I couple of good points you raise here! As Rich points out in his earlier comment, our whole goal of IMA Lab is to leverage community investment in software by focusing our efforts on open-source tools that can lead to better and more reusable tools for the field.

The long-term strategy for sustainability of this effort includes some increase in staffing on the part of the IMA, but more importantly an emphasis on working with museums to build bench strength on their own teams and to help them take as much control of their own online initiatives as they should want.

Likewise, in using open-source tools, we put the ownership of the technology back into the hands of the museums. This lets the museum seek support from a much wider collection of software vendors w/o necessarily needing to change platforms to do so. I think we’ve all suffered from the ills of vendor lock-in… this is one strategy for addressing those and a better long-term strategy for museum technology. If the IMA can help bootstrap those efforts than I’m certainly game.

I would pay some serious moolah for a clone these days But am inspired by the likes of Seb Chan, Nancy Proctor, and Nina Simon… who have shunned the need for sleep much longer than I have and lived to tell about it!

-Rob

The connection between the IMA Labs and BPOC is strong because of the similarities of the plan and it was obvious to me for a long time that this is how our community needs to proceed. That’s also why we were the IMA Labs first customer.