Phillip Djwa's blog

Importantly, the deliverables were met. In terms of engaging arts organizations, the ones that were fully engaged and committed to the project did do very well.  However, clearly there needs to be more upfront planning and value proposition generated that the arts organizations can easily understand, grasp in their language and move forward with. 

In future, projects it would make more sense to concentrate on fewer larger projects than many smaller projects.  A budget of 5 to 10 thousand dollars would be more appropriate for any kind of future initiate. 

Working with MetroCode and PocketCINE was great as the principals in those organizations are smart, enthusiastic and committed to these projects. 

The business model is dictated through an observation of what potentially might work, as this has not been validated in actual experience.  One of the concerns that many of the arts organizations had was that in a limited world of time and money, both the MetroCode and the PocketCINE did not stand out in terms of what would be "high value at low cost" to the participating arts organizations.  They perceived it as an initiative that would take time away from other resources and could potentially cost more than they had. 

One of our issues was that the budget that we had for each project was relatively modest, which should have allowed for several projects to occur, but in fact the concern from the organizations often was that the money was not enough.  

It is a truth that in many arts organizations trying to help a small project is a lot harder than doing a large project, just simply because the time and resources are almost the same for a small or large project in terms of the financial reporting that are required.  

However, that being said, the business model really needs to be based around a service that is easily accessible and as much self-service as possible.  I personally felt that a MetroCode model where somebody could upload and create their own MetroCodes using a simple web based interface, uploading their audio or video files in a fast and convenient way, could be an excellent model. 

Here are some personal reflections on the cultural outreach.

•    The interesting aspect of these projects was in the relationship between the arts communities and the technology providers.  Although arts organizations are fundamentally innovators, technology is not always seen as an easy or simply adaptable factor.  Many of the arts organizations that we spoke to, after an initial enthusiastic response, fully considered the impact and staff resources that running with a project such as MetroCode or PocketCINE would entail and started to get cold feet.  Many of the organizations we spoke to evidenced some concern that they didn’t have any “technical” staff on board that could successfully manage such a project.  Even though the reality was, was that the technology would be handled by the network provider, there was concern from the arts organizations that the technology would be too difficulty or too troublesome to manage.  

•    Another aspect was in terms of the technology itself.  We did not have a clear enough value statement that the arts organizations could quickly understand and apply.  Even though we were fairly confident that the values and benefits were spelled out, we should do a better job at explaining the benefits and explaining the overall impact.  There were certain unknowns, for example, how long would it take to record the different message for any particular MetroCode project?  This was an unknown that was impossible to quantify before going ahead, and even though we were able to do some guesstimating, it did concern some arts organizations.  

•    Timing is everything and especially with arts organizations that have a busy schedule of production.  If we were going to engage the arts organizations, we should start at least a year ahead of time and to allow for the full integration of potential technology within the production.  The most important aspect of this would be also to prepare and lessen the opportunity for failure in terms of giving the arts organizations enough time to work this into their marketing budget in terms of time and resources.  

•    Another issue that occurred was the relative sophistication of some of the arts organizations in dealing with their marketing collateral material.  Many of the organizations received compensation for funders, sponsors and other partners in return for the display of their logo on other promotional materials.  This was a problem in that there was some expectation from our network partners that they would get recognition on different pieces of marketing collateral that the arts organizations were considering.  While this was not a huge issue, it did result in some confusion from the two parties in reaching a negotiated settlement because of differing expectations about what the value of this project was.  We could have done better to assign a dollar value to the project and propose that as an aspect that the arts organization would be receiving in terms of benefit.  

•    The technology itself suffers in terms of how it can be presented.  There were implementation issues that arose and some of the bugs, quirks, different ways of doing things, were not immediately clear.  One of the problems in working with new technology is there are many ways to implement and to present this to different arts organizations.  Arts organizations would probably be better served by having a fixed product offering that would simply just provide a very straightforward value proposition that is clearly explained.  

•    In terms of actual numbers and promotions, the numbers were not high in terms of the actual people that clicked through and went through to the different aspects of MetroCode and PocketCINE; however, we understand that this is an emerging market and to understand the use of these aspects should be followed up on with some further research.  It would be interesting for example to see if there were ways to contact people that use the system and to enquire about the relative success or interest level that was sustained for the different projects.  

Arts organizations, as mentioned, are very innovative in their very nature.  Engaging audiences in this time and age require many different kinds of marketing approaches.  One of the ones that we felt would be most successful would be to try and understand how we could use innovative cell phone technologies to attract and engage audiences. 

One of the interesting things of this was using MetroCode to develop and deliver a number of different events using a form of talking posters.  This was done because talking posters are fairly straightforward in terms of the technology required and seem to be a fairly easy sell to understand to any user.  This was furthered by the evidence from the original arts project that MetroCode did with the Sculptural Biennale, where a user could, by inputting a specific MetroCode into their cell phone, receive information about a particular sculpture. 

The Mobile Muse Project was designed to be an innovative approach to providing cell phone innovation to different target audiences.  The project that I worked on was the Cultural Outreach, where we looked at involving cultural groups with using innovating cell phone technology.  The inspiration for the project was to engage community culture groups in working with innovative technology to further their own strategic and tactical goals in delivering their services, productions, and other artistic practices to the general community at large.  The different aspects of the project involved connecting and engaging community cultural groups, understanding their requirements and then providing a potential project partner from Mobile Muse’ different network partners and see through the project through implementation to delivery.