 Kia ora koutou, menei. Welcome to our fireside chat with Cip Chan. We were going to have someone introduce us, but we've decided to just kick off ourselves instead, so to introduce myself. Whoa! My name's Courtney Johnston. I'm the director of the Dalsat Museum and Petone Settlers Museum, and I also take care of community arts out in Lower Hutt, so just across the water there, along to supporter, I guess, of NDF. This is the environment that I grew up in as a professional, so it's always so nice to be back. And I think a big part of that growing up and my experience within this community has been shared with Cip, who will be no stranger to most of the people in the room, but I also realise that you will be unfamiliar to a few people, so maybe you could start off by introducing yourself and telling us where you've been and where you are now. Yeah, cool. Thanks. I first came over to this thing in 2006, in fact, when I was talking about social tagging when I was based at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, and I think during that period, I was there from mid-99 to 2011. We were doing a lot of work around that shift from museums as authoritative places into these places where social media was a thing, still as a thing, but that shift of authority and that sort of sense of the web or something moving from that period of being about being a published resource into then being a social resource, and then as I left the Powerhouse, the mobile piece had occurred and we'd started to do experiments with AR and I guess it's first iteration then in 2009, and then also then into mobile apps and all of those things. So then in 2011, I get a call and I get on a plane to go and help rebuild this place, the Smithsonian Design Department Museum in New York, the Cooper Hewitt, which was a really interesting experience. That sense of both starting to shift what the building was for and what was in the building. So I started to acquire software and code for the museum's collection, that sort of piece that has design moved from being about furniture and these things into stuff on screens. What does it mean for museums to start collecting code and then sort of taking that notion of collecting code and releasing that code? So a lot of the Powerhouse work was about the open access piece as well and so in collecting digital-born pieces as my Java tries to update, you have this sort of notion that what does it mean to collect and then release pieces and that GitHub repository thing that we did with Planetary with Aaron Cope was really important, but really the main work was about really building this experience around the museum itself. So as some people may have heard, we created a pen which does this in the museum. As you walk around the museum now in New York, you're given this pen that allows you to collect all of the things in the museum to take home, which is kind of an interesting repurposing of the museum, I guess a little bit more like a public library using the physicality of the museum as a place to browse and then to use that as a way to get access to all the digital resources as well as all the things you create too, so that notion of giving a utility value to the museum visit and reimagining things like the wallpaper collection that had been digitised and giving those things that, when I came into that sort of museum, a very small amount of that collection had been digitised shortly after I left it. It had all been done, so you renovate the building, but if you're renovating the building and digitising all the stuff, how might you make the building work better for a world when all of the things are on the web? So from there, I've then moved to Melbourne. I'm at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image now. So of course, my visa gets cancelled without prejudice, which I think is awesome. And so I'm here now, right? So this is the National Museum of TV, film, video games, digital culture, and it's a very different scale of proposition now, which is exciting. We are the most visited museum of this type in the world. We have a lot of visitors, 2.4 or 5 million visitors a year. So there's a different scale issue there and I think coming into the role I am there, which is all about experience, that sense of how do you work with the media? How do you work with... I'll just jump to this. What is the purpose of that museum when all the things in that museum are actually better experienced on your couch or in bed? Like if you're doing... If it's about film, then arguably there is a reality about seeing a film in a cinema that is different from seeing it on your couch, but for a lot of people, that's not their experience now. Similarly, when we're showing VR works, you end up with... This is Lynette Warworth's collisions work that we have on at the moment. That is a museum gallery experience. It's kind of an interesting one because it's people sitting in chairs with headsets on. And that's a gallery experience. It's a free experience, but it's a gallery experience. That takes up our smaller gallery for three months. So this is an exhibit that, you know, 15 people can see each 30 minutes. One of the... You use the word experience and one of the things that's been noticeable in your move, because you've talked about it, is your selection, I think, of the title Chief Experience Officer. And it's been interesting to see that Shelly Bernstein, as she's moved from Brooklyn Museum to the Barnes Foundation, has adopted the same title. And we were talking just before about brand and museums and the meaningfulness of that. So what's behind that brand for you? Yeah, look, I think it's a realisation that, you know, I think out of the powerhouse experience, really began to realise that the context of people engaging with collections and the museum's knowledge changed the way and the impact that it had. We used to, you know, I remember probably in 2006, 2007, I would have been saying that virtual visitors, as we used to call them, were as important as physical visitors. They're differently important. The context in which people engage in material is different. And I think that's become really the case with mobile. We know that mobile hasn't taken away time from our screens. It's added more time to our screens. I was reading a report from Pew, I think, last week, that, you know, now what Americans spend something like eight hours a day on a screen. So they've not reduced their desktop time at work. They've just added on mobile time and then they've added on Netflix time at home. So it's all now screen mediated, but the context is so different that how we absorb and learn from our screens has changed. So the experience part has become incredibly important. And Cooper, you're it too. Building a physical device changed the way people behaved in the museum. And I knew that from the Science Museum work at the Powerhouse, but that thing of giving people a thing that meant they put their phones away or used their phones in a different way but gave them sort of an additional magic power or super power was kind of interesting. And it just became this sort of thing that actually what's missing in museums is that usually experienced designers are brought in to design an exhibit. And then you have, you know, services team that manages the guest experiences, but actually those are fused together. And then the promise of digital as well is not just reduced to the building. I mean, you and I are old enough to remember the promise of the web as a global thing. That really was that mid-2000s, early-2000s or even the 90s view of the web as this global resource. And I think it's almost become balkanised in recent times just well as a balkanisation of politics as well. But, you know, I don't want to lose sight of that. So that notion of a CXO role instead of a digital role was an important shift because it would also assert that digital was folded into just the operations of the museum. And the mission is digital and physical because it's the mission of the museum. One of the things that you and I have talked about quite a lot over the last couple of years, which I find fascinating, you've held these kind of change-making leadership positions both within the Australian system, which is arguably publicly funded, and within the American system, which is substantially privately funded. How is that... How's moving between those environments affected you as a museum person and how have the expectations upon you differed in those two environments? Yeah, look, I think it's been interesting. I think in Australia, in New Zealand, in the UK, there is a general consensus that the public museums are there for the public. And I think in America, that's not the case. And I think, you know, the V&A had that beautiful piece from Neon Circus, which was this, which was really about communicating that all of the things in the museum belong to the public. And actually, it was the museum's responsibility to assert that and make it possible for the public, the citizens, to engage with the museum in new ways, but also to claim it. And I think in the US, that's not the case. There's a non-profit tax kind of status that is about educationalness. So the education piece becomes the reason you get the tax exemptions. It's not that. And so the purpose of the collection is very different. The purpose of the museum and the type of educational role the museum takes, I found was perhaps a bit more paternalistic. Than we might have moved out of in Australia and New Zealand. I think New Zealand and Australia actually are about a decade ahead of the US in terms of museum practice and about a decade behind in terms of access to capital to fund that change. The UK probably sits in the middle there. But I think there's definitely a different sense of professionalisation in Australia and New Zealand. I mean, we had the new sort of museology in the 80s came through both our countries well before the US. And of course the US has amazing collections. I mean, in the art museum world, the art market as well is so important, but also brings a whole different set of donors and the purpose, the cultural capital that's garnered through that is difficult to underpick, particularly in a society that doesn't want to talk about class and barely wants to talk about race. And I think in Australia and New Zealand, we're much more upfront about that, which is a good thing. It doesn't mean we've resolved it at all. When we first got invited to do this session, one of the things that was happening at the time was that some of the prominent US digital innovators, particularly the New York Public Library and the Met, were either shedding well-known and influential staff or shutting down operations. And it's hard to tell whether that was being done because the change that they were hoping to affect had taken place. And so you no longer need your skunkworks and such because it's become widespread change. Or if it was because the change that they were hoping to affect wasn't happening and therefore these things were seen as failures and they were being shut down. So I'm interested in your opinion on what might be driving that. A couple of high-profile flagship initiatives that have been shut down, people have been let go quite publicly, what's your gut feeling on why that's happening and is that a faint signal for our sector? Yeah, I think it is. The funding environment in the US around the world as well has changed. I think one of the things with being largely philanthropically driven is that the consistency of funding that we expect in Australia and New Zealand, even though it may be reducing or its make-up may shift, there is a sense that if you're a government-supported museum, you're not chasing grants each year to fund your operations. And I think in the US, that isn't the case. The certainty of financial security isn't there. You're also dealing with managing a much larger series of stakeholders and boards. So I remember at Coop at Hewitt, we had a board of 40 individuals. And that's not unusual at all. That's not big. That's not big. I remember visiting LACMA in June last year and their board table has something like 70 seats. And it's so long that each seat has a little microphone built into the marble so people can hear each other. Like the UN. Yeah, it's like the UN. So that sense that you're managing the director's role is to manage or the senior leadership's role is to manage 40, 60, 80 people who may have very differing opinions and different pet hates and pet projects that their personal money will go into supporting. That's very different to dealing with a ministerial change. Party politics will generally deliver a predictable series of policy initiatives that have an electoral cycle role. That's not the case if it's private money. But I do think also there was another thing going on or there is another thing going on in the US which is a two-sided piece. One is that digital is done. And I think you definitely get the feel with some of those initiatives being shuttered that in some cases there was a sense that we did enough to secure the funding and resources we need to do. The other things that we really care about, the digital was a way to be seen to be showing innovation. Kind of like a loss leader almost. Yeah, it's a repositioning piece but wasn't necessarily about a structural change. And I think in the other cases though the structural change was what was desired and the ability to fold initiatives that had occurred on the side and been successful into the organisational change that is required in very large organisations. All these places and working in the Smithsonian as well. These are big places that org change takes five, seven, eight years. Possibly beyond the director's term as well. So there's that piece. And I think that there's a sense that often the work that goes on, the really exciting work that you and I and others get really excited about, unless you can fold that into the core operations of the museum within 12 to 18 months, it's not actually successful. And that was something I guess my team and particularly Aaron Cope and I were very aware of at Cooper Hewitt which was about if we were going to make this change we had to make it all of the way through the museum. And so from the security guards, through the conservators, through the curators, the way exhibits were done was the only, we had to change that as much as deliver the bright shiny thing. And that's very difficult if you can't also juggle the desires of the director which may also change and their ability to manage the board and your ability to manage the board. I think there's a lot of lessons for us locally and I think part of the shift that Ross Parry and others have spoken about of going to a post kind of digital phase in museums is about making that transition. And you start to see directors now particularly talking about the mission more than digital. And so if digital people can't align themselves with the mission and articulate that really well I think that's a warning sign. You've mentioned your team a couple of times now and a few people like Aaron who are familiar to long-time India for 10 days. And one of the reasons that I hold you and Shelley in such a steam is the generosity with which you have shared your work over time and encouraged your teams to do the same thing. I mean, we have open-source documentation in our sector and a big part of it is due to you guys and it's not easy to prioritise that time or to prioritise your team's time to document and share thoroughly what you're doing for the benefit of all the rest of us. So what got you started doing that and how have you maintained it? Yeah, I mean I guess for me it started off really as this was, you know, can you imagine a time before Slack or anyway, around that time when blogging was still a thing. We had an internal, you know, I know, right? Did I say that now? Before Wikipedia, no, it's not that old. But no, no, there was this sort of moment in the mid-2000s when I started at the Powerhouse from my team, a blog that was really just a way of us talking within the museum. And that blog, we opened it up to the public but of course no one would see it. Myself and Peter Marni who ran the media teaching labs he's now head of education at the Powerhouse. Peter Marni and I were having a discussion in one of the posts about media teaching. This was when there was a place called the Soundhouse there and what happened was suddenly this comment came in from a teacher who had found it through a Google search and it was a really interesting comment and we just engaged with that comment and from that point on that became just a public facing thing and that started to change what we wrote about and then it became mainly me writing about unfortunately. And then the Powerhouse started up another whole other suite of public facing blogs but I think it was that use of writing as a reflective practice that I think for me has become incredibly important and now certainly at Cooper Hewitt and now at Destran Centre for the Moving Image it's that sense of I guess part of my management style is to get people to have reflective practice and to write what they're doing so whenever a project goes live or whenever we make a learning we allocate time to that because I think if you don't write those things down you don't get to look at them you don't have to concretise those thoughts in that moment which can often lead to new things like oh right I'm expressing it like that right okay now that's what I'm going to use for this but then you can look back on it to in a year, two years time and go that idea that failed then is ready now it's that piece that you don't necessarily realise but that extra two hours it takes is totally worth it but reflective practice is super important it's a little bit like keeping a diary which I don't do but I know people can do that but it's a public facing one because I think one of the things that my former bosses at the powerhouse very early on Kevin kind of assumption who's now director at the Maritime Museum Tim Hart who's now at Museum Victoria in a senior leadership role Mitraba who was my first boss at the powerhouse they all instill this sort of sense that when you're working in the museums or library sector you're not doing it for one institution you're doing it for the sector as a whole and I think in Australia and New Zealand that is very much the case in the US that isn't the case because of the way you're competing for people on your board so you know Courtney's on the board of X so we can't get her to be on our board so who else can we get and there's a competition piece which is unhelpful and I know there's been initiatives I remember in 2006 in fact here when Susan kind of remember Chun was out here speaking about the tagging initiatives of the Steve kind of project the difficulties of getting that to work across multiple museums when it was a very clearly a beneficial piece of work that was such a struggle and I don't think in Australia and New Zealand of course there's struggles around collaboration but there is more it gets back to that public service piece it is the thing that I after make especially after the experience of doing a whirlwind travel around the states that was what I just came back and was so thankful for was that sense of being a public service and that that gives you your mandate to be generous and that when you're more privately supported it's a lot harder to be generous because it's no longer to your benefit in a way or short term benefit so I think it isn't the longer term but maybe directors and boards aren't around for long enough to realise that to see what happens when you give it away the other thing I mean hands up here who's done who's been around for as long as I have and it has been to one of Seb's web analytics workshops back in the long time people so you've like for at least a decade you've been travelling really extensively doing talks like this and maybe not so much now but previously running an awful lot of workshops what's driven you to commit to that kind of I mean you said it at lunchtime you're like you just get up at 3am and do your work so that you can go to the conference later on in the day that you've been invited to speak at what's driven you to commit to that kind of schedule and how have you balanced that with your day job Yeah I mean I think it's become I mean I remember in 2007 at the powerhouse it became a thing where I began to go out on the road a lot more we had a lot of success with the collection site in fact that collection site I hear is being replaced finally in January we say that will have been around for 11 years which is kind of amazing that's a long time on the web but yeah it was about carrying the brand of the museum out and I think I'd always done this as a piece for the museum so on arariums and revenues earned from that I would always flow back as a budget item and I think that was an important piece of it and I think for Cooper Hewitt it was very much acknowledged that this was about getting Cooper Hewitt on the map this was like earned media you know a lot of the digital humanities conferences and other things I would go and speak at were about putting Cooper Hewitt into the digital humanities world and backing it up with actual products and services that meant it made sense to be there but almost you know I learned over the time at the powerhouse that when we do digital projects we never spend enough money on marketing and promotion and in fact it's about generating meaningful buzz around your things but it's also about demonstrating that your organisation is outward facing and I think this comes through to both the last question about reflective practice and this one is that institutions need to be looking out to the world particularly in Australia and New Zealand we need to get out there because people don't look down here we're far away so this was very much about carrying the brand of the museum out so powerhouse Cooper Hewitt was very good in that term but it was difficult at times because we had both me and Aaron going out and that was hard and it was a very difficult high pressure time to do it but it was incredibly important because it was about putting the institution on a map a series of maps in fact and now at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image this is about signalling that that museum is now Australia's national museum of this stuff and we speak to the world we don't just bring exhibitions in we have exhibits touring around the world now in Europe and America that we make and this is about not just touring exhibits but taking the ideas the competencies and the knowledge of the museum out and contributing back at a global scale if we're talking about film museums or museums and video games we need to be creating a network of museums globally around this stuff and that only happens by having people go out I think that's it's a budget priority and it's one that I would defend all the time it's like what are we going to cut well the travel has to stay because the travel gets you all this other stuff So everyone should start we can relabel our marketing budget and travel and spreading the word budget I would not say that it's just professional development I think it is that but it's carrying the brand and it's about shifting the brand to being one which is about connectivity outwards which is carrying that web that web philosophy the web is a web of people and people need to get out and the value of my team going out me going out others going out is that we bring ideas back to and I think that's a really important way to validate what your museum is doing because even we would send curators out and getting them to report back on what they did I had one of our developers go out to America and did a really long 8 or 9000 word post of his American museum visits really great way of him reflecting back on what he'd seen and who he'd spoken to but also communicating to all the staff we have now connections with all of these places and this is what we're doing and putting us on the map even though we're in Melbourne but you're in the network network that's global In preparation for the session again I read the recent interview you did with Sampert where you talk about the importance again when your when your day is crammed remembering that we work in the creative sector and the important word there is creative like if you get too dragged into spending all of your energy on the operational side of things you could be running a ferry shipping service or a supermarket or it could be anything the reason that we're all drawn into this is that creative side of things and you talked about not having the headphone time which is the time where you can sit and immerse yourself in doing something without writing emails or being in meetings and things like that. How do you keep yourself fresh? I think it's increasingly hard I think there's that piece that you have to keep reminding yourself in this sex sector that we're incredibly lucky to work with the people and for the organisations we do even on the worst day it's not the worst possible work day anyone could have by any means. I don't say no people but few people few people and honestly it's a real luxury that we have and I think we need to acknowledge that and be aware of the privilege that we have of working in this field with all the people we do and try to not make it crap for other people too. That's also the piece I remember that this sector is fond of meetings and one of the things that was really interesting in that you know what I mean right but it was interesting in New York that we were working with a strategy firm when it was coming crunch kind of time to deliver the pen this was a we were making a physical device that was being manufactured in 10 factories in type type type type Taiwan co-design with a firm in Spain and all of this crazy stuff all within a very period of months before launch and there was this really important line that stuck with me from this strategy firm which was you should aim for consent rather than consensus and so that sort of sense that you go into meetings with an idea that you're going to have consent to try a thing rather than spend 2 hours coming to a consensus decision a 20 minute meeting that leads to a consent to try a thing to get to the next stage is better so you know I think hopefully my team maybe might disagree at times around this I've got better at shrinking the number of shrinking the length of meetings and shrinking the number of meetings and across an organisation I think that's incredibly important that people need to be trusted to get on with stuff and you need to give people the tools and the inspiration that's the role of leadership is to inspire people to do new things and get out of their way and to keep other people out of their way as well out of their way as well I mean in order to generate a curiosity amongst visitors I mean I have a thing on here I can put up with museums are curiosity machines and we should be there to try to make those curiosity machines better and there's ways that we can improve our own processes to deliver on that mission better and I think the headphone time is now it happens at different hours of the day and I have to be I've got kids so I have to make sure there's good family time and those things and under plugging from all of this stuff is really the real challenge now I think getting that balance right is something we all struggle with so I don't have an elegant segue for this question so I'm not even going to try it but because you guys are kind of getting a little bit of what I guess Seb and I ping between each other every so often and one of the ones that maybe the last year or so I've been occasionally agast I'll send Seb a DM and I'll be like I'm seeing this it's visit a research but it feels more like surveillance starting to creep through and I don't and it kind of sounds funny but I don't think it's funny anymore since about two weeks ago I don't think it's funny anymore and I feel like our data ethics aren't where they need to be yet where are you sitting on that look it's tough I mean the big data piece is reality everything is collecting more data all of the time our own systems that we choose to install are doing that and we're not communicating that to our publics very well if at all I think the exploratorium has done some really good work around this about making visible things about cooking collection on their website beacons in their physical spaces these kinds of things but we should be doing more of that and I think one of the nice things that science museums have been able to do better than others is to couch you in terms of the education role of the museum is to talk about surveillance capitalism and to talk about the surveilling nature of technology we as a profession shouldn't get away from that but I'm always pleased that libraries have always held up privacy as a mantra from the beginning and that borrower records are an important private thing and museums could learn a lot from how libraries deal with this because it's part of the shift from delivering experiences to delivering services and experiences delivering services does mean data collection usually it does mean personalisation and often we're not in control of the system design all of the way through but we can minimise its effects and we can develop internal policies that stop bad things from happening I remember some of the public libraries in the US setting up tour tour nodes for example and running all their public Wi-Fi through tours so people browsing were as anonymised as they could could be when they're in the public library space and so museums could also be doing that but it's always a discussion with the marketing department and the development team who want to gather people's information because that potential leads for leads for things donations or ticket sales all this sort of stuff but it's about managing that well and having an ethics that carries through to policy and that it's not fixed that you have to keep evolving that because I remember you telling me about cell phone towers being installed and cell phone tracking coming into New Zealand museums I was kind of shocked but I think that's becoming the normal the sort of new normal and it's only because the public isn't aware of what that might lead to and you know there's a trade there's a utility vs privacy sort of transaction that we make in our own personal lives but when you're in a space that is like the magic circle that a museum creates when you step into that magic circle you should need to understand what the rules are or the rules need to be legible to you you know the magic circle is an important privileged space but if you don't get told the rules then it's very one sided power kind of relationship and I think the lessons of the last 20 years in museums has been that shifting of power from the institution to the community we owe it to our communities to do that same shift of power around data that's kind of what I try to ask myself whenever I'm making these decisions it's sort of how does the public benefit from what we're doing for them or to them and if I can't see a quite near term benefit then my need to because often to say no don't ask that question if you're not going to act on that question don't ask that question if you don't need that information don't take that information if you don't need to track how many times someone's walked past your building by picking up their cell phone next thing is of course now we're in a new age with the shift in US and global politics is that it's not just do you collect it but who might come and collect it from you through subpoena or other means and so I think libraries are very good at that and defending that and I think as I say museums need to learn a lot from libraries around that stuff that's the libraries totally I think that's all we have time for if you could join me in thinking Seb for his ongoing curiosity how's our fire going down there I never got to see the fire did you put any mallows on it excellent that's so you that's awesome I think we should open source that and get everybody one back in the office thank you both of you friends of NDF back in front of us so thank you very much