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.

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.