I spent yesterday with a lively group in Birmingham at the Museum's Collection Centre (MCC) on an industrial estate that could have been anywhere in Britain. The aim of the day was to explore what a Subject Specialist Network (SSN) could do for the Science and Industry Museum sector as a whole.
Conversations during the day got me thinking about the form and structure of a 'formal' network (like an SSN) and 'informal' networks such as the socio-technical networks explored by Thomas Hughes in his Networks of Power. Hughes looked at the role of networks and relevant social groups in creating consensus and stability around technological artefacts. In STS and Actor Network Theory it became vital to create symmetry by reinstating the role of the technological artefact as an actor in the system; it could also be useful to look at how an artefact - either physical or non-physical - functions as a component in a formal network with agreed rules and consensus.
Hughes shows that the role of systems builders, such as Edison, is to strive to increase the size of the system under their control and reduce the size of the environment that is not. These technical and organisational networks acquire goals, direction and momentum - something that is vital for any project or network that it is its initial stages and hopes to encompass the needs of a variety of actors - museums, repositories, objects, archives.
