Hi everyone.
My name is Gretchen Halverson, and this is Shel Olsen.
We're from the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
We're here today to talk about collaboration.
We started to think about this topic
after returning from a conference,
feeling, on one hand, a great sense of excitement,
of energy,
of thrill to collaborate and contribute to the field.
On the other hand, we felt a sense of fatigue,
a sense of overwhelming knowing
that the day to day work might get in the way.
How might we work against this cycle?
How can we keep the post-conference momentum going
after we leave?
How can we think about small collaborative efforts
as a means to get there?
We'd like to start with a story.
- So, it was a few years ago that we were
rebuilding our flagship website. We wanted to...
(person shouting)
- Mic, is it okay?
We wanted to rebuild our collections website
a few years ago,
and we wanted the search to be really fast,
and we wanted it to be really, deeply browsable,
and really showcase the information on all the artworks
that we hold in our museum.
We got those core goals mostly built,
and things were up and running,
and then we were in a meeting trying to figure out,
"What do we still need?"
We came up with a few ideas, and one of those was
that we needed a way to show the relative size
of all our artworks,
and give a visual idea of how big or small something is.
We didn't quite know how to do this,
so we had to go from there.
So, we wrote it down.
It was on our to do list, and we waited
to come up with our concrete next action.
Luckily, right around this time,
there was a blog post from Good, Form & Spectacle,
which is a design agency based in London
that works with cultural heritage,
and they were working on a project for the British Museum,
and they had built a dimension drawer,
which draws that nice, volumetric box next to
a bright yellow tennis ball,
and it does a really good job of showing how big
or small something is against a universal reference point.
They wrote their project.
They posted all of the code openly,
and so, it only really took a day or two to dive in
and adapt what they did to work with our collection.
We generated 150,000 dimensioned rungs.
We put them into our collection site, and they worked great.
This simple, we sent a note of thanks back to London,
and they were overjoyed to see their projects getting used.
We really didn't expect to get the feedback
that we did get noted.
It generated a lot of interest from our visitors,
and even became a point of reference in the field.
You can see Chad from St. Louis Museum Park
here tweeting up how this is a good example
of how to do it on the website.
But, we really don't deserve too much credit for this.
It all goes back to George Oates and Frankie Roberto,
who were two collaborators in London
that worked on this project.
We just found it roughly at the right time and were able
to implement it quickly, and with little investment.
- So, this example illustrates that collaboration can happen
not just in big, elaborate ways,
but in small, organic ones, too.
The effort didn't occur over months and months.
It didn't require deep budgets.
It didn't require layers of approval.
Rather, it was small.
It was measured, but it was also significant.
We'd like to ask that we value those small contributions,
those small collaborative efforts,
just as much as we value the big ones.
- And, to take a step back, this isn't new.
This isn't a great, wonderful idea that we've invented.
This has been happening for a long time,
and it's happening more and more.
We think the two of us aren't necessarily even
that good at it. (audience laughs)
So, I want to take a moment to thank everybody who's here
in this room,
who professionally engages through blogging,
or on social media, or by attending conferences like these.
I think it's a really, really generous gesture
for all of us to be here,
and it all leads us into a tighter-knit community,
and by sharing our experiences,
and talking about the work we do,
we're taking small steps forward.
- So, this might just seem like common sense.
It might be obvious,
but perhaps we acknowledge
that simple can sometimes be hard,
and practice makes perfect,
and small can be significant.
So how do we get there?
Number one: talk about your work.
GitHub, slack channels, blogs, e-mails, coffees;
talk about what's working, and what's not working.
Where do you need help,
and where might you have an opportunity to share you work?
- There are almost too many opportunities to share
and to read and listen,
but the second most important thing is that we find
what other people are talking about or sharing in.
Pay attention to it,
and really register that within our day-to-day work.
Even if it's just a matter of taking a few minutes a day
to follow-up with someone,
that's the start of bigger efforts and collaboration.
- And finally, use it.
When you find someone's work, when you're listening to it,
think about whether you can use that to solve one
of your own problems.
Save a week's worth of work,
and get that work that could win.
- So, we think that these are some things that we can do
to keep the ball rolling,
make it maybe roll a little bit faster.
I'm not saying that everyone should go home and start a blog
on Monday, or write a presentation for the next conference,
I hope, but, what can we find that's really a small gesture,
a little thing that might make a big difference somewhere
in the future?
- What can you commit to today?
Dedicate yourself to finding the value in those small,
collaborative moments,
and be hopeful that those moments matter.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
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