eri on the interweb

Over the course of this year I have worked on several service design projects for staff, so staff engagement has become a particular area of interest for me. My previous 2 posts have been on the talk I saw Sebastian Chan present at Australian Infront’s Insight series. Sebastian Chan has been the web manager at the Powerhouse Museum for a number of years, leading many innovative projects. Amongst them was the digitisation and publication of the entire museum collection which also allowed user generated tags. This and other projects have opened up domains previously held exclusively by curators. So, in the audience Q&A of his talk on Museums for the Next Generation I asked him:

Did the results speak for themselves or did his team have to campaign the merits of an open source user generated collection and tagging system to museum staff? How did they get staff on board?

back row snap of the event

I first saw Sebastian Chan speak at Web Direction on 2007. He presented on social tagging (“folksonomy”) projects at the Powerhouse museum. The first of these projects was the digitisation of electronic fabric swatches. After that the entire collection was digitised and published available for public classification. Recently I saw him present and got an update on these projects.

When I first saw this case study presented in 2007 the stats amazed me:

• 95% of all available objects were visited at least once in the first 10 weeks of the collection being published online
• 86% of tags created by users were not found in museum (curatorial) descriptions
• 88% of tags were assessed as useful by museum staff

Sebastian Chan on Museums for the Next Generation

The Powerhouse Museum and the in-house digital agency Chan has been heading within it have liberated the collection and extended the museum experience beyond exhibitions and museum walls.  Sebastian Chan is head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. I first saw him talk at Web Directions in 2007. Then he case studied social tagging projects and it was great to here how the initiatives have grown.

Amongst the strategies, tools and technologies discussed on the night were:

• Open APIs to enable sharing of collection data
• Geo coded images enabling data mash-ups of historical photos
• Social tagging enabling richer descriptions of collection items
• Keyword search tags enabling ‘frictionless tagging’ and driving improvements in how items are catalogued by examining how people describe them
• Online exhibitions (such as the Australian Dress Register) encouraging learning and cataloguing amongst smaller collectors

Watching a gripping game of Rugby League between West Tigers and St George I curiously grabbed my phone to check the Twitter stream. Looking for a shortcut to league tweets I checked trending topics—no league unfortunately but there was “tonga” trending because of the first game of the Rugby Union.

So I checked it out. Now I have seen spam twitter profiles, been @spammed and have heard of direct mail spam. But had not seen such blatant pr0n spamming of a hashtag. Note #tonga…

it went on…

and on…

and on…

and on! With Miley and Obama?!

There’s efficiency and there’s experience. Last month I published an article for UX Mag on the subject of customer efficiency. It opens with a story about the Melbourne trams. It’s conductors were replaced by machines in an efficiency drive. However the efficiency of customers and of the service required consideration around tasks beyond ticket purchase. Conductors served a multitude of customer needs but in the narrow assessment of their use they were deemed redundant.

Tram conductor - Illustration by Nam Nguyen

A reader of the article, Lisa Chow, cited an example from her own professional experience as a library consultant in the comments. A system to check out books replaced librarians doing the task but the self service model wasn’t necessarily efficient for users trying to achieve multiple tasks in the act of borrowing a book–like querying outstanding fines.

Having worked for a company behind open source software, I know how important community conduct is, on forums and other channels. In fact it was something that Geoff, as FarCry product evangelist had to (and I’m sure still does) moderate closely. This interaction between products and users is vital in fostering closer relationships between companies and customers, feature improvements and product innovation.

So it is great to see Get Satisfaction create a campaign around this. Get Satisfaction is a service that allows customers to send feedback, bugs and feature requests to companies. They have created a campaign called the Company Customer Pact. An accord, or code of conduct if you will. As interactions between companies and customers get closer through social media it will become more and more important that people are on the same page. Check it out, and get on board.

http://www.ccpact.com/