Museums Australia Futures Forum May 2008

Quite a morning with the six provocative papers and some comments from Frank regarding his attendance at the 2020 Summit and recent travels. Some points across the board that I took away:

• People will make decisions based on the information they have available now – not on what could be made available (i.e. people don't know what it is we don't have)
  
• Museums need to be more innovative and look at government departments that have problems our collections could help solve/add value to (e.g. climate change; genetic resources; potential in cultural collections in mapping cultural landscapes across Australia)
  
• We need to use our own websites but travel across the web – using the already available places where people already visit online (Flickr, YouTube, etc). Made the point that we tour our exhibitions to physical sites – we also need to tour the web
  
• We aren't in the innovation landscape
  
• 'We have a broader attention span and a shorter absorption time'
  
• 'Gymnastic minds of today's audiences – we can and do jump around!
  
• Rip, mix and burn experiences
  

  rip – take your favourite stuff
  

  mix – mix them up
  

  burn – publish!
  

• How do we devise systematic strategies to engender creativity?
  
• Practice-led research?
  
• Research methods are needed that can cope with complexity and mess
  

In the afternoon I joined the Learning for Life group which had an interesting discussions about how we link learning and museums in people's minds and what we would ask Minister Garrett for. They liked some of the points I made in my provocative paper about unsexy audiences and moving beyond the entertainment/learning/education debate, as well as catering for people in their own place and time.

I then went to the Digitisation group and got hold of Seb's final points about the challenges for museums in this area:

• Not a technical issue
  
• Need to prioritise digitisation for high volume public access
  
• Obtaining maximal rights and permissions
  
• Letting go of sole ownership, embracing connectedness
  
• Aligning strategies with audiences
  
• Asserting brand value as interpretation and engagement, not raw content
  
• The web as centre, not peripheral to the organisation
  

[BTW these points are ©Seb Chan under strict copyright orders from him!! Right you are there Seb!]

This was followed by a rather spirited discussion... and then the ICOM Australia AGM, including the launch of our new website.