Day the Seventeenth

I got up early this morning to go to the train station. I got as far as explaining that I’d lost my purse and that I had taken a bus before the lady politely cut me off and told me that they didn’t take responsibility for anything lost on the busses, and I would have to contact the bus company directly. She provided me the number, and I left feeling rather discouraged.

I took some time to contact the bus company, and found out that I had to email them a missing item report. So I did so. Apparently, they’ll get back to me if they find it. If I don’t hear back within 10 days, I should assume they haven’t found it and they’ve given up. I was discouraged again, but clung to a small bit of hope.

On the bright side, our third sponsor was finally in today! The first thing he said to us when we met him was ‘you guys have a hard project, don’t you?’ We didn’t really know how to answer. But we finally had an opportunity to sit down with all three of them and go over what they are looking for. It was an interesting meeting; we got the distinct impression that this was the first time the three of them had ever sat down to talk about it, as they kept talking over each other and sharing rather contrasting ideas.  But a few common themes emerged. First, our scope was too big; we need to narrow it if we want to finish by our March 2 deadline. Second, before we can even begin to think about coming up with a way to measure meaningful engagement, we need to define it. So we were given a deadline of Friday to come up with a definition, and a deadline of next Friday to test and confirm whether that definition would work.

Having a deadline in front of us was, for me at leat, exhilarating. I was just glad to have a direction to go in. And the task itself was at once daunting and relieving. We’d been assuming that, to put it simply, we didn’t know enough to come up with a definition. We had tried and failed to find one that someone else had come up with, and so we’d floundered. But our sponsors wanted us to come up with one on our own. After all, someone has to, right?

It occurs to me that I’m not sure I’ve described the nature of our project. I’ll try to do so briefly here. In a sentence, we are studying how museums (Te Papa in particular) can use social media to engender meaningful engagement with its visitors. What this requires is first figuring out what meaningful engagement is, and second figuring out how to measure it. For example, does a ‘like’ indicate meaningful engagement? Or is it not meaningful until someone comments? What’s the difference between meaningful and unmeaningful engagement?

Stop and think about those questions for a moment. Try to come up with an answer. I dare you.

Now you understand my project. About as much as I do, anyway.