Introducing #museumfitness, a Side Project where Art & Athletics Mix

When I have a day to myself, there are two things I like to do most in this world:

1. work.
2. work out.

To celebrate the confluence between these passions, some buddies and I have started an instagram account called @museumfitness. We are posting short museum-based exercise videos each week. I invite you to follow the account, send in your own videos (tagged #museumfitness), and sweat along with us at your institution.

While it's a silly project, #museumfitness is also a small attempt to break down unproductive divisions between "art people" and "sports people." Pop culture often tells us that intellect and sports don't mix. Some of my museum friends seem viscerally uncomfortable with athletics. Some of my fitness friends would never set foot in a museum. I believe that smarts and sports DO mix... and at least for me, they enhance each other.

I've been a nerd my whole life, and a jock since high school. When I was 14, I joined the water polo team. I spent every morning and evening in the pool. I loved it--the hard work, the yelling coach, sweat in my eyes and chlorine in my hair. I felt like part of something challenging and communal.

After high school, I stopped playing high-level sports but kept building my passion for social sweat. I boxed. Played ultimate frisbee. Climbed rocks. Played beach volleyball. Right now, when I'm not at work, I'm training for obstacle course races with a local team.

For me, sports are a way to push myself and to connect with people who are different from me--both skills that enhance my work as well.

I love challenges. Challenges at work can be messy and interpersonal. Challenges in athletics are simpler. Cleaner. How far can I run? How hard can I push myself? I can dig deep when I want to, and if I decide to quit, I'm not letting someone else down. When I challenge myself in sports, I train myself to be tougher in a low-stakes environment. That helps me confront challenges at work--which often come with emotional or political stakes--more confidently.

I love building social bridges. My museum focuses on it, and I really believe that building bridges across differences can build a better world. I get to practice bridging in my personal life through sports. My fitness friends come from all walks of life. They are more diverse than my colleagues economically and politically. Despite our differences, we trust each other and support each other. We work together to achieve impossible, trivial heights.

For no obvious reason, we have quite a few #museumfitness fanatics at the MAH. I love working with people who know how to push themselves beyond their comfort zones. I love working with people who aren't afraid to shoot for a big goal. I love working with people who are ready to dive in and support each other so we can reach that goal. I learned a lot of these lessons playing sports. I have no doubt you could acquire these skills in other ways. But I learned them--and keep learning them--through fitness.

If YOU are a closet member of the #museumfitness tribe, join us in bridging these divides. Take a five-minute pushup break in the office. Run up the stairs. Invite your colleagues to sweat along with you. Invite your gym-mates into your museum. And shoot a video for instagram. We'd love to have you as part of our team.

Women of Color Leading Essential, Activist Work in Cultural Institutions

A new poster from the National Park Service,
based on Rich Black's 2009 image.

Over the past few months, I've been doing research for a forthcoming book on relevance. One of the best parts of developing a book is learning new stories. For me, the early stage of writing a book is a treasure hunt--an excuse to seek out new examples and ideas that strengthen the story.

Here are three sources that have inspired me, from four activist women of color. Each of these women push the boundaries of cultural institutions in different ways, with digital and physical manifestations. But don't take my word for it. These women all have strong online presences, and I invite you to join me in learning from and supporting their work.

Ravon Ruffin and Amanda Figuero - Claiming Space for Brown Women in the Digital Museum Landscape

Based in Washington DC, Brown Girls Museum Blog is a new-ish site led by graduate students Ravon Ruffin and Amanda Figueroa. Ravon and Amanda are using several social media channels to explore and share museum exhibitions, programs, and projects. They are holding meetups, creating swag, and getting heard. Ravon spoke at MuseumNext last month (video here) about how communities of color claim space and power in the decentralized digital landscape. I was impressed by her expertise, and the example that Raven and Amanda are setting in strengthening their own voices as emerging leaders in this space. I can't wait to see what happens as they claim more space and power in museums, both through this project and individually in their careers.

Monica Montgomery - Building a Museum of Impact

In New York City, Monica Octavia Montgomery is pushing the boundaries of how we make relevant, powerful museum exhibits with the Museum of Impact. The Museum of Impact is a pop-up project of short-term exhibitions on urgent topics of social justice. Monica is a museum pioneer in two ways: she is using the museum medium to tackle tough social issues, and she is inventing new models for urgent, responsive, relevant programming. Monica publicly launched Museum of Impact this year with an exhibition on #blacklivesmatter, and she has projects on other themes--immigration, environment, mass incarceration--in the works. Want to know more? Check out this great interview with Monica by Elise Granata, and learn more about how you can get involved.

Betty Reid Soskin - Rewriting History in the National Parks

Yes, I DID save the best for last. Betty Reid Soskin is a nationally-renowned park ranger in Richmond, CA, and I am completely blown away by what I've learned from her in the short few weeks since I first heard her name. Betty is the oldest national park ranger in America at 94, but more importantly, Betty is an activist, a truth-seeker, and a storyteller. She speaks, writes, and fights for justice--in a federal historic site.

Betty gives tours at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park, sharing her lived experience working there as a clerk during the war. Her blog, CBreaux Speaks, is one of the most eloquent I've ever read. She writes about race, history, parks, culture, and politics. She writes with power, and a voice unlike any I've encountered online. And she's been blogging for over 12 years.

Here's an excerpt from one of Betty Reid Soskin's earliest blog posts, from September 2003, when she was first asked to participate in the planning of the national park in which she now works. She was in the room as an elder, a civic leader, and a part of the site's history. But she immediately saw that she had an additional role to play: as a truth-teller of the full history of the site. Here's how she described it:

In the new plan before us, the planning team was taken on a bus tour of the buildings that will be restored as elements in the park. They're on scattered sites throughout the western part of the city. One of two housing complexes that has been preserved, Atchison and Nystrom Villages. They consist of modest bungalows, mostly duplexes and triplexes that were constructed "for white workers only." In many cases, the descendants of those workers still inhabit those homes. They're now historic landmarks and are on the national registry as such.  

Since we're "telling the story of America through structures," how in the world do we tell this one? And in looking around the room, I realized that it was only a question for me. It held no meaning for anyone else.

No one in the room realizes that the story of Rosie the Riveter is a white woman's story. I, and women of color will not be represented by this park as proposed. Many of the sites names in the legislation I remember as places of racial segregation -- and as such -- they may be enshrined by a generation that has forgotten that history.  

There is no way to explain the continuing presence of the 40% African American presence in this city's population without including their role in World War II. There continues to be a custodial attitude toward this segment of the population, with outsiders unaware of the miracle of those folks who dropped their hoes and picked up welding torches to help to save the world from the enemy. Even their grandchildren have lost the sense of mission and worthiness without those markers of achievement and "membership" in the effort to save the world.  

And, yes, I did tell them. And, I have no idea what they'll do with the information, but I did feel a sense of having communicated those thoughts effectively to well-meaning professionals who didn't know what in hell to do the information. 

Fortunately, Betty Reid Soskind did a heck of a lot more than participating in that 2003 planning session. She became a leader in the development, and now the interpretation, of Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park.

Spend time on Betty's blog, and get inspired by her journey as an activist and a truth-teller, a passionate advocate for what cultural institutions can do to advance truth and justice for all. Support Ravon and Amanda and Monica, and their journeys to become leaders in our field. Our cultural universe is full of stars. When we deny ourselves the full brilliance of the stories and voices in that universe, we impoverish our own experiences. We cloud the potential for truth, beauty, and justice.

Let us all be amateur astronomers of culture, huddled around the powerful telescopes of diverse experience. Let us seek truth, beauty, and justice, and amplify them, together.

What the Museum Sell Out Game (Re)Taught Me about Participation Inequality

Last week on this blog, I tried an experiment. I wanted to open up conversation about how we judge the relative ethics of various sources of museum revenue--all of which have moral grey areas. Instead of writing a post and soliciting comments (my typical approach), I used an online polling tool to create a simple game where you could read short provocations about questionable revenue sources and give each source an ethical thumbs-up or down.

The outcome taught me a few things about ethics... but it taught me even more about online interaction.

In the last week:

• 10,000ish people saw the blog post on the web or as an email. 
• 3,125 people viewed the game. 
• 610 people played the game.
• 20 people commented on it. 

This is a beautiful demonstration of participation inequality online. The vast majority of folks consume most content online passively. Some people actively play, share, collect, or gather online content. A small percentage comment on it. An even smaller percentage create it.

When people talk about participation inequality, we often focus on the disparity among levels of participation. We ask: how can we motivate more people to contribute?

But another way to look at participation inequality is via the diversity of types of participation available. We ask: how can we create different pathways to participation for people with different motivations? 

On platforms with many participatory options, more people are more active. On Facebook, you can post, like, comment, add photos, play games... but you don't have to do all of those things to be an active contributor. Watching friends change their profile shots to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage reminded me how Facebook is constantly experimenting with new ways to participate.

I think this diversification is key to inviting broad audiences to feel meaningfully involved in participatory projects. So often we stick with one or two basic strategies, ignoring the fact that those forms may be welcoming to some and off-putting to others.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I write blog posts on a platform where you can comment. I assume that commenting is the way people want to participate. But the barriers to commenting--both technical and psychological--can be huge.

When I decided to make this little game about museum ethics, I hoped that more people would participate than typically comment on a blog post. I was astounded by the difference. 0.6% of game viewers commented. 20% of game viewers played. Clearly it was an effective alternative form of participation.

I learned from what these 610 players contributed. It challenged some of my preconceptions about how people feel about the ethics of grants, attendance, facility rental, and corporate sponsorship. It gave me (and hopefully them) a whole lot more food for thought than the post alone.

Games aren't right for every circumstance. But this experiment made me question: what am I doing to make it easy and meaningful for people to participate in the work we do? How can we offer more diverse ways for people to get involved?

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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 You Lose When You Become Embedded, and a Moment of Mourning for Blog Conversations

In the community engagement universe, there's a high premium on arts organizations becoming "embedded" in their communities. Instead of being lone islands of culture, the goal is to be part of the fabric of diverse cultural life.

I'm proud of the way that my own museum works on embeddedness. For us, it means showing up at other people's events. Supporting organizations and community projects that are extended family to our own goals. Partnering, everywhere. Joining a long list of people and organizations working together to build a stronger community.

But today I want to acknowledge the loss that comes with being embedded. The loss of distinct space. Of voice. Of importance.

This loss is real, and I'm feeling in it another sphere of my professional life: this blog.

I've always treated blogging as a learning practice. I learn twice; once in the writing, and once in the reading and engaging with commenters.

In the past three years, the number of comments on this blog has declined significantly. Readership is up. Comments are down. What used to be a lively online discussion--with some posts garnering over 50 comments--is now fairly sedate.

People are still engaging with these posts--they just aren't doing it on this website like they used to. When I talk to colleagues, I hear they are using Museum 2.0 posts for all kinds of things: office discussion groups, Facebook debates, grad school homework. In its own small way, Museum 2.0 is "embedded" in many platforms and mediums.

Problem is, I'm only part of a tiny fraction of those conversations. I'm learning less. I feel more lonely in my writing. It makes it harder to keep it up.

This "problem" disproportionately impacts only one of this blog's thousands of users: me. For me, this content being embedded across different platforms and conversations is lovely in the abstract but frustrating in the day-to-day. I used to feel like a party host with really amazing guests. Now I feel like a street performer. I'm part of a bigger city. I supply some content but only get to talk with a few gadflies who stick close to the show (of whom I am very appreciative). One of my greatest blogging-related joys is when someone shares a blog post with a colleague and accidentally hits "reply" instead of "forward"--thus letting me in on their conversation.

This is what it means to be embedded. To not be the center of attention. To be used by someone else, somewhere else, without notification or participation. To be more important, but to feel less important.

I absolutely believe that being embedded makes us stronger and more resilient. But it also means less control of space. Less people coming to our party. More time blowing up balloons and giving them away. Wondering--rarely knowing--where they will land.

What's Coming Up, What Happened, How Can I Help, and What the Heck is this E-Blast For, Anyway?

Like a lot of organizations, our museum sends out a weekly email to folks who are interested in upcoming events, exhibitions, and happenings at our museum. We are sensitive to keeping it short, interesting, and readable. We mostly focus on sharing what exhibitions are on and which events are coming up that week. Just the facts, ma'am.

At the same time, we generate some pretty great digital documentation (mostly photos and videos) from recent events. This documentation often languishes in corners of the social web. We capture the moments, post them online, and that's it.

In the past few months, we've started to experiment with sharing documentation on the e-blast. We've known for awhile that the most clicked-on part of our e-blast is often the Wishlist--a simple call-out for stuff we need for programs and exhibitions. As a community-based museum, it makes sense that we actively solicit participation through the e-blast when we can.

Bolstered by the power of the Wishlist, we decided to explore other non-announcement-y content to add to the e-blast.

Here's a recent e-blast we sent. It features:

• an event & exhibition announcement
• an opportunity to apply for our teen program
• an instagram video of a ten year old who did a spontaneous performance at a recent event
• a wishlist request

This e-blast had a surprising surge in clicks. Our average e-blast has a click rate of 1-2%. This one clocked in at 3%. The only other blast that has ever had this 3% clicks offered two job announcements.

Of those clicks, the vast majority - 44% - were on the video of the singing girl. Triple the number of clicks that anything else got. Documentation trumped announcement. An exciting moment captured digitally was more interesting than the promise of future exciting moments. 

A crass way to look at this is that the video was link-bait. Of course people will click on a video of--as we put it--"a 10 year old crushing a surprise performance at First Friday." But this documentation is also a direct showcase of our mission to ignite shared experiences and unexpected connections. I was in the room when Lily got up on stage and belted out a song she wrote. It was extraordinary. It brought the room together. It was a mind-exploding, unexpected moment of connection. It's the kind of magic that sometimes happens at the MAH.

If we wanted our e-blast to be as reflective of our mission, programming, and values as possible, it would primarily feature:

• invitations to get meaningfully involved
• documentation and celebration of community members who have gotten involved, shared experiences, made unexpected connections, or experienced moments of ignition
• clear and welcoming language about a diversity of available experiences where you could have these experiences too

We're moving in this direction, but we could probably do more. I'm a bit embarrassed at how simple this seems and how we had to wander into discovering it. We thought the e-blast was prescriptively for one thing. Our visitors are reminding us that any communication can and should be mission-oriented. Thanks, visitors.

If your e-blast was written in the language of your mission, how would it be different? What would it feature?

Learning Cultural Competency through Social Media

What if there was a place where we could learn more about the experiences of people who are totally different from us? Where we could hear directly, in their own words, what they love, hate, fear, desire, dream?

There is that place. It is called the Web.

I don't care who you are interested in learning more about--people of a particular race/ethnicity, gender, political affiliation, physical ability, generation, sexual orientation--there is a bubble on the Web populated by them. People often complain that social media can become an echo chamber to reinforce pre-existing beliefs and expectations. It's true. The extreme atomization and diversity of media sources can enable people to burrow into mirrored caves.

But most of the Web is open. Which means you can go into whatever cave you want--including those occupied by people who come from different worlds from you.

Earlier this spring, I decided to go on a mission to use social media to increase my cultural competency around Latino experiences, issues, and interests. At our museum, we're making a big effort to increase our engagement with local Latino families. Alongside work we are doing locally with specific neighborhoods, individuals, and organizations, I wanted to use the Web to learn more about Latino issues generally.

I didn't do anything fancy; I just shifted my informal news diet. I eliminated some blogs and podcasts from my reading list that reinforced information I already knew. I took a break from my regular diet of feminist-tinted news. I used the time I had carved out to tap into new sources related to the Latino experience and people of color.

How did I find these sources? I started by:

• subscribing to some mainstream aggregators, like Huffington Post Latino Voices, Latino USA, Colorlines, Codeswitch. 
• reaching out to Salvador Acevedo, a brilliant marketing strategist who focuses on Latinos. Salvador gave me suggestions of websites and influencers to check out. I spent a few hours hunting around and subscribed to a few that related to my interests.
• following a few hashtags and people associated with these sources on Twitter, checking out the lists of who they follow, and adding more people to my Twitter feed through their networks.

That's it. It's not a complex educational activity. I'm not segmenting or diving into very specific areas. I'm wading in the waters of someone else's media landscape. 

In three months of doing this passively, I've already noticed some specific changes to my work practice. Here are just two examples:

1. It has made us more savvy surveyors. There has been a lot of coverage in the Latino/PoC mediaverse about how Latinos self-identify racially on the US census. Blog posts like this one--which I probably never would have seen in my old news diet--have informed conversations at our museum about how we ask visitors to identify in demographic surveys. We are in a year of developing assessment tools for our programming, so this issue is highly relevant to our work, and these news sources help us address weaknesses in our approach.
2. It has influenced exhibition content. I'm neck-deep in a redevelopment of our permanent history gallery about Santa Cruz County. Reading news from a Latino perspective has helped me consistently encounter non-dominant ways to look at California history. Yes, these narratives are also present in some of the advisory discussions and reference materials we are using in developing exhibition content. But hearing those counter-narratives reinforced daily in my news diet builds confidence in them and makes me more thoughtful about how to frame historical issues of immigration, labor, culture clash, and racism in the exhibition context.

Again, I don't want to suggest that this approach is ground-breaking or intensive. It's not. But it IS easy, and I have found it to be powerful as a context shift.

I spent years immersed in a feminist media landscape. I consumed news, pop culture, and media through that lens. Now, I'm trying out someone else's media landscape. I'm noticing how that lens is showing me things I didn't see before. It's focusing my attention differently. It's turning the Web into a window instead of a mirror.

Coming to AAM? Want to Meet People for Real Conversations on Issues that Matter Most to You?

Everyone always says that the best part of conferences happens outside the sessions, in the hallway conversations and one-on-one meetings that aren't on the official schedule. 

This may be true. It's also incredibly frustrating when you are new to a field, at a huge conference, or if you are not a born networker. If the best part of the conference isn't on the agenda, how the heck are you supposed to access it?

Last week, I was talking with some colleagues at my museum about the upcoming American Alliance of Museums conference and asked them what kinds of people they wanted to meet at AAM. Their remarks made me realize two things:

1. I don't know the people they want to meet.
2. It's ridiculous to assume that the best way to set up one-on-one meetings is through a conversation with your boss, or a hunt-and-peck through the AAM registrant list.

So my colleague Elise Granata and I set up a very simple LinkedIn group as an experiment. Here's how it works:

• Join the LinkedIn group (if you are searching, it's called "Hack Your Hello's at AAM"). 
• Post the question that you are bringing to AAM or is most on your mind.
• In the "add more details" section, list your contact info and availability during the conference.
• Contact people who share your interests and set up meetings with them at the conference. (Hint: you can do this even if you are not going to the conference.)

That's it. Easy. Hopefully.
If nothing else, it will be the first time I've ever really used LinkedIn.

We'll also be hosting an informal meetup at 10:15am on Monday, May 19 at the tables outside the general session (we assume there will be tables). If you don't want to go through the trouble of setting a meeting time in advance, show up on Monday and find someone interesting to talk with. 

I personally feel that the scheduled sessions at AAM are also pretty darn good, and the conference mobile app is useful for coordinating your official schedule. If you want to check out a presentation, I'll be speaking:

• Monday at 12:15pm as the keynote speaker for the Small Museums Administrator's Committee luncheon, talking about why small museums (should) rule the world of relationship-centered museums.
• Tuesday at 1:45pm in the "I wish somebody had told me..." storytelling session, talking about how I built confidence identifying as an activist.
• Wednesday at 8:45am in the "Hack the Museum" session, about our MuseumCamp in 2013 at which diverse teams built experimental artifact-based exhibits in 48 hours.

A couple other scheduled events I recommend:

• My excellent colleague Elise will be speaking on Monday at 1:45pm in the "Advocacy in Practice" session about our work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History to engage community members as ambassadors and advocates for our community-based institution.
• "Mistakes Were Made" on Tuesday at 3:15 is always a fun, honest story-sharing experience if you need a break from the content-focused presentations.
• The people in the "Future of History" session (also Tuesday at 3:15) include some really incredible innovators who inspire me.
• The fine folks at Incluseum are hosting a happy hour on Tuesday at 6pm at the Diller Room (p.s. - they want people to RSVP).

Enjoy the conference - or at least the LinkedIn group. I look forward to seeing if this experiment is helpful in matchmaking some fruitful conversations.

Tagging in Museums #blowinguppersonal #notwhatweplanned

Here are a few of the hashtags I've seen applied to photographs of museum objects on Instagram lately:
#heytherebigfella
#biggysmallistheillest
#forbrightfuture
#myfavorite
#instagood
#bestday
#withmyhomies
#whatever
#learnedfromthebest
#revolutionary
#nowicandie

These tags all do a great job capturing the magic of exploring a museum. They do a great job sharing the humor and surprise of collections objects. They position museums as social starting points, experiences worth sharing, braggable moments.

They do something entirely different than what museums professionals thought tags might do for our institutions.


Almost ten years ago, museum techies started to get excited about tagging. In 2005, a group of art museums launched steve.museum, a project to explore ways that visitors and non-professionals could help assign descriptive tags to online collections. The point was to "bridge the semantic gap [between experts and visitors in describing objects] by engaging users in the time-consuming and expensive task of describing our collections; add a multi-cultural, perhaps multi-lingual perspective to our documentation; and possibly even develop strategies for engaging new types of users in looking at and thinking about art."

Steve.museum received significant funding from IMLS, and several museums started experimenting with tagging projects, both within and beyond the Steve universe. This included a bevy of research papers and workshops, as well as innovative tagging projects intended to do everything from provide contextual information about artwork to identifying actions taken by families of birds.

The best projects incorporated heavy game mechanics to turn a chore--describing objects--into a fun plaything. While these projects had some success, tagging museum collections objects never really took off as a visitor-contributed slam dunk. And it declined over time. As Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum told me this week: "We've seen far less tagging on our site in recent years and most of the tagging is being contributed via our tag game, Tag You're It, with far less direct activity on object pages within the collection online."

Meanwhile, social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and eventually Facebook started to incorporate tagging and hashtags into their interfaces. Tags have morphed from a way to assign a useful, searchable label to an idea (the kind of tagging museums were interested in) to a way to add commentary in an oddly authoritative, winking third-person voice. Tags like #booyah or #cute or #bestdayever allow people to electively apply an external label to a personal moment. On Instagram in particular, tagging has become the way to get noticed and get connected. In the early days of blogging, people would say "links = love." Now, it's more like "tags = love."

Where does this leave museums and dreams of visitor-driven tagging of collections? The good news is that people are finally psyched about tagging stuff. On their own. Without institutional prompting. The complicating news is that the way people want to tag is to document their personal/social experience with objects, not just the object on its own.

I think this means huge potential for museums to better understand visitors' emotional and affective relationship with specific objects and experiences--what surprises, delights, confounds, and connects. In this way, I see the shift in the use of tagging as opening up new opportunities in visitor research. For example, check out this site, where you can see instances of two hashtags applied to the same photo - try entering "museum" and "love" to get a feel for it.

As for the use of tags to document objects in a common vernacular, it's possible... but only if museums can find ways to help people connect those kinds of tags to their own motivations for tagging.

What do you see as the future of tagging and museum collections?

Image Beats Text: Good for Museums, Tough for Me

Over the past year, I've had a hazy sense that the social web is transitioning from a text-based to visual medium. Services like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram are growing at incredible rates, especially with younger users. Facebook shifted its design to focus on photo and video-sharing in response to data showing that this content is shared way more frequently than text and links. Visual content motivates more responses than text, engages younger participants, and is often cited as a major trend of 2012 and 2013.

A trend in which I take almost no part. It's surprising (and a bit embarrassing) to realize how little I engage with tools that appear ascendant broadly and are in constant use by my colleagues. I appreciate these tools--the attractiveness of Instagram, the usability of Vine, the utility of Pinterest. But I live in a digital world in which text is still king. I spend my professional time online reading blogs, reading reports, sharing articles, engaging in text chat. I use an RSS reader to aggregate articles to read, a bookmarking tool (pinboard) to save links of interest, and conversational tools (Twitter and Facebook) to share. And of course, I use this blog as a reflective space to learn by writing.

In contrast, many of the people I work with use visual social media formats as their lead tools for creating, sharing, and consuming information. At our museum, Pinterest is a primary tool for brainstorming and sharing ideas. Instagram has become a popular way to share photos, along with Flickr, where we catalog all our images from events and exhibitions. And the most recent excitement is around Vine, which we're using to make snippets of video showcasing our work. Individual staff members use these tools both personally and professionally. They are invested in them beyond their workday.

I'm supportive of all of this. At the same time, I recognize that these tools and this form of content-sharing is (so far) not for me. Part of that has to do with my personality--I love to write, and I rarely take photographs. While I'm comfortable working out my thoughts in a half-baked way in words, I rarely use images as part of that learning/reflecting/sharing experience. I just haven't figured out how to integrate these tools into my workflow.

But what's awkward for me is actually probably very good for museums. Museums, and museum staff members, tend to be highly visually-oriented. It's about the objects, the display, the people, the process, the event--the image of the experience. I suspect that there are many more museum professionals who are ready and eager to share photographs or videos documenting their work than are ready to write about it.

This is great for museums looking for authentic ways to engage with people online. We don't have to hunt for photogenic projects: we have impressive feats of construction and wonder on display on a daily basis. Visual content can build excitement about museums in a way that would be hard for a social service agency or nonprofit to emulate.

At the same time, we might think about how these tools might be used inside our field in the context of professional development and building communities of practice. Most of the professional networks I belong to online operate using the most antiquated of text-based tools: the listserv. Even sites that do encourage use of images or video as part of professional sharing tend to make those elements optional while text is required.

This makes me wonder: are younger practitioners creating their own online communities of practice in visually-based social networks? Are there opportunities for explicit knowledge-sharing that are rooted in photographs and videos? Does the growth of visual content affect who within an organization produces digital content and how those resources are managed?

Clearly, this is not my area of expertise. I'd love to hear what you think.

Facebook as Staff Backchannel: A Simple Way to Promote Transparency and Intimacy

A month ago, one of our front-line staff members, Sarah Groh, came to her supervisor and me with a concern. Sarah and some of her colleagues in visitor services feel disconnected from the work that happens "upstairs" in the office and in our creative project development.

This problem is nothing new. Any place with people working different schedules in different parts of the building suffers from it. It can be easy for front-line staff to feel like second-class citizens; they can't make it to regular staff meetings, they work on days when other people are off, and their work, while deeply important to our overall mission, can be repetitive and deeply unsexy.

At our museum, we've gotten better at communication up from the front desk to the office. Visitor services staff write synopses of weekend days, notable visitor interactions, and events that help me and others get a sense of what's going on. But as Sarah pointed out, that communication is one-way: from front-line to office, never from office to the front desk.

And so we decided to try something really simple: a private staff Facebook group. We thought for a minute about more complicated backchannel options but realized that what we really wanted was an easy-to-use, opt-in space where people could share what's going on with their work.

At first, from a managerial perspective, I was unsure. Would people feel pressured to post and follow? Would enough people use it to make it work? Would it help with the basic problem we were trying to solve?

Within just a week of its creation, the "MAH Stories" private Facebook group had proven itself as a ridiculous success. People use it to share surprises in the archives, inspiring meetings with artists, dead birds in the lobby, and free food in the fridge. People post silly photographs from the basement cleanup and cheer on each other's small successes. A colleague who's out on maternity leave posts photos of her baby and makes everyone jealous.

The group organically and immediately put an end to all-staff emails (except for the highly administrative). At the same time, it opened up opportunities to share things that never would have felt "important enough" for an all-staff email - like the fact that three people were wearing purple pants on Tuesday, or a photo of an exhibit in development, or the false alarm on a bomb threat due to an overturned crockpot in the driveway. For several of us who were traveling in May to conferences, the Facebook group became a natural place to get reconnected with the flow of what's happening at home and to share some of what we were learning on the road.

I doubt this would be the perfect solution for every organization, but it really is amazing how quickly it has changed the nature of cross-institution communication at our museum. Here are a few things I'm learning from this experiment:

• Promoting openness and participation on staff takes just as much work as it does in the community. We're an institution that focuses intentionally on being transparent and collaborative with our community members. It's ironic and a bit surprising that I didn't realize sooner that we need the same level of intentionality to bring this ethos inside the museum as well. Kudos to Sarah for making it happen. 
• There's a healthy creative tension between transparency and intimacy. Sometimes, I look at the internal Facebook group and I think, "this is what our regular Facebook page should look like. This is the kind of creativity and personality that we want to share with everyone." But then I realize the incredible value of the intimate space behind the closed door, where we can be silly and experimental without fear. It's also the one place we can get away from the constant dialogue with the community. The privacy of the group binds us together as a team, even as it highlights ways we could be more "ourselves" in the public sphere.
• Connectedness builds staff culture. No one wants to get (or send) an email about a weird work dream. But on Facebook, it becomes a funny thing to comment on and connect with. The Facebook group has allowed us to cheerlead for each other, make jokes, and banter in ways that don't always happen in an intense work environment.
• Using a tool that everyone already knows is a heck of a lot easier than converting people onto something new. We could have adopted a tool like Yammer that is made specifically for private company conversations. But everyone was on Facebook, knew how to use it, and was using it in the course of daily life already. We didn't have to become "friends" on the site to be in a group together. The adoption was automatic and smooth with zero time spent in trainings or plaintive emails reminding people to use it (a fate I have seen many intranets suffer).

What tools do you use to stay connected behind-the-scenes?

Reflections on a Weekend with Ze Frank and His Online Community

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Or that visitors form a spontaneous "laugh circle" on the floor. Or that we take a group photo together at the end of the day.

Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This past weekend, in conjunction with our exhibition about Ze Frank's current participatory project, A Show, we hosted "Ze Frank Weekend"--a quickie summer camp of workshops, activities, presentations, and lots of hugging. It was an opportunity for people who participate with Ze Frank's projects online to come together in real space and connect with him and with each other.

It was pretty freaking amazing. About 700 people participated over two days, including some who had traveled to Santa Cruz from London, Indonesia, and across the US. The group was mostly young (teens to thirties) and nerd-diverse: a little bit punk, a little bit hacker, a little bit craft grrl. There were two guys with rainbow beards who did not previously know each other. There were some locals who stumbled in unaware, but mostly, this was an insider's event for people who know and love Ze's particular brand of emotional connection mediated through online participation. To get a sense of what it felt like for participants, check out this great video by one visitor from afar about his experience.

A few things I learned/observed/was impressed by:

A spirit of inclusion, generosity, and welcome permeated the event. We were pretty nervous about the unknowns going into the weekend. Ze had issued an invite to tens of thousands of people online, and we had no idea how many people would attend, and who they are. What we DID know is that the people coming would be connected through work that focuses on sharing intense and not always comfortable emotions online. I was concerned about how we could welcome people into the museum in a way that acknowledged the enormous risk they were taking in showing up in a foreign city and space to connect with people they only sort of knew in an online space. 

Online to onsite migration isn't always easy. I feared that the event would feel cliquey and wouldn't represent the creative, inclusive spirit of Ze's work. But three things made the event a success in this regard:

1. Ze was amazing. He gently acknowledged the fundamental weirdness of meeting people in real-life, in confronting their "fleshiness," giving voice to anyone else's concerns about over-stimulation in the space. Ze was really hands-on with everyone, giving hugs, taking photos, jumping in to do activities with participants. Even though for many of the participants, Ze is a celebrity of epic proportions, he did everything he could to make the event about them and their engagement and not about him. 
2. The activities had a really low barrier to entry. We collaborated with Ze to develop activities throughout the weekend that were lightweight, fun, and encouraged low-key social interaction--exactly the kinds of activities that we have found encourage social bridging with strangers. When people walked in, they received a program and a sheet to collect finishing stamps (unique marks created by participants at one activity station) from other participants. The sheet gave people a lightweight tool to use in social interaction, to trade and share stamps. And the program helped people feel like they knew what was going on. Again and again, we tried to balance the wackiness and spontaneity of the event with the surety that people were in the right place, that we could help them, etc.
3. Our volunteers and staff--and the participants!--rocked. Our regular museum volunteers partnered with new volunteers drawn from Ze Frank's online community, which created a nice bridge between people who knew the museum and people who knew the community and its spirit. Participants who felt more confident modeled generous behavior and engaged others. I was so proud to see how our overall ethos of participation and social bridging was manifest in making the experience really wonderful for everyone.  

The museum itself was well-integrated into the event. In some ways, this event reminded me of the Ontario Science Centre's YouTube Meetup in 2008--a real-time, physical event to support an online community. One of the concerns at the YouTube Meetup was the disconnect between the museum and the participation; for many attendees, the science center just became a venue for a social experience. In this case, because our current exhibition includes a gallery of things made by Ze Frank's community, it was natural for weekend participants to be enthralled by and want to engage with the exhibition itself. Also, our museum-wide approach to participation suited this community well; they really enjoyed exploring other floors and participating in activities that had nothing to do with Ze Frank except in the ways that our philosophy and his are well-aligned. I loved meeting so many people who were surprised and delighted by the participatory approach of our museum--it made it feel like this was a place "for them" instead of a place that was hosting them.

As always, I learned a lot from Ze Frank's unique approach to community participation. One of the regrets of this project for me is that Ze and I have had so little time to really talk about how we think about engaging people in active participation--we've just been busy making it happen. But during the weekend, Ze gave a couple talks that opened up new pathways for me, especially around designing participatory experiences that spread and grow. A couple of key points I got from him:

1. Make sure to develop prompts or projects that are both interesting to DO and to experience as an audience. This is something I strongly subscribe to--a huge percentage of any audience is more likely to spectate than to contribute. But on the web, it's even more important than in a museum. In a museum, if something is appealing to watch, a person might share it by taking a photo or talking about it with a friend. Online, if something is appealing, a person can share it in a million ways via social media. Ze talked about having a personal filter on project ideas that really focuses on ensuring that the activity AND the resulting content is appealing to share.
2. To get lots of participation, always celebrate the human quality of the work. Ze pointed out that many participatory projects that operate as contests end up focusing on a narrow set of "best" work that can exclude broad participation. When Ze described his Young Me Now Me project, in which people replicated photos of themselves as children, he explained that he really encouraged people not to focus on getting the props or costume right but instead to focus on getting the expressions right. By focusing on that human element of self-expression, people felt that the activity was open to them regardless of their ability to set up a scene or take a great photograph. This point is a really interesting extension of my focus on personalization and using individual experiences as a starting point for community participation. Broad participation is not the goal of every project, but I found Ze's framing here a useful salve to the frequently espoused and flawed idea that "to get lots of participation, make the activity stupidly easy."

All in all, a beautiful and stimulating weekend. You can see more comments from participants here and here and see a photo set from one participant here.

Dreaming of Perpetual Beta: Making Museums More Incremental

When I started this blog in 2006, I made a multi-media introduction to the concept of "museum 2.0" based on Tim O'Reilly's four key elements of Web 2.0:

1. Venue as content platform instead of content provider: the museum becomes a stage on which professionals and amateurs can curate, interpret, and remix artifacts and information.
2. Architecture of participation with network effects: each person who participates contributes something meaningful and lasting. Visitors' interactions allow them both to personalize their museum experiences and to engage with other visitors through their shared interests. The museum gets better the more people use it.
3. Perpetual beta: the museum is always in flux, incrementally releasing new versions, refining procedures, and responding to audience desires.
4. Flexible, modular support for distributed products: inviting people to plug-in their own creations, whether those be DIY audio tours, pop up events, or co-created exhibitions.

From 2006-2011, I focused almost entirely on #1 and #2, playing with ways to invite visitors to actively participate with professionals to co-create powerful experiences around museum objects. 

But in the past year and a half as a museum director, I find myself increasingly interested in #3 and #4. In a lot of ways, our successful turnaround at the MAH has been driven by both embracing incremental change and opening up clear opportunities for community organizations and individuals to "plug" their cultural brilliance into our space. We're using #3 and #4 to achieve #1 and #2 in the Museum 2.0 playbook.

At first, our enthusiasm for incremental change and flexibility was a reaction to a tough financial position. When I started at the MAH last May, we had absolutely no money. We also had a vision to be a thriving, central gathering place for our community. The only way to reconcile our resources with our goals was to start doing whatever we could to start nudging in the direction of our dreams. We scrounged for free couches. We invited local artists and community groups to perform. We designed events and interactive exhibits on ten dollar budgets. We experimented with everything--hours, front desk staffing structure, community programs. We knew we weren't doing everything at the desired quality level. But we got it going anyway.

A year and a half later, we are in a much more stable financial position... and we've tried to internalize a mindset of perpetual beta and modular support for community collaboration. As things got better financially, as we learned more about what worked and didn't, we replaced furniture and enhanced our exhibitions. We upped the budgets and the scale of the projects while maintaining an iterative approach that relies on prototyping and low-tech experiments.

I feel strongly that as long as we have a social mission and a strong desire to fulfill that mission, we should do everything we can every step of the way to attack it, even if that means starting with something simplistic, messy, or uncertain. We make room for interns and artists and people who walk in the door with crazy ideas. There are plenty of times I have silenced the exhibit designer in my brain who wanted everything just so, or the museum director who wanted to make our visitors happy all the time. If we're going to move forward, we have to be able to try things in a risk-tolerant environment.

One of the things that often made me uncomfortable as a consultant was the extent to which museums, and their funding vehicles, often make perpetual beta an impossibility. The exhibit is planned for years and must open perfect on day 1. The grant is for a three-year educational program whose curriculum has to be locked in from the start. If we can't have a perfect couch designed by Frank Gehry, we won't give visitors couches at all.

The result is damaging for museum professionals and visitors alike. For museum professionals, it creates a falsely elevated sense of risk and stress around projects that, let's face it, don't have to be perfect out of the gate. No one is going to die if you change a label a few days after opening. No one will be seriously injured if you invite a dance company in and they do something strange. No one will suffer if you put out a prototype--or two, or ten--before finalizing a design. We need to build experimentation into our work processes if we want our work to evolve over time.

For museum visitors, the damage is even worse. How many brilliant sparks of ideas never get to the public because we falsely assume it will take too many resources to get them off the ground? How can we show people that we truly care about making our institutions welcoming, or challenging, or fun, or creative, if we need two years and eight approvals to put out some couches and paintbrushes?

I'm not suggesting that museum professionals shouldn't strive for excellence. What I've seen--in Web 2.0 and elsewhere--is that real excellence comes from incrementally pushing towards a big audacious goal. If you can get it right on the first try or with the resources you have, then your dreams may not be big enough.

What are you working towards, and how you are iterating and experimenting to get there?

Khan Academy and the Revolution in Online Free Choice Learning

Last week, I became completely intoxicated with the online videos of Vi Hart, self-described mathemusician. Her nerdy, entertaining videos about math evoke the power of free choice learning while poking gentle fun at the drudgery of how math is often taught in school. She's brilliant and funny and pushes people to get excited about higher math and the big ideas behind it. She would be the best science center educator ever.

But Vi doesn't work in a science museum. She was a free agent for a long time, until the beginning of 2012, when she joined the teaching staff of Khan Academy.

Khan Academy, the free, nonprofit online source for educational instructional videos, is a young powerhouse in the online learning space. Its multilingual videos have reached almost 200 million viewers since it launched in 2006. Its funding has skyrocketed as major foundations and technology companies have made multi-million dollar grants and investments in its growth. Founder Salman Khan started by sharing his own videos with a math and science focus, and in the last year, he has added new "faculty" including Vi Hart as well as Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, who are well known in museums for their excellent Smarthistory website and podcasts.

Khan Academy is interesting in itself as an online learning space. But the participation of partners like Vi, Beth, and Steven puts it in a new category for me. Salman Khan's videos give people access to good instructional content on standard (and often confusing or poorly taught) educational topics. How to solve a quadratic equation. How to titrate an acid. Test prep for the SAT. This is all fine, but it exists very much in the K12 and college framework.

Vi Hart's videos, on the other hand, are idiosyncratic, explorative, and a bit subversive. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker's content about art history is social and dialogue-based in format. These instructors aren't teaching you the equivalent of a high school course in math or art history. They are connecting you with knowledge and inspiration in more creative ways... the way the best museums do. It's no coincidence that Beth Harris' last job was as Director of Digital Learning at MoMA.

Does this mean Khan Academy is competitive with museums? Maybe. More importantly, it means that we should be looking to their model to push ourselves in how we think about delivering the most engaging, powerful content possible. We often talk about museums as leaders in providing substantive, essential alternatives to formal schooling. But museums are rarely seen as pursuing this promise in the innovative, aggressive, and highly publicized way that Khan Academy is.

I asked Beth Harris and Steven Zucker about their experience working at Khan Academy after years in academia and museums. When I asked them what's in it for Smarthistory to be a part of Khan Academy, they highlighted the extent to which Khan Academy represents a revolution in education and high quality online learning experiences. Here are some of the comments on the "why" behind their involvement:

[Khan Academy has] a hugely generous vision and commitment to rethinking education—our mission is “a world-class education, for anyone, anywhere”—not to mention brilliant programmers and staff. This is an epic moment in the history of education, who wouldn’t want to be part of it? We are finally leaving behind the 18th century model of education where groups of students are expected to learn at a standard pace. Every day we read about ways that teaching, learning and accreditation are being unbundled. New institutions and new, more personal modes of teaching and learning are being investigated. And we will soon know much more about learning, thanks to analytics, than we ever have before. 

They commented on the power of the learning community around the online videos (for example, check out this conversation about Leonardo's Last Supper):

Khan Academy is much more than a huge library of high quality videos, there are learning analytics, self-paced exercises, and perhaps most importantly, a committed learning community—even for art history! We have a great community of learners that ask and answer questions and our videos are being translated by volunteers all over the world. We are reminded of how much fun learning can be. 

They advocated for the power of online research and learning:

There is a huge appetite for knowledge about art that is not being met. We both come from higher education and it’s always seemed remarkable to us how little museums work together to support the study of art. Students around the world want to understand the history of art, not necessarily the history of a particular collection. We also wish that museums and universities worked together more closely not just for research, but for learning. Learning is increasingly global and fluid and the fact that cross-institutional initiatives such as the Google Art Project and Europeana are rare, points to how much work still needs to be done. We wrote about that in a recent blog post, Why the Google Art Project is Important.

Many museums produce superb lesson plans, curator interviews and artist interviews for the web. But there are other content models we can explore. Conversation has been key to Smarthistory’s success, and we’ve worked with several museums to facilitate the creation of conversation-based content. We’ve also done short technology workshops to enable content experts to create their own videos. In the era of YouTube, we don’t always need Final Cut Pro and expensive videographers.

And they talked about the difference between working for a museum and working for a startup nonprofit:

We both loved working for MoMA in different capacities. But as everyone knows, museums are not the easiest ships to turn. This is a period of intense change when nimbleness is a real asset; working for a start-up has allowed us to produce a lot of high-quality academic content. For the Google Art Project, the two of us recorded, edited and produced 90 videos in four months (with only a small amount of editing assistance). Obviously, museums produce fantastic content, but we wonder if their limited resources should remain focused on traditional print publishing. The principles of digital publishing—which is iterative, personal, prolific, and collaborative, could unleash museums as active centers of learning and engagement.

One of the things that baffles us about museums is that while they support scholars with deep expertise, they produce relatively little content for public consumption on the web. The focus remains on the high status, expensive and little-read exhibition catalogue, instead of developing web-based content that will draw more visitors, and help create a loyal web-community. An educator at the Met recently told us of a group of visitors from Japan that joined a gallery tour and promptly asked to see the works of art featured on Smarthistory. 

If we want museums to be pioneers in free choice learning, seen and funded as "hugely generous" and committed visionaries who are rethinking education, we need to push ourselves. Beth and Steven ended their email to me by quoting Salman Khan's new book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, in which he writes:

What’s needed, in my view, is a perspective that allows us a fresh look at our most basic assumptions about teaching and learning, a perspective that takes nothing for granted and focuses on the simple but crucial questions of what works, what doesn’t work, and why. 

What would that "fresh look" mean for museums?


Thank you to Beth and Steven for contributing to this post. They wanted me to tell you that Smarthistory invites art historians and curators to contribute in the their areas of expertise. If you would like to contribute, please contact them at: Steven@khanacademy.org and Beth@khanacademy.org 

Ze Frank Takes Over (My) Museum

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. But every once in awhile, something extraordinary comes up, something that isn't emergent or evolving or encouraging but something that explodes into your life like a comet knocking on your door.

That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (see minute 2:20, above). And to cut to the end of the story first, yes, we are creating a project together, yes, you can participate, and yes to whatever other questions this brings up in your head.

Ze Frank is a participatory artist who creates digital projects that are explicitly about creating and enhancing authentic interpersonal connections. He is an authoritative artist of the social web with a slew of accolades and a suite of diverse projects under his belt. This 2010 TED talk is a good introduction if you haven't experienced his work before.

Ze is a skilled performer, but more importantly, he's a thoughtful ringleader for a series of intricate games, missions, and provocations that invite participants to bridge social barriers in surprising ways. He invites participants to write songs for each other about dealing with rejection. To recreate childhood photographs. To celebrate political differences. To dress up their vacuum cleaners.

Ze's work can feel silly or strange. It's often intended for an audience that I only barely understand through the ways they respond and interact with the work. In other words: I have a lot to learn from him. This winter, as part of a museumwide exhibition called Work in Progress, Ze and the virtual army of participants in A Show will take over a gallery of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We will be displaying products created by the online community, creating a process for ongoing online and onsite collaboration, and providing a gathering space for people connected to each other through Ze's digital universe. And on a conceptual level, we'll be exploring questions of how online and onsite participation interrelate and what their babies look like.  

This project excites me for a number of reasons:

• Our values are aligned. Ze genuinely cares about his participants, and he is driven to design interactions that inspire real moments of intimacy. His projects are rigorous, sincere, and generous. As someone with a keen interest in designing exhibits that engage strangers meaningfully with each other around objects, I'm thrilled to work with a pioneer on this in a different context.
• Ze's work has always gone beyond the digital. Photography, video, audio, text, origami, mail art... These projects don't only "work" on a screen. We won't just be "printing out" the experience. It will be exciting to play with a gallery space because the work is multi-dimensional physically as well as conceptually. 
• The scale and scope of participation in A Show is extraordinary. Most of the participatory projects I've been involved with are rooted in a community that is geographically-defined. Ze's community is worldwide people who self-select to engage with strangers online. This isn't a group I know a lot about, and we're all curious about how they will intersect with our local audience and with each other.
• It offers unique opportunities for learning more about participation. How will this partnership influence the way we think about other participatory experiences in our institution? How will it change the way we see online and onsite interactions? What constraints and surprises will emerge? I'd love to find a grad student or two who are interested in creating some interesting research around this project, and of course, I'll be blogging about it.

We don't have a lot of details at this point about the specifics of the project, but here's what we do know. The exhibition will run from December 14, 2012 to March 4 of 2013. Ze will be in Santa Cruz for some but not all of that time. We will be looking for interns and volunteers who want to help facilitate the space throughout the winter--please contact me if interested. And copious thanks to Eric Siegel, who introduced Ze and me to each other.

Most importantly, I'm curious: what would you like to see us explore with this exhibition? 

How Do You Document Your Creative Process?

Recently, my colleagues have gone wild for Pinterest. Pinterest is an online sharing tool that allows you to construct virtual bulletin boards to collect and display images from across the web. While some museums are using the tool in clever public-facing ways, that's not what's happening here at the MAH. At our museum, our programs team is using Pinterest to develop ideas for upcoming community events. As staff members and interns discover intriguing activities, products, or artwork on the web, individuals can "pin" items of interest to the boards for specific events (i.e. Fire Festival) or program types (Family Programs). This is particularly effective for us since interns and volunteers are significant contributors to our programmatic team and everyone is on different schedules. We can collaborate on Pinterest boards asynchronously, comment on what others add to the boards, and plan events based on the aggregated information. We're starting to use it for the early stages of exhibition planning as well.

We're not using Pinterest to do something cool on the Web. We're using it to solve a basic internal communication problem. I used to constantly email links to individual staff members with a message like "we should try this." Pinterest replaces those emails by sharing that content a more broadly usable, indexable way. It aggregates design inspiration in a central place we all can share.

And that central place happens to be public. Pinterest allows us--requires us, really--to document a part of our creative process openly on the web. As social web tools become more mainstream and privacy concerns lessen (somewhat), I'm seeing more and more organizations use them in informal ways. Project coordination on wikis. Loosely formatted blogs to document progress. There's no extra effort involved to upload or create something special for public consumption. It's just part of the work itself.

What that means, potentially, is a lot more capacity to share the HOW behind our work, not just the end result. It's hard to learn from colleagues when everything is completed and spit-polished into a case study or conference session. I learn a lot more from the messy center of projects--when you know enough to have some goals and direction, but you're still muddling with what the final result will be. At least for me, that's when the juiciest part of the creative process happens.

At first, it felt a little odd to have people outside our own organization "follow" some of the Pinterest boards we thought we were using for internal purposes only. But then I realized we were functionally granting the world access to our brainstorming. I suspect as a professional I can learn a lot more from my colleagues if I can tap into and observe these kinds of internal conversations as projects are proceeding. And for students who mostly experience completed projects through packaged case studies, this kind of access may increase understanding about how the sausage is made.

I'm curious how other organizations are publicly documenting and sharing creative process. I think of this as fundamentally different from creating something packaged to share on the Web for comment. What tools are you using that naturally invite others to follow along? What messy creative bits are you sharing--intentionally or unintentionally?

Open Thread: How Does Your Institution Say Happy New Year?

It's that time of year when inboxes fill up with digital thank you's, happy holidays, and end-of-year solicitations. At the MAH, we had an intern who worked this summer and fall to create a video (her first!) to reflect some of the new activities at the museum. We didn't really have a plan for what we would do with it, but when it was done, I suddenly realized we had a great way to showcase 2011 to our members, donors and friends. (Warning: the song can get stuck in your head, and yes, that is my dad singing.)

And that made me wonder: how do other organizations showcase their work at the end of the year? What do you do to ask, tell, share, and celebrate what's been happening at your institution? This year, I've seen everything from heartfelt solicitations (Young Playwrights Theater) to surreal pop culture singalongs (MCA Denver) to impressively-produced, collaborative, yet poignant pop culture singalongs (Detroit Science Center, which closed one month after this video was released).

Enjoy our video and share your own via the comments. I don't really have any brilliant ideas on what makes a good end-of-year video (except that it should be short). I'd love to hear your thoughts on what works and doesn't. If lots of people share their videos in the comments, I'll write a follow-up post next week based on some of the apparent trends.

Digital Museums Reconsidered: Exploring the Walker Art Center Website Redesign

I have a confession to make: I've never cared much about museums on the Web. I'm focused on the onsite, in-person experience. When smart people talk about digital museums and virtual experiences, I nod and compartmentalize it as someone else's bailiwick. I understand the value of having a web presence that is reflective of institutional brand, makes content available for people to use in a variety of ways, and enables new connections with community members. But I've never really understood what it could mean for a museum to create a website that has a complementary function to the physical institution--an entity in its own right that expands beyond the scope of the physical institution, programs, and collection.

Now, I think I'm starting to get it. Last week, the Walker Art Center launched a major website redesign, which museum geeks are hailing as "a potential paradigm shift for institutional websites," (Seb Chan) and an "earth-shaking game changer" (Museumnerd). Here's what I see: a website as a unique core offering--alongside, but not subservient to, the physical institution. Walkerart.org is not about the Walker Art Center. It is the Walker Art Center, in digital form.

The new site resembles an online newspaper, featuring articles written by Walker staff alongside stories from the greater world of art reporting on the web. While there is a tight menu of Walker Art Center offerings at the top (Visit, Exhibitions & Events, Media, Collections, Join), the rest of the website is a digitally-based panoply of content broadly related to the Walker's mission. It is an online experience about contemporary art that goes beyond the Walker's walls.

And it breaks a lot of conventional rules about museum homepages. Such as:

• It organizes the content primarily by "stories"--a news lexicon that I've never seen used in a museum context.
• There's lots of content everywhere, including little things you wouldn't usually see on a museum website--like the current weather in Minneapolis, where the Walker resides. 
• It features many stories ("Art from Elsewhere") that were not produced by the museum and are not about the museum. 
• The "Art from Elsewhere" stories all link to sites that are not associated with the Walker. No more lock 'em in and keep 'em here--the theory is that the value of the site is in the curation of links across the web.
• The name "Walker Art Center" is abbreviated to "WALKER" at the top of the homepage. It's not 100% clear that this thing called walkerart.org represents a museum or facility, though there are ample opportunities to discover that.

Is this the future of all museum websites? Probably not. The care and feeding required for a site like this is tremendous. The Walker employs a four-person editorial team (one of whom is completely dedicated to the website), along with a five-person new media initiative group. That's more people than work in my museum total--and a lot more who are dedicated to digital experiences and content than at even the largest museums around the world.

But the biggest reason that the Walker site is so unusual is its clarity of purpose. Not only did the Walker have the resources to create a major online project, they had the institutional coherence and focus to make it their primary website. Many, many museums have created superlative online experiences--from the IMA's ArtBabble to the Exploratorium's educational resources to the V&A's collections site any number of exhibition microsites--but these are all offshoots in the museum website universe. 

What the Walker has done is commit to a unique online approach--not just for one program or microsite, but for their homepage. They took their vision of the institution as an idea hub, looked at comparable sites online that achieve that vision, and adopted and adapted the journalistic approach to their goals. 

An institution of any size with enough mission-coherence and courage could create a website that is comparably unique. It comes down to articulating your mission in a digital space. Not every museum would choose a journalistic approach. Maybe the metaphor for your institution is a restaurant with a simple set of consistent offerings or a music venue with a constantly rotating program of events. Maybe some museum websites would look like online schools, or community bulletin boards, or shopping sites. But I suspect that most of them would continue being a little of this, a little of that, with a brochure for visiting slapped on top. And I think that's ok too if your goal is to have a physical museum with a website that supports it.

But if you want to create a digital museum as a partner to the physical, take note. Thank you, Walker Art Center, for showing me one version of what this can look like.