Its been a while. In fact its been six months. I only have so much writing in me and I’ve spent the summer preparing, and the fall teaching, a course through Johns Hopkins online Museum Studies Program. The course is entitled The Management of Technology in Museums. Its really a boot camp in museum technology that tries to address the issue of technology literacy in Museums. Its also a small attempt to address a concern that I have for the future of technology literacy in museums. Its not that we don’t have some amazing technology talent in the museum community, its the base level of technology familiarity and comfort that many museum employees don’t have. My main worry is how the rounds of staff cuts that we’ve seen and are still seeing is affecting our pool of digital native museum employees. Our cuts went by the book, identify the areas that need cutting (most areas), offer voluntary packages, then last in first out. We had some uptake for the voluntary packages, but then we culled from our incoming talent. Our technology literacy pool had to have suffered, other institutions must have too.

I had a question from one of my students, a director of a small museum, “Do you feel in the next few years the Getty will hire more staff for technological stuff instead of the more traditional museum positions?”. My reply was that I want to hire traditional museum people with technology literacy, or at least comfort, hence my conviction for teaching this course. I’m currently on week 10 of this 14 week course, so its all downhill from here. I think its going well, but you’d have to ask the students and its been a lot of work, but I highly recommend it, from a teaching point of view rather than an enrollment point of view. If you’ve ever thought about teaching, I encourage you to investigate joining a faculty to teach online. You can do it from the comfort of your own home and you don’t have to be somewhere at a particular time. With the cost of education rocketing, I have to believe its a growth industry.

So the course is two-thirds done and I’m in Portland at MCN. I’m set for a presentation on Friday with the Smithsonian’s own Mike Edson and Carmen Iannacone on Strategery: The Realities of Strategic Planning. No, its not a spelling mistake, its a Bushism, or rather its a Will Ferrell-inspired Bushism. I have a number of definitions including:

Strategery: stra-TEE-jar-ee.
1. When you don’t actually have a(n exit) strategy
2. When you have a strategy that is rapidly losing support
etc, etc…

I’ll be talking about some recent strategic planning processes that we went through at the Getty around how we document, interpret and provide access to our collection including some personnel restructuring. I’ll try not to make it too navelgazery.

Part of the challenge in technology strategic planning is how to prepare for the seemingly endless technologies coming down the pike at us. In case you’re wandering what those are, I compiled a matrix of technologies Past, Present and Future from the past six years of Horizon Reports for Higher Education and the Horizon Report – Museum Edition, conveniently colour-coded for your viewing pleasure. In case you’re unfamiliar with the series, the horizon project report format presents six key technologies and their predicted impact over three horizons: Less than 1 year – meaning that examples are easy to find in current practice; 2 to 3 years – meaning that these technologies are established and easily supportable with actual examples; and 4 to 5 years – meaning that these technologies may only be found in research, demonstration, or experimental contexts. The six years of reporting gives us a body of past, present and future technologies spanning the period 2004-2014.

Technology Matrix - Horizon Reports

Green is the ghost of technology past, amber is the ghost of technology present, red is the ghost of technology future. So you can see how good the horizon process was and is as a predictor for the future. So, looking at the ghosts of technology future what’s your prediction for the most impactful technology? Not necessarily just in museums, but wide-spread?

I’ve been um’ing and ah’ing about which one it is for me. I think the one that is going to make me buy the Christmas turkey for Tiny Tim is Social Operating Systems. Basically the concept is to re-organise the networked environment around the individual, but not in the way it was organised before with personalisation. (An aside: Despite Web 2.0, we’re in the third iteration of “The Web”. First it was simply “The Web”, people and organizations launched and surfed websites; then it became “My Web” with personalization tools and resources to tailor the experience to the individual; now it has become “Our Web” with tools, resources and platforms to create a shared experience.) The next iteration will still be “Our Web” – the concept is just too powerful, but it will be that much easier to engage wholesale with the network.

There are experimental initiatives in this direction, but Opera Unite is an interesting one. I don’t think its going to take off but they are obviously thinking along the right lines. Basically it turns your web browser into a web server, it allows you to serve up any content that you want, which means you are stating your presence and any other information that you want whenever you fire up your browser. Potentially this means that if you were to join Facebook for example, you would just join and all you history, preferences, images, friends, etc, engage with you. The networked environment then becomes an extremely transitory experience of those people who are “online” at that particular moment. Like Skype, when you log on to Skype it tells you how many people are currently engaging in conversation at that moment. It should be peer to peer networking in the extreme but the Opera people haven’t architected it in that way which is a shame, but nevetheless its a step forward. The powers that be hate P2P networking because (it can) circumvent established network connectivity and security, making it really hard to police and monitor – awesome.

There are countless iPhone apps that allow your iphone to connect with others for some discrete task, but imagine if they were all integrated with your own social operating system, that was your own handheld device. Awesome.