Mission Models Money

Russell Willis Taylor is CEO of National Arts Strategies, the pioneer body in the US for organisational leadership for arts and culture.

Listen to Russell’s critique of our Governments’ drive to increase US style fundraising in the arts, her views on how part of the answer to the global financial collapse is to do less better and her belief that the times we live in require artists and arts leaders to be revolutionaries.

Last night saw the official launch of the Centre for Creative Collaboration, a new and experimental space in Central London which uses the principles of open innovation to encourage collaboration between creative disciplines.

It has however been open for a few months already to find its feet, so I recently took the chance to talk with Brian Condon of Complexity Partners – the convenors who helped make the overall project happen – to find out about what it is, how people can get involved and what they’re learning already.

And if you want to follow the conversation about the centre on Twitter you can do so by watching the hashtag #c4cc

Just before Easter I had the great pleasure of attending Rewired State Culture, the first culture-focussed instance of Rewired State who have the brilliant tagline of Geeks Meet Government.

The day-long session was held at the Guardian’s London HQ and had an excellent format.  On one track you had the geeks working with various data sets provided for the day using their creativity to prototype new services and apps.  And on the other track you had people passionate about the cultural sector and technology (like me) in an unconference format talking about the issues of the area.

At the end of the day there was a showcase of what the developers had created and while I’d love to show them all, I include only a small selection.

You can read a fuller review of the day here (thank you Brian Kelly) and see the project list at the Rewired State site.  It worked really well and I hope that they hold another culture focussed event soon, especially since one of the co-convenors of RS is the infectiously passionate DCMS CIO Mark O’Neill.  I feel there is definitely scope to open the discussion wider in the cultural sector with much of the focus this time on collections and museums.