Not Content with Content

Earlier this week at work, we published (and effectively open-sourced) a digital strategy that will guide us for the next several years. I wrote about it on the museum’s blog and if you’re into this kind of nerdy stuff, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Shortly after we made the strategy public, I stumbled upon a tweet by the brilliant Seb Chan:

I get sad when museums talk about all their stuff as ‘content’. — Seb Chan (@sebchan) March 31, 2015

I’ve never liked the word ‘content’ and I always feel a bit icky when I hear marketers fling it about. Seb is completely right. The word doesn’t do museum missions justice and it cheapens the integrity of our subject matter. Sure enough though, there it was littered throughout sections of our strategy used to describe the museum’s varied objects and narratives.

Since the strategy was open-sourced on Github, I promptly filed an issue ticket and started discussing language alterations with my team. Everyone agreed that an edit was appropriate. A few minutes later, I pushed an update to the repo. We now refer to our objects, media and ephemera with more meaningful language.

This is a really great example of how operating openly and transparently can positively impact institutional philosophy. This minor modification made our approach much stronger. I hope we push more changes like this in the future and when I look back on the versioned repo a few years from now, I’ll be able to see a comprehensive record of how our approach evolved over time.