Last week before the Volcano overshadowed any events, Joe Baskerville and I headed over to Denver for Museums and the Web 2010- a major international conference for Museums in the digital space. The conference is a hub of information from the sector with a series of lectures, workshops, conferences, and presentations all exploring the issues of museums online.

MW2010 kicked off with a talk by Brad Feld. He’s an entrepreneur who did a great job of telling museums to take risks if they want to achieve something fantastic. He said (though I’m paraphrasing) “If you need to buy a new computer system, you could buy IBM which will be a safe bet, but won’t blow anyone away, or you could take a risk on something less well known and get a truly amazing result.” He also prophesied the volcano by suggesting we all go and work in someone else’s office, which a bunch of the stranded European delegates ended up doing thanks to the generosity of our US cousins.

One of my conference highlights was Play at Work: Applying Agile Methods to Museum Web Site Development by Dana Mitroff Silvers from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Alon Salant from their developers Carbon Five. It was all about Agile Development methods. It was a hands on interactive session where we played games and activities, including stand up meetings, story writing, and story mapping. Holding meetings standing up sounds like a bit of a cliché, but the talk showed how these activities can be successfully adapted to apply to museum development, and how it had worked for SFMOMA.

After that I headed over to Tales of the Unexpected: A Pragmatic and Candid View of Life Post-Launch - three museums including Cogapp client MoMA talking about life after redesign. A personal highlight was Allegra from MoMA showing a slide from the usability report we did for them last year and showing how our user testing has shaped what they’re doing. All three organisations talked about their post-launch findings such as having a CMS doesn’t mean less work, and how important digital strategies and post launch budgets are. This matches the advice we give our clients, and it was great to hear it from the organisation's point of view.

Fast, Open, and Transparent: Developing the Smithsonian’s Web and New Media Strategy was all about the Smithsonian and how they had developed their digital strategy. Michael Edson led the talk and spoke about how they developed their strategy through a series of workshops, conferences, YouTube, Twitter and a wiki. He had loads of awesome quotes, one of my favourites being “Think big, start small, change fast.” which is completely relevant to a lot of projects we’re working on right now. Seriously good.

I also got a chance to meet up with Paul Rowe from Vernon systems who we’re working with on the Waddesdon Manor project. Those guys are currently working on E-hive - the future of collections management, which is an online system that automatically publishes to the web. In the future they are planning a combined content and collections management system (a CCCMS I guess!), which will be really interesting for Cogapp and the museums world to keep an eye on.

As well as the Museums and Web conference we also got a chance to look around Denver visiting the Denver Art Museum, the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, a Henry Moore exhibition, City O’ City - a veggie restaurant, and the Wynkoop brewery (twice) alongside working our way through this about three times each.