cultural engagement

As I mentioned in my last post, MUSE II was designed with cultural engagement at the core of our whole plan. The biggest challenge in doing leading edge research within our mandate was finding the right cultural groups who had existing content and audiences, as well as the interest and capacity to experiment with new mobile technologies, and then connecting them with leaders in mobile technology innovation who could pull projects together. With an end goal of inspiring innovative project ideas that are both innovative and culturally relevant, we needed these two groups to collaborate. As folks from these sectors don't tend to naturally collaborate, some MUSE-Matchmaking was in order. 

Mobile MUSE has always been about the intersection of mobile innovation and culture. While our mission has been to build a vibrant mobile content industry in BC, our funding priorities have always been to do so with a strong focus on ensuring cultural organizations benefit from this economic growth. This means helping create true collaborations between technology providers and cultural organizations. Not an easy task when you are dealing with bleeding edge research!

I’ve been involved with MUSE since its inception, and was asked to become part of the leadership team for two reasons: to ensure the prototype ideas MUSE developed had a strong grounding in the needs of the cultural community, and to use my background and network in the community to successfully plug community organizations into MUSE.