Museums and cultural heritage organizations wrestle with ticketing systems, finding it hard to access the data, apply complex discounting, and maintain brand experience. In 2017, two organizations took on innovative approaches to solve some of these problems. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) developed a new ticketing site internally, a Web product called Museum Nice and Simple Ticketing (MNST). Its key concept: a cart-less and login-less experience. Also in 2017, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) launched a new ticketing and transaction platform called Hive which uses an open source Web-standard approach to run transactions and work seamlessly with customers' membership records in Salesforce. Both institutions recognize the complexity and stress of developing these systems. And yet, both ACMI and Mia took this route. The session will explore key details of each project, including the following:
- Why a ticketing project? What problem(s) were we trying to solve?
- How each platform was built;
- Similarities/differences between the organizations and projects;
- Integration—the word that scares all technologists.

This session is designed to be meaningful and useful for a number of different MW attendees, from senior decision-makers to software developers and the staff who spend their days working directly in ticketing and transaction systems. Attendees will learn real-world information about the technology, code base, APIs and UI/UX of each system. Attendees can expect an open discussion and active debate about the “best way to do this”—after all, not every organization can or should take the same approach. Attendees will take away practical knowledge about business systems, software development, and transaction processing that can be applied to their own organizations and professional careers.