What/Why/Who

What

Sync is a two year prototyping and innovation programme for the cultural sector in Scotland. It has three central elements: the annual Culture Hack Scotland event, a Geeks-in-Residence programme, the Sync Tank magazine. It is part of Creative Scotland’s Cultural Economy programme for 2012-14, alongside Ambition Scotland and the NESTA R&D programme.

Why

The concept and fact of innovation can be pretty intimidating for the majority of cultural organisations. We hear stories of large-scale institutions doing marvellously expensive digital projects and wonder how we might be able to do the same with far less budget and capacity. The Guardian tells us about the latest shiny technology trend, while the Today programme talks about new studies showing that x% of all young people are now behaving in y way online. It makes us want to bury our heads and get on with what we do and know best. Sync looks to address these problems by creating relatively cheap and risk-free environments for all types of cultural organisations to test out potentially valuable thinking and tools, where the only barriers to participation are interest and openness.

Who

The people who really make Sync work are the people who read its website and take part in its programmes. Supporting them/you is a team of producers, all of whom welcome your feedback about how to make Sync work better.

// Rohan Gunatillake looks after strategy and design. In his time he has been a Director of Mission Models Money, created a popular urban meditation mobile app and led the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab – whose ground-breaking work has provided much of the inspiration for Sync.

// Suzy Glass looks after liaison with the cultural sector. She is a cross-artform producer, and has worked with organisations including Central Station, C4, the BBC, the London Transport Museum & the Museum of London. She is one of the directors of Trigger, a producer-led company that makes creative happenings where artforms, sectors and interests collide.

// Erin Maguire looks after events and logistics. She runs Beyongolia, combining leading edge tech savvy with top quality technical production skills.

// Devon Walshe is leading on the tech side of things, looking at things from the perspective of the developer. He’s an entrepreneur, publisher and geek, who among other things is the founder and director of The Journal, an expanding local publishing platform for students and young people.

//

As an innovation and prototyping programme Sync will do its best to drink its own Kool-Aid™.  We fully intend to do some good and valuable things for everyone who engages with us. Please let us know what’s working and what’s not, and we’ll see how we can do things better.

A key idea for Team Sync is platforming – so that whenever we do something, we try to do it in such a way that it is directly replicable for someone else to pick up and use.  For example this website is a custom theme built on WordPress and we’ll be openly sharing the theme files so that if you like the style of this site as much as we do you can take it and customise if further for your own needs.

 

 

Press release

Download [Word doc]: Press Release – 16.04.12 – Culture Hack Scotland and Geeks-in-Residence