Hack4Europe! UK Winner in the category 'Audience award'

Screenshot of adding an object to a blog post with 'Share What You See'

Owen Stephens and I won the 'Audience Award' for our 'Share What You See' hack at Europeana's Hack4Europe! UK held at the British Library in June 2011. Not bad, considering we'd met for the first time the day before and managed to make a new WordPress plugin in about six hours.

I blogged about the hackday and our project at 'Share What You See' at hack4europe London.

'Share What You See' is a WordPress plugin designed to make a museum and gallery visit more personal, memorable and sociable.  There's always that one object that made you laugh, reminded you of friends or family, or was just really striking.  The plugin lets you search for the object in the Europeana collection (by title, and hopefully by venue or accession number), and instantly create a blog post about it (screenshot below) to share it with others. Once you've found your object, the plugin automatically inserts an image of it, plus the title, description and venue name. You can then add your own text and whatever other media you like.

Museum Crowdsourcing Games: Improving Collections Through Play (and some thoughts on re-inventing museums)

A presentation for the Inspiration Seminar on Digital Communications and Heritage (Inspirationsseminarium Digital kommunikation & kulturarv, #kulturwebb) at the Nordic Museum, organised by the Nordic Museum's New Media department in collaboration with Mabb and IdeK lab.

I've saved my slides and speaker notes as a PDF (7mb): Museum Crowdsourcing Games: Improving Collections Through Play (and some thoughts on the future of museums) and the video is at http://bambuser.com/channel/nordiskamuseet/broadcast/1646762 (though I'm not sure how long it'll be there).

You can also find related posts on my blog, Open Objects, at https://www.openobjects.org.uk/search/label/crowdsourcing and https://www.openobjects.org.uk/search/label/games.

Chapter 'Crowdsourcing games: playing with museums'

The book 'Museums At Play: Games, Interaction and Learning' is edited by freelance strategist Katy Beale and published by MuseumsEtc.  My chapter, 'Crowdsourcing games: playing with museums' discusses the power of crowdsourcing games and the participation economy, possible new relationships with audiences and new types of engagement with objects, and the potential for an ecosystem of museum games based around collections.