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One of the great things about going to a conference like Museums and the Web is what happens between programmed sessions when you’re just meeting people and networking.

I’m representing SMK National Gallery of Denmark in a European project where our plan is to develop an augmented reality application for cultural heritage sites and institutions. In this project I’m working among others with Noëmie Tassel who’s the European director of a participatory mobile project called MuseTrek. When she heard I was going to MW2010 she sent me an email where she introduced me to Bill Jacobson, the CEO of Musetrek in United States whom she knew was also coming to Denver for the conference.

Yesterday Bill and I met over lunch and I had a chance to get better acquainted with the concept of MuseTrek. It’s basically a participatory mobile visitor guide based on crowd-sourcing technologies that combine official institutional content and user-generated content and creates dynamic recommendations out of it. In a few months MuseTrek will be launched as a free iPhone application soon to be followed up with a release on other smartphone platforms as well.

Later that day we set up an informal meeting where Bill showed me the application prototype on his iPhone and we discussed the possibilities in including SMK in the group of museums providing institutional content for the platform.

Being aware of the generally high level of maintenance that participatory projects demand from institutions I was pleased to learn that MuseTrek requires minimal input from participating museums. Basically you just have to provide attraction listings, a sitemap and venue tags to get into the game. With this in mind I’m looking forward to getting back to SMK and discuss the potential in joining the project.

So thanks, Noëmie, for introducing me to Bill!

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MuseTrek, Museums and the Web, MW2010, networking