I’m not a museum professional at all, but I’m a pretty heavy Twitter user, and I follow a good many museum people on Twitter. I was interested, a few weeks back, in “Ask a Curator” day, (un)organized in pure Clay Shirky fashion by the hashtag #askacurator.

What I’d like to do is sit down with some smart folks and some laptops in a room and see what we can do with that data. Visualizations? Analyses? Other? The dataset can be downloaded from twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/askacurator (though you need a Twitter account to get it).

I’d especially love to invite people who know more about data analysis than I do: I mostly do all my analysis with Excel, but surely there are better tools.

Hi all! We’re counting down till tomorrow, and you may be thinking, like @twittorician, “Less than a month [a day] until my first unconference. I have no idea whether that leaves me enough time to unprepare.” Rest assured, there’s always time to unprepare. One of the great features of an unconference is its spontaneity.

Still, here’s a little preparation, in the form of some Ground Rules:
* Have fun.
* Be productive.
* Keep it collegial and participatory.

Other than that, all you have to do is show up with an open mind. If you can make it to the introductory session at 10:30am tomorrow (Thursday) in the Sheraton room Capitol A/B, that’d be ideal: during that session, we’ll come up with some ideas for what to do during the 11 session slots that remain unscheduled. If you can’t make the introductory session, you should still feel free to drop in on any session you like and to register for this site, which will allow you to post to the blog.

Finally, we’d like to congratulate our good friend Ben Brumfield on a new addition to his family. Childbirth! Now that’s fun, productive, and participatory.

We’re very pleased indeed to announce that THATCamp has partnered with the Museum Computer Network to bring you an “unconference within a conference.” THATCamp MCN, offered in conjunction with I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In 38th Annual MCN Conference, will be free and open to anyone who wants to attend and share ideas and get work done in the company of experienced museum professionals used to working with technology.

October 28th – 30th, 2010

Sheraton Austin at The Capitol

Austin, TX

See also the website for the associated conference, I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In 38th Annual MCN Conference.