Welcome back to Digital Works, the newsletter from Substrakt that's part of our programme of free talks, podcasts and other content, bringing arts, culture, museums and heritage professionals together to talk all things digital. I'm Katie Moffat, Director of Sector Strategy at Substrakt. Please get in touch if you have anything you'd like to share, or if you need any support with your digital projects. And if you find this newsletter useful, do forward to a friend or colleague.

Latest Things

We are extremely excited to annouce our first ever Digital Works Conference!! It will be a two day event, held in Leeds, UK, on 24-25 April 2024. Day one will be focused on leadership, strategy, and new ideas and day two will be all about successful execution.

You can see on the event website that we have already announced a few of our amazing speakers, like Fran Sanderson, Director of Arts Programmes and Investments at Nesta and Ruby Steel, Founder of Studio Exception. We also have a call out for speaker proposals so if you or someone you know has something you think will be of interest please do complete the form. The theme of the conference is 'curiosity' but other than that the focus of the programme is intentionally broad. Digital means many different things in the cultural sector and we want our programme to speak to and explore that breadth. Really hope to see some of you there!

There is also still time to register for our free webinar about user-led content design, this will be led by Substrakt's content specialist, Zosia, along with our Design Lead, Dan. I promise you don't want to miss this one.

OK, onwards with the tech news... This issue's 'if you only read one thing' is this piece by Bloomberg's Dave Lee on the moral case for leaving X (Twitter). This is extremely compelling and surely it won't be long before arts organisiations make the decision to shut down their accounts. On the plus side, if you do decide to leave X (Twitter), it will be reassuring to read that NPR, who shut down their account in April, have found the effects on traffic to their site to be negligible. You should also be aware that research shows that links shared on X (Twitter) to any other social media platforms are being throttled.

Meanwhile Threads is showing a bump in active users. This is after a little slump after the initial flurry of sign-ups. So it's bounced back and seems to be winning the 'what will replace Twitter' war. For now anyway.

The UK Government's controversial 'Online Safety Bill' has been passed. Here's a good explainer about what it is, its aims and potential pitfalls.

ChatGPT can now see, hear and speak (I'm sure this will end well).

And in a bit of a departure for this section, we'd like to highlight this opportunity for a fixed term contract Digital Officer at the wonderful Citizens Theatre in Glasgow.

Useful Things

A couple of important updates on Accessibility and Sustainability. Firstly, the much awaited Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 are here. You might be wondering what this means for you?

There is also a new set of Web Sustainability Guidelines, and here's a handy summary. 

A practical and useful post about content and Google search rankings which discusses the challenge of creating 'good' content that ranks well without resorting to bad faith SEO practices.

What are accessibilty overlays? A great video about why accessiblity overlays are a very problematic solution to making your site accessible.

You might want to consider creating an AI policy for your organisation. As AI tools are being increasingly used in all sorts of scenerios, we really need to consider the ethical and legal ramifications. Here is some sensible guidance for civil servants about the use of AI in a work context. And here is a useful example policy. 

Thought-provoking, Inspiring & Entertaining Things

The social media folk at Milwaukee Public Library do a very good job. See for example, this brilliant version of the Bentley meme (a popular meme that started on TikTok and subsequently migrated to Instagram).

The V&A launched mused, "a new website for creatively curious kids". Lots to love with this not least the fact that the team behind it did extensive user research with the target audience to build something they'd actually use!

The wonderful Watershed has launched a new immersive gallery Undershed (ps Watershed's CEO, the inimitable Clare Reddington, will be one of our speakers at the Digital Works conference).

A quite mind blowing demo of ChatGPT coding a wireframe from only a hand drawn illustration. The low-fi nature of this demo means it could be easy to dismiss it but when you think about what the AI is actually doing, it's incredible.

Digital Works Podcast

A reminder that, in addition to our regular interview podcast, we now have a new short 'Bytes' episode, which will be released after every newsletter to discuss three of the most interesting stories in the newsletter. Have a listen and let us know what you think!

Getting to 1 million digital subscribers, creating meaningful metrics, and working with NT at Home - with George Montagu, FT Strategies.

What effective funding looks like and thinking differently about value and risk - with Fran Sanderson, Nesta.

The power of cultural leaders developing a 'digital imagination' - with Seb Chan, CEO and Director of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image)

Running a successful digital project - with Fiona Morris, CEO and Creative Director of The Space.

Strategy & team culture - with Hilary Knight, formerly Director of Digital at Tate, now a consultant at AEA Consulting.

Innovation and experimentation - with Nick Sherrard, a partner at Label Ventures.

The importance of collaboration and how NT at Home happened - Nicholas Triantafyllou, the National Theatre.

Listen to all the episodes.

Good Reads

Since X (Twitter) has gone off the rails, a lot of what we might call 'professional' social networking as decamped to LinkedIn. But what does that mean for the content that is more personal? I really enjoyed this piece: It's not just you. LinkedIn has gotten really weird.

And finally this lovely article about how some tiny countries who happen to have, what are now, very useful domain suffixes are making some unexpected revenue from domains such as .ai.

See you soon

That's all for this issue, if you see anything interesting, surprising, fun, or useful, please do share it with us so we can include it in a future newsletter.

And if you're looking for help with a digital project or any kind of digital consultancy support, please do get in touch.

Until next time, stay safe.

Bye!