Paula's blog

I seem to be out of the office a lot recently, to start the month I attended Gallery Camp at the New Art Gallery Walsall Birmingham, where people from galleries, arts organisations, tech geeks, researchers and artists joined forces to discuss the future of galleries.  It was an unconference style event where the delegates suggest topics to discuss in breakout groups.  I'm interested in how cultural organisations are gathering data from social media channels and how they are using it.  Sadly, there were no organisations in my group that seem to be using this.  http://www.thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/

In late September I headed down to Woking to meet the Permeate Team www.permeate.org.uk at their round table event.  It was great to be able to go to a meeting to be a 'fly on the wall'.  The trainees that I met were really happy, they had gained experience, self confidence and felt they had a voice worth listening to. 

I went to visit Permeate as their values and the project are similar to DASH and our IN project.  A few days later Monika Richards was able to come to Birmingham for a meeting to discuss Permeate coming to the West Midlands.  I do hope that this will give many more people the chance to gain experience in cultural organisations here.  Watch this space.

On my way through London to Woking I stopped off at St. Paul's Cathedral, my first ever visit, despite living in London for nearly 5 years!  I went to see the Caravan exhibition http://www.oncaravan.org/#!exhibitions/c21kz where artists from the East and West had painted life size donkeys, CARAVAN was started in 2009 as a catalyst to encourage East and West, and their creeds and cultures, to journey together through the Arts.  The donkeys were thought provoking, sad and beautiful. The donkeys were being auctioned off after the exhibition to help support grass roots charities in Egypt.  I wish that I: a. had the room for one and b. had the money to buy one.  I will just have to try and make my own!

In early October I attended an Intelligence Briefing, (sounds grand doesn't it?) at a secret location in central London, otherwise known as the NCVO offices.  It was an Arts Marketing Association event about how social media is changing the way cultural organisations listen and respond to their audiences.  http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/becoming-a-social-arts-organisation

Yesterday 17/10/13 I went to Birmingham and met two more men named Chris to add to the ever growing list of men I know named Chris.  I'll tell you more about them another day.

Next week I'm off to Brighton for a workshop on Digital Project management, which will be a great help if my Nesta application gets the go ahead.  I'm very excited about that one, but I can't tell you too much or I might spontaneously combust. Talking about funding, I have applied to six different trusts for funding for visual arts workshops, so keep 'em crossed for me. 

Bye for now.

Paula