Web work and skunkworks at a museum

Nina Simon’s post of 13 May 2008 about Museum skunkworks is very timely. I think her third way to achieve change in museums, the skunkworks, is a good solution. But then I would, as we are about to do just that at, or something very like it, at the museum I work at.

In brief, senior management has just given us the go ahead to form a group of web workers from across the organisation to work together to make better use of our website, and the internet in general. We have the support of senior management, and a certain amount of authority.

Democratic blogging

On the weekend I had a conversation with a colleague about our staff blog at work. (Yes, I know, so sad to be talking work on the weekend, but that’s how it goes). He said that he found the blog to contain little of interest to him, and that the posts that he did enjoy, he enjoyed because of the writing style of the poster, rather than the topic. He went on to say that the idea of a democratic blog is perhaps not a good one, as the best blogs are those written by one person, with a real and recognisable voice, whereas this staff blog was a bit of a mess, and he felt it was probably largely ignored. He also made the point that the blog could be seen as an “in” crowd thing: that with a relatively small number of active bloggers, we ran the risk of being seen as a bit exclusive.

Blogging at a museum

We have been blogging at my museum now since October 2006. While we were far from being the first museum blog, we were among the first 100 listed on Musuem blogs.

The journey has been an interesting one, and we have learned a great deal by taking it, arguably more by doing than by watching. But we are still learning, and it is this that interests me. Looking back on what we have done has the effect of skewing the view, as it is easy to forget why a certain choice was made at a certain time.

The difficulty in talking about events as far away as October 2006 -or even October 2007 – is that hindsight gets in the way, and it is hard to remember how things really happened. It is easy to see the results of decisions, but not so easy to see what was decided when and in what order. After having to read a lot of glowing case studies for a university course in marketing that I am doing, I realised that the problem with tehm is that you rarely read about the bad or even poor decisons, the last-minute panics, the long discussions about risk management and dealing with the “what if” questions that come up over and over again. And yet these are the very things that we seem to struggle with all the time. Maybe if I can record some of what we are dealing with day by day, and how we manage to figure out what to do, it will help me find a pattern in what is happening which will help me better prepared next time. And it may even help someone else.

Guidelines for social media

Reading Seb Chan’s post called Updating your social media and staff blog policies on fresh+new lead me to Jason Ryan’s post called Principles for public sector social media

It reminds me that I have to update the blog “policy” (more of a set of guidelines) that I wrote for work early last year, and which now looks very old and tired. I’ll be turning first to the BBC, especially the original 15 principles, which I love, and the more recent and comprehensive BBC use of social networking and other third party websites.

One of the reasons I like the principles so much is that support an approach, a way of thinking, rather than setting hard and fast rules. I think this is really important in a space where rules need to able to change quite quickly. For example, at the Memorial, we have been using blogs since October 2006. In that short time, we have changed our approach to blogs and how we use them, as well as to our static site. Having hard and fast rules would have made it much harder to go the way we needed to move.

Of course, instead of writing a blog policy, I’ll draft a set of guidelines for using blogs, external sites like Flickr and Facebook, as well as how to respond to public comment in any or all of these spaces, for my colleagues to respond to.

I missed museums and the web 2008

Sounds like it was a good conference. I kept in touch with it mostly on Nina Simon’s blog, which I have been reading, okay, lurking on, since she started it in late 2006. Bryan Kennedy provided his overview of the conference, and touched on what I would have expected, given all I had read to date – social media, tagging/folksonomies, Flickr commons, and the nature of authority. He also added a note about programmers which I found to be interesting:

More museums should be building these programming skills in internal teams that grow expertise from project to project. Far too many museums small and large rely on outside companies for almost all of their technical development on the web. By and large the most innovation at Museums and the Web came from teams of people who have built expertise into the core operations of their institution.

I agree. At my museum, we are fortunate to have had in-house programmers and developers. While sometimes this means that things are not done within the time frames everyone wants, the end result is one that works and is understood. The experience we have had with some externally developed websites have been less than satisfactory. This is not because of poor work, but rather because of a lack of a deep understanding of what we about, what is in the collection, and how all the parts of the museum fit together. An outside company cannot hope to understand these things in the sort of time frame allowed for the development of a website, no matter how brilliant they are.