One is the weirdest number of people to manage

Or, how to garden with a single plant

When someone on your team shows interest in people leadership, an obvious move is to give them a single report for a time, so they can try it out, dip a toe in the water. It’s a big shift, after all. I’ve done this myself in the past, but from many coaching conversations I’ve had, I think it might be counterproductive.

So here goes. Welcome.

For a large part of my career, I’ve found myself inhibited with writing, especially long form. And then for another large part of my career, I’ve enjoyed writing very much. I’ve been thinking about why that has been, what currently is, and what might be.

Which Blob Are You?

Just passing on a small facilitation technique I picked up last year: Blob Trees!

Reframing Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

Every so often I come across a description of neurodiversity that is both enlightening and also a mild bummer in that it makes behaviours sound like a problem with the neurodiverse person rather than an effect of society’s difficulties with understanding and appreciating them.

What Continuous Integration can teach us about caring for relationships

At Kraken Tech, two crucial factors determine our happiness and success at work—our working relationships, and Continuous Integration (CI) staying green.

ACMI’s Standards for exhibition technology

When ACMI set out to renew its exhibitions, the team realised that building technology for museums is a world of its own; fragile, large-scale, public-facing, and constantly surprising. Drawing on years of experience from staff and collaborators, we pulled together a living set of “Exhibition Technology Standards.” Released openly as a Creative Commons wiki, these standards share practical guidance for anyone designing or procuring tech in cultural spaces, with an open invitation to remix, extend, and contribute.

An Internet-of-things strategy for ACMI

At the heart of ACMI’s $40m Re/newal was a bold rethink of how technology underpins the visitor experience. Instead of relying on expensive, ruggedised hardware, the team built a flexible ecosystem of hundreds of centrally managed devices, coordinated by XOS, ACMI’s custom “experience operating system.” This shift let curators control content with ease, reduced costs, and opened the door to richer, more resilient experiences for visitors.

ACMI’s open-source media player for displaying fleets of video

This is just a quick post to say hello, we made an exhibition-scale internet-of-things media player, and we’ve open-sourced it so you can use it too.

Sticky tape and string: Learning faster from TripAdvisor reviews

Last week the British Museum wrote about how they were making sense of their TripAdvisor reviews, using natural language processing techniques and data visualisation — work they presented at MCNx. It was good-looking (if dense) stuff, which surfaced new insights into what visitors found important about their experience, and pointed towards some root causes. But I couldn’t help thinking that the approach suffered from throwing away the ratings data, and was very resource-intensive— the article concludes with plans for two PhD data science interns and a partnership with the Alan Turing Institute to continue the work. This makes it pretty daunting for other museums to join in the fun.

I trained an A.I. to imagine movie titles from ACMI’s collection

My first few weeks at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) have been a whirlwind of discovery, exploration, planning and excitement around its forthcoming renewal. One of my projects is to continue to flesh out explorations of machine learning and related AI techniques to ACMI’s collection of Australian moving image works.

This is not that project.