 Kia ora koutou, thank you for joining us in our session today. We would be talking about how we develop the Wahine Tua Women in Defence project. Kulaweza Hormin Aho, I work in the research team at the Air Force Museum of New Zealand and Christchurch, and I'm here today with my colleague Marauke. He's also from the Air Force Museum and Liz Milden from the National Army Museum Te Matatua. Together, along with Karis Bose from the Torpedo Bay Navy Museum, who unfortunately can't be with us today, we are the team behind Wahine Tua, an online exhibition that we created to mark the 125th anniversary of suffrage in Aotearoa, New Zealand. So, I'll briefly give a bit of background before I hand over to Liz and Marauke who will explain why we decided to collaborate online for this particular project and how we achieved this. Our three organisations are the National Service Museums for the New Zealand Defence Force, and we're based in three locations around the country. Navy Museum at Devonport in Auckland, Army Museum at Waiuru, Central North Island, and the Air Force Museum at Wigrim in Christchurch. Given the separate services we represent, not to mention our physical distance from each other, our museums don't often work together. But for the 2018 suffrage 125 Whakatū Wahine National Event Programme, which we're proud to be part of, we ended up pooling our skills and resources to work very closely producing this exhibition, and in the process overcoming a number of obstacles that have prevented us from working together collaboratively in the past. So when my original exhibition proposal on Air Force Women in Combat was accepted as an online exhibition, our director at the time, the late Therese Angelo, suggested broadening the scope to also include navy and army personnel. So then deciding to collaborate, it became a tri-service museum project with Karris and Liz joining me on the research team, interviewing personnel, and Maraika undertaking the huge task of video editing and designing the exhibition online. So collaborating in this way allowed us to interview personnel from around the country, and here—sorry, my mic's gone— here are a few excerpts from the exhibition. It's actually—it's not just about females anymore, maybe it's just about work-life balance across the board. So I wanted to do something that was challenging for me and something where I could express myself as a Māori woman. I didn't feel any different from a male trainee. I felt exactly the same. I was treated the same, and I was still expected to do the same things that a male could. The only thing that was different was that the physical test standards are different for females, because I'd say everything else was smack-bang. Kia ora. I'm Liz Milden. I'm the curator of Hildre at the National Army Museum, Tomatatoa, and I was lucky enough to be asked to work alongside Louisa and Maraika and Karris on this project. I'm going to talk a little bit about why I collaborate, but first of all I'd like to give a bit of background on the women in the services in New Zealand. So on the 29th of July 1977, the New Zealand Women's Royal Naval Service, the New Zealand Women's Royal Army Corps, and the Women's Royal New Zealand Air Force, which were separate from the main regular force, they were disbanded, and the women serving in them were integrated into other corps and units within the three regular services. With regard to the army, even though women were now part of the regular force and working fully alongside their male counterparts, there were still restrictions in place regarding which corps women could serve and in how far their careers could progress. Section 16 clause 2 of the Human Rights Commission Act 1977 meant that the NZDF, New Zealand Defence Force, could exercise a preference with regard to who they recruited within the specific corps or trades and also who was promoted within those corps or trades. Women were not able to serve in combat roles across the three services. Within the army they were excluded from corps such as the Royal New Zealand Infantry. Restrictions were placed on career progression within corps such as the Royal New Zealand Artillery. So they could still join the artillery, and their prospects of promotion were very limited. In 1987, so this is 10 years after the initial integration, it was only then that women in the Royal New Zealand Air Force were able to train as pilots, and in 1988 they were able to fly combat aircraft, but again not in combat situations, and the same for the Navy, they were able to serve at sea, but again in non-combat roles. In 2006, Human Rights Women and Armed Forces Amendment Bill removed all restrictions in relation to which corps or units women could serve in, and meant that women could now serve in combat roles, whether that be with the Navy, army or the Air Force. So, why collaborate? The three service museums, as Louisa said before, had never collaborated before on an exhibition, so one Suffrage 125 presented the perfect opportunity to combine skills and resources. You know, why would we not take the opportunity to work with our fellow service museum colleagues? The success of this collaboration could also provide leverage for pursuing further tri-service museum projects in the future. The legislation that was introduced regarding gender integration and the 2006 Amendment Bill was not just about one service, it was about moving forward and then finally abolishing gender discrimination across all three services. The project was an opportunity to try something new with regard to it being a collaboration. It was also a collaboration that was made more feasible due to being able to successfully utilise available technologies, Skype, Basecamp, so we could connect the team members who were based in three different parts of the country. By involving all three museums, access to resources and research materials was increased, which meant went towards providing a more thorough and balanced coverage of each of the three services. Team members could also utilise the skills and support of colleagues within their own museums. Each service and each service museum can have a sense of ownership in relation to the exhibition and the material that has been shared with the public. Awesome. Ki ora, everyone. My name is Mereika. I'm the communication assistant at the Air Force Museum of New Zealand. I'm not a trained exhibition designer by no means, but when the team asked me to join and work them sort of start off as an editing capacity, and then it developed into... Hang on, I'm quite curious to see what else I can do with this online thing because I am quite curious to see what we could do. So, just with that in mind. So, I'll just be talking to you guys a bit more about the benefits of going digital with this exhibition. So, the women's interviews were video and audio, so it made sense that it would become an online exhibition. It also meant that it was going to be more accessible. So, it meant that people who'd never physically stepped foot into a museum would be able to view these stories. And especially these stories which within our different service museums may or may not have explored in such a way in terms of these oral histories. So, it's also adaptable. It can be used on a variety of different digital devices. So, as you can see here, there are examples of the launch. So, we have here the launch at the Navy Museum. They also had a blackboard which they invited visitors that came into the museum to write their stories, share who their wahini toa is in their lives. And then we've got Liz there at the launch at the Army Museum. And as you can see, they have a touch screen at the entrance of the Army Museum as well, which can then explain to visitors a bit more about the online exhibition and also invite them to further explore this online. It's also very flexible. Being on a digital platform meant that we could update as we went along. So, it meant we didn't have to worry about reprinting any panels, which was great, especially with a deadline that was not going to move for us. So, it was really quite handy. It also meant that for the future, we could add more interviews. We could add more supplementary materials from our different collections to explain the wider context of the exhibition. We could also update the timeline that appears on the online exhibition as well as policies change or anything else that we need to add. We can also add more features. So, if we decided that we wanted to provide a space for people to share their stories by commenting, that's something that we could also look at doing because it's flexible and adaptable in that manner. The flexibility and adaptability also means that we can take these interviews and we can use them in different types of exhibitions. So, for example, if the Navy Museum wanted to do an exhibition around leadership today within the Navy, they could easily utilise the different interviews that we do have from the different interviews from the leadership there. It's also cost-effective, as I said, in the terms of not having to actually print or produce any print materials. So, that just meant that, again, yeah, sorry. That's basically how I've already said that before. Measurability. I know in previous talks everyone's been talking about measurability, Google Analytics. You can see how many people have viewed the page and the page has been viewed 2,489 times from the time of launch, which was 28th of November 2018 until this metric measured up until the 30th of September 2019. Each video is around 7 minutes long and we can see that people who have visited the online exhibition spend around an average of 10 minutes on this page. So, while we don't necessarily know how they interact with that just yet, it's something that we need to look into in terms of measuring that, we can make a sort of educated guess that they're at least watching either one in full or watching a few minutes of one and then deciding, oh, actually not really into this one, but let's move on to that one. All right, I'll just sort of carry on where sort of list started in terms of working collaboratively. So, as she mentioned, we used a cloud-based project base camp. So, we used this to manage the project as well as to communicate. It was also used to share files, ask questions in a forum-based environment which meant all team members could view this. So, for example, if Liz, Louisa and Keras were talking about interviewees that they needed to talk to, but I wasn't necessarily in that live chat. I could always go back later on and view that and kind of catch up in that sense especially because we're also physically removed from each other. It also helped us to set clear deadlines that we could all view as well by using the calendar function. So, in the beginning Louisa would set up all of the tasks that we needed to do and the dates that we needed to accomplish them by, which was also really useful for us to ensure that we are keeping track and if we're noticing that we're a little bit behind on something trying to understand why that is and seeing what other resources we needed to pull from our different organisations. We held weekly Skype meetings just to catch up on any issues that we may have occurred during the week and again just quickly realising if there's something that we needed a little bit more help with on one area and who could pick up certain things. So, for example, a lot of the interviews that were conducted with the Air Force personnel who were based up in Fenua Pai were conducted by Karris who was based up in Auckland, which was really great so I mean that Louisa didn't have to fly up especially just to conduct those interviews. We also used a cloud based computer file transfer system called We Transfer and this was mainly used for the large raw video files that were seen to me to then edit. So by using things like Basecamp and Skype we were able to maintain really good general communication. There was obviously also the old school telephone as well. Things got a bit tricky towards the end especially but overall we felt that that communication worked really well. And there's just a lovely little picture of the three of them having a bit of a Skype conversation. Alright, so I'll just talk to you a bit about the editing process which I was really excited to get my hands on but I had to be careful what I wished for. I got all the footage and then we were like, right, what do we do now? Because the beauty of this project was that we had no idea what we were going to receive. We had questions that we asked that was focused around the journey of all these females. Why did they decide to join? How did they find that whole process of joining in the beginning and where do they draw their string from in terms of their wahenitawa? And of course you don't know who's going to say what, how long are they going to speak for? Personalities are very different. It's also depends on where in their career they are. People tend to be maybe a little bit, wouldn't say short in the answers but they knew what they wanted to say when they were young and energetic and they were like, yes, let's go. Georgie Kress was a great example we saw that in the clip. Very energetic, just things of you, you're able to do it and go for it. We're all the same, let's go for it. And then you get really thoughtful interviews as well from Lisa Hun as well talking more about leadership and senior leadership. So you're getting a lot of different types of answers and so with that in mind we thought we don't really want to cut this up too much and say here's a slide, here's the question, here's the answer. We sort of decided, no, let's just we'll still cut it up just to make it a bit shorter for the scope of the exhibition. But we still wanted to feel like a natural conversation and they were just telling us their story. So at the time the Air Force Museum did not have the Adobe Premiere Pro editing software that I really wanted to use. However the Taranga Crash City Central Library came to the rescue with their availability of all the Adobe suite software. So I was able to actually go in there spend as much time as I needed to I didn't have to book in or explain really, I just went there and kind of taught myself quickly how to edit with some YouTube tutorials but there are stuff available to actually give you tutorials to help you with the basics of how to use the software which I thought was really incredible because it just showed you that if you don't necessarily have all those resources and you wanted to do something collaboratively like this there are resources out there for you to be able to do this. It was quickly also noticed that I needed a very clear brief on what we wanted. I needed to know exactly when I needed to cut and stop and start so again it was just a very clear communication to say, hey guys, this is we've got a lot of amazing things here but for this project we need to decide what exactly it is that we want so they're really great and actually provided me with clear outlines of what it is that they wanted. Stop at this minute, start at this minute when she sees this, do this and that was really really great, it really helped out a lot with editing. Okay, so I'll just go over to the current home of the exhibition. So we decided to host a Wahanita Women in Defence on the Air Force Museum of New Zealand's website so the website is hosted on WordPress which made it really easy to create an online exhibition as it is a drag and drop sort of function which means I didn't have to code I don't know if I should say to learn how to edit quickly but as I was already doing this for my job as a communications assistant I mentally stuck up my hand when Luisa asked me about the capabilities of doing this on a website and I said yes, I can do that, let's do it. We uploaded the final cut of the interviewees to the Navy Museum's Vimeo Channel and again it just shows you that collaborative nature of the exhibition by using other resources so again the Vimeo Channel is something that the Navy Museum already uses and it meant that I wasn't going to use up all of our space in our media library on our WordPress website. So now I'll just delve into the world of the design so I kind of took the approach that the videos would act as interactive exhibition panels like the ones that you would find in a physical exhibition at a museum. The final 13 videos encapsulates the overall viewpoint of the interviews time in the New Zealand Defence Force and they all differ in lengths and are on average just under 7 minutes so the colour purple was used to link with Suffrage 125 and it also helps distinguish the online exhibition from the rest of the Air Force Museum website. So I'll just do a bit of a walk-through. So the three images and first paragraph act as an introduction or overview panel you'd find at the start of an exhibition. So I am Linnitha Kearney from Taifo and went to Taifo University College. I joined in 80 and 90. So as you can see you can just walk through that. We used the Quo-Box to highlight key themes from each interview and we also used the colour purple so the purple banners you'll see as a way to indicate to the visitor that you're about to enter into a new section similar that you would find if you were walking through a physical exhibition moving into a new idea or theme. So historical context was provided by archival recruitment materials you seen previously in the slides and they were curated from the Navy Army and the Air Force Museum. It is displayed in the form of an interactive slideshow and you can also view that onto the website. Clear and simple timeline design was also implemented so the visitor can have a broader understanding of women in the free services since gender integration in 1977 and gender equity changes. And I'll just pass back to Louisa. So we've got about 5 minutes so I'll try and wrap up. So although the exhibition has been launched the potential for adding new content and linking related content to it, like blog posts that our individual museums are working on anyway is virtually limitless due to the exhibition's digital nature. However, each of our museums have our own other big projects that we've got going on and so we need to respond to those activities as they arise and so we need to ensure that going forward all three museums have shared Web Administrator rights to upload, edit and manage the exhibition independently from each other. This is most easily achieved by relocating the exhibition to its own Web domain. First and foremost this will enable any one of our museums to upload additional content to the exhibition even if the other two museums are engaged in other work. It also allows us to plan for the exhibition's future, archive it, expand the content and interactivity wherever possible and run a refreshed communications plan around its relaunch. A Web domain will require minimal but ongoing funding and so we'll be working on a proposal for this in the new year. Some other updates will include some written form content from RNZEF recruits, interview captions for our deaf members of the online community audience and souvenir leaflets to better promote the online exhibition to our real world museum visitors. Basically this whole project was an experiment for us and the exhibition development process was also experimental in nature working across three museums that all intersect with NZDF and its individual units or services was a challenge especially working within a defence IT environment so that's why base camp and Skype were so valuable to us because we can't file share very easily we can't Skype there's a lot of things that we have to, we had to think around around some of those challenges while we did this even though we all work for the same organisation essentially. But despite budget we didn't have allocated budget as well so we just kind of like asked for things when we did need them we didn't have an allocated budget but despite these constraints and challenges of distance we achieved pretty good communication and we also have identified areas for improvement and produced a process template which can be used as a guide for future projects of this kind within our organisations and and so we launched this about exactly one month ago on 28 November 2018 125 years since New Zealand women cast their first vote in a New Zealand election so I hope you enjoyed that and if we have time for questions we'll be, we can do that now or we'll be around for the rest of the day thank you