space. We've also been involved in projects like the Semantic Web Think Tank (2006-2007), Mashed Museum hack days (2007, 2008) and LIVE!Museum (2009-2010). Apparently list discussions even inspired Culture24's Let's Get Real analytics project! In response to surveys with our members we're experimenting with more regional events, and with event formats like the 'Failure Swapshop' we trialled early this week and #drinkingaboutmuseums after the conference. (On a personal note, reviewing our history and past events was a lovely excuse to reflect on the projects and events the MCG community has been involved in and also to marvel at how young familiar faces looked at past events).

I'd reviewed the MCG list subject lines over the past few months to get a sense of the chalenges or questions that digital museum people were facing:

• Finding good web design/SEO/evaluation/etc agencies, finding good staff
• The emergence of 'head of digital' roles
• Online collections, managing digital assets; integration with Collections Management Systems and other systems
• Integrating Collections Management Systems and 3rd party platforms like WordPress
• Storytelling to engage the public
• Museum informatics: CIDOC-CRM and other linked open data topics
• 'Create once, publish everywhere' – can re-usable content really work?
• Online analytics
• Digital 3D objects – scanning, printing
• Measuring the impact of social media
• MOOCs (online courses)
• Google Cultural Institute, Google Art Project, Artsy, etc
• 3rd party tools - PayPal, Google Apps
• Mobile - apps, well-designed experiences
• Digital collections in physical exhibitions spaces
• Touch tables/large-scale interactives
• The user experience of user-generated content / co-produced exhibitions

Based on those, discussions at various meetings and reviews from other conferences, I pulled out a few themes in museum conversations:

• 'Strategically digital' - the topic of many conversations over the past few years, including MCG's Museums on the Web 2012, which was actually partly about saying that best solution for a project might not involve technology. Being 'strategically digital' offers some solutions to the organisational change issues raised by the mismatch between web speed and museum speed, and it means technology decisions should always refer back to a museum's public engagement strategy (or infrastructure plans for background ICT services).
• Mobile - your museum's website probably has over 20% mobile visitors, so if you're not thinking about the quality of their experience, you may be driving away business.
• Immersive, challenging experiences - the influence of site-specific theatre, alternative reality games and transmedia experiences, the ever-new value of storytelling...
• High-quality services integrated across the whole museum - new terms like service design and design thinking, are taking over from the old refrain of user-centred design, and going beyond it to test how the whole organisation appears to the customer – does it feel like a seamless, pleasurable (or at least not painful) experience? Museums are exploring new(ish) ways of thinking to solve old problems. As with mobile sites, you should be designing around your audiences needs, not your internal structures and complications.
• Audience participation and engagement - we'll hear about games over the day, but also think about crowdsourcing, asking the audience to help with tasks or share their knowledge with you.

And a few more challenges:

• New models of authority and expertise - museum authority is challenged not only by audiences expecting to 'curate' their own experience but also by younger staff or people who've come from other sectors and have their own ideas about digital projects.
• Constantly changing audience expectations - if you've ever seen kids smoosh their hands on a screen because they expect it to zoom in response to their touch, you'll know how hard it is to keep up with consumer technologies. Expectations about the quality of the experience and the quality of the technology are always changing based on films, consumer products and non-museum experiences.
• 'Doing more with less' (and then less again)
• Figuring out where to ask for help - it can be hard to find your way through the jargon and figure out what language to use
• Training and personal development - job swaps or mentoring might supplement traditional training

There'll always be new things to learn, and new challenges, so find supportive peers to learn with. The MCG community is one of the ways that people can learn from each other, but the museum sector is full of smart people who are generous with their time and knowledge. Run a discussion group or seminar series over lunch or in the pub, even if you have to rope in other local organisations to make it happen, join in mailing lists, find blogs to follow, look for bursaries to get to events. The international Museums and the Web past papers are an amazing resource, and Twitter hashtags can be another good place to ask for help (check out Dana Allen-Greil's 'Glossary of Museum-Related Hashtags' for US-based pointers).

I finished by saying that despite all the frustrations, it's an amazing time to work in or study the sector, so enjoy it! We shouldn't limit ourselves to engaging audiences in play when we could be engaging ourselves in play.

Notes from THATCamp Feminisms West #tcfw

I'm just back from ten days in the US where I attended two events, both closely related to digital history, feminist digital humanities and women's history (whether intellectual, science, education, etc related). I'm posting to mark the moment and to collect some links - I think I'm still digesting the many conversations and moments of insight.

THATCamp Feminisms West #tcfw

A THATCamp is a technology+humanities unconference, a format much loved in the digital humanities world. This one was conceived from a twitter conversation and organised by the wonderful Jacque Wernimont of Scripps College in Claremont, California for March 14-15. Two other THATCamp Feminisms were held simultaneously in the south and east. I was invited over to do a workshop, and thought 'data visualisation as a gateway to programming' would be useful - I prepared two exercises, one of which involved thinking about how to match visualisation types to the structure of the selected content in ManyEyes, while the other was more about learning about how code works by playing with a pre-coded (and heavily, chattily commented) working visualisation that used SIMILE's JavaScript libraries - 'view source' and save the file to your hard drive to get started. It was a good chance to talk about the issues that messy humanities data create for generic visualisation tools, the risks in the 'truthiness' of visualisations, the importance of thinking critically about algorithms and issues around primary sources and women's history, etc, with people who'd thought deeply about some of these issues and could make their own contributions to the workshop.

The day started with the #tooFEW Wikipedia editathon (storify of results), which gave everyone a chance to learn and try out something new before the THATCamp had even officially started. It was a nice way to ease into things and achieve something together before working out the THATCamp programme as a group.

Over the day and a half I went to sessions including Feminist digital pedagogy and Feminist Collaboration. After a week of further travel across the US and another conference, the sessions are blurring into one, but overall they were a great chance to think about what a feminist digital humanities might be like (see for example Transformative Digital Humanities projects or read Toward an Open Digital Humanities from an earlier THATCamp for things to move towards or be careful of), to ask questions like 'what would a feminist Digging into Data look like?', to ask 'does it matter if feminist projects are made with people who don't share their politics'? (Probably not, though academic work might be attractive to people who value work/life balance.)  What's the right mix of openness and shared authority, how collaborative can a class be, and how can we help students fail safely in the cause of experimenting (especially when using public technologies like YouTube or Twitter)? It's important to remember that, as Alex Juhasz said, feminism is about process (or praxis), doing and making things, which in turn made me realise that one reason I value teaching coding is that it gives people DIY tools to make things that suit their own research needs and styles (see 'Why learning to code isn’t as important as learning to build something' but please also read Code: Craft and Culture and the comments below it). I also loved Alex's statement that she's 'less interested in feminism that starts from danger than feminism that starts from agency' and being fearless about taking up space.

The value of meeting in person was an underlying theme of the event, and eventually a conversation about Building a DH Regional Hub, and the difficulties in collaborating between institutions and organising in-person meetings with the huge geographic coverage of the Los Angeles area lead to the invention of Mindr: 'Grindr for travelling DHers - who's nearby and what do they want to chat about?', or as @laurenfklein described it, a 'geo-aware interface to DH Answers', an app that lets you know when someone with similar scholarly interests is nearby and might be up for a chat.  I would *love* this to actually happen, and who knows, if someone is able to shepherd the enthusiasm for it, it might.

Beyond the value in the discussion, just being surrounded by people who were digitally savvy and were also aware of the effects of implicit biases and tech-as-a-meritocracy, the role of disciplinary gatekeepers, assumptions about gendered work, emotional labour and the pressure to be 'nice' as well as the peculiarities of academia was brilliant. It was also a bit intimidating at first as I don't feel hugely qualified to comment on feminist issues (it's a long time since I've been caught up on theory and 'feminism' online has probably made it sound scarier than it really is) unless conversation moved to 'women in tech' issues or I could contribute observations on my experience of academia and workplaces in the UK. Perhaps that's one reason I was encouraged by discussion about possible models of feminist scholarship and mentoring (including asking male allies for help) - I don't have to figure this out on my own. That said, as Anne Cong-Huyen said:

'At an event like this one, where we come together to address or at least share about gender and sexual equality in dh and the academy it leaves us to ask: Where does the burden of addressing that inequity fall? [...] And how about those of us who are junior faculty, adjuncts, or graduate students (like myself) who have even less power within the academy?'

Or in Amanda Phillips' words:

In this way, THATCamp Feminisms felt a bit different than other THATCamps I’ve attended. The infectious enthusiasm of DH was tempered here by the political, professional, and market realities that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

I think it's important that those realities are widely understood and shared, or some of the promise of the digital humanities will have failed to blossom. Creating space for those hard questions perhaps highlights how positive, supportive and constructive the environment at THATCamp Feminisms West was.  I don't have a witty or concise conclusion, except to say that I met a bunch of amazing women and came away encouraged and inspired, and you should definitely go to a THATCamp Feminisms if you ever get a chance. Or run one yourself and see what happens. To quote Alex Juhasz again:

To me it is was less the DH, or even the digital, that made this conversation matter, but the feminist: because we shared values, the will and capacity to be critical as well as intellectual while being supportive and trying to distribute authority and voice around the room all the while working, quick.

Other posts:

• THATCamp Feminisms West: thoughts by @EnglishNerd
• THATcamp Feminisms Day 1 and THATCamp Feminisms Day 2 by @alicen_lewis
• Now I’ll Blog It: Re #tcfw by Alex Juhasz
• Up and Running with Omeka.net - Miriam Posner's @miriamkp notes for her workshop (bonus cute dog photo and links to extra resources with info like 'When Might Omeka be the Right Choice/Not the Right Choice?' (PDF))
• #tcfw: Precarity, Solidarity, and Pressure by Anne Cong-Huyen @anitaconchita
• A short follow up to THATCamp Feminisms and TCFW: Feminism – the right to say ‘no’ in all contexts by Jacque Wernimont @profwernimont, who has also shared Feminisms and Technology, a bibliography in progress
• Building a DH Feminist Network by Amanda Phillips @NazcaTheMad

(For the clarity, my personal definition of feminism is something like 'working to create a world in which the choices available in your life aren't determined by your gender' - of course, ideally the same would be true for ethnicity, nationality or class, and they're all inter-related, and they all work to create a better life for all genders. I shouldn't have to offer a definition of feminism as 'equality of opportunity' but somehow the term has been twisted to mean all sorts of other things, so there you go.)

From Claremont I made my way back to LA, then over to DC, then Philly, catching up with or meeting various ace people before heading to Bryn Mawr for Women's History in the Digital World, but I've run out of time and space so I'll have to post about that later.

'Engaging digital audiences in museums' conference

A quick report and Storify summary from Wednesday's joint Museums Computer Group (MCG) and Digital Learning Network (DLNet) conference, 'Engaging digital audiences in museums', which was held on 11 July 2012 at the University of Manchester.  I'm the Chair of the MCG and was on the Programming Committee for this event so I make absolutely no claim to impartiality, but I thought it went really well - great speakers and workshop leaders, enthusiastic and friendly participants and a variety of formats that kept energy levels up during the day.

My notes are sketchier than usual as I was co-chairing some of the sessions and keeping an eye on the running of the event, so this is more of an impressionistic overview than a detailed report.  There are already a number of other posts out there, and we'll have the post from our official event blogger and illustrator up soon for more comprehensive accounts.

For the MCG, this event was experimental in a number of ways - in running an event with another practitioner organisation, in the venue, in running parallel workshops, buying in commercial wifi, and in devoting part of the day to an unconference - and I'm curious to know what response we get in the evaluation from the day.  (If you were there, our short feedback form is online.)

The event was designed to bring museum learning and technology staff together because we felt we were missing opportunities to benefit from each others skills and experience. I know technologists are grappling with measuring impact, and learning people with reaching new audiences in different ways - hopefully each group would have something to offer and something to learn, though it might mean seeing past each others jargon and understanding different views of the world. (This 'Interloper Report' and comments from MW2012 provide some insight into the potential.) We planned the day as a mixture of inspiring talks and opportunities to get stuck into conversation about topical issues. It was also a day for making connections so we'd included coffee breaks, lunch and the unconference so that people could find others interested in similar things or to put faces to names from the MCG and DLNet lists and social media.
The various tweets I've added to storify do a reasonable job of covering the day, but I've left out things like the QR code discussion. Other conversations about generic learning outcomes have taken on a life of their own - for example, Rhiannon's post 'Generic Learning Outcomes - friend or foe?' seeks to understand why non-learning people don't seem to like them.

I thought Nick Winterbotham's presentation of the Group for Education in Museums (GEM) 'self-evident truths' was interesting, and some of his points were picked up and retweeted widely:

• Our heritage is not about things it is about people
• Everyone has a right to know about and be at ease with heritage
• Heritage embraces the past and present of all cultures
• Heritage is essential as the cradle of everyone's tomorrow
• Heritage encompasses all literature, science, technology, environments and arts
• The multiple narratives of heritage deserve respect
• Learning is an entitled journey, not a destination
• Heritage learning is an entitlement for everyone
• The development of heritage learning skills must be a perpetual excellence
• Learning is not simply a justification for cultural spending, it is THE justification for cultural spending

Nick advocated for a world where no-one hesitates at taking a risk in learning, and said that we love art, digital culture because of how we feel about it, not what we know about it. He urged us to focus on how your audiences live, learn and love your subject matter; to acknowledge the intellectual generosity needed; and find the big idea that will transform your organisation.

Matthew Cock talked about the challenges of audiences, particularly around mobile. The three-pronged model for audiences in museums: attract -> engage -> impact.  He asked, when you see someone in a museum with a phone, what space are they in? Are they engaged, distracted, focused? Is it a sign of disrespect and disengagement or a sign of bonding with the group they're with? And how do you know?

He talked about the work Morris Hargreaves McIntyre had done to understand their audiences and their varying motivations for visiting: social - museums as enjoyable place to spend time with friends and family; intellectual - interested in knowledge; emotional - experience what the past was like; spiritual - creative stimulation, quiet contemplation, etc.  (See also MHM's Culture Segments report). How does this connect to using mobiles to engage people? People have different activities - chat, read, recording audio or photo, playing media back, share something via social media etc. Each fulfills a different need. The challenge is to match specific things you can do on a mobile with your motivations for visiting. He referred to Maslow's hierarchy of needs to think about the needs a museum satisfies in our lives and the experience economy.

People are seeking venues and events that engage them in a memorable (and authentic?) ways - we're shifting from buying lots of stuff to seeking unique and engaging experiences. The visitor wants to walk away with the engagement having effected a transformation (the impact point of the three-pronged model). Measuring that impact is really hard. Evaluation can look at lots of things but it's hard to understand the needs of our visitors and what works for them in this space.

Later I asked what Learning people like Nick could tell us technologists about measuring impact, but it seems like it's the holy grail for their field too. Nick did mention that we go from a stage of cognitive to affective impact over time after an experience, which is a good start for thinking about this.  Judging from the response on twitter, I'm not the only one who thinks that measuring the impact of a museum experience and understanding whether it's ephemeral or lifelong is one of the big tasks for museums right now.

John Coburn's presentation on the Hidden Newcastle app harked back to the buzz around storytelling
a few years ago, but it also resonated with conversations about the different types and purposes of museum websites - an app that's not about sharing collections or objects but about sharing compelling stories fits firmly in the 'messy middle'.  In this case, 'it's the story that creates the impact, not the object. The value of the object is as the source for the story'. I love that they wanted to create intrigue about the people and the times in which they lived and compel exploration.

It was a difficult choice but I popped into the 'tech on a budget' workshop where Shona Carnall and Greg Povey presented some interesting ways to use existing, readily available technologies to create interactive experiences.

I'll leave the detail of the other presentations to the storify below and other people's posts and skip to the unconference.  Because time was short we asked for session ideas and votes from the podium, rather than letting people write ideas and put their votes up on a shared board.  After the unconference we all gathered again to hear what had been discussed in each group. The summaries were:

• Commercial side of commissioning cool things: reluctant to put a price on it, but UK has cultural expectations around free museums which makes it harder to charge. Digital is received as god given right, something that should be free. But how come the West End theatre is able to charge so much for a ticket? Museums providing paid-for entertainment not just a browsing experience. We pay for entertainment but we don't expect to be entertained in museums. 
• Learning outcomes: friends or foe? Attitude is sometimes that learning outcomes are rubbish - decided generic learning outcomes (GLOs) are a really good thing. It's not about shoe-horning facts into everything or pure knowledge transfer - it's also about inspiration, experience, skills, wonderment. The wondrous Romans! Trying to change the stigma about what learning actually is, it's an experience as much as formal education. Maybe 'aims and objectives' a better term than 'learning outcomes'.
• How do you evaluate wonderment - with difficulty. What is it? Element of surprise, something being visceral, physiological responses. Are adults too cynical for wonderment? 'Smiling Victorians' - challenge expectations. Imagine writing a budget to get iris recognition to measure wonder! Hard to measure or evaluate it but should always aspire to it.
• Coherent experience, call to action in gallery to online with mobile in gallery: talked about pressure museums are under to introduce next tech, be whizzy, or is it addressing a real need? Can you piggyback on software that's already out there?
• Reaching different audiences: particularly teenagers: find out what inspires them, tap into that. What are the barriers to engaging them? They're creative, maybe we should work with them to create digital offers, empower them. Apps for apps sake - under pressure to deliver them.
• Big ideas: intellectual generosity. (Goodness! There was a long list of the characteristics MCG and DLNet would have if they were an animal or a tool...)  We are intricate explosions. Intricate - all the stuff we're talking about is detailed and a little fragile but explosive because the world will catch fire with what we're doing.
• Failure confessionals: web content management systems - maybe simple is the way to go. Failure is a good thing, and at least we didn't screw up like the bankers.
• Social media audiences: does it make sense just to have one FB, twitter, etc account per org? Keeping a brand together is good but it doesn't always make sense to lump all audience conversations into one channel.

And with the final thanks to the student volunteers, programme committee, unconference organisers and speakers (and particularly to Ade as local contact and Rhiannon as the tireless organiser that made it all happen), it was over.

We're already looking ahead to the MCG's Spring 2013 meeting, which may be an experimental 'distributed' meeting held in the same week or evening in different regional locations.  If you're interested in hosting a small-scale event with us somewhere in the UK, get in touch!  We're also thinking about themes for UK Museums on the Web 2012, so again, let us know if you have any ideas.