Back from my holidays

Sorry, there hasn’t been any activity on this blog for the last month.  To be honest, there won’t be much for a little while, as I’m still ploughing through the backlog in my inbox that built up while I was on holiday. If you want to see what I and my family got up to in New Zealand and Australia, check out our holiday blog.

Back at work though, all sorts of things have been happening. Of immediate interest to the web-savvy is the Googlegroup set up by a volunteer at Knole for the other volunteers there. he has put a great deal of thought into building and populating a secure framework for content, which volunteers can access, and a coomunications channel for news. It’s not yet been released to more than a small group fo volunteers who are testing it all, but I am very impressed. I know other properties are thinking of doing something similar, and I think they should use this a model.

A lightbulb moment

I love this picture, the room is in Saddlescombe Farm, and apart from the lightbulb looks almost exactly as it is drawn in a book about the farm in the 1860’s. If a funny little place, only open to the public a couple if days a year, but right onthe South Downs way. I spent a (freezing) Tuesday afternoon there, planning with colleagues how we might make it more accessible. We could try selling tea there on Summer week-ends, but we can’t attract too many cars there, as it’s such a sensitive site. So our main target will be walkers and riders, and perhaps we can attract people down from the top of Devil’s Dyke.

On Friday I found myself sitting at head office, working out the terms of reference for a proposed Technology for Engagement Group. It includes a number of people on the succesful Virtual Tours group (we had our phpto taken afterwards for the staff magazine, to celebrate our JODI award). We plan to support properties looking into using new technology for interpretation and it was interesting to hear the ideas that were coming in – Tyntesfield are exploring “mscapes” or mediascapes, and I’d not heard of these before. Other properties were thinking about podcasts and vidcasts and user generated web content.

The group also plans to be a first point of contact for companies and researchers approaching the Trust with innovative ideas, and I was keen that we should be a fixed term group, so we discussed running for two years. And maybe finishing with a technology conference.

Anyhow, today I’m thinking that we haven’t yet thought about how new media might improve access to Saddlescombe without attracting cars.

Back at work

I had a lot of time left at the end of my leave year, so I’ve been out of the office for what seems like ages. Not posting either. Back now. Happy New Year to you all.

It was a close run thing, but the Trust’s poll for Green Father Christmas or Red Santa Clause was won by the Greenites our green FC at Standen was very well recieved, so I think we’ll be kitting out more of the region’s Father Christmases with green togs for next year.

Today, apart from doing a bit of administration for my team’s Personal Development Reviews,  I’m also looking at: our final brief for a pilot of updated tills; commenting on a partnership idea between one of our properties and a local mental health charity; trying to fix a meeting with Go Ape, t talk about the possibilities of future partnerships.

I’ve also had a look at a prototype site our central web-team have created, which shows how we might share user generated content, to create a far more personal and interactive interpretation of some of our places. It’s a bit clunky in this early stage, and uses the blog aesthetic, which somehow isn’t yet working for me in this context, but I’ll watch with interest as it develops.

We won! We won!

I mentioned before that we were shortlisted for a JODI award. Well I’m sitting in the ceremony now having just watched Heather, our Head of Access, and Steve go up on stage to collect the award.

I’m filled with pride, because I feel the virtual tours, whilst the work of many brilliant people, are my baby. And that feeling is not diminished by the example they showed on the ceremony being the one for the Homewood, which is the one I commissioned and which formed the basis if the “approved” tours now flowering in properties across the Trust.

The invasion of the iPhones

A little footnote to the conference blogs. I saw a good number of colleagues using their iPhones, among the NT supplied Nokias and Blackberries. When I found one wasn’t using his for his Trust calendar and email. I showed him how. I should have checked with all the other owners, to make sure they also knew how. We want a groundswell of popular iPhone use to make sure that our IT department don’t turn off the the OWA function that pushes us our email and diaries!

While I was writing this post, I was interupped by our head of e-engagement. We talk about all sorts of stuff, but I ended up briefing a new colleague if his on how to use her iPhone for exchange access. The march continues!

Doh! New improved website

My first meeting as a proper MSDM, with my other MSDM’s was interesting in many ways. But of particular interest was a presentation/discussion with Nick Burne, our interim head of e-engagement. He talked through some of the work he and his team have done since he joined the Trust.

The first interesting thing he said was that he is taking a beta approach to improvement, small incremental changes, and live piloting, just like Google does. He talked about how it has become much more acceptable to the public to be offered a chance to watch us try our new ideas out, and join in on testing them and offering feedback.

I’d already heard about the most obvious exaple of this, our use of Googlemaps to locate our properties, with a lot more functionality than our old mapping had, and the possibility of mashing other data in. For example, right now you can link on a link to get a weather report for that property.

But then he talked about smaller usability changes that he’s making to the interface, and particularly the home page. And as he talked i realised that these changes had already been made, and were so subtle I hadn’t noticed them, until there were pointed out. But they really do improve the visitor experience. Putting the logo at the top left, on white (rather than middle left, on a grey background), reducing the number of options in (and relocating, below the logo), the menu bar, making pictures clickable, makeing the “calls to action” more obvious. It has made a huge improvement, with only tiny tweaks.

Then, he asked us about where we saw priorities in the coming year. I made an impassioned plea for Radical Transparency, more for my colleagues hearing than Nick’s. We went on to talk about blogs, and then got more esoteric with a brief chat about Creative Commons, but that was a step too far for my colleagues, I think, and went over their heads.