The MCG Committee are pleased to announce that the keynote speaker for this year’s Museums+Tech conference will be Loic Tallon.

Loic’s keynote will be ‘Is the Met open?’

The word ‘open’ was used often at The Met to describe both how the digital team worked and the activities we delivered. Openness is one of the five principles of the agile framework, Scrum, that the department (alone in the museum) adhered to. Open also leads the title of The Met’s highest profile digital initiative: the Open Access programme. Open was synonymous with good: it was not easy though, nor was it applied universally. The latter was never a goal.  

Using The Met as a case study, this keynote will reflect on the value and tensions of  ‘openness’ in a cultural institution, and provide a commentary about openness as a success measure in our practices.

Loic is the former Chief Digital Officer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), where he worked from 2013-19. At The Met, Loic led the digital transformation of practices, capabilities and processes across the institution – 2,000+ staff, $320M annual budget – to better serve the institution’s mission and expands its relevance to new global audiences. He reshaped the design, philosophy and processes of the Digital department. He spearheaded the release of all high-resolution photos of public-domain artworks under CC0 / Open Access, free for users around the world to use, remix and share as they wish. He also developed far-reaching new partnerships with Wikipedia, Google, Microsoft and MIT through which over 100 million users a year now connect online to knowledge, creativity and ideas through The Met collection.

In March 2019, Loic relocated to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with his wife and young family. Loic now works part-time as a consultant and coach in digital transformation within the non-profit sector. He also cycles a lot more.

Image credit: “IMG_8048” by arcticpenguin is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0