At the Visioning Event on the 18th, there was a great discussion about what the ‘South East’ bit in Turning Point South East really meant.
On a practical level, most people agreed that something simple and regionally focused – like an online map of the visual arts in the region – would be a great starting point, which could develop nationally and globally through being ‘open at the edges’, and allowing people to find information by topic (eg. ‘performance art’) rather than imposing geographical or bureaucratic boundaries.
Ideas for this online event calendar and visual arts map included:
- Creating a site that allows people to get updates (via email/sms/RSS etc…) of “visual art within a 10 mile radius of me”.
- Allowing both geographical and topic-based updates for example: “performance art near me”
- Creating editorial or a ‘curated’ mail-out (like e-flux) from the site.
And there were some great ideas about how to do this:
- Bringing together existing initiatives, online tools and networks rather than building new things,
- Gathering or ‘aggregating’ information from existing websites, rather than forcing everyone to update the site manually
- Developing a consistent brand identity for all network members to use to grow the network,
There were also great ideas about trying to share market research and audience attendance data to help TPSE members improve what they do, and get a shared sense of what audiences want and respond to in the region.
But there are still lots of questions that need fleshing out!
- We need to know who we are talking to. Who are our ‘priority’ audiences? Who gets served first?
- What is already out there? Sites? Organisations? Initiatives? Individuals with lots of fresh visual arts data?
- How do we already collect audience data, and are their privacy issues in sharing it?
- What are the barriers to participation for organisations/individuals?
- Are we going to rebrand TPSE? If so – how?
- What are the funding/financial resources available to support this kind of network long term? What is it’s business model?
Once some of these questions are discussed on the TPSE google group, we can start sketching out some potential technologies and processes, but until then, let the discussion begin!
