Weeknote #32: Partiality
Another shorter week as we headed off for a wedding in Marple, south of Manchester. Lots of stone cottages and rolling hills. This is minus the boy who returned from the Boardmasters festival in Cornwall (via a 14-hour coach journey). Despite saying he isn't really "a festival person" he did admit to having an amazing Summer. He's now doing work experience at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Oh, to be 16 again...
What happened this week?
Monday was spent scoring applications for a high-profile role and putting the pieces in place for a couple of AI-related projects.
A Management Team meeting on Tuesday brought together senior leaders from across the Library. It's taken a while but it's feeling like a more energised and coherent group. I presented back the results of our AI Survey which surfaced a range of concerns and some work to do on communications and guidelines. I'm hoping to share top-level results with other cultural organisations and need to find time to write things up.
We also said a final farewell to fellow Director Joe Marshall, after seven years in the role. He's been great to work with and we'll miss his calmness and knowledge.
I then chaired a Cyber Security Steering Group evaluating our monitoring, defences and response readiness. We're in a much better place than when I started, although it sometime feels hard to take positive action against the rising external threats. The Board continue to push us to drill down on risks - both a blessing and (reporting) curse.
Wednesday saw a catch-up on GovCamp Scotland, now just over a month away. We're oversubscribed, which is great, but it also brings headaches around ticket allocations and waiting list management. Next year we might need to think about setting up as a more formal entity.
Favourite email of the week: "The wonky trolley from the ground floor kitchen has gone awol."
Interesting things
- A good explainer of the The Met's new semantic search surfacing both written terms and the contents of each artwork.
- A great list of playful online experiences built around cultural collections (h/t Màiri Lafferty)
- Building joined up digital services in Scotland - lots of good thinking here about building on solid foundations mixed with an (idealistic?) vision for a single user experience:
The priority is no longer just about building platforms, but more about connecting them into a seamless ecosystem – where services work together behind the scenes so that people experience something simple, consistent and joined-up.
- I'm always fascinated by attempts to eradicate any friction and create "seamless" experiences, with this transport concept being a good case in point. What might be useful for cargo, may not be best for humans (which seems obvious when you type it out).
- I like Ash Mann's "scale of visibility" for digital work - a good companion to Kati Price and Daffyd James's Structuring for Digital Success (from 2018!)
- A super useful post by SCVO for charities responding to supply chain incidents after the Beacon CRM compromise (by John Fiztgerald).
- AI won't rescue your organisation from itself - More wise words from Tom Loosemore.
- The Four Illusions of AI: Implications for Museum Practice - good insight for cultural organisations across Access, Discoverability, Certainty and Understanding.
Watching, listening, reading, doing
🎺 I absolutely loved, All Rise, Wynton Marsalis’s epic Jazz Symphony - the opening concert at the Edinburgh International Festival ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Other Festival stuff:
🎤Rory Marshall - High energy sketch-show, lacking a bit of structure and depth ⭐⭐⭐
🎤 Li Jin Hao - As my friend Jim put it: "He bounces between gentle philosopher, wistful poet, silly billy punsmith, and unnerving agent of chaos". Very well-timed with a big moon dominating the stage one hour after the eclipse ⭐⭐⭐⭐
🎤 Jordan Brookes - A polished version of last year's work in progress show. He remains my favourite with incredible structure, crowd work and physical performance ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🌓 Partial eclipse: Stunning ambition hampered by the audience not being able to look directly at the show ⭐ (one star)*
📺 I re-watched the incredible 1995 BBC documentary, The Death of Yugoslavia, which includes interviews with the main protagonists (before many were arrested).
🎞️ Catching up on some Christopher Nolan:
Tenet - nope: too difficult to follow and incredibly flat characters⭐⭐
The Prestige - less ambitious but captivating storytelling ⭐⭐⭐⭐
*my first and only fringe joke
