Category Archives: Speakers

All upcoming and past speakers at SiC events

Friederike Fankhänel

With a diploma in Visual Communications (University of Fine Arts of Hamburg) and experience as a freelance designer, stylist and art educator, Friederike explores the boundaries of traditional museum education and its look. Linking the exhibitions to DIY and crafting, fashion blogging and social media, she hopes to inspire the visitors’ own interest in and creative uses of the art and design collections. Friederike and her colleagues develop guided tours, workshops, participative exhibition parts, interactive and digital content with a focus on offers for all-ages and all-abilities and a preference for interdisciplinary collaborations. Visit Studio MKG to see selected projects.

Douglas McCarthy

Douglas McCarthy holds an MA in Art History and has worked internationally in museums and archives for almost twenty years. In his current role as Collections Manager at Europeana, Douglas fulfils its mission to ‘transform the world with culture’ by creating compelling narratives using digital collections to be freely shared, reused and remixed. He writes regularly about open access for Europeana Pro and has interviewed leading professionals from institutions such as the Musée de Bretagne, Pinakotheken, Wellcome Collection, Slovak National Gallery and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Douglas is an active member of the global Open GLAM community and collaborates with many organisations such as Creative Commons, openglam.org and the Wikimedia Foundation. He leads an international survey of open access policy and practice in the GLAM sector with Dr Andrea Wallace and writes about this work on Medium. Douglas is the founder and co-editor of the Medium publication Open GLAM and he has been an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Digital Media Management since 2012. Follow him on Twitter.

Philipp Geisler

After studying Art History and Social and Economic History, and a non sequitur career in software development, Philipp Geisler has been living his passion for the virtues of open data and the possibilities of civic tech at Code for Hamburg and the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland. He incorporated his other passion for art and creative expression as project manager for 2016’s open cultural data hackathon Coding da Vinci Nord. He keeps working on providing new ways to invite new audiences to engage with their (digital) cultural heritage in creative ways to realize its true potential.

Helene Hahn

Helene Hahn is working on different aspects of the knowledge society and the digital world. She devoted herself to the protection of digital human rights and civic participation made possible by the use of technology and open data. At the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany she works as a project lead and is responsible among others for the data literacy program “Datenschule (School of Data Germany)”. As a cultural scientist she is passionate about (digital) cultural heritage. She is a Co-Founder of the cultural hackathon “Coding da Vinci”.

Sarah Powell

Sarah Powell is currently the Rights Specialist at Auckland War Memorial Museum where the philosophy towards access and reuse of their digitised collections is “open by default, closed by exception.” Her role consists of managing rights and permissions for digital images of collection and providing clear and consistent statements for online visitors. She has also been involved with implementing a cultural permissions statement which is assigned to images of Māori and Pacific objects, ensuring ethical and cultural considerations are taken into account alongside legal considerations. She has recently completed a Masters in Museum and Heritage Studies from Victoria University of Wellington where she focused on the adoption of the Open GLAM philosophy within New Zealand cultural heritage institutions.

Barbara Fischer

Barbara is an art manager, aiming to make things possible together. That means intermediating since 1994 among different stakeholders: Institutions and artists, public and organisational pretensions, economic needs and financial limits or for five years now connecting galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) with volunteers out of the Wikiverse. Thus enhancing GLAM to join the Open Culture movement as in Wikimedia projects. Like the GLAM hackathon Coding da Vinci, which she outlined with DDB, digiS and OKF.

Ellen Euler

Dr. Ellen Euler, LL.M., is Deputy Director of Finances, Law, and Communication of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and Director of the think tank “Cultural heritage digital”. As she studied law and has an additional qualification in information law from the Institute for information, telecommunications and media law (ITM) and a master of laws degree in IT law & law of intellectual property from the course “European Legal Informatics Study Programme” (Eulisp), she is an expert in the (copyright) legal questions of our digital cultural heritage, as well of the economic aspects associated. As national Project Lead she was responsible for the national adaptation of the Creative Commons licenses 1.0. In numerous publications and lectures she handles the topic of how the legal framework must be designed so that archives, libraries and museums can adequately fulfil their respective institutional tasks in the digital and networked era (including articles on legal aspects of Web harvesting, digital long-term archiving and visual catalogue proof, as well as on digital deposit copy right). To merge and accompany the German discourse on cultural heritage in the digital world initiated the series “Cultural heritage in the digital world”, whose first edition “A Future for the Past” was published in 2015.

Speaker: Harry Verwayen

Deputy Director, Europeana

A GLAM toolbox for assessing impact

Harry Verwayen will give an overview of the state-of the art of ‘impact’ thinking in our sector ranging from the theoretical to the very practical day to day application of it. You will get an insight in impact as a useful concept, the tools and methodologies that have been developed to design, assess and narrate impact, and practical examples of institutions that have used this methodology to their advantage, like Europeana and SMK Open.

Learn more about the impact toolbox

About Harry Verwayen
Harry Verwayen is the Deputy Director of Europeana. He is responsible for making sure that the organisation meets its objectives, and do it well. What he likes to do more than anything else though is to design and implement new business models that will change our way of thinking about heritage as an enabler of societal and economic growth. Lately, much of his attention and effort is directed towards the developments of the sharing economy. A visual thinker, he needs a white board as much as a strong coffee.

Speaker: Tim Sherratt

Access is never simply ‘open’

It’s a struggle for meaning, power, and value. I’m interested in using digital tools to see collections differently, to create opportunities for reflection and resistance. From Australia’s racist immigration policies, to the encroachments of state surveillance, I’ll be exploring how digital access changes the types of questions we can ask of the past.

About Tim Sherratt
Tim Sherratt is a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections. Tim has worked across the cultural heritage sector and has been developing online resources relating to libraries, archives, museums and history since 1993. He’s currently Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra. Tim’s tools and experiments include important things like The Real Face of White Australia, useful things like QueryPic, and strange things like The Vintage Face Depot. You can find him at timsherratt.org or as @wragge on Twitter.

Picture © Christopher Brothers 2012 

Speaker: Rob Stein

Chief Program Officer, American Alliance of Museums

Can the cultural sector really change lives?

For those of us working in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, we believe that answer to be a resounding yes. However, demonstrating this impact – beyond anecdotal evidence – has proven to be devilishly hard. Why is that the case?

While the cultural sector has progressed significantly to adopt technology that can exhibit collections, engage audiences, and document histories – have we missed the chance to prove why those things are important in the first place? As support for culture seems to be under continual threat, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums must leverage these technical skills to deliver measurable social impact lest we risk being sidelined as recreational, superficial, and optional.

Let’s explore together the ways that cultural organizations can advance our work in this area and document the proof of change we see every day.

About Rob Stein
Robert Stein is a museum leader, technology expert, and strategist with deep experience in the museum field heading up innovative projects and diverse teams. In April 2016, Rob joined the American Alliance of Museums as the Executive Vice President and Chief Program Officer to lead the organization’s programming efforts in service to both national and global audiences. In that role, Stein is responsible for key strategic initiatives including the expansion of the Alliance’s role as a thought leader, content provider, and global catalyst for excellence in the field of museums.

Rob is a sought after author, speaker, and consultant, focusing on the impact museums can have in their community, how technology efforts can change the dynamic of museum innovation, and how metrics and measurement can drive continuous improvement for the practice of museums.

Stein is active in service to the museum field having served as a board member of the Museum Computer Network, an active member of the International Program Committee of Museums and the Web, and as a National Advisor to the Education Committee of AAM. He is currently a Senior Advisor to the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University.