Conversations with other digital practitioners: what came out of the first two

Over the last two Thursdays I ran a small experiment. I invited people working in and around digital in the cultural sector (and beyond) to spend an hour together online, comparing notes.

A cool mix of people came across the two sessions, joining from several countries and from very different kinds of organisation.

The idea came from something that I've heard lots of other people mention too. Since the pandemic, it feels like the chances to easily bump into someone who is doing a similar job somewhere else seem to have gone away, or become much more difficult to access.

Conferences are expensive and often too big or over-programmed to actually be able to talk to anyone. And a lot of the people doing this work are the only digitally confident/competent person in their team, which can be a lonely experience.

These sessions were an attempt to rebuild a bit of that serendipity and to provide a space to swap notes, borrow ideas, and occasionally just vent.

What people wanted to talk about

Across both weeks, the same handful of themes kept surfacing, whichever room I dropped into.

Making the case for the unglamorous work. Nearly everyone had a version of this. Leadership hears from a conference or a vendor that AI will fix everything, then asks why you can't "just switch it on". And you have to be the person explaining that there is no shortcut around the boring foundations like data structures, document management, or what to do with the years of files that nobody tagged properly. It is not a fun message to deliver, and it does not get you thanked.

Measurement is falling apart. This came up in the room on AI and discoverability. When you cannot tell a human from a crawler in your analytics, and visibility now depends on being cited in places that are not your own website, then the old numbers stop meaning much. Nobody claimed to have cracked it.

The maintenance gap. Project funding buys the shiny new thing. Two years later the shiny thing breaks, and there is no budget or in-house expertise to fix it (something that came up in my research for both Beyond the Promise and The Hidden Cost). This fed straight into the outsource-versus-build debate, where the consensus was that having the people on your team who are user-centred and can connect the dots matters more than any single technical skillset.

User-centred practice, still a new idea for some. For those of us who have been doing this a long time, it is genuinely surprising how often you walk into a room and realise that thinking about the actual user is not even on the table yet, and you are back to explaining why it is worth doing at all.

And a recurring, only half-joking idea (that again came up during the Hidden Cost conversations) - maybe we need to let some things visibly fall over. So much digital work stays invisible precisely because the people doing it are good at stopping the fires from ever being seen. The uncomfortable thought was that the only way to get the work taken seriously might be to stop firefighting and let the consequences show.

The thing(s) people actually valued

The word that came up again and again was cathartic. "Reassuring", "I'm not the only one", "The grass is not greener anywhere else".

People valued the specific (stealable!) ideas that were shared, but what they seemed to value most was the solidarity - an hour of frank discussion with peers who 'get it', without having to leave the office or make awkward small talk at a networking event.

Doing it again

The appetite is clearly there, so I am going to try to run these roughly monthly. I will keep the groups small, because I think that is what makes the conversations good.

If you work in or near digital in the cultural sector and this sounds like something you would value, sign up to my newsletter and I will make sure you hear about the next one.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the conversations over the last week, you're all brilliant.