Last Friday, March the 8th 2013, The New Institute and SNS Reaal Fund organized a seminar called “Moving Stories” in Rotterdam. This event was organized for museum professionals and other interested parties to share knowledge about narrative experiences and digital innovation in museums and learn more about the developments of the projects of SNS Reaal Fund. The program ‘Digital Innovation in Museums’ by SNS Reaal Fund was created in 2012. Harry van Vliet was part of the evaluation committee. Over 90 proposals were handed in and 13 of them are honored. Due to the success of the first edition SNS Reaal Fund decided to give museums an second opportunity to hand in a (new) proposal they have to submit in June 2013.

Curiosity is a fundamental component in research. It stimulates the motivation to explore and to discover the “truth”. It is the engine on which research is driven that leads to new insights and knowledge that expectantly is valuable for science and the society. As a researcher you always have your eyes open to new and enticing things in your surroundings that devotes your attention. Judgments’ are not made quickly since there are different perceptions that one can take in. At least, this is what I think what my research attitude primarily is about. As a researcher I find it therefore inspiring to read about other fascinating research and experiments that are being done in the world. In this blog I would like to share one experiment with you.

Nowadays the majority of the world is aware of the contributing value of social media: they enable interaction between senders and receivers. Many organizations, both in the private and public domain, are looking for the best way to interact with the public and to improve their relationship. At the moment, social media have become elemental in the communication mix. In fact, most communication professionals believe that interaction –and participation- has become essential to build a sustainable relationship with the public. One of the elements that leads to the success of a festival is for example also attributed to the degree of interaction with the audience, as you can read in our recently published book about festival experience. While businesses are at the forefront of the latest developments, governmental organizations mostly lag behind the newest developments.

Museumkompas website

Economic recessions and political developments are driving museums from their comfort zones: how do museums have to position themselves in the society? How do museums keep their head up under pressure from various political developments? When and how do museums have to collaborate with each other? And in what degree do they have to make use of the digital resources? These issues where central topics during the yearly Dutch museum conference which was held in the last week, on the 4th and 5th of October in Maastricht. This conference is an initiative of the Netherlands Museums Association (Nederlandse museumvereniging). We are studying these issues in our project Museumkompas and are working on different products to help museums to deal with these questions. Therefore, we were asked to give a workshop about our project Museumkompas.

After the European Soccer Championships and the Olympic Games it is time to start a new (school) year. This year will begin differently than the other years, because in two weeks we will have to vote for the Dutch elections of the “Tweede Kamer” (The House of Commons).

This year Thijs Waardenburg and I attended at the Museumnext conference that took place in the CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemporánia de Barcelona) in Barcelona. Many inspiring presentations, workshops and discussions about the digital side of museums were held. Museumnext is a conference about technologies and participation for the museum sector that brings together museum professionals and researchers from around the world to share best practices, encourage new thinking and discuss ‘what’s next?’. As we are trying to help museums to cope with the increasing technologies and expectations from the audiences with our project Museum Compass and the specific products (Museum Match, Museum Monitor, Business Models), we wanted to be a part of this community to share thoughts and be inspired by many projects that museums have been doing. In this blog I will highlight some of the presentations we have seen.

More and more organizations are implementing social media in their communication strategy to communicate to their external and internal stakeholders. Vice versa social media are also being used by employees to share daily activities, concerns or other organization-related content with their online social network. Employees are increasingly present during working hours and in spare time on social media. Almost one third of the employees are regularly posting organization-related messages, according to a study of Verhoeven (2012). So the question how to deal with content posted by employees on social networks that concern the organization is increasingly important.
Recently the national railways of the Netherlands (NS) has send official warnings to employees who posted messages on Twitter about defective coffee machines and used (#) hash tags of the organization and (#) fail during the winter period. This in turn could cause, from the perspective of the NS, damage to the organization.

As some of my colleagues already said: happy 2012 to everyone! When the year comes to an end we reflect on the past and look forward to the coming year. We dwell by the things that we have achieved, the new experiences we have gained, the things that unfortunately went wrong or the goals we weren’t able to achieve. New Year is an event to reflect on our life and develop new goals for the coming year.