Bente Vinge Pedersen Daniel and I just finished a meeting on the topic “how to plan a workshop day for our colleagues about Web Outreach”. The task was given to us by our director Thomas Söderqvist, who formulated the reason for having such a day like this:
If we shall be able to convince scientists about the importance of communicating science, we need to practice what we teach. In other words, we need to develop an exemplary communication practice that others can learn from (and others include not only scientists, but also curators in other museums). Telling others outside the museum what we are doing is an *integral* part of our work. It’s simply a part of everybody’s work description. We need to explore what it means to communicate ‘museum work in practice’ rather than ‘ready-made museum work’. Our online platform [e.g. this blog] is basically finished – now we can begin to produce content together.
With this in mind Daniel and I began contructing a program. We thought we could begin with a discussion on pros and cons in communicating our work online. Afterwards we were thinking of presenting ten examples of good use of social media, having people talking about their own experiences and how they benefitted from it. It all seemed easy and interessing… sort of… and then we realised, that this exercise would propably not get us any closer to what we wanted, namely creating a common culture of exploiting social media as daily working tools. Just talking about it would probably not evoke the action we need. What to do?
Consequently we moved our meeting to the media of Twitter and began sending each other tweets across the table instead of talking, and we decided that the next step would be for me to go and write this blog post. As a direct outcome of the tweeting we developed a name for the day. It is no longer “A web outreach day” – we call it “Museion & the Web” (with a loving thought to the Museums & the Web conference, which Daniel BTW is attending in April) . Also we created a logo – and made a video about the creative process, which is now published on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsyMM7MwjwA
The future process of deciding the program for the day we will excecute here online. Let’s see if we can involve our colleagues – or others if they find it interesting enough to interact with us – in putting together a program. So I will end this post by posing a question: “If you think of it as a worktool – what is your best social media experience?”
