What Church Planters Taught Me about Welcoming New People into Community Organizations

This summer, a gift landed in my podcast feed: a five-part series on evangelical church planting.

This podcast series didn't come from a Christian source. It came from Startup, a podcast about entrepreneurship. The series focuses on the intersection between mission and hustle--a battleground familiar to many nonprofit leaders.

I've been fascinated by church planting for a long time. Not because of religious affinity--I'm an atheist Jew--but because church planters teach me new lessons about relevance and inclusion.

Church planting is the act of creating new churches, often targeted for people who may not feel like church is relevant to them. Church plants bring the message of Christ to new people in new ways.

Like church planters, I'm passionate about connecting new people with mission-driven community experiences. I see church planting as way, way outside my comfort zone--leading to surprising, catalytic lessons.

Here are two reasons you might want to join me in learning from church planters:

1. Church plants are petri dishes of innovation when it comes to inviting new people into mission-based organizations.

Church plant pastors are a lot like other nonprofit leaders. They're passionate about organizational mission. They want to connect people to work they perceive as life-changing and sublime. But church planters pastors differ in an intriguing way: they are unapologetically evangelical. Their evangelism makes them creative, courageous hustlers when it comes to inviting new people into their work.

Some nonprofit leaders are put off by evangelism. It seems pushy, or gauche, to insist that passersby check out the art center or adopt environmental habits. We want people to be inspired by our mission... but we want them to come to it on their own. Instead of evangelizing, we hedge. We court newcomers, but not too much. If they don't come running to us, we demur. We don't want to be too exposed. We assume they just weren't interested. We drop it.

Evangelists don't hedge. They feel called to share the mission, to spread the message. They may be pushy, but they're also more whole-heartedly invested in bringing in newcomers. And that means they take bigger risks and attempt wilder experiments in making their work relevant.

Put in a daycare center? Hold services in a brew pub? Evangelists push themselves to reach new people in new ways. There's a lot we can learn from their experiments in pursuit of relevance.

2. Church plants are part of a healthy ecosystem for innovation and diversity--the kind of ecosystem I wish we had in the cultural sector.

The biggest, most established churches don't see church plants as threats. They see them as innovative feeders. Tim Keller, head of the giant Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC, claims that new churches are 3-6x better than established churches at attracting the "unchurched." And so Redeemer plants new churches. They don't just do it in far-flung cities. The majority of the churches they plant are in New York--the exact same city where Redeemer operates.

The result is an ecosystem in which large and established institutions help fuel new and risky ones. The rationale is both generous and self-serving. It's an abundance model, premised on the idea that more churches means more Christians and a better world for everyone. New churches bring new people to Christ. They bring new donors to Christ. And they bring fresh, innovative methods to pastors of churches old and new. So big churches like Redeemer spend time mentoring and funding church plants.

What would it look like if our largest organizations actively championed and funded new, experimental upstarts?

What would it feel like if we approached new potential audiences with the zeal of pastors on a mission?

What else can we learn from the weird and wonderful world of church planting?

Check out the podcast and let me know what you think.

What is the Turkey and the Bread (or the Sourdough Starter) of the MAH?

Last month, I went to an amazing training called the Skid Row School for Social Change. The mission of the Skid Row School is to train leaders to scale solutions to the world’s biggest problems as rapidly as possible. It's run by Becky Mangiotta and Joe McCannon, two brilliant nerds who led national movements in homelessness and public health and then decided to teach others how to do it. I attended because I'm seeking new ways to share the MAH's model and support the development of more community-centered cultural institutions around the world.

I learned a ton at Skid Row School, but the lesson that still keeps me up at night is this one: when you want to scale and spread a model, you have to distill it to its essence. Unless you're going to franchise, you can't maintain control of 100% of how your model spreads. Nor should you want to. The power is in unleashing the model, ceding control to others who will adopt it and take it further than you ever could.

But if you're going to unleash something, you better make sure that you believe in it 100%. Some people are rightfully fearful of "dumbing down" their model for scale. As Becky and Joe noted, it can sound like taking your amazing craft beer and distilling it into a Bud Light. But they suggested another metaphor: the turkey sandwich.

Imagine that your existing project is a turkey sandwich. You've spent years making it the perfect, artisanal turkey sandwich. You've got just the right mustard, two slices of lettuce, pickled onions... it is dialed-in delicious.

But if you want to share and spread that turkey sandwich, you've got to focus on the basics. To make a turkey sandwich, you only need two things: the turkey and the bread. When you want to scale, you need to get clear on what is the turkey and what is the bread. If you insist on all those artisanal fixings, you severely limit the clarity and scalability of your model.

That's not to say the mustard isn't important. The mustard matters! But it's not the heart of what you are trying to share. And if you get it right, others who adopt your model should be able to pick their own mustard, or leave it out entirely, to the tastes and needs of their community.

What is the turkey and what is the bread of the MAH? I've asked myself this a thousand times in the past month. Is it partnerships and participation? Treating the museum as a community platform? Igniting events and activities? Social bridging? Our participants reflecting local age/income/ethnic diversity?

I love asking people what they think the turkey and the bread is--especially folks who appreciate the MAH but aren't deeply involved. Sometimes, a donor might identify something I hadn't considered--like being located right in the middle of a vibrant downtown. Other times, a visitor might use the exact language of our strategic documents. The more people I ask, the closer I get to understanding what's a condiment and what is core. (And if you have an opinion on this, I'd LOVE to hear it.)

I've also started tinkering with an alternate food-related metaphor for this quandary: sourdough. When you make a loaf of sourdough bread, you begin with a "starter." The starter is a living culture of bacteria, yeast, flour, and water. Each time you bake a loaf, you use a little bit of the starter to get it going. In-between loaves, you feed the starter flour and water to keep it growing and healthy. The starter is alive and infinitely expandable. You can share it, split it, grow it, or let it die.

As I think about how the MAH might share our model, I find myself gravitating to the sourdough starter metaphor instead of the turkey and the bread. Like the turkey and the bread, the starter is the epicenter, the beginning, the core. It has a unique flavor profile, but when you bake it you can add other ingredients to your preferences. It can be shared, used, and expanded. But starter is more than just core ingredients. It is alive and mutable. It's a catalyst for expansion, but it needs love and attention to keep growing.

Do you have any ideas for me on the identity of the "starter" from which the MAH's work grows? If we shared a slice of the MAH's starter with you, what would you hope it might cook up in your world?

What's Your Vision?

It's 8am in the classroom; 5am in my body. I'm sitting at my assigned seat, next to a man who sells trailers in in Indiana, a woman who runs a Chamber of Commerce in Pennsylvania, and a guy who provides liability insurance to doctors across the US. A cheerful curly-haired deli owner stands in front of 30 of us and shares a quote he loves: "Artists live in the present and write detailed histories of the future." Something tells me this is not the business visioning workshop I anticipated.

Last week, I attended a workshop on Creating a Vision of Greatness at ZingTrain, the training arm of Zingerman's Deli, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zingerman's is a deli that has pioneered some innovative ways of doing business. One of those is the use of visioning (also called future-casting).

You can write a vision for yourself, your organization, your project, or your team. At the training, we saw examples of small visions--like a restaurant barback who had a vision for a better way to make juice--and big ones--like the 10-year vision for the 700-person Zingerman's community of businesses. We learned how to write visions, how to use them, and how to share them with others.

For me, writing a vision was empowering, exciting, and useful. It was even more useful to learn how participatory writing visions can be. In the Zingerman's model, visioning is for everyone at all levels of the organization. It's for anyone who wants to go somewhere in their day, their year, their life. Writing a vision can empower you, clarify your thinking, and help you change the world.

So here are a few notes on how to write a vision. If you want to know more, I recommend you check out the related ZingTrain articles on visioning, or even take their two-day course.

WHAT IS A VISION?

A vision is not a solution to a problem. A vision is a detailed history of the future. It's a story written from the vantage point of a few months or years from now. It's a story of what happened after you launched that program, gave that speech, conquered that challenge. What does the world look like in that future? What's different about your life, your work? That's the story a vision tells.

HOW DO YOU WRITE IT?

A vision is a story. Write it that way. Write your vision with as many specifics as possible, in narrative form. This is a detailed history from the future. Imagine you're seeing an old friend after a few years, telling them about all the amazing stuff you've done since you last met. Use evocative language, engage the senses, engage your emotions. Make it a positive vision. Put in everything you want to see happen--even if it seems impossible. Don't focus on how you got there. Write about where you arrived.

If you have trouble writing a vision, here are some tips:

• Before you start writing your vision, write a list of things you are proud of, in any part of your life. The goal here is to write down as many as possible. You'll warm up your hand and get yourself in a positive frame of mind. 
• Use the "hot pen" or automatic writing technique. Start writing, and don't stop--for ten minutes, thirty minutes, whatever you need. If you get stuck, write nonsense words. Don't take your pen off the paper until the time is up. When you break through stuckness, you might be surprised what you find on the other side. 
• If you get stuck thinking about the steps to achieve a certain part of the vision, write your way out of it. Imagine you already figured it out. Write something like "It took awhile to raise the money, but once we did, we had even more than we needed." 
• If you're focused on big picture goals, cast your vision far enough in the future that you're on the other side of all the obstacles you face today. The trainers suggested writing a vision 5-10 years out, and they encouraged us to go for ten if we could. 
• Dial up the "want." Put in everything you want to see happen. If you want a hot tub in the staff break room, put it in. Don't put in the stuff you're supposed to want. Put in what you really want! No one else is going to guess what you want, and this is your vision. This is your dream. Put it all in. --share it. Get feedback on what parts feel alive and compelling, and which parts seem cloudy or forced. If it's a vision for a group, involve others in the group in the redrafting of the vision. They will make it better, and you will all feel greater ownership over the final version.

A SIMPLE WAY TO TRY IT

This week, we experimented with visioning at my museum in an all-staff meeting. We took 30 minutes for the exercise. Here's what we did:

• We reconnected about a year-long (already-established) goal to improve our work experience individually and collectively. 
• I briefly explained what visioning is and why it might be valuable for us. 
• We took ten minutes to do personal, "hot pen" writing of a vision for spring of 2018. The prompt was to write a detailed story about a day in spring 2018 when we are working even better as a team (whatever that means to you). We all wrote for ten minutes straight. 
• We paired up, shared our visions with a colleague, and wrote down things we heard that excited us. 
• We shared those energizing elements with the whole group. These included ideas like "musical chairs job shadowing," "foot massage conference-call room," and "more meetings in public settings." 
• A small group volunteered to take this work forward to establish a shared vision we can then use to guide us to more collaboration in the coming months.

I'm not sure yet if visioning will become a go-to tool for me or for the MAH. But I'm going to keep trying it. And I hope you will try it too.

In fact, I have a vision for one month from now. It's a Thursday morning, I'm scanning emails, and I'm delighted to get a note from you. After reading this post, one morning, you woke up early, grabbed an old journal, and started writing. You wrote a vision for that big dream of yours coming true. You wrote yourself into a position of agency and leadership. You wrote yourself overcoming obstacles to reach your goal. You wrote a future that is more beautiful because of your efforts. And you shared it with someone. You enlisted them in helping make your vision real. You wrote to me to tell me you tried it. It was uncomfortable, a little weird, but empowering too. I'm looking at my screen, smiling with appreciation for you.

Are Cultural Organizations Built to Fail to Scale?

My new audial obsession is the podcast How I Built This, in which Guy Raz interviews entrepreneurs who built notable companies. The podcast offers incredible stories behind the making of businesses like Chuck E Cheese, Southwest Airlines, and Zuumba. I've also been reading more about social impact nonprofits that went big, like Goodwill, CASA, and YMCA.

One of the biggest questions on my mind as I listen is: why isn’t my industry scaling up the way these organizations do? I can think of many extraordinary innovators in the nonprofit cultural sector--people and organizations creating brilliant programs, site-based experiences, and products. Many of these projects seem replicable. But I can think of only a few who have scaled up and out in a meaningful way.

Why aren’t our collective best ideas growing and spreading all over the world? Why aren’t more cultural organizations franchising, scaling, and replicating like comparable businesses?

Here are a few of my hypotheses (and I’d love to hear yours in the comments). I am not suggesting that any of these factors are bad or immutable. I'm suggesting they may be reasons we aren't scaling.

Precarious business model. Even if an institution or a project is fabulous, it may not have a solid, replicable business model behind it. If the work is financially dicey on the scale of one building, it can be disastrous to scale up.

Too much emphasis on innovation. The more we tinker with and change our products, the less time we spend scaling those products. Arts institutions have beat the innovation drum for decades now. Change may be necessary... or it may distract us from opportunities to grow.

Too complex and diversified a business. Cultural organizations tend to have many programs, projects, audiences, and goals. Businesses that scale are simpler and more focused. If it would take a thousand-page manual to replicate your programs (which are always changing!), it's too hard to reproduce.

Friendly industry that encourages sharing and copying. There are no NDAs in the nonprofit culture sector. Professionals share program models, exhibitions, and design techniques across organizations, often for free. This intermixing means there's less distinctive value to scaling any one entity's offerings.

Too much emphasis on unique experience and local idiosyncrasy. Many cultural organizations put the singular, authentic experience first. Many of us are proud of how our cultural organizations reflect and respond to our local communities. This can lead to assumptions--not always true--that what works here can't be copied and won’t work somewhere else.

Skills mismatch. The skills needed to create an incredible program are different from those needed to spread that program around the world. Our industry cultivates and rewards creative dilettantes who make beautiful things. We often look with suspicion on MBAs and people who want to commodify our work.

Mission mismatch. What's the upside for cultural organizations to scale? Most don't see any benefit to spreading that program around the world. It might be nice if it happened, but it's not the goal. The goal is local engagement, authenticity, scholarship, prestige, or keeping the lights on and the art pumping. I suspect most of us would be loathe to cut programs or make hard tradeoffs in favor of scale. The argument for it isn't worth the pain.


What's missing on this list? What counter-examples have you seen?

Please share your questions or comments! If you are reading this via email, you can join the conversation here.

Against Participation

At first, I thought it was a joke.

A colleague at UC Santa Cruz asked me to participate in a social practice symposium called Against Participation. Hosted by a sound art collective, Ultra-red, the 2015 event promised "to investigate listening as a political activity and to interrogate the stakes of participation in neoliberalism."

I read this sentence many times without comprehension. Because I really respect the person who invited me--with apprehension--I said yes.

I walked into Against Participation with my hackles up. I assumed the event would fly in the face of my deep value for community participation. I imagined an academic conversation stuffed with arcane, impenetrable vocabulary. I feared I would be laughed at and not understand why.

Instead, I had a powerful learning experience--one I'm still grappling with over a year later.

When should you choose not to participate in an experience? When should you turn down the invitation to share your voice? How should you make these decisions in an imperfect world where every host is using you for something, and every voice is in danger of being manipulated, misunderstood, or subverted?

I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't really thought about these questions before the Against Participation symposium. I thought a lot about where to participate--where I can have the most impact. But I didn't think about whether to participate.

I'd always thought that participating disproportionately benefited the participant. I'd always assumed that more representation is better than less representation, more press is better than less press, more sharing and engaging is better than the alternative. I'd assumed it was my responsibility to represent myself well, and if I failed, it was a matter of my communication, not a system set up to disempower or distort my words.

But Ultra-red reminded me that many environments function as distortion machines. There are many ways for voices to get chopped and twisted. Sometimes, choosing NOT to participate is a powerful statement that protects ownership of your voice and story as your own.

The problem, of course, is when you choose not to participate, most people don't see it as a noble protest. Most people don't notice at all. The absence of your voice doesn't take up as much space as its presence. And so we have to choose: to be distorted or to be overlooked.

I hear about these tensions often from colleagues struggling to participate in hostile workplaces. I've met too many young, talented people of color who want to work in museums but feel belittled, tokenized, or unsupported in their careers. Should they keep fighting to engage and transform the systems that knock them down? Or should they opt out, find friendlier environments, and stop participating in discriminatory spaces?

I grapple with these questions personally when I decide what invitations to take, where to spend my time, where to share my voice. For example, I get frequent media requests, including about museum-related news items that I know little about. Should I comment on whether museums should acquire artifacts related to police violence against African-Americans? In that case I said yes--even as I felt unsure of whether I was the right participant in that space. In other cases--like when I was asked to write a "fun" etiquette guide on how to visit museums--I said no. I knew it wasn't a piece that invited me to participate in a meaningful way.

And yet, someone else will write that breezy etiquette guide. Someone else will say yes to the invitations we reject. Someone else will take that job. Someone else's writing will be on the wall. Were those opportunities missed?

When do you participate, knowing your participation may serve others for reasons different from your own? When do you refuse, knowing your non-participation may be overlooked entirely?

The 2016 US election dredged up these questions for me once again. It reenergized me about focusing my limited time, energy, and creativity on the participatory opportunities that fuel me and my dreams. It pushes me to block out certain participatory forums that distract, exhaust, or limit me. I'm reminded now of how non-participation can be a source of fuel as well as a lack.

Sometimes transformative participation is possible. Sometimes not. How do you choose?

Give Yourself Some SPACE in 2016

Every once in a while I look at my growing toddler and think: time will never go backwards. She'll never be this age again. Sometimes, that's a relief. Sometimes, the thought invokes pre-nostalgic fear. But mostly, watching her grow reminds me that time keeps moving relentlessly forward, whether we like it or not.

How do we tackle the problem of time? Some people attack the problem by sleeping less. Some seek to maximize and quantify time, building personal efficiency engines to squeeze out a few more seconds or minutes of joy each day.

In 2016, I'm choosing to take a different approach, inspired by Albert Einstein. I'm confronting the problem of diminishing time by making more space.

When you make space for yourself and others--physically or metaphorically--you expand your world. I've always loved the idea of "space-making" as a strategy for personal care and interpersonal empowerment. This past summer, my museum hosted a retreat for diverse professionals to explore space-making in deep ways. We talked about it. We shared tips and what ifs. We tested out each other's preferred ways of making space, and we tried to develop new space-making solutions to each other's problems.

The result is the Space Deck - 56 ways to make space for yourself and others. 100 extraordinary campers developed hundreds of different spacemaking ideas, which we developed, tested, and distilled into this deck of 56.

Just like a deck of playing cards, The Space Deck is divided into suits, representing different ways to make space through STILLNESS, CREATIVITY, COURAGE, ACTIVISM, RELATIONSHIPS, MOVEMENT, RITUAL, and ENVIRONMENT.

The Space Deck addresses frequent questions at work, like "how can we make space for everyone's voice to be heard in this meeting?," as well as personal questions, like "how can I find some peace in a world of chaos?" The cards share techniques that help you tackle your fears, declutter your mind, connect with your senses, and confront injustice.

You can check out all the spacemaking cards by suit on the Space Deck website. But if you prefer to hold space in your hand (Einstein would approve), you can buy your own personal deck to have and hold. Special thanks to Beck Tench, Elise Granata, Jason Alderman, and all the MuseumCampers who co-created the Space Deck together. All proceeds from Space Deck sales will support future creative retreats and camper scholarships.

Time won't slow down. Instead of trying to race time or trick it or beat it into submission, buy yourself some space in 2016. You'll be amazed how roomy it makes the day.

OdysseyWorks: An Empathy-Based Approach to Making Art

The quest for relevance begins with knowing your audience. Who are the people with whom you want to connect? What are their dreams, their impressions, their turn-offs, their fears?

Ultimately, any approach to answering these questions is limited at some point by the size of the audience involved. When you are dealing with an audience of hundreds or thousands of people, you have to make assumptions. You have to generalize. 

But what if you only had an audience of one?

OdysseyWorks is a collective that makes immersive art experiences for one person at a time. They select their audience--by application or commission--and then they spend months getting to know that person. They spend time with them. They call references. They try to understand not just the surface of the individual's personality but the fundamental way that person sees the world. And then, based on their research, they remake the world for a weekend, twisting the person's environment with sensory experiences that explore and challenge their deepest inclinations.

When I first heard about OdysseyWorks, I thought their projects were indulgent novelties. But the more I learned, the more I appreciated their thoughtful slanted window into audience engagement.

OdysseyWorks' projects get to the heart of the fiercest debates in the arts today. Does "starting from the audience" mean pandering to narcissism and dumbing down work? Is it elitist to present art that may be dislocating or foreign? How do we honor the audience's starting point and take them somewhere new?

As artistic director Abe Burickson described their work to me, I imagined Theseus walking deeper into the labyrinth towards the Minotaur. Theseus entered the labyrinth with a string tying him to what he already knew. And then he followed that string into darkness, danger, and ultimately, triumph.

I asked Abe about how he sees the tension between the desire to start with the audience and the desire to move the audience somewhere new. He spoke of the audience as providing a challenge, a challenge like any other artistic constraint. The audience provides an offering of a certain way of looking, a challenge to see the world differently and get inside that perspective with their artwork. OdysseyWorks locates that starting point, hands the audience the string, and draws them further and deeper into mystery.

Abe told me about a performance OdysseyWorks created for a woman named Christina. Christina loved all things symmetrical and tonal. Loved baroque and rococo. Hated Jackson Pollock and John Cage. The OdysseyWorks team is not that way - they like messy and atonal - so it was an interesting challenge. Could they create a space of comfort, a world of her own, and then move her to a space of dischord where the things OdysseyWorks thought were beautiful might become beautiful to her?

Here's how Abe described the project to me:

We started the weekend in Christina's comfort zone. We started with Clair de Lune by Debussy, which she loves, and a few other structured things that worked that way. Over time, she encountered the music in multiple locations--in a symmetrical architectural space, with family. 

As the day went on, she relaxed--which is key to the process. When you engage with something, especially something new, you are often on guard, physically, socially, intellectually. You just don’t trust right away. 

When you no longer feel that people are judging you, you become much more open to new things. It's really quite amazing how much of a shift can happen. 

Once those reservations and judgments faded, we started playing other version of Clair de Lune. There are hundreds of really messed up versions of Clair de Lune. We played them just to shake it up. At one point after seven hours, and about 500 miles of travel, Christina got picked up by a train and was driven to a scene. It was about an hour drive. And in that hour, she just listened to this Clair de Lune version we composed, this 80-minute deconstruction, a slow deterioration, that started classical and ended sounding like people chewing on string. It was beautiful noise. It was the exact opposite of what she liked, and yet by that point, she found it beautiful.  

The whole experience was kind of a deconstruction of form. The experience was powerful for her. Later she said it pried her open.  

The goal was not that Christina should like John Cage. Nor is it about creating a moment of pleasure. The goal was to create work that is moving for her and a compelling artistic challenge for us. It's about creating a different engagement with life. 

To me, the biggest aha this story is the middle--the enormous role that the perception of "being judged" plays in narrowing our experience and our openness to new things. When we trust, we open up. But how often does an arts institution start working with an audience by building a trusting relationship (versus bombarding them with content)? What could we gain by starting with empathy instead of presentation?

OdysseyWorks is doing a crowd-funding campaign right now to fund a book project documenting their process. I'm learning from them, so I'm supporting them. Check out their work and consider whether they might help you through the labyrinths in your world.


If you'd like to weigh in, please leave a comment below. If you are reading this via email and wish to respond, you can join the conversation here.

Use This: Audience Research in Rotterdam Provides a Template for Smarter Segmenting

Imagine a concise, well-designed report on audiences for cultural activities in a large urban city. Imagine it peppered with snappy graphics and thought-provoking questions about connections to research and audience development in your community.

Stop imagining and check out the Rotterdam Festival's 2011 report on five years of trends in audience data and related audience development efforts. They didn't do anything shocking or groundbreaking, but what they did, they did very well:

• They identified the unique characteristics of Rotterdam citizens. 
• They created psychographic profiles of eight target types of cultural consumer in Rotterdam, based on existing European market segmentation research. 
• They interviewed and learned more about people representing these eight types. They identified the types' distinct interests and concerns, aspirations, media usage, and barriers to participation.
• They used clear, evocative language (even in translation!) to convey their ideas. 

While their approach is not one I have used, I learned a lot from it. I recommend checking out the short-form report [pdf] and considering how the work in Rotterdam might inspire or support your own work on audience identification, understanding, and development. Hats off to Johan Moerman and the crew for making and sharing this work.

What Happens When a Viral Participatory Project is Too Successful? Diagnosing the Power of the Love Locks

Last week, the international press lit up with a story from Paris: the city is removing the "love locks" from the Pont des Arts bridge. 45 tons of rusting padlocks, inscribed with lover's names, were hauled off to protect the historic bridge and its views of the city. And so, one of the most successful, accidental, and fraught participatory projects of the past decade comes to an end.

The "love locks" are not a project with an institutional or artistic director. Nor are they historic. They started to proliferate on bridges around the world in the mid-2000s. The concept is simple: visit a picturesque bridge in an historic city. Carve or write your names on a padlock. Lock the lock to the bridge, throw the key in the water below. Your love is memorialized forever... or until the municipality decides that the locks must go.

No one planned the love locks, but their success is rooted in the same principles that make all the best participatory projects work:

• it requires no instructions beyond its own example. See the other locks on the bridge, and you immediately understand how to participate. The other participants teach you how to play. While the tools require some forethought (purchasing and inscribing a lock), on the most active bridge, enterprising vendors have sprung up, ready to sell you a lock and inscribe it for you.
• it is simple to do, but it feels significant. So many participatory projects do the opposite, requiring you to take a dozen tricky steps to no meaningful end. Payoff here is fast and powerful. 
• it has emotional resonance. You don't need to write a missive about your relationship, just affix a symbol (which has been helpfully assigned by everyone else). And yet, the symbol feels important. It is an expression of the idea that love is forever and no one can tear you apart. I've read stories of people affixing locks during honeymoons, but also after the death of a spouse or a child. Sentimentalities can be embarrassing to say aloud... which means we are constantly seeking comfortable, often symbolic, ways to express them. 
• it is durational. One of the reasons lovers are so frustrated by the removal of the locks is that they can no longer fulfill step two of participation: visiting your lock years later and reconnecting with time past. Few couples will actually do it, but for those who do, there is a huge secondary sentimental payoff. If your contribution is thrown into the trash bin at the end of the day it was made, it may feel trivial. The longer it stays, the longer the perceived commitment to the participants and their experience.
• it connects you to something greater than yourself. We often say at our museum that "make and share is better than make and take." We're constantly seeking ways to invite people to participate in projects that grow over time, so participants can see how their contribution became part of a greater whole. The love locks do this in an incredible way, connecting your love relationship to those of hundreds of thousands of other couples. It reminds me of that moment in a wedding when the officiant turns to the audience and says "all of you are here to bear witness to this commitment." The locks bear witness to each other, and to everyone who affixes one.

Of course, it is this great collective uprising of love and locks that is leading to the love locks' downfall. I support any municipality that feels that the locks must go. I understand that they can pose a danger to people's safety. That they invite tourists to vandalize others' cities. That they are another way to capitalize on sentimentality.

Yet still I see them as beautiful lessons in how we all want to participate. We just need the right opportunity and mechanism. That's the key.

Data in the Museum: Experimenting on People or Improving Their Experience?

Every few months, a major news outlet does an "expose" about data collection on museum visitors. These articles tend to portray museums as Big Brother, aggressively tracking visitors' actions and interests across their visit. Even as the reporters acknowledge that museums are  trying to better understand and serve their visitors, there's a hint of menace in headlines like "The Art is Watching You."

We're trying to personalize. We're trying to adapt. We're trying to be responsive. But it can still come off as creepy. In a world of iteration, prototyping, and A/B testing, do we need a new ethical litmus test for social experimentation?

I came back to this question as I listened to the most recent RadioLab podcast about Facebook's mass social experiments on users. For years, Facebook has teamed up with social psychologists to perform social experiments through small changes to the Facebook interface. These experiments look a lot like those conducted in social psychology labs, with two big differences:

• the sample sizes are many tens of thousands of times larger than those in the lab--and a lot more diverse across age, class, and geography. 
• no one signs a form giving consent to participate. 

I thought this sounded great: better data, useful research. Turns out not everyone thinks this is a good way for us to learn more about humanity. Last year, there was a HUGE media kerfuffle when people were shocked to learn that they had been "lab rats" for Facebook engineers researching how the News Feed content could impact people's moods.

To me, this was surprising. Sure, I get the ick factor when my personal data is used as currency. But I know (mostly) what I'm buying with it. Facebook is a completely socially-engineered environment. Facebook decides what content you see, what ads you see, and your personal ratio of puppies to snow warnings. And now people are outraged to find out that Facebook is publishing research based on their constant tweaking. It's as if we are OK with a company using and manipulating our experience as long as they don't tell us about it.

It seems that the ethical objections were loudest when the intent of the experiment was to impact someone's mood or experience. And then I started thinking: we do that all the time in museums. We change labels based on what visitors report that they learned. We change layouts based on timing and tracking studies of where people go and where they dwell. We juxtapose artifacts to evoke emotional response. We tweak language and seating and lighting--all to impact people's experience. Do we need consent forms to design an experience?

I don't think so. That seems over the top. People come to the museum to enjoy what the invisible hands of the curators have wrought. So it brings me back to my original question: when you are in the business of delivering curated experiences, where is the ethical line? 

Consider the following scenarios. Is it ethical to...

• track the paths people take through galleries and alter museum maps based on what you learn?
• give people different materials for visitor comments and see whether the materials change the substance of their feedback?
• cull visitor comments to emphasize a particular perspective (or suite of perspectives)?
• offer visitors different incentives for repeat visitation based on behavior?
• send out two different versions of your annual membership appeal letter to see which one leads to more renewals?
• classify visitors as types based on behavior and offer different content to them accordingly?

I'd say most of these are just fine--good ideas, probably. I suspect we live in an era where the perceived value of experimentation outweighs the perceived weight of the invisible hand of the experimenter. Then again, I was surprised by the lab rat reaction to the Facebook experiments.

It's hard sometimes to differentiate what's an experiment on humans and what's an experiment to improve your work for humans. As the Facebook example shows, just claiming your intent is to improve isn't enough. It matters what the humans think, too. 

I guess that's what makes us more than lab rats--we can speak up and debate these issues. What do you think?

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What I Learned about Strangers from Jane Jacobs on my Winter Vacation

Yes, I was that woman on the beach with a library book about urban planning. And loved it.

One of my vacation goals was to think big picture about public space. I'm entrenched in a project to build a creative town square in Santa Cruz connected to my museum. I wanted to reconnect with the philosophical goals of the project.

So I decided to read Jane Jacobs' classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's a masterful work: witty, story-ful, righteously indignant, and wise. (I also received many other book recommendations and look forward to reading and writing more about urban planning and public space in the months to come.)

My favorite part of The Death and Life of Great American Cities was Jane Jacobs' treatment of strangers in public space. It challenged my pre-conceptions and made me think twice about "good" design for social bridging.

STRANGERS IN ORBIT

Jane Jacobs writes beautifully about the anonymity of big cities. Lively public space creates opportunities for social contact without commitment. Share a smile. Pay for someone's coffee. Flip someone off. You'll never see them again.

No friction, no repetition, no expectation. These anonymous collisions may seem trivial, but they aren't. They are continual reminders that we are all human. They often reinforce civility and empathy. They allow us to be kind, and generous, a bit wild even, without consequence.

In places where there is healthy social contact among strangers, people help each other out. They intervene when a stranger is in trouble. They hold open a door. They care--because they only have to care for a minute.

If social life ranges from "being alone" to "being together," public social contact exists in the middle. When we lose the public space that facilitates it--active sidewalks and thoroughfares--we lose the simplicity of anonymous collisions.

Suddenly, the stakes get too high. Now we can't just nod at each other--we have to get to know each other, exchange numbers, have a conversation. Social contact becomes work, and that work pays uncertain dividends: Friend for life? Bore? Injury?

"Being alone" and "being together" are both useful ways to be. But they are extremes. When we don't feel safe in public space with strangers, we're stuck with these extremes. Either we're having a coffee date or completely ignoring each other. There's no in-between.

Many of us live in towns where we rarely have the opportunity for this kind of anonymous, safe, positive social contact. This is a problem. It means we smile less at strangers. We take care of each other less. We fear it opens up a social contract for too much more.

DESIGN FOR STRANGERS

I am obsessed with designing opportunities for strangers to interact meaningfully with each other. I've always had a bias that building community means people moving from "alone" to "together." But Jane Jacobs showed me there are lots of different ways to experience togetherness. More "together" isn't always better. Sometimes it's a stressor to be avoided.

My museum's mission is to "ignite shared experiences and unexpected connections." Reading Jane Jacobs, I felt glad that we're doing work to enhance low-expectation social contact. We do this in simple ways, like always putting out multiple chairs at an activity station. But I also worry that we sometimes set unrealistic expectations for the intensity and duration of interaction among strangers at the museum. Is it really necessary for visitors to share their life stories with each other? Is it OK for them to just share a pair of scissors?

We're in the process of developing more consistent evaluation tools at our museum, and one of the things we track is how often strangers interact in the museum. I think we have a bias (I know I do) that deeper interaction--a longer conversation, an interaction with followup--is "better" than brief encounters. We've actually had internal debates about whether it "counts" if someone self-reports "talking to a stranger" or if they have to actually "have a meaningful interaction with a stranger."

Maybe it's time to reconsider what kinds of stranger interactions are most important for us to cultivate at our museum. Maybe it's just as important to be a place that reinforces the joy of anonymous interactions as one that encourages the work of building relationships.

How much do you work on supporting people "being alone?"
How much do you work on supporting people "being together?"
How much do you work on the social contact in-between?


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How Museum Hack Transforms Museum Tours: Interview with Dustin Growick

A new company in New York, Museum Hack, is reinventing the museum tour from the outside in. They give high-energy, interactive tours of the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The tours are pricey, personalized, NOT affiliated with the museums involved… and very, very popular.

Today on Museum 2.0, an interview with Dustin Growick. Dustin is a science instructor at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) by day, Museum Hack tour developer/leader at AMNH by night. 

How did you first get involved with Museum Hack? 

Dustin: About a year ago I met a couple of people from Museum Hack at a conference. They were “preaching the museum gospel” in NYC via alternative tours at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was intrigued and curious to learn more, but also skeptical of the merits of an outside group running roughshod in The Met.

So I went on a tour…and experienced the museum in an entirely new way. I heard incredible—and often salacious—stories behind hidden gems I’d walked past numerous times. We interacted with the art and with each other through dynamic photo challenges, kinesthetic activities, and conversations. We discussed impressionism from Manet to Monet, and delved deeper in pointillism and Greek sculpture. Heck, I even learned about a 17th century German drinking game. For the first time in a long time, I was personally interacting and engaging with the museum, the collection, and with complete strangers in a way that highlighted the art. 

When the opportunity to design my own two-hour museum adventure at the American Museum of Natural History presented itself, I jumped at the chance. I’ve been leading my own Museum Hack tours at AMNH for about 9 months now. The tours boil down to three key things: engagement, relevance and fun. I want to help people find interactive and accessible points of entry and give them the tools to curate their own experience during every museum visit.

Can you give an example of the kind of Museum Hack activity that makes this different from other museum tours? 

Here’s an example that I experienced on that first tour of the Met. While in the American Portrait Gallery, we played a game called Matchmaker Matchmaker. Here’s how it goes:

• Take a few minutes to allow a subject in one of the paintings to “find you”. It can be a human or an animal, and they can be the main focus of the piece or some strange-looking fellow lurking in the background. Go to whatever piques your interest and draws you in. 
• Use both the posted information and your imagination to come up with a simple backstory for this individual. What is their name? Why are they in this scene? Where did they get that phenomenal feather boa? 
• Find a partner or get matched with a partner. You now have exactly two minutes to concoct the epic love story that brings together the two characters you’ve chosen. 
• As you stand amongst the portraits, share your tale of deception, love, mystery, and intrigue with the rest of the group. 

During this simple, ten-minute activity, we curated our own experience by practicing “high levels of noticing” and by investigating museum signage on the wall and online. We were encouraged to use our smartphones to search accession numbers if we wanted to dig deeper than the copy on the wall. We shared what captivated and spoke to us on a personal level, not just what we were told was “important." But perhaps most significantly, we used the art and the subjects therein as jumping off points for bringing the museum collection to life.

Who is the audience for Museum Hack? You are a museum insider and a content geek. But I know that Nick Gray, the Museum Hack founder, often emphasizes that Museum Hack is for people who don’t love (or even like) museums. 

We at Museum Hack have gone back and forth about our target audience: is it people that don’t like museums that we want to convert, or people who want a more personal experience, or people who want an active museum experience?

I don’t think anyone who doesn’t like museums would ever pay for a tour. Then again, many of our most passionate participants are somewhat ambivalent towards museums--or people who are daunted by the Met or AMNH and want a more personalized experience. I think of us guides as “museum personal trainers”. Whether you’re an art history buff, a professional athlete, or don’t think you even like museums, sometimes all you need is a little help using the equipment.

How do you advertise Museum Hack? If you want to get people who are not already interested in museums, how would they even know to look for you? 

Social media and word of mouth. It started with word of mouth, and then it got much, much bigger. Now a ton of our business comes from TripAdvisor reviews and Zerve - a ticketing website. We’re one of the top-rated destination tours to do in NYC. The reviews are so positive. And then during the tours themselves, we’re hashtagging, tweeting - that is promotional too.

When we became more known on these trip planning websites, it shifted our audience. It used to be mostly young New Yorkers. Now we have a larger and more diverse audience, including a lot of tourists who are thinking of going on tours anyway.

Are there differences between the Museum Hack experience at the Met and AMNH? I imagine that there are a lot more presumed barriers to break down at an art museum than a science museum. Dinosaurs seem pretty accessible. 

There’s a certain level of assumed stuffiness or pretention at the Met. We do a good job of breaking down those boundaries--and maybe those tours involve a little more swearing and silliness. As far as AMNH goes, there’s a little bit of that, but we focus more on offering a more personal experience, finding ways to engage with things in the space and make them personally relevant to you. One of the big ones is that we bring the people behind the artifacts to life. I don’t think on a normal tour they talk so much about the badass character and life experience of the explorers and revolutionaries behind the specimens.

How do you start a Museum Hack tour in a way that signals the different experience ahead? How do you manage the diverse people on the tour who may want different things from it? 

We have a specific opening activity to bring the group together. We huddle up, share what you should expect from the tour, and introduce everyone. Everyone puts their hands in the middle--like a sports team--and does a cheer. From the start, you are face to face with strangers. We use language throughout the tour to encourage the interpersonal, e.g. “make eye contact with two new museum friends.”

It also helps that we generally sell out at 8 people, and the guide always has a co-host if the group gets that big. Having two guides means we can do split stops at some places, giving some people one experience and some another. It allows a little more freedom, and it also gives people many voices and personalities to engage with.

It seems like there are two ways to look at Museum Hack. One is that you have completely reimagined what a museum tour can be, and for whom. The other is that you have produced the most excellent version of a museum tour—more engaging, more personalized, more entertaining. Which description do you think is more accurate? 

That’s a tough question. I think that for the two museums in which we work, it might be A. But for museums in general, it's B. There are definitely elements of what we do in use at other institutions and in other contexts, and this leads me to believe that B is a more accurate description. But as far as The Met and AMNH go, I think we've totally reimagined the tour experience (A).

How has Museum Hack informed your day job as a museum educator? 

It has made me a better educator and added tremendous value for the audiences with which I work, both at NYSCI and on Museum Hack tours. Ultimately, it hinges on coming back—time after time—to the same five questions:

1. Why should my audience care about [insert content]? 
2. How does [insert content] relate to their lives and their interests?
3. What are the tangible points of relevancy that will engage my learners on a personal level? 
4. Am I giving people the tools necessary to curate their own museum experience during repeat visits? 
5. What is my “ask” of my audience? What are their “next steps”? 

Museum Hack let me step outside the routine context of my normal scope of work to really explore the core concepts of interactivity, engagement and relevancy. It’s made the museum experiences I facilitate more enjoyable, longer-lasting, and much more meaningful.

But you don’t have to take my word for it: next time you’re in New York, shoot me an e-mail. We’d love to give you a first-hand taste of the Museum Hack special sauce, and prove to you why we truly believe that Museums Are F***ing Awesome.

You can share your questions and comments directly with Dustin here in the comments section or by emailing him at dustin@museumhack.com

Quick Hit: Three Blogs to Expand Your Arts Nonprofit Universe

It's that time of year. Scrambling at work, socializing afterwards... which, if you are a torn extro/introvert like me, can involve a lot of time in the bathroom reading while everyone else is toasting the season.

Here are three blogs that I'm loving these days for breaks from the chaos. Each of them comes from the extended family of museums: close enough to be relevant, far enough to spark new thinking. These are the cool cousins I'm fascinated and energized by.

1. Butts in the Seats. Joe Patti runs a performing arts center in Ohio. For ten years (!) he has been blogging about arts management. He does so thoughtfully, prolifically, and very frequently. He points me to resources I've vaguely heard of. He writes with an open, curious mind. His posts open up questions and ways of thinking about audiences, marketing, management, and engagement that get me thinking differently. Start with the Categories list on the right if you don't know where to start. Check it out here.
2. Nonprofit with Balls. Vu Le is hilarious, wicked smart, and writing extremely important weekly posts about nonprofit management and organizations based in communities of color. If there's one blog that has rocked my world and made me laugh inappropriately in the bathroom, it's this one. Imagine if Buzzfeed were run by a nonprofit manager... and actually funny. Vu is surprisingly singular for his cogent, explicit posts about cultural competency, frustrations of fundraising, and challenges of nonprofit management. He is based in Seattle, but the blog is pretty universal. If you want to know more about organizations rooted in communities of color, leadership development, unicorns, or vegan analyses of Game of Thrones, start reading this blog now. 
3. Grasstronaut. This is a new blog by my colleague at the MAH, Elise Granata. Grasstronaut offers long-format essays and interviews about grassroots and DIY arts spaces. Elise has opened my eyes to the world of hybrid, informal arts spaces. They operate with a completely different set of budgets, decision-making processes, and vulnerabilities than formal organizations. What does it look like when youth invent their own arts empowerment spaces? When comic book stores host comedy shows? When arts organizations get shut down and reborn over and over? Read Grasstronaut and find out. 

What are you reading and appreciating this season? 

Three Provocations from the West Coast of the Arts

You know those people who drop morsels of brilliance like a little kid scattering bread to ducks? I was surrounded by them last week.

I'm part of a cohort of ten arts organizations in California funded by the Irvine Foundation to strengthen our work to engage low-income and ethnically-diverse people. We meet in person twice a year. These are all really smart, dedicated people, and I feel lucky to learn from and with them.

Here's what hit me.

ON TACKLING A STUCK THING//

Deborah Cullinan (Executive Director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) spoke about the change process. She compared some frustrations to "a bird flying into a window." 

I love this metaphor because it doesn't just speak to stuck-ness. It speaks to the fact that there is a living thing on the other side of that glass wall. There is motion. There is joy. If we can open the window, the bird can fly in. Simple as that.

ON PROCESSING NEGATIVITY//

Jon Moscone (Artistic Director of CalShakes and son of the late San Francisco mayor George Moscone) talked about thinking politically about how we respond to criticism and to praise. As he put it: "Count the votes."

If someone is negative about what you are doing, will they ever vote for you? 

Does their vote even matter? 

If the answers to these questions are "no," move on. 

Jon implored us to think more like activists and less like artists. Less focused on being loved. More focused on strategically understanding who is important to our cause and ignoring those who aren't.

ON COLLABORATION//

Michael Garces (Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater) shared about a killer workshop that made him completely rethink how collaboration is supposed to work. We usually think about collaboration as a process of compromise and negotiation. But Michael suggested that collaboration really means "You get 100% of what you want. I get 100% of what I want. And we work really hard to make it work."

What would it look like if you approached partnership this way? 

Press Here: Breaking the Fourth Wall in Children's Books... and Museums?

You open a children's book. You see a yellow dot. The text says "Press the yellow dot and turn the page."

Suddenly there are two yellow dots. You follow the text. You press some more. You turn the page. More dots appear. You rub the dots. They change color. You shake the book. The dots move around. You clap. The dots get bigger.

Either I'm really sleep-deprived, or Press Here is the most brilliant interactive children's book ever. Let's be clear: there are no pushbuttons or popups or electronics built into this book. Author Herve Tullet uses the most basic children's book materials (pages, words, and images) to create a responsive, dynamic adventure. Press Here is a "normal" book that uses book-ish tools--pacing, spatial arrangement of images on the page, text as instruction--to break the fourth wall and create an interactive experience.

I was thinking of Press Here when I heard about the new children's book This is a Book Without Pictures. B.J. Novak's book uses the basic structure of reading aloud to subject the reader (presumably an adult) to proclaim ridiculous things about him/herself. The text points out that, "Everything the book says, the person reading the book has to say." Said person goes on read every absurd word aloud, fighting with the book, pleading to stop reading the book, casting asides to the audience that he is NOT actually a robot monkey even though the book says he is. Hilarity ensues.

Press Here and This is a Book Without Pictures each break the fourth wall of book-reading in ingenious ways. They recall other artistic work that breaks fourth walls--classically in theater, and more recently in new media projects. (For an adult version of Press Here, enjoy Ze Frank's classic optical illusion.)

This makes me wonder: how do we break the fourth wall in museums? How do we use the essential tools of museum-ness to disrupt, surprise, and delight people?

One part of me thinks this is an impossible question. Museums already engage people with multiple senses, in multiple dimensions. Visitors are already immersed in the experience because of its engaging nature. Maybe there is no fourth wall at all.

But then I think about institutions like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which uses the essential tools of museum presentation to subvert expectations about expertise and content. I think about all the dioramas that we are stuck outside of--and all the clunky add-ons we offer to distract people from the existence of those glass panes. I think of overbuilt animatronics, intended to suggest the vitality of artifacts but instead reminding us how deep the uncanny valley is between life and death. And I think of brilliant people in other mediums--authors like Herve Tullet, artists like Ze Frank--who are breaking walls we didn't even know existed.

So I wonder: where is our fourth wall?
Who will break it in some beautiful, simple way?

Looking for Inspiring Examples from Unlikely Suspects? Check These Out.

How do you find fresh and inspiring resources in your field?

This is a tricky question in the nonprofit arts world--and probably in every field. There are some industry blogs and twitter feeds. There are some good conferences. There are some useful research papers. But most of these resources live in narrow silos, invisible to most of us. If you don't know the language, the players, the conversations in that subset of the field, you won't even know where to look.

The result is that the resources we know most about tend to be limited to those in our respective silos, and stories about giant organizations. Not so helpful for a curious person with diverse interests--especially if you care most about small, experimental organizations. They often don't have the bandwidth or the visibility to share their stories easily.

I was discussing this with a colleague last week when I realized: I am part of the problem. Every once in a while, I see something great, and I don't share it. Each of us is a connector to new work and new worlds.

Below are two excellent e-books put out by the National Arts Marketing Project, one on artistic interventions in uncommon places, and one on taking a leap of faith with "weird" programming. (Full disclosure: my museum is profiled in the latter.)

I love these e-books. They are short, beautifully produced, and thoughtfully edited. Best of all, they profile diverse organizations I know very little about.

NAMP puts out some other e-books about branding and digital engagement which may also be of interest. But for me, the stories in Making Space and Let's Get Weird--about art in laundromats, theater in churches--share lessons that go far beyond marketing.

Thanks to NAMP for writing these e-books. And thanks to you for sharing the resources that you are inspired by--whenever and wherever you can.

MuseumCamp 2014: Experiments in Social Impact Assessment

You run a program. It changes kids' lives. It builds more responsible environmental stewards. It strengthens your community.

How do you measure that?

This was the question at the heart of last week's MuseumCamp. MuseumCamp is an annual professional development event at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in which teams of diverse, creative people work on quick and dirty projects on a big theme. This year, the theme was social impact assessment, or measuring the immeasurable. We worked closely with Fractured Atlas to produce MuseumCamp, which brought together 100 campers and 8 experienced counselors to do 20 research projects in ~48 hours around Santa Cruz.

We encouraged teams to think like artists, not researchers. To be speculative. To be playful. To be creative. The goal was to explore new ways to measure "immeasurable" social outcomes like connectedness, pride, and civic action.

The teams delivered. You can check out all twenty research projects here. While all the projects are fast, messy, and incomplete, each is like a small test tube of ideas and possibilities for opening up the way we do social impact research.

Here are three lessons I learned at MuseumCamp about research processes:

• Look for nontraditional indicators. The JerBears group used "passing of joints" as an indicator of tribal affinity at a Grateful Dead tribute concert. The San Lorenzo Levee group used movement of homeless people as an indicator of social disruption. People x (Food + Place) looked at photos taken by children in a park to understand what contributed to their sense of community. Some of these experiments didn't yield anything useful, but some were surprisingly helpful proxies for complex human interactions.
• Don't (always) call it a survey. Several groups created projects that were somewhere between engagement activity and research activity. Putting stickers on signs. Taking photos. Finishing a sentence mad-libs style. My favorite example of this was the One Minute Art Project group, which rebranded a fairly standard sticker survey into a "fast, fun, free and easy" activity. They had several participants who said "I wouldn't do a survey, but I like doing this."
• Every active research method is an intervention. It's easy to look at the One Minute Art Project referenced above and see a red flag - maybe people self-select into this because it's "art" instead of "research." But I realized through this process that a survey solicitation is just an active an intervention as an engagement solicitation. There are different biases to who participates and why. But we shouldn't assume that any one research method is inherently "neutral" just because it is more familiar. Many of the most interventionist projects, like the Karma Hat, yielded really interesting information that was not visible in more passive research methods.

And here are three of my favorite findings from the experiments:

• On depth of bridging among strangers. Two groups dove into the work at the MAH on social bridging - one with the Karma Hat game, and one with a photobooth project. The Karma Hat required people to wear a hat, write their name on it, and pass it on. It was hugely used. On the other hand, a photobooth where people were prompted to take a photo with a stranger they met at the museum was barely used. We saw that people were ready and willing to engage with strangers at the museum, but not necessarily to build relationships on those engagements. This is just a drop in the barrel of exploration we are doing around bridging at the museum.
• On smartphone usage at natural sites. We Go to 11 studied the difference in mood change for people at a beautiful site overlooking the ocean relative to their smartphone use. They found that people with smartphones used them to go from a state of active negativity (tension, anxiety) to active positivity (energy, joy). People who didn't use smartphones at the same site tended to embody passive positivity (serenity, calm). Not a shocker, but a pretty interesting project.  
• On the power of programming to spark civic action. This project, measuring the connection between empathy and action at an indigenous solidarity film screening, is full of useful insights. Read their report for thoughts about the challenges of participant observational research, the power of spiritual experiences, and the results of a compelling survey about ignition to action.

I encourage you to explore all the projects and see what insights might connect to your own work and research goals. You can comment on the projects too and share your own ideas. Please bear in mind that these were very quick projects and are more like research sketches than full evaluations.

What did you get out of MuseumCamp? If you didn't attend, what do you want to know more about?

Building a Pipeline to the Arts, World Cup Style

It's World Cup time. And for the first time in my adult life as an American, that seems significant. People at work with the games running in the background on their computers. Conversations about the tournament on the street. Constant radio coverage.

If you are reading this outside the United States, this sounds ridiculously basic. Football/soccer is the world's sport. But in the US, it has only recently become something worth watching. For most of my life in America, pro soccer was considered something risible and vaguely deviant, like picking your nose in public.

But now it's everywhere. It's exciting. And it's got me thinking about how we build energy and audience for the arts in this country.

Barry Hessenius recently wrote a blog post questioning the theory that more art into the school day will increase and bolster future adult audiences for art experiences. Like Barry, I feel that more art in schools is always better. I also share Barry's skepticism that there is a direct, premier line between art in schools and adult audiences for art.

I got into museum work because learning happens in many places and many ways. School is just a small part of it. When we talk about what kinds of experiences create pathways to more arts participation as adults, we have to look in AND beyond school. We have to look at what kids are doing after school. What kinds of tools and media they can access. Who their role models are.

Consider soccer. Soccer did not transition into a national phenomenon in the US based solely (or even mostly) on school participation. Soccer isn't just part of school; it's part of life. Millions of youth play in afterschool and weekend leagues. International stars like Pele captured attention on the airwaves. Immigrant families found local leagues where they could participate and feel connected socially. Stronger youth leagues led to stronger college teams led to stronger Olympic and professional performance. And all of that led to more audience--at all levels of the game.

There have been pro soccer leagues in the US on and off for almost a century. But over the past fifty years, soccer has ascended on more levels to a stronger footing overall. Instead of just creating a league for top play and hoping an audience would show up, soccer is developing a constantly-refreshing audience by creating opportunities for kids as young as four to participate in AYSO youth leagues. AYSO goes out of its way to include kids with different abilities, with "everyone plays" as one of its chief tenets. At the same time as it promotes inclusive participation, AYSO is affiliated with the United States Soccer Federation (the pros). AYSO builds both the players and the audiences for soccer's future in this county at all levels.

This isn't just a soccer phenomenon. Across sports, there is a deliberate embrace of practice at all levels to strengthen participation. In basketball, there is street ball and varsity and college play and D-league and the NBA. All of these levels and types of play support a pipeline that accommodates players and audiences at different levels of skill, financial capacity, and enthusiasm.

This pipeline absorbs diversity in quality of play without "dumbing down" the experience or lessening the desire to achieve top levels of excellence. When we talk about embracing participatory experiences at non-professional levels, arts professionals often get worried that the best work will get drowned out in mediocrity. But the diverse world of sports has done an extremely good job of preserving the top levels of play. At the same time, it has cultivated active spectators who understand the subtle differences between the tiers. Imagine if people were as knowledgeable about the specific talents of top symphonic conductors as they are of top athletes.

What would that take? Arts already offer opportunities for participation, grand narrative, and diverse tiers of quality that are needed to make this pipeline a reality. We just have to connect the dots. Imagine if the world's leading symphonies were affiliated with the largest organizations for first-time instrument players. Imagine if every community theater was a development theater for a bigger one. If ballet theaters and ballet schools and dance in the park events were coordinated. If kids were checking out art supplies from the library. If maker fairs were connected to science centers.

To me, this kind of pipeline is necessary to build future audiences and practitioners in the arts. It just requires a few things:

• Mutual respect, coordination, and collaboration among organizations that work at different levels of expertise, budget, and scale. Instead of seeing differences in quality as competitive or embarrassing, we could see different tiers as part of a healthy ecosystem that builds rather than detracts. Enough art already exists to get this going--it just isn't usefully connected yet.
• Emphasis on developing both practitioners and audiences. Why can professional sports leagues charge hundreds of dollars for a ticket? Because they have built demand through hundreds of hours spent playing and watching the game for free or low cost. Sensible tiers lead to sensible discernment when it comes to paying for audience experiences.
• Diversity of opportunities to engage. School is only one of many venues where cultural experiences can happen. If we embrace the abundant diversity of venues and formats rather that declaring some "in" and others "out," we can spend more time building a field and less time parsing out who belongs there.

I dream of a time when we have as much attention and access to creative and cultural activities as we do to athletics. Sure, there will always be non-participants. There will always be audience gaps. There will always be top performers on the bench. But hopefully, there will be a culture of diverse people participating, cheering, and showing up.

If we can do it for soccer, I know we can do it for art.

What I Learned from Beck (the rock star) about Participatory Arts

In December of 2012, the rock musician Beck released his latest album, Song Reader. Song Reader didn't come as a CD, or an LP, or a bunch of digital audio files. It is what it sounds like: a book of original sheet music, beautifully designed and complemented with artwork and text. There are twenty songs in Song Reader. But if you want to hear them, you have to play them yourself--or check out hundreds of interpretations shared by musicians on the Song Reader website.

There are many artistic projects that offer a template for participation, whether a printed play, an orchestral score, or a visual artwork that involves an instructional set (from community murals to Sol LeWitt). Beck's project is unusual because he deliberately resurrected a mostly-defunct participatory platform: sheet music for popular songs. In his thoughtful preface to this project, I reconnected with five lessons I've learned from participatory projects in museums and cultural sites.

1. Constrain the input, free the output.

In my experience, the best participatory experiences are as constrained and clear as possible in the invitation offered, and as open-ended as possible in the outcome generated. Sheet music is a beautiful analogy for this.

The fact that there is no original recording by Beck of the Song Reader songs, no model upon which "covers" would be based, frees the reader to imagine the songs in any number of ways. As Beck put it:

The opening up of the music, the possibility of letting people work with these songs in different ways, and of allowing them a different accessibility than what’s offered by all the many forms of music available today, is ultimately what this collection aims for. These arrangements are starting-off points; they don’t originate from any definitive recording or performance. 

2. Level the playing field for participants of diverse backgrounds.

One of the things I always focus on in participatory exhibit design is ensuring that everyone has the same tools to work with. When community contributions are presented as second-class content, that negatively affects both the quality of the contributions and the perception of the product. If there are museum objects and visitors' objects on display together, all should be afforded the same level of exhibit design, labels, etc. If there's a talkback area in an exhibition where people can make drawings, visitors should have access to the same kind of paper and colored pencils that was used to generate seed content.

These kinds of participatory projects can actually de-motivate because participants can't possibly measure up to the display model. If Beck is in a fancy studio and you're in your garage with your ukelele, why bother?

Beck talks about this in the context of learning to play music as a young artist. The music he listened to on the radio "got its power" from studio techniques. He described it this way:

When I started out on guitar, I gravitated toward folk and country blues; they seemed to work well with the limited means I had to make music of my own. The popular songs, by contrast, didn’t really translate to my Gibson flat-top acoustic. There was an unspoken division between the music you heard on the radio and the music you were able to play with your own hands. By then, recorded music was no longer just the document of a performance—it was a composite of style, hooks, and production techniques, an extension of a popular personality’s image within a current sound.

Of course, Beck notes the irony that sheet music is not exactly accessible to everyone, especially at a time when many people are making music digitally in all kinds of ways that don't start with standardized notation. But when it comes to building from a template, sheet music has simple power. As Beck puts it:

I think there’s something human in sheet music, something that doesn’t depend on technology to facilitate it—it’s a way of opening music up to what someone else is able to bring to it.

3. Everything old is new again.

Sheet music is not a new technology. Beck was inspired to launch this project by the popularity of sheet music and songbooks in the early 1900s. In the 1930s, a popular hit could sell tens of millions of copies of the sheet music, which translated to tens of millions of people playing and singing the songs in their own homes.

Thinking about this, I was struck by the resonance with conversations swirling in the arts field about "little a" art: art that happens in the home, in churches, in parks. There seems to be a hunger these days to document, research, and celebrate the diverse places and ways that people make and share art outside of formal, recognized institutions.

While any family theoretically can start a home singalong or a neighborhood play-reading group, it often takes a tradition, a formal structure, or a template to prompt this kind of activity. Song Reader looks back and encourages reengaging in a tradition that fosters participation. Similarly, when a theater adopts a talking circle practice, or a museum starts a knitting group, the institution is reconnecting with traditional templates for participatory engagement.

4. Participatory processes often (and sometimes unintentionally) restructure the product.

When you are developing a participatory project with non-professionals, it usually involves changing the process from the norm. That's expected. What's less expected is that the product itself is often restructured to meet the particular needs and assets of the participants involved. For example, a history museum might traditionally develop exhibitions internally, with one curator writing the labels in third person (even if drawing from primary sources). That same curator, when developing an exhibition in partnership with community members, may take the opportunity to produce labels in multiple first-person voices of the participants. Their involvement creates an opportunity to create a slightly different product.

Similarly, Beck found himself writing songs differently when writing for the songbook instead of the studio. He noted:

I started to think about what kind of songs have a quality that allows others to inhabit them and to make them their own. What is it about a song that lets you sing it around a campfire, or play it at a wedding? Is it the simplicity of the sentiment? A memorable melody? What makes certain songs able to persist through any era, and adapt themselves? ... 

The songs I would write for one of my own records began to seem less appropriate than songs written in a broader style. At times, I struggled against my own writing instincts—where was the line between the simplistic and the universal, the cliché and the enduring? Classic songs can transcend and transform a cliché, magnifying a well-trodden phrase or sentiment and making it into something elemental. But often that approach descends into banality and platitudes. My appreciation for the ability of songwriters to avoid those pitfalls drove a lot of the writing here; still, I have little idea whether any of these songs managed to find that line. In the right hands, maybe they’ll be able to come a little closer to it.

This gets a bit at the confounding question of how to measure "quality" in a participatory project. Is quality sheet music the same as a quality pop song? No. They are designed to do different things.

5. It's complicated.

Song Reader brings up several familiar questions about participatory arts:

• What happens when an artist creates a participatory process instead of a traditional art product?
• Who owns the products created by that process? Who owns them in a legal sense, but also who is perceived as the owner/originator/creator of the products?
• Are the products created via such a process of worse, better, or equivalent quality as traditional art products?

These questions were particularly present as I scanned the Song Reader website, which feels partly commercial, partly community-based. The content and quality of the songs shared varies widely. But that's part of the point - that the same song can be played reggae or country, by a string quartet or a girl in her bedroom. It can be the basis for a contest, a giant concert, or an evening at home. It can be the spark a personal art practice or a community gathering. It can be a big mess, or a quiet surprise.

As Beck puts it: "That instability is what ultimately drew me to this project."