In 2023, the Arts Marketing Association invited me to partner on the Test Phase of their Heritage Innovation Fund project. The broad question was how the heritage sector might build AI literacy and digital confidence at scale. It was a question I was particularly interested in, as most available learning resources at the time seemed generic, quickly dated, or adapted from tech and business contexts where the underlying assumptions often don't quite translate.

Over the following year, I facilitated co-creation sessions with three cohorts of heritage professionals: in London, Manchester, and online across the four nations. Around forty participants took part, from museums, galleries, and heritage organisations of different sizes and focuses. With the AMA team, I planned each session in response to the last, rather than in advance, so that the direction of the work could genuinely follow what the participants were telling us rather than what we had assumed they'd say.

A few priorities surfaced consistently. Participants wanted something that would stay current rather than date quickly. They wanted knowledge rooted in their own sector, rather than adapted from elsewhere. Perhaps most of all, they wanted better ways of finding and learning from colleagues doing similar work in other organisations, particularly in the wake of how much sector connectivity had thinned since the pandemic.

Drawing on these findings, and on Wikipedia as a model of a self-updating, community-built resource, I authored a concept that synthesised the cohort's insights into a coherent platform. Users would share real-world experiments as "field reports," captured through an AI-led conversational interview and fed into a shared knowledge base that learned continuously from its contributors. I named it Goose.

The concept became the basis of the Grow Phase funding application, and in October 2024 the National Lottery Heritage Innovation Fund awarded Goose £250,000 to develop towards a minimum viable product.

Looking back, I think the most meaningful part of this project wasn't the funding outcome, significant as it was. It was the experience of seeing how much a sector will tell you about its own needs when the process is genuinely set up to listen, and how far a good idea can travel when it's built from that listening.

With thanks to Cath Hume, Carol Jones, Jacqueline Haxton, Paul Blundell, and the team at the Arts Marketing Association for the invitation to partner on this project and their support throughout.