2010: an overview

An incomplete, retrospective list of work, talks and more in 2010…

In April I gave a talk and wrote a long paper Cosmic Collections: Creating a Big Bang at Museums and the Web in Denver (then got stuck in the US while the Icelandic volcano dust kept flights to Europe grounded). My abstract: "Cosmic collections' was a Web site mashup competition held by the Science Museum in late 2009 to encourage members of the public to create new interfaces with newly accessible collections data prepared for the Cosmos & Culture exhibition. The paper reports on the lessons learned during the process of developing and running the competition, including the organisational challenges and technical context. It discusses how to create room for experimentation within institutional boundaries, the tools available to organise and publicise such an event on a limited budget, the process of designing a competition, and the impact of the competition. It also investigates the demand for museum APIs.'

In June 2010 I went to Science Hack Day at the Guardian and worked on 'The Revolutionaries' with Premasagar Rose, Ian Wooten, Tom Morris, Inayaili de León, Andy McMillan and Richard Boulton – and it won a prize for the hack most useful in education! Prem wrote a blog post about it: Science Hack Day and The Revolutionaries.

In July I organised a meetup about 'Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage

In September I gave a talk at OpenTech 2010 on 'Museums meet the 21st century'.

I wrote a chapter called 'All change please: your museum and audiences online' for the book Museums Forward: social media and the web, edited by Gregory Chamberlain.

I created a cartoon character called Dora

In late 2010 I was madly working on my MSc dissertation on crowdsourcing games for museums, which included a lot of research, design and code: metadata crowdsourcing games for museums.