[More live blogging from Gemma from the MCN 2010 conference, ‘I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In’ in Austin, Texas, to help MCGers keep up with the news and exciting research being shared at the conference.]

Conference roundup 29/10

This session consisted of 5min briefings from people who had attended other conferences over the year which were of interest to MCN delegates.

MW2010
International participation 500+people attend
Programme is built from the bottom up, based around what people are working on and thinking about now. Encourages conversations.  Social media activities were highlighted.

CIDOC
Highlight of the programme was a new mutilingual archaeology thesauras. There was also presentations about the Athena project and Europeana. Papers and presentations are available online. There are working groups which are like SIGs but have time during the conference to do things.  Working on new LIDO standard which will be international and incorporate Spectrum.

Assoc American Museums Annual meeting
MCN is an affiliate organisation
Theme museum without borders. This looked at the idea of the ‘young 21st century is about connectivity’
Highlight: serendipitous conversations with non-tech practitioners

New media consortium
Technology conference.  Had a host university, attendees are generally faculty staff from member institutions. Videos of keynotes on NMC’s website.

Texas Association of Museums
Not being derailed was conference theme. Economic problems and devastating weather of last few years.

Research roundup from Dublin Core Conference
Around management of the DC standards community struggling with the need of an abstract model.

American society of info science and technology
Highlight about how to manage your institution’s twitter account

Tate handheld conference
Workshop day by invitation only to discuss mobile work going on in museums.  Day  two series of presentations.  Big conversations about who brings the device? The visitor or is it provided by the museum?  Day 3 about mobile standards. Included ways to package content so that when exhibitions go on tour content can be reused.

Design4mobile
Corporate user experience development conference.  This also talked about divorcing content from the device eg content on drop box and used through different devices.

You don’t need a mobile strategy but mobile needs to be part of the strategy.  Mobiles absorb the technologies they encounter eg cameras and GPS
Next generation CMSs have content and presentation layers.  All presenters focussed on audiences.  Users misbehave and don’t follow the path you expect.
3min rule was introduced.  This considers what were users doing 3 mins before and 3 mins after mobile experience?

Takeaway that museums are up there technologically and business isn’t more developed.  Also due to competition they don’t share information about things which are in development whereas museums can and are able to stand on the shoulders of giants.

South by Southwest SXSW
Started as a music festival, then film festival, now there’s another part which is an interactive festival. Programming is broad.  No groundbreaking announcements, but they saw a maturing of existing technologies eg twitter announced at a previous SXSW.

Big themes across the sector:
QR codes are on the way out, instead we will go to image recognition ie google goggles.

Apple is edging out flash, so a move to HTML5