Notes on a Science Museum evening event

On Wednesday 29 January Stevie met with the team from the Science Museum (including Roger Highfield, their Director of External Affairs) to discuss the possibility of an evening event at the Science Museum. The initial thinking was to team up for a “Science Museum Lates” event related to their communication exhibition. However, after discussion, a tie-in with Wikimania was identified as a much greater opportunity, given the number of Wikimedians in town for the conference.

The Science Museum evening events tend to attract around 5,000 people and tend to have a younger demographic. They are particularly popular with 18-30 year-olds. Quite often they feature a specific theme with other elements built around it. The one I attended was focused on the Large Hadron Collider. The events also incorporate other aspects, such as talks, presentations, silent discos, speed dating and other elements.

There was great enthusiasm in the room for the potential that a Wikimedia-themed event, linked to and preceding Wikimania, could bring. Several potential elements were tentatively explored. These included visualisations of Wikipedia, the concept of Wikipedia as an ecosystem (linked to an upcoming exhibition about James Lovelock, the person behind Gaia Theory), scientific experiments related to Wikimedia and exploring the potential to digitise elements of their collections. Other ideas included a Q&A session related to Wikipedia, to include Jimmy Wales, Nigel Shadbolt (Open Data Czar), looking at the science that makes Wikipedia work, the theories behind crowdsourcing, games that can be played using Wikipedia, Wikipedia-related treasure hunts which involve exploring the museum, tours of the museum, use of QRpedia...

There was also broad agreement that there are elements of an event that would be pitched at Wikimedians and some that would be for total newbies.

There are some things to think about:

• Is it practical to hold the event on the Wednesday before the start of Wikimania?

• Because the event would be a stand alone, rather than a part of the already agreed programme, there is a need to consider funding. This is certainly something that would be attractive to potential Wikimania sponsors (there is also a beautiful space called the Smith Centre that could be made available for the sponsors to sue privately)

• How can we conduct a scientific experiment related to Wikipedia / Wikimedians on the day? This would add some real science to the event and be very worthwhile.

• How can we help to select which objects from the collections? We could come up with a shortlist of 20 and encourage attendees to vote beforehand which ones to display.

• How can we make sure the event is of benefit to Wikimedia projects? What content could we work on? What resources would we like to see digitised as a result?

• What themes would we like to include in the event programme?

Some watchwords to think about in the context of the event:

Playful Engaging scientific varied diverse Interesting Useful