MW2008: Notable sessions on community

It's been a couple weeks since the Museums and the Web 2008 conference now. Here are two sessions that I'm still thinking about: Peter Samis' presentation of their findings at SFMOMA of visitor text comments posted from the exhibit to a blog, and Gail Durbin's session about their experiences with Web 2.0 projects at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The two compliment each other well: raising questions about visitor voices in exhibits, and providing some potential answers.

Peter's presentation raises questions about the visitor voice based on experiences in their fascinating exhibit of Olafur Eliasson's work. Visitors could type in comments on the works while in the museum. The comments included reflection on visitors' experience, but were characterized generally as a "mixed bag" of responses (ie, "cooooooollllllll!!!!!!!!!!!"). An issue: how much weight do we give to visitors' comments, many of which did not involve much consideration?

The project that caught my attention in Gail Durbin's presentation focused on the V&A's World Beach Project which allows users to submit photos of installations of stone they create on beaches. The project provides an extraordinary structure allowing visitors to collaborate with the museum in parallel to an exhibit.

A thought: visitors don't have much time to create media while in the museum, and we need to ratchet up the filtering process to get at the gold (which _will_ be there), or scaffold more tools to support visitors' expressions. But post-visit creative opportunities (such as the World Beach Project) offer even more options for significant visitor involvement.