I'm delighted to announce that some time in the next few days / weeks, BBC Breakfast will be airing a short piece about MEET (The Museum of Electrical and Electronic Technology.) I'm expecting it to include an interview in which I explain our original plan and the impact of my declining health on being able to achieve it, plus a couple of demonstrations of how the MEET concept generates exciting STEM learning potential from some of our vintage exhibits. If they give me advance warning of the TX date and time, I'll post it in this thread.
In the meantime, my physical abilities are diminishing to the point of finding it increasingly difficult to walk. As I put it in the interview, we are 'some weeks away' from finally having to pull the plug on MEET, as we have not found anyone to lead the project as a whole once I am gone. Sam Battle of the Not Obsolete Museum is very much in the loop and there is still scope for extensive collaboration with him and others, but as with all these options time is against us to devise a holistic solution.
Disbanding would be a huge blow that negates most of the last 15 years of my life but I have to accept that if it gets left too long I won't have the strength left to oversee dispersing, rehoming and scrapping the collection. The latter sounds dramatic, but in reality there are many objects in the collection that are not 'collectables' in the normal sense, and equally unattractive for other museums to take on if they are not in a position to use them as educational resources in the way that we would within MEET.
As I have said elsewhere, above and beyond the collection I am keen to preserve and promote the MEET concept. Dispersing fuse boxes to a fuse box museum, radios to a radio museum, computers to a computer museum etc. works contrary to MEET's principle of making all these things accessible and inviting to non-specialist and non-technical audiences, therefore that kind of 'Plan B' is very much a last resort.
In the present moment however we are still alive and kicking. Please keep this thread alive and kicking too, with ideas and suggestions of things you might enjoy seeing / doing at MEET!
In the meantime, my physical abilities are diminishing to the point of finding it increasingly difficult to walk. As I put it in the interview, we are 'some weeks away' from finally having to pull the plug on MEET, as we have not found anyone to lead the project as a whole once I am gone. Sam Battle of the Not Obsolete Museum is very much in the loop and there is still scope for extensive collaboration with him and others, but as with all these options time is against us to devise a holistic solution.
Disbanding would be a huge blow that negates most of the last 15 years of my life but I have to accept that if it gets left too long I won't have the strength left to oversee dispersing, rehoming and scrapping the collection. The latter sounds dramatic, but in reality there are many objects in the collection that are not 'collectables' in the normal sense, and equally unattractive for other museums to take on if they are not in a position to use them as educational resources in the way that we would within MEET.
As I have said elsewhere, above and beyond the collection I am keen to preserve and promote the MEET concept. Dispersing fuse boxes to a fuse box museum, radios to a radio museum, computers to a computer museum etc. works contrary to MEET's principle of making all these things accessible and inviting to non-specialist and non-technical audiences, therefore that kind of 'Plan B' is very much a last resort.
In the present moment however we are still alive and kicking. Please keep this thread alive and kicking too, with ideas and suggestions of things you might enjoy seeing / doing at MEET!
