Reasonable Doubt

This week being able to progress taking online payments continues to be an itch I can’t seemed to scratch.  With that being said I mentioned:

• Met two UWE students to explain how we currently make use of interaction onsite
• Discussed how we will approach the AV requirements for our Moved by Conflict exhibition
• Reviewed our social media guidelines and changed all the passwords!
• Had a great catch up with most of the team to look at our 2014-2015 plans
• Contributed to our 2015-2018 service plan
• Got a request for licensing 214 seconds of video footage – was nice to pop to films at 59 where they work until 2am and turned our recording around super quickly
• Learned how I’ll need to report official stats back to the Council
• Some University of Bristol students showed us their improved prototype for interacting with objects in a case. Very clever use of gestures
• Wrote a one-page business case for dealing with our online revenue (we get money, we pay the council, no?) as there is a large untapped opportunity
• Sat with our education team to look at their needs on the new website

This week was I got up to:

• Explored research collaboration with University of Bath – if anybody has £8,000 kicking around to give us to have a PhD student you know where to find me!
• Ran a 30min introduction to using twitter for Natural Sciences. It’s important we give the keys to our social efforts to the curators and I look forward to what they cook up
• Discovered which path of “accountability” I need to tread to use various online services
• Met with two of our student groups to have a demo of their projects. I was blown away by their progress and both could be used as they are quite nicely
• Sat with our exhibition designer Simon to see what contribution our team needs to make for Moved by Conflict which opens in October.
• Gave an update to the wider management team about the new website and using online tools for managing projects
• Found out i’m very curious about records management
• I’ll be contributing to a HLF digital bid we hope to put in – funny as I co-wrote the digital guidance back in 2012 and now i’m on the other side of the desk
• Reviewed some tenders
• Discussed with two curators about how we can blog and use our tools to build interest for an exhibition next year
• Started to think aloud about our content strategy

Coming out of the haze of two substantial bids this week felt like light work in comparison:

• Finally submitted the Nesta digital r and d bid
• Agreed how we’d use our Nexus 7 tablets for the English Magic exhibition. Finally get to make an ebook!
• Waved goodbye to Mark who has been supporting our moving image digitisation programme
• Shared my ideas with our interim director about online tools for running projects
• Sat with marketing to discuss their input on the new website
• Mark P took me on a tour of the M shed kiosks as we work to switch over from using umbraco to run them to our collection management tool eMU
• Started to use basecamp for an internal project to showcase the benefit for the service. I suspect the Council has plans for project management across the landscape but no doubt it will something different…
• I have taken on a lot of the evaluation and performance role functions so had a positive session with Fay to look at the essentials
• Really enjoyed meeting an English Heritage  contact to find out how they are going to be approaching digital and I’ve offered to lend a hand if they need
• Reviewed some tenders for a local partner. Please note that if you use public money we expect open practices and sharing of the outputs. If you don’t want to play then get off our court
• Shared the first visual designs of the website with a fairly wide group and was excited to see the design language work.

This week was tiring and well over those 37 hours:

• Attended the Council budget training for the second time – the user experience and user interface are so poor that please note ‘user acceptance testing’ is not the same as user testing from the beginning
• Met up with a local business wanting to pitch us selling audio services
• Showed our new website progress to the central comms team and got some helpful tips
• Spent A LOT of time on our Nesta Digital r and d application only for the website to crash on submission day. A HUGE thanks to Gail Boyle for carrying me to the finish line
• Met with fffunction to get a first peek at the website visual design
• Spoke on Thursday evening at museumshowoff
• Discussed what the next steps were for the British empire and commonwealth collection from a digital view

This week I managed to get up to:

• Switched from an intensive and antiquated system for organising our exhibition ‘private views’ to using eventbrite
• Enjoyed an event to officially launch our inclusive audio guide ‘DiscoveryPens‘ which Paul organised
• We submitted our major Arts Council bid which is a huge deal for the future of the service, wish us luck!
• Got the news that several great folk will be taking voluntary severance
• Switched my brain from the ACE bid to the Nesta digital R and D fund for the arts bid
• Started to outline key objectives for 2014-15
• Enjoyed the Pervasive Media studio lunchtime talk about using ibeacons which I hope we can begin to experiment with
• Outlined plans for several talks I’ll be giving soon

Roll on next week.

By the end of this week I could see the light at the end of the tunnel for two of our major project bids. I still managed to get up to some mischief:

• Had a great chat with future cities to see how we may be able to work together. The museum should have a strong role to play, being one of the few free public indoor spaces left…
• Dipped in and out of Arts Council bid stuff
• Met with the University of Bristol and aardman to develop our joint Nesta bid. Great to have folks to bounce ideas off
• Discussed what the folks at the L Shed needed from me to help them – scanning equipment, staying out of their way and putting in some wifi were the main areas of focus
• Chopped it up with David from the Watershed to find out all about their digital work
• Attended bathcamp 44
• Attended a lunchtime talk at the pervasive media studio from Daniel Meadows
• Two post-doc students from the University of Bristol demo’ed a prototype combining motion tracking and a clever way of interacting with objects. I really hope we can test this approach soon
• Fought bravely for a digital budget…