About

I’m currently Relationship Manager, Digital and Creative Economies, Arts Council South East. At ACE I’m responsible for a mix of regional and national tasks; in the South East these include initiation and development of Brighton Digital Festival and working with Dan Thompson of #popuppeople and @artistsmakers fame, as well as directly working with artists and organisations like Blast Theory, Semicondutor, Lighthouse and Photoworks. Nationally, I work with the Director of Broadcast and Digital on development opportunities like open cultural data, digital accessibility and new forms of digital content distribution.

In 2011 I was a founder member of Digital Education Brighton [DEB], and I’m currently on the steering group of the ICT TeachMeet Group within DEB. We organise regular regional unconference-style meetings for ICT teachers where emerging practice is related from peer to peer.  I’m currently organising the culture strand at the UK’s first Open Data Cities conference, in Brighton on April 20th, 2012.  

 A former Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times journalist, I have sixteen years experience of writing and editing online, winning multiple awards as an editor, and I’ve worked in the museum and gallery sector [on and off] since 1985! I led editorial, digital and design development of successive incarnations of the 24 Hour Museum/Culture24 website from 2001 to 2007 as well as client sites of C24 such as Untold London, Abolition 200 and Museums and Galleries Month.

More recently I managed and redeveloped the Disability Arts Online website, funded by Arts Council England, and the Jodi Awards website, for the Jodi Mattes Trust.

Since 2001 I’ve presented many peer-reviewed papers within the digital culture community of practice at conferences such as Museums and the Web, EVA, MA and DRH and I was a founder member of the AHRC-funded Semantic Web Think Tank. Papers include work on UGC strategies, SEO in an open data environment; RSS publishing strategies; development of citizen journalism networks; publishing CMS development; writing for the web training; taxonomy, vocabulary and semantic thinking; value and quality propositions within the online content ecology.