Museums and the web conference

http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/meetings/2-2006.shtml
I recently went to this conference, which was pretty intensive and useful, being not too theoretical but still thoughtful. The presentations are on the website so I won’t summarise them. I left wondering about the dynamics of collaboration between cultural collection institutions, Government initiatives, regional networks (e.g. broadband consortia, MLA’s), creative companies and the generic or neutral Web 2.0 tools that are growing apace.

New inspirations

As I mentioned in the last post I’ve been setting up a new business, Flow Associates. See www.flowassociates.com If it was simply me mutating into a company it would be simple but I’m forming it with a full-time partner, Mark Stevenson. It’s more exciting this way but a bigger investment of energy, exploring how we can co-operate with our diverse backgrounds (him: marketing, technology, comedy, science, writing. Me: education, public cultural organisations, literature, culture, art). Despite these different skills we have a lot in common: a love of words; but also thinking in terms of systems; a belief that learning is about making sense of big ideas and solving problems; an interest in new technologies and futures. We’re thinking hard about our ethics and methodologies so I’ve been searching out common interests, e.g. in these links.

I recently twice met an interesting man called John Wood and each time he had a T-shirt that said Attainable Utopias. So I Googled it.
http://attainable-utopias.org/new/index.html

Thinking about innovative ways of establishing partnerships between creative businesses/cultural organisations and schools I came across this:
http://generalpraxis.blogspot.com/

And the inspiration for our company name, is Csikszentmihaly. I’ve never been one to follow tracts on how to be happy, especially not ones written by Americans, but Flow is different.
http://www.brainchannels.com/thinker/mihaly.html