Intelligent Naivety

Last Thursday we attended a summit of all the public agencies currently engaged in promoting or delivering technological developments in the culture sector. There were a combination of strategic agencies, current project leads and some of the major institutions in the room.

With the current amount of focus and investment going into technology in the culture sector (e.g. through digitisation, content distribution, user-generated content sites, etc.), the need for sector-wide guiding principles and a joined-up approach cannot be overstated. The aim of the gathering was therefore simple and yet devillishly difficult: find a way for all of the agents to work more closely together on their technology strategies.

In our view, we saw two different yet equal challenges surfacing. One takes place at the technical level: how do we integrate and standardise current technologies and processes, and identify best practice and providers, so that we are able to deliver the functionality demanded by the applications of today and tomorrow?

The second challenge is equally as important, and yet it is too often missing from the discussions: how do we develop services that meet and exceed consumer expectations; that are based on a solid understanding of user behaviour and demand? Rather than building excellent, solid technologies and then searching for an audience for them, how can we reverse this mindset, so that technologies are built with consumers and end use at the centre? How do we then adequately market the technologies we develop, not simply to the culture sector, but to the wider general public?

This balance of consumer-centric development and technological integration should be two main and equal pillars when developing future strategy. We look forward to reporting how these talks develop, and crucially how the actions are matched to the words, over the coming weeks and months.