Do we like our visitors?

Me at the Norman Rockwell Museum

Before we get to today’s topic, I want to start with a thank you. I’ve received some many notes, emails, DMs, and tweets of support this month. Your responses are so cheering, and I’m thrilled to get them.

I started this month with the metaphor of fitting into big shoes. Those of you who know me in real life might know my love of shoes. So, I’ll end this month with another shoe metaphor, of sorts. When I got those little pings of support, I feel like I could dance. In some ways, though, it was a little selfish. I got the praise, but no one else got to enjoy those good vibes. What I’d like to see is that this digital space becomes a place where we all get a chance to feel those good vibes. I imagine each month as a chance where we can collectively engage on ideas, and where I share this amazing platform with everyone. Think of this being a dance party, where I am happily sharing my dancing shoes. And I must really like you all because I don’t share shoes lightly. :> But, we’ll talk more about how this collective space will unfold next month. Today, let’s finish up on this month’s topic, what I learned during my time as a consultant.

This month, I started with looking at some broad reflection on our field and visitors before looking at some of the great ways that we do participation in our spaces. I also posed a big question: Do we as a field signal that we like our visitors?

I, myself, don’t know the answer. And I was really interested in hearing people’s answers. I want to give a shout out to Bob Beatty, who shared this topic on Twitter and Linkedin. Shares like that are what get these questions to the biggest possible audience. Thanks to his efforts, we had some wonderful feedback. (In subsequent months, I’ll include visitor feedback by name after getting express permission from the writer. But today, I’m not going to attribute these comments, as I am in a bit of a time crunch on my post. I’m on my way to a camping trip without wifi in the Maritimes.)

The big themes from comments could be broken into three broad categories: we think we do; we don’t even think about it, and we don’t. The first set of comments signal something I have noted throughout my career. Most people don’t develop program and spaces with the express hope of failing. We do this work for visitors and people. Our challenge is that we can’t step outside of our frames and beliefs. Our lack of understanding about visitors makes it hard for us to really create visitor-centered projects. The rise in audience evaluation is promising, certainly. But, one respondent remarked that we particularly like audience evaluation when it supports what we already believe. We need to as a field be better about hearing the difficult truths our visitors might share.

Another theme in comments was how much of our field seem immune to visitor feedback. One comment particularly struck me. We see some of our most front line, security, work as being immune to visitor feedback. Also, other people mentioned how cold our spaces are, both temperature and emotionally, and how we persist in that behavior as if our visitors are not customers who need to be treated well. Now, temperature is something we will always have as a challenge due to collection care. But, how many peoples do a good job of explaining why our spaces are cold?

Finally, the majority of comments fell into the idea that we don’t. Most people talked about the ways we maintain inequity through our hierarchical thinking. We see ourselves as better than visitors, when as one colleague says we just read a different book. And, our contempt for visitors is obvious to people. We do this both in our physical spaces but also in the ways staff speaks about visitors in our meetings and our hallways. I am curious if we would want our physicians speaking of us this way. If we wouldn’t want to be discussed this way, should we want our clients to be discussed in this manner? The ways that we communicate internally about visitors, is a signal about how we, as organizations think of our visitors. They are not just people who help us write grants to banks to support us doing what we want to do. They are our partners in keeping and sharing collections and ideas for the greater good for society.

What’s there to do then? Well, this is a hard one. The persistent negativity about visitors isn’t something any one person can solve. I would say that this can’t be something that just one or two departments can fix. Museum education and front of house are often placed in the challenging position of “standing up” for visitors in internal meetings. Frankly, everyone should be standing up for visitors. Without them, we can’t keep our doors open. Everyone should try to put themselves in the place of what is best for our organization, which includes what is best for visitors. Everyone should work hard to speak kindly about visitors. Everyone has to sign on to the social contract that museums are for visitors, and then act accordingly.  Until we agree and act as if visitors are central to our work, we as a field will never accomplish our goal of being equitable, accessible spaces.

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Looking forward, Nina will be back sharing more thoughts about her blog next week. After that we’ll spend the latter part of August, we’ll talk a bit about our next few months in this space. I’m basically driving into the wilderness as soon as I finish posting this, but when I come back to society next week, I’ll check comments here, at Twitter (@artlust), and at IG (@_art_lust_).

Feelings and Participation

Me with a friend

As I keep saying, I’ve been to a few museums of late. In reflecting on the sample, I’ve made some broad reflections on museum workers and visitors. Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog.

Before I do, I wanted to tell you I'm not picking the best of the best, but rather ones that I illustrated my themes. In this field, we are definitely low on praise and even lower on profit. Awards can be incredibly gratifying. Awards can show higher-ups the value of our work and they can be important tools for showing funders results. And, I have been known to give out an award or two. (Psst, also consider entering the Muse Awards come 2020, but that's a story for another day)

@artlust doing a charming job hosting us at #museawards #AAM2019! @AAMers @AAM_MediaTech pic.twitter.com/dGtCfVWFKG

— Rob Stein (@rjstein) May 20, 2019

This list is instead some good things I’ve noticed, without any saying they are the best. Why? As important as excellence is, shared success is equally important in this field. Our visitors often see museums as a genre, not unlike hospitals or libraries. They understand we are different, but they don’t see us in competition with each other. We should see ourselves like those board games, where all the players have to work together to win. If all museums get better, we have more people who like going to museums, which increases museum revenues, and makes the field more stable. I’d much rather think of museums as all rising with the tide, then being torpedoed one by one.

Lumin at Detroit Institute of Art

Now on to the interactives…I’ve been thinking a great deal about the function of interactives in museums. We often use them to add in extra content we couldn’t get into the label or assess people’s learning. Both of these seem natural as we are in the business of ideas and we are adjacent to formal education systems. But, while adjacent, museums differ from formal classrooms in numerous ways. People go to school because they have to or want to in order to get to their goal. (People go to museums for leisure.) People go to school regularly over a period of time (and to museums intermittently, occasionally, sporadically, or rarely). But, to me, the biggest difference is about how learning is connected to feelings. Think of the classes where you learned the most. What are your feelings about your teacher? Those feelings developed over hours of classroom time with a human. Museums get our visitors for an hour or two if we’re lucky. And we don’t even have the carrot and/ or stick of grades. We have people’s good wish and natural interests. With this in mind, when we produce participatory experiences, while our impetus is to serve our power users with extra content or “check for understanding” interactives, there are so many other ways to use interactives. Let’s think about these other kinds of interactives (and I use this word loosely) in terms of the feelings they elicit.  

Sewing interactive at the Museum of the City of New York

Engaged: Engaged is the underlying feeling with the in-depth interactives I mentioned above, but only for people who feel learning a lot more or proving you’re right. Many people come to museums and already feel they don’t get it. For them, in-depth interactives can support feelings of not belonging.  For some visitors, the feeling of engagement comes from being connected to ideas quickly. Making things is one way to feel engaged quickly. Tate Exchange in London, for example, had a wonderful moment a couple summers ago where people could embroider their immigration stories on a patch to add to a collective wall. This activity went with an artist’s work where she told of immigration stories. Doing is also learning in Museum of the City of NewYork’s sewing machine interactive. This interactive combines an actual sewing table and an interactive. You’re supposed to sew on the line in order to earn a few pennies. I watched people do this interactive. Every person left that interactive realizing how hard piece-work was. That interactive did more for that exhibition than any one label.  

The Cloisters

Enthralled: Immersion is a hot topic in museums. I wrote about it last year and I talked about it this year on Emily Koteki’s podcast series. For me, immersion should drop you into an experience. Immersion is not about dropping people into interpretation; it's about allowing people to feel things. One of the most immersive museum interactives isn’t one at all. The Cloisters is a set of buildings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. You walk out of the 21^st century and into Medieval Europe. Technology is, of course, a hot topic in immersion. In this case, I find the most interesting ones to be made by artists. Anyone who has ever spoken to me in person about VR knows I love Laurie Anderson’s VR that was at MASS MoCA last spring. You walked through a chalkboard world; your wonder drove your interaction. The Pointe aCalliere in Montreal does a good job of disseminating actual content in an immersive light/ content show that overlays an actual archeological site.

Surprise: We don’t need to do much to surprise our visitors, given how pervasive traditional galleries are. That is why I want to applaud those museums that offer surprises to visitors. Surprises are those moments where you often hear unrelated social groups chatting. I was at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and there was a peephole to look at an anamorphic image. Person after person was surprised and intrigued enough to ask a stranger what was happening. That’s huge. Sound is often a good surprise in spaces. The Hampton Court Palace also in London did a good job in their spaces to have ambient sound that evokes the past of their spaces.   

XYZT Light interactives

Joy:  We rarely think about the feeling of joy when we work on museum galleries. But I argue this is one of the best things we can add to our visitors’ lives. One of my favorites was XYZT at the Peabody Essex Museum a few springs ago. People were transfixed by the space. It was one of the rare times in a museum that I heard people laughing with happiness. The American Museum of Natural History had two wonderful moments happening this summer. Their T Rex show brings joys to anyone who loves a giant, feathered predator. But dinosaurs are sort of a freebie. I was impressed by the joy people felt about the projection of a wave at the entrance of their Unseen Oceans show. People of all ages were oohing and ahhhing, and most importantly smiling.

mesmerized by T Rex at AMNH

Equally mesmerized by waves at AMNH

Overall, I invite us all to think about what experience you want the visitor to feel and why. As you add more interactive or participatory elements to your space, I invite you to balance a variety of feelings. Don’t ignore the “light” emotions of joy and surprise. You don’t have the hours your favorite teacher had. Your chance to be memorable is in a very short window. Do you want to be memorable for only hitting one kind of visitor?  

Speaking of visitors, last week I asked if you think most museums act like we like our visitors. I’m asking for responses here or on social. Next week, I’ll compile people’s thoughts (with credits) into a summary post of this month.  

Also later in the fall, I’ll be focusing on Front of House staff. I’d like to hear from the security guards. Please help me get responses to my survey. Pass it to all your friends who were once or are now guards.

Find me on social @artlust on Twitter and @_art_lust_ on IG or leave me a comment. 

Visitors in Focus

As I said, last week, I’ve been to a travelin’ girl for the last couple of years. Not quite a troubadour, as my karaoke skills are more humorous than sonorous, I’ve enjoyed being on the road. In writing this post, I couldn’t help but think of that old Johnny Cash song, made famous again in hotel ads. The song’s lyrics are basically a litany of places he sang. And, I could do something similar, though that would help no one.

So, instead, I am offering 3 posts this month about what I learned from visiting more than 300 museums. Last week, I talked about what I learned about museum workers. This week I wanted to think about visitors.

What did I learn?

1. People are there on their time off. 

We know this, perhaps, but I think this point is important to underscore.

Most full-time museum staffers are there on the weekdays. When they leave their offices to grab a coffee or unthaw themselves after working in freezing offices, they might notice galleries filled with seniors, school children, and people pushing strollers. Thinking about museum hours, we are most open when other people work. People who are able to come during these hours, therefore, become important audience segments. That said, other than school children, people who come during the day are there as part of their leisure time. Now, before you think, wait, but they want to learn something. Yes, that can be true. Leisure time encompasses many different behaviors. Some people want to learn or feel enriched during some of their leisure time. (I graphed leisure, fun, and museums for an old post, if you want to think more about the relationship between those concepts).

But there are other reasons people go to museums on their leisure time. Many go to socialize. It’s a great date spot, I’ve noticed. Some go because they feel like they should, like parents attending with their children. Some go because there is air conditioning. Some go because it’s too inclement outside to do anything else. Now, I am not going to keep going through the possible reasons for museum visitation, as others like Susie Wilkening does it better.

But, what I would say, anecdotally, is that almost every visitor walking in the door at the museum is there on their time off. Think about your time off. Do you want to be spoken down to? Do you want to feel stupid? Do you want to be lost? Do you want to be frustrated? People are giving us their time off. We need to make them feel like we value this precious gift.  

2. They look a bit nervous. 

Our spaces can be very subtle.

No one wants to get yelled at. So, people are often visiting our spaces in high alert mode. The fear of being yelled at is a particularly good way of turning off future visitation. And, you might say, I’ve never seen anyone yelled at in my museum galleries. But, visitors often see museums as lump sum prospect. So, bad experiences in one museum become connected to their concept of “museum” in general.

Add to that, we aren’t always all that human-centered. I have dragged my kids, museum kids mind you, through many a museum gallery. I know which of you don’t have seating. I have sat on the floor with my children. Now, I will say, I’ve never been yelled at for sitting on the floor. And, as an old school gallery teacher, it’s a pretty comfortable behavior for me. But most visitors wouldn’t even think to sit on the floor. Instead, they’d walk out of that museum deciding these are not spaces for them.

Add to this, our designers are careful to pick seats that work with the aesthetic of the art. I’m a snob, so I get that. But our visitors are worried about getting yelled at, and then we put in seats that sort of vaguely look like art. This is like leveling up the discomfort levels for our visitors.

Finally, we like to hide the goods. Galleries are often up some stairs, bathrooms behind a wall. We make our signs appealing to us, not instructive to our visitors. Basically, we create spaces for the power users and the people who know our unwritten rules. These are behaviors that foster the inaccessible nature of our institutions. If we are committed to diversifying audiences, we need to think hard about the behaviors that feel exclusionary and change them.

3. They read labels. They really watch videos. 

Oh, another week talking about labels.

I remember doing an observation study when I was very pregnant with my daughter. I sat on a bench pretending to draw while I watched behaviors. It was a bit demoralizing to see people avoiding the panels we’d worked so hard to create. But people sure did read labels.

More than a decade later, I still saw people reading labels. I ached to ask people why they read the labels they did. But I’d have mortified my family. I did notice many people were scanning down the label quickly as if reading on a phone. Studies indicate people are reading more text, but more quickly, often skimming for specific information. I wonder if they are doing this with the labels.

I was most surprised at how much time people spent watching videos. Many of these videos were without captions (work on that y'all), and some were really boring. And, yet, everywhere I went people sat through the videos. Why? Well, I would guess in part because watching moving images is a regular practice for most people. Rarely, outside of museums, do people stand and ponder something static. But, almost every day, you get information from a movie image. I also think many people understand videos to be a type of orientation. So, the video feels like a common mode of communication and a lifeline to help you get a handle on what you will see. 

4. Selfies aren’t the reason they are pulling out their cameras.

Any behavior shift can feel uncomfortable or suspect. Cell phones in the galleries often get a bad rap. Alli Burness, Meagen Eastep, Jenny Kidd, and Chad Weinard gave a great talk ages ago about cell phone photography/ social photography. They discussed how personal photography wasn’t just about selfies (and in fact often wasn’t). In my visits, I noticed very few people taking selfies. But many were using the camera as a note-taking device. Capturing favorites and even photographing the label to remember the name of the artwork. 

As a museum educator, I've spent a career cajoling, inviting, dreaming that people will be engaging with collections. With cell phones, they are. People were using the phone to take “artsy” images. Our collections were, in essence, sparking creativity day in and day out through cell phone photography. 

We need to rethink cell phones as distracting to the experience. Visitor's experiences are often heightened by cell phones. They are able to do something, and they get to use paradigms they already use in their everyday life. They might be a different way of experiencing collections than before the advent of the cell phone, but different isn't wrong. (And, registrars out there, I do say all this about phones with the caveat that cell phone photography cannot put collections at risk.) 

The issue about cell phones boils down to allowing people to enjoy our galleries in ways that work for them, not in the ways we decide. There is not one way to enjoy museums. You don't need to read the labels (I often don't). You don't need to listen to the audiotour. You don't need to agree with the curator giving the talk. When we allow for multiplicity in engagement, we open the doors to more people being engaged. And, finding new audiences is a numbers game. (I wrote more about this recently). 

5. Interactivity is the best way to get intra-group social experiences.

I’d talk to anyone anywhere. But most people don’t speak so readily to strangers. I noticed when I was at a station doing something, people would talk to me. For example, at the Museum of the City of New York, there was an interactive about sewing (which I’ll discuss more next week). The interactive was about piece work. Two people talked to me about how terribly hard the seamstresses must have worked for their meager wages. In other words, that interactive made strangers discuss the point of the exhibition and relate it to their lives. Holy grail of museum engagement right there. It wouldn’t have happened beside a panel, and I don’t think it would have happened around a collection object. But, the position around a shared physical engagement allowed the shared moment of conversation.

Next week, I’ll write more about interactivity in the galleries, so I’ll leave it here.

To conclude, I’d like to ask you all a question. Do you think museums act like they like their visitors?

In all my observations of visitors in galleries, I sometimes wondered if some museum professionals liked the visitors they were serving.

Museums sometimes are so focused on scholarship and scholars they lose sight of their visitors and their visitors' needs. Now, before your hackles go up, I acknowledge we serve many masters. Scholarship is not an insignificant part of our work. But, scholars and visitors have different, often opposing needs. For many museum professionals, scholars are easy to serve. It's basically like planning party for people exactly like yourself.

But visitors needs require stepping outside ourselves and our desires. This issue can be compounded by our motivations. Many people go into this field because of the collections, myself included. There is something quite different intellectually in connecting objects to people vs connecting people to objects. Centering people is not natural for many museum professionals. They focus on Educating (with a healthy dose of talking down to) and they forget you can’t educate people who aren’t there. Spaces often project an attitude of superiority or disinterest in the visitor's engagement; no one wants to be talked down to.

Knowing more information doesn’t make you smarter, it makes you more knowledgeable. This difference is essential to our work. It is not intelligence that separates museum workers and visitors, it is facts, ideas, concepts. To paraphrase a fellow museum worker, it’s just that we read different books. Keeping this in mind, our spaces and our actions should be about sharing ideas without making people feel dumb. Above all, we should show people that we like them and we should express that we like that they are in our spaces.

At the end of the month, I'd love to have a compilation of people's answers to the question if they think museums show they like their visitors and how. Share here in the comments or on social.

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And, if you really just wanted to read my song, try this section. Feel free to sing it with a Johnny Cash roughness…

I've been everywhere, man.

I've been everywhere, man.

Many a collection rare, man.

Programs and interactives to spare, man.

Of museums, I've a-had my share, man.

I've been everywhere.

I've been to

Akron, Chicago, St. Paul, Minnesota,

Salem, Cincy, Toronto, Iona,

Santa Cruz, Philly, Glasgow, Ottawa,

London, Jersey, Miami, Tacoma,

Phoenix, NYC, Orca, LA,

Manchester, Lancaster, Worcester, and, I'm a killer.

As always find me at @artlust on Twitter and @_art_lust_ on IG.

Hello Museum World!

Hello World! Or maybe hello museum world! I feel a bit like a child walking around in someone else’s, slightly bigger shoes taking over this wonderful blog. The metaphor certainly works in terms of filling big shoes. But, I like that metaphor for another reason. Children see play and imagination as their job. Filling big shoes isn’t scary; it’s something to enjoy and pursue with zeal. I am taking this challenge in that way—a wonderful, playful exploration. I hope you join me on this romp (and pick me up if I wobble). This month, I wanted to share some stories from my last two years as a strategy and content consultant. (Previously, I had worked at the same museum for 17 years.) I went from lots of change in one place to help many places with their change. And, while over the next few months, I'll share things about me, I wanted to write today about the field.

So, when you visit more than 300 museums, parks, and historic sites, what do you learn? I thought I would kick off my tenure around here by sharing stories and reflections about my visits. This week, I wanted to start with us, museum and cultural workers. In these last two years, I have spoken to hundreds of colleagues around the world, both in person and on social. I’ve learned so much from all of you, and a little about us as a field. Here are my top five reflections:

1. We Care: I know this might seem obvious, but it is worth calling this out. We are a field of people who truly care about our work. We are not in this for the 9-5, and most of us work well beyond the average work week. This is a hard point to illustrate with a story because every story I will share for the next few weeks is about the care we put into the work. Each label, I assure you, is a testament to the care of scores of museum workers. Each time a front walk is plowed in the snow, each time someone helps a visitor find their way to a gallery, each time you see a funny social media post. The care we put into our work is the fabric of this field. It makes me immensely proud to be one of you at every one of my visits.

2. Front of House is Hard Work: While I did gallery teaching for many years, for most of my career, I’ve had a desk and a phone in non-public space. A portion of our sector lives their work lives in the public realm. These front of house workers, including visitor experience staff and security guards, are often the ones taking our missions to the people.

I was so impressed by the front of house workers. On a very hot day last month, I tromped into the Dyckman Farm House in Manhattan, glistening from the heat and the trek, to see a smiling gardener invite me to sit down in the shade. Another time, I walked into MASS MOCA with my two elementary-age daughters. A guard knelt down to tell my daughters there were some interesting works in this gallery that could be touched (and he pointed out everything else is look only). He spoke to them as humans (not with a baby voice), and he seemed like he was happy to see us. I attempted to do some of the interactives in the National Museum of Scotland with wonderful encouragement from the education staff there. Let’s just say my pedal power is not so powerful, but I felt supported and encouraged. Overall, our front of house workers very often put our field’s best face forward.

3. Some of Our Staff are Listening: It’s hard to remember a time before Museum 2.0, and Nina’s advocacy for interactivity in our gallery spaces. So many museums have taken up the charge to make their spaces engaging on different levels. And while interactivity is up in general, I was particularly impressed by the number of museums who are proactive about visitor feedback and prototyping.

I saw places where museums were being transparent about how they do their work. My favorite, perhaps, was the prototype space at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle. As they were readying for a huge revamp of their spaces, they turned a gallery into a prototype space. My favorite little section was a place where people could vote on the styles of labels. My children particularly loved watching a technician/ scientist work on processing an avian taxidermy sample. Different strokes, perhaps. But, both of these sections were drawing back the curtain, if you will, on the work of museums. I wholeheartedly believe museums seem more vital to visitors when they know we are a changing, evolving field. When we show we are growing, we invite people to see our changes.

4. Some of our Staff still Needs to Listen: As a field, we still have so much growth. Take labels, for example. Many of our labels seem like the text that time forgot. They are written for a populace that is largely non-existent, people without Google on their phones and infinite attention spans. Now, I say this as someone who has written scores of labels and taught others to write them. I have definitely written some poor labels in my life. (And I will be writing much more deeply about labels in an upcoming post).

But for the sake of this list, I use labels as an example of a place where we as a field have not done a good job of evolving. There is nothing in our work that is so sacred as to be above scrutiny. Being critical of every element of our work, and every expectation, can only improve our practices.

5. Our Staff is Taxed: I wrote a book ages ago now about Self-Care. It started as an act of self-care myself. I was tired intellectually, and I needed to find a better way of being in this field. I was so glad other people liked the book. But, in writing that book, I also found people came to me about their problems. I was happy to listen (still am), but I realized something was fundamentally wrong in our field. My book was an individual helping other individuals. Certainly, caring for yourself is important.

But I think we as a field need to think about why so many of our professionals are feeling taxed. As I said above, our visitors might not see this exhaustion when they walk in. But burnout leads to job turnover. Losing trained people is like throwing away money. I don’t have the answer, but I have been trying to find systemic ways to embed wellness into the ways we run our museums.

In conclusion for this week, we are doing good work--you are doing good work. It can be hard, and often underappreciated, but it makes a difference. Next week, I'll talk about my reflections on how visitors seem to feel in our galleries.

N.B. In an upcoming post, I'd love to think about guards. If you have been a guard, ever, consider taking this survey. I'll make anonymized data available to anyone who asks.

I'll be checking comments, obviously. But, I'm easy to find on social @artlust on twitter and @_art_lust_ on IG.

Unleashing Museum 2.0

I spent last week with the OF/BY/FOR ALL team at the Skid Row School for Large Scale Change. At the end of the training, we each wrote a statement in the form of “I used to believe / now I believe.”

I wrote: “I used to believe that leading large-scale change was about cultivating and sharing my energy and passion. Now I believe it is about building platforms for partners to hone, grow, and share theirs.”

In the spirit of this belief, I’ve decided to unleash the Museum 2.0 blog as a platform for others to share their energy and passion. After 13 years of blog being my own personal stage for learning and sharing, it’s time to open it up.

For that reason, I’m thrilled to announce that over the next two months, I’ll be transferring ownership of Museum 2.0 to Seema Rao. I’ve been lucky to call Seema a friend, mentor, and co-conspirator now for several years. Seema is a brilliant museum educator, a generous spacemaker, a prolific writer, and a creative troublemaker. She is committed to community participation, equity, and innovation in museums. Seema inspires me for her ability to share her own voice and share the stage with others. I know Museum 2.0 will grow richer with Seema at the helm - and I know she is eager to learn from you too. You can meet Seema on Twitter and check out her own fabulous history of blogging here.

Here’s how this transition will work:

• In July, Seema will jump in as a guest blogger, sharing some stories and lessons learned from visiting 300 museums in the past two years. 
• In August, I’ll come back to share reflections on the past 13 years of Museum 2.0. I’ll also share more about how you can continue to follow my writing and work. 
• In September, Seema will take the reins, start building a relationship with you, and share her vision for a multi-vocal future of the Museum 2.0 blog.  

I am so grateful to you for being along this 13 year journey with me. Your comments, emails, guest posts, and questions have spurred my learning and shaped my path. As a heads up - I’m taking the month of July off the internet (I prescheduled this post). So I won’t respond right away to your comments, emails, and questions. Please know that I appreciate you. I’m excited to reconnect in August and share more about what Museum 2.0 and your participation has meant to me.

Until then, I’m thrilled to invite Seema to take the stage, share her brilliance, and learn more about yours. Museum 2.0 will always be a place where we experiment, learn, and commit to building inclusive, relevant, joyful organizations. I can’t wait to see what Seema brings to this blog and to us all.