I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in a live-chat event on the Guardian Culture Professionals network this week, in the company of some brilliant people. Whilst the format is a little tricky to follow, the two-hour flow of it made for a nice rhythm.
You can read the full transcript here, but I thought I’d pull out a few points that really chimed for me.
1. Networks
I became acutely aware that we weren’t participating (or even aware of) networks in our field. I don’t *think* that’s because we’re wholly ignorant (although I do admit to being partially so…) of them existing at all, but more that this is further evidence of the odd place which we inhabit. Are we at arts festival? Trade show? Village fete? Videogame festival?! Nicely, the experience of just taking part in the GCP chat started to form some new conversations – it really validated a lot of the conversations we’ve been having internally at the moment though…
2. Mistakes
We’ve made a lot of mistakes, only a few big ones – but lots of smaller ones which we iterate on rapidly. I didn’t really get a good answer in during the chat on this subject as there are so many. It did remind me I need to capture and evaluate them better though. ]
3. Open Source Festivals
I was really excited that Suzanna was using this kind of language to describe the approach to their programming for Shoreditch too. This is really worthy of further investigation – not just as a political / social position, but also the operational detail with which that is implemented. OpenGameCity is still one of the most interesting parts of the project for me…
4. Hits vs Surprises
I hadn’t really consciously thought of us programming in this way, but of course we do. I think colliding those two things together is our core schtick.
5. Metrics & Analytics
We’ve been historically quite bad at this. The BOP research that Ulrike linked to provides a really comprehensive starting point.