Should we feed the machine? – thoughts on the Museums Computer Group conference

I love the Museums Computer Group mailing list. In a world of Discord servers and Instagram broadcast channels an email group feels wonderfully arcane and accessible at the same time.

The same spirit of intellectual depth and inspiration is always there at their annual conference which this year was held at Thinktank hosted by Birmingham Museums Trust. It was a great day full of interesting and insightful talks which I’ve tried to condense into a few themes below:

Digital audiences are real audiences

Digital audiences are real audiences – even if they don’t convert to physical, they are still valuable.

The first talk to mention with was Nik Wyness from the Tank Museum, whose YouTube channel recently passed 1 million subscribers (many outside of the UK). This was swiftly followed by the V&A’s Jo Duggan who described the broad young audience of their ‘top of the funnel’ youth platform Mused. It was clear that as a sector we need to think about digital audiences as valuable audiences in their own right, even if they never ‘convert’ to physical.

It was especially interesting to learn that the Tank Museums’ e-commerce offering attached to their YouTube channel drives multiple times the revenue of their physical shop, delivering hard financial value for their organisation following focused digital investment.

You don’t have to go it alone

You don’t have to go it alone – agencies, specialists and more all make your time (and money) go further.

When asked what the biggest mistake that small organisations make when investing digitally, Josie Fraser was unequivocal: “trying to do it all themselves.” In a sector so defined by volunteering, small teams and stretched budgets, it makes sense to lean on the expertise of others – whether it’s agencies or individuals. For example, 68% of heritage organisations are volunteer led, or have less than 10 staff members.

From the V&A to the smallest projects described, the most successful projects shared throughout the day were all open and honest about using external expertise to meet their goals.

You’ve got to meet (and talk to) the people

A big theme that emerged throughout the day was user testing and its importance in digital projects – less big scale data, and more in depth qualitative interviews with real humans. From focus groups with 11-14 year olds, in depth conversations with super users or meeting detectorists in a field at 7am on a Sunday in the name of making a website (David Eccles from Numiko told an excellent story about doing the latter).

This might look different at different size organisations, but the richness of information will still outstrip numerical data at any level.

People still aren’t sure what they think about AI (but it’s definitely here)

Nearly every talk across the day mention AI in some way, some negative, some positive and  even a few were ambivalent. it’s clear that AI and in particular Large Language Models are here to stay and being forced into every area of our lives. I’m still on the fence but I stand by my talk for the Cog Team that if you understand how they work you’ll be better informed to decide.

The Big Question: Should we feed the machine?

The biggest question that I came away from the day with is “should we feed the machine?” When I talked at the Arts Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Day recently I made the case to step off the hamster wheel of big tech platforms. But several talks at the Museums Computer Group made the case for feeding the algorithms and playing the hand we’re dealt.

With Nik Wyness sharing YouTube success at the Tank Museum, and Ellie Wyant going into the details of their larger budget influencer  content creator marketing at the National Gallery, the case was made to embrace social media platforms with eyes open. But I still found myself concerned that these institutions are holding huge risk if platforms collapse, or the rules are changed in Silicon Valley for arbitrary reasons. But perhaps this is no more “precarious [than] being reliant on government largesse in the middle of the culture wars” as Ash Mann replied to me on BlueSky.

Anra Kennedy from the Audience Agency underlined this with a fascinating retrospective of many sites and platforms for digital storytelling that she had been part of over the last 20 years – almost all of which were now lost to the ebb and flow of digital degradation and maintenance. Things online feel forever, but they’re soon lost in the noise – and recently at an ever increasing pace.

From the conferences I’ve attended recently, it feels like we’re at a tipping point where the effort of maintaining social media relevance is starting to show the strain for us as humans, our planet ecologically and for the preservation of collective knowledge amongst all the noise.

Soon things will have to change. I’m foolishly hopeful that this might mean a slower, more human internet, at least in some places.

But I’d love to know if you feel differently.

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