The Art of Gathering: A Fabulous Book to Help You Host Better Meetings and Events

I remember the first staff meeting I ever ran. I had just started at the MAH as the new executive director. The museum was in huge financial trouble. I wasn't sure we were going to make payroll that week. But I also had a more immediate problem: I had no idea how to lead a staff meeting. I felt like a new teacher on the first day of school. Everyone's eyes on me, expecting something. I had no idea what to do.

I didn't know how to open a meeting. I didn't know how hold power and share it. I didn't know how to kick off a productive conversation, make group decisions, or close a meeting with energy. I knew that I didn't want to replicate the droning report-fests I'd encountered in other jobs... but I felt like I didn't have any alternative formats to draw on.

The weird thing is that that wasn't true. I'd spent years leading workshops around the world as a consultant. My expertise was on inviting strangers to participate in public settings like museums. I had lots of creative formats for drawing people out, sharing stories, and working collaboratively. I had tools to achieve everything I wanted to achieve in that staff meeting. But for some reason, I applied none of those lessons to my new situation. It was as if I had bought a new car and lost all memory of how to drive.

Priya Parker's wonderful book The Art of Gathering shares the core principles of how to drive. Whether you dream of better meetings or you're planning a community festival, I urge you to read this book. Parker argues that all events--from team meetings and picnics to conferences and weddings--are opportunities to come together with purpose. The book explains how to host events with purpose, drawing lessons from intimate parties, mass happenings, and international summits. This is one of those rare non-fiction books with the killer trifecta: strong stories, specific takeaways, powerful vision. It made me feel more confident about what I already know and eager to push myself further. It's an easy read, and if you're like me, you'll want to put it into practice right away.

Here are my three big takeaways from The Art of Gathering:

1. Hosting is an exercise in courageous leadership. When you host an event, you have the power to define what happens. It takes courage to assume that power. If you shrug it off, you hurt the event. Too often, a conference moderator will tell each panelist they have exactly five minutes, and then do nothing when a speaker heads into his 18th minute at the podium. Too often, a dinner party host will airily encourage guests to "get to know each other," without providing fuel for connection. When we abdicate hosting responsibility in an attempt to practice humility or democracy, all we do is let someone else take over. Instead, Parker encourages all event hosts to adopt a stance of "generous authority." Take the lead. Set the table. Invite people into participation. Redirect when needed, even if it feels uncomfortable. You'll end up doing more work than usual--and getting the results you want.
2. When participants are diverse, explicit rules help. I admit: I've never been a fan of events that start with the group writing rules for the day. It always feels contrived and dreary to me. Of course we know not to look at our phones, or to listen with respect. But Parker makes the point that the more diverse the participants at an event, the less likely that they have shared expectations about etiquette or ground rules. Creating event-specific rules can level the playing field, make the implicit explicit, and create a specific culture for the event. Parker calls these event rules "pop up rules," and they can be as silly or serious as desired. First names only. Everyone must wear a hat. Sit next to a stranger. These kinds of rules have the surprising dual effect of helping people know what to expect AND making events more memorable.
3. Strong events deserve strong endings. Many events close with a whimper when we yearn for a bang. The end of an event is one of those moments when the host has to actively practice leadership (and often abdicates). The host has to decide to close the discussion. To clear the plates. If you don't decide as host, people will straggle away, some exhausted, some feeling guilty, all missing out on the opportunity for a shared closing moment. At work and at conferences, we're often "saved by the bell" of the clock telling us the time is up. But why are we letting the clock close our meetings for us? If we open meetings with purpose, we should close them that way too. Closing rituals seal the shared experience of the event and launch us back into the real world with the event's imprint on our hearts.

The Art of Gathering expanded my understanding of what it means to build a powerful culture of participation. Events are not all logistics and content. The way you welcome, the way you host, the rules you make, the way you say goodbye--all these play major roles as well. As Parker writes in the introduction: "Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try." Sounds like great participation to me.

This is What the Participatory Museum Sounds Like

It's late in the afternoon. I'm cranking away on a grant proposal, when suddenly, a classical rendition of "All the Single Ladies" wafts up the stairs. In the office, colleagues lift their heads. "Is that...?" someone asks. "Yup," another nods. We grin.

This is the magic a piano in the lobby makes.

We've now had a piano in the MAH lobby for several months. About once each week, a visitor walks in and blows everyone away. Sometimes it's a homeless person. Sometimes a lover's duet. This week, it was a little guy, attended by a stuffed toy on the piano bench. It's rare that someone sits down to bang out noise. 95% of our piano users play music, beautifully.

The piano is a simple invitation to meaningful visitor participation. The activity is clear and well-scaffolded. The outcome is open-ended and visitor-driven. It invites visitors to make the museum better. When visitors share their brilliance, it brings the museum to life.

I believe that every person who walks into our museum has something valuable to share. A creative talent. A personal history. A special skill. It's not their job to present their abilities to us. It's our job to welcome them, invite them to contribute, and give them the tools to do so. This is the participatory museum, played out loud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest Post by Jasper Visser: Storytelling for Social Cohesion at Story House Belvédère

I first read about Story House Belvédère on Jasper Visser’s excellent blog, The Museum of the Future. This small, startup cultural project in Rotterdam works directly and intimately with community members to share their stories. It is a platform for social bridging and cultural exchange. Jasper enhanced his original post to share with you here. I hope you’ll be as charmed and inspired by Story House Belvédère as I am.

Story House Belvédère in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is a magical place. On a beautiful location in a former jazz-era night club, a committed team works on storytelling activities to bring different communities in the city together, and contribute to a happier, more engaged city. They do so by making the stories of individuals and communities visible, and encouraging new encounters. In its short existence (it opened in 2013), the place has made a name for itself as a successful community-driven, innovative cultural initiative.

I visited Story House Belvédère as part of the new Intangible Cultural Heritage and Museum Projects I am involved in. I had heard a lot about Belvédère before my visit, so my expectations were high. The place surpassed them. I spoke with some of the people working there, especially founder Linda Malherbe.

What makes Story House Belvédère so special?

It is rooted in its diverse neighborhood and the people who live there.

Story House Belvédère is in Katendrecht, in southern Rotterdam. Katendrecht is a part of town that for over 125 years has been a home for migrants and newcomers to the city. The neighborhood is a mix of people and communities by design and has a rich social history. Currently, the neighborhood is being gentrified and its development, which tells a wider story about the city, is ongoing. The team found the current home of Belvédère almost by chance when they were looking for a temporary working space. But the location proved perfect. According to Linda, the project could not have been imagined and developed anywhere else in the city. A diversity of people and stories is the reason it exists.

It started as a community project rooted in relationship-building.

Before there was a house, the team behind Belvédère organised a community-focused social photography exhibition outdoors on one of the quais in the south of Rotterdam. It was an exhibition of group portraits of the many communities in the area. City officials doubted the idea of an exhibition in the public space in a part of town they considered dangerous. They said, "you will get shot at, and in two weeks everything will be destroyed." But they were wrong. The exhibition was up for a year and a half. When it ended, the portrayed communities took their portraits home, starting relationships with Belvédère which in some cases still persist.

After the photography show, the team was encouraged to continue their work. They focused on one of the key events in Rotterdam history: the bombing of the city at the beginning of the Second World War. Inspired by Story Corps, they toured the neighborhood with a mobile recording studio and captured memories of the bombing. They created storytelling events and shows, which prompted other communities to start telling their own stories. As Linda says, “Every story inspires a new story.”

The success of the storytelling events encouraged the team to look for a permanent location. They found it in the old jazz club/boxing gym/neighborhood museum Belvédère, a building which dates back to 1894. Together with the communities they had worked with before, they are now renovating the building. In 2018 it will officially reopen. But currently you can visit when the door is unlocked - which is almost daily. After the formal reopening, they still expect to evolve. As Linda says, the process will never be finished, as people will always continue to add and make changes to the building to reflect new stories and ideas.

The community values of the team permeate the space and their projects.

Already you can feel Story House Belvédère is a special place. You feel it the moment you step into their warm and welcoming space. It feels like a living room, where everybody can be a friend. Even the coffee cups and the cookies are in style. The magic, of course, goes beyond aesthetics and is deeply embedded in the organization.

A small team is the driving force behind all projects. It is a committed, dynamic group of freelancers who care about the mission and magic of the place. The place they created is warm and welcoming, and yet it is their energy and enthusiasm that stuck with me most after my visit. I asked Linda to describe what defines the team, and received over a dozen characteristics:

• A shared love for people 
• They are good listeners 
• Positively curious, and always asking new questions 
• Actively looking for (a diversity of) people 
• Etc. etc.

The approach the team takes to connect with communities and then connecting communities is straightforward. In projects, they build a profound relationship with one specific community, such as the Chinese, Bulgarians, or football hooligans. This relationship is based on a genuine interest and includes a long-term commitment to stay involved with each other. When I visited, a community member had made our delicious Bulgarian lunch. Such profound ties make it possible that when a new project focuses on another community, the team can personally invite people from other communities to join. In that way, they build bridges between communities. Everything starts with listening and being curious about the other, and then inviting people, as guests, to take part.

This approach permeates all activities of Story House Belvédère. If you rent the place for a private event such as a wedding, some spots at the event are reserved for people from other communities. So, if you’re interested in joining a Syrian wedding or Jewish Bar Mitzvah, you can. The reason this works is because of the personal ties between the team and the communities. The aim of Linda and her team is to create relationships with people that are everlasting.

Platform Power: Scaling Impact

Last month, I sat in the back of a meeting room at the MAH and watched something extraordinary happen. Our county board of supervisors had brought their official meeting to the museum. They were off-site for the first time in years, holding a special study session sparked by an exhibition about foster youth, Lost Childhoods. The supervisors toured the exhibition with some of the 100+ local partners who helped create it. Then, for an hour, former foster youth who helped design the exhibition shared their stories with supervisors. They spoke powerfully and painfully about their experiences. They shared their hopes. They urged the politicians to fix a broken system. It felt like something opened up, right in that room, between the flag and the tissues and the microphones. It felt like change was breaking through.

This was not an event orchestrated by the MAH. It happened because two of our Lost Childhood partners urged it into being. They negotiated with the County. They set the table. They made something real and meaningful happen.

They did it because the exhibition belonged to them. They helped conceive it, plan it, and build it. The Lost Childhoods exhibition is a platform for 100+ partners to share their stories, artwork, ideas, projects, volunteer opportunities, and events.

Nine years ago, I wrote a post called The Future of Authority: Platform Power. In it, I argued that museums could give up control of the visitor experience while still maintaining (a new kind of) power. Museums could make the platforms for those experiences. There is power IN the platform--power to shape the way people participate. This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum.

Nine years later, I still believe this. Now that I run a museum, I experience the variety of ways we can create platforms that empower community members to do certain things, in certain ways, that amplify the institution. The power IN the platform is real. But I've also become reenergized about the power OF the platform for those community members who participate. I value platforms for their power to scale impact.

Traditionally, museums and cultural organizations offer programs. Staff produce them for, and sometimes with, visitors. Each program has a fixed cost, and expanding that program means expanding that cost. If it takes a staff member 5 hours to run a screen-printing workshop, it takes her ten hours to run it twice. Even a smash hit program is hard to scale up in this model.

At the MAH, we've tried wherever possible to break out of unidirectional program models. We believe that we can most effectively empower and bridge community members (our strategic goal) if we invite them to share their skills with each other. This is the participatory platform model. Instead of staff running workshops, our staff connect with local printmaking collectives. We ask them what their goals are for outreach and community connection. And then we support and empower them to lead workshops and festivals and projects on our site. Instead of "doing the thing" directly, our staff make space for community members to do the thing--and to do so beautifully, proudly, with and for diverse audiences.

Does this work scale better than programs? It's not always obvious from the start whether it will. This work is relationship-heavy, and those relationships take time to build. When we created an exhibition with 100 community members impacted by the foster care system, it took almost a year to recruit, convene, open up, explore, and create the products and the trust to build those products well. But that investment in building a platform paid off.

When you build relationships in a platform, you build participants' power. Platforms can accommodate lots of partners and support them taking the projects in new directions. Since opening in July, exhibition partners haven't just planned a County supervisors' meeting. They've led over 50 exhibition-related community events at and beyond the MAH. They've created powerful learning experiences, diverse audiences, and new program formats. Our staff could never produce all this activity on our own. We put our energy into empowering partners, which ignited their passion and ability to extend the exhibition to new people and places.

Whereas a program is a closed system, a platform is an open one. In a platform model, more is not more staff time and cost. More is more use of the platform, more participants empowered to use it to full potential.

As our organization grows, we are looking for more ways to adopt a platform mindset. Now that we've opened Abbott Square, we have a goal to offer free cultural programming almost every day of the week. This means a huge shift for the MAH (previously we offered 2 monthly festivals plus a few scattered events). How will we increase our event offerings so aggressively? We're not planning to do it by adding a lot of staff to programming the space. We're planning to do it by building new platforms. We are learning from our "monthly festival" platform and building a lightweight, more flexible version. We want to make it easier for community groups to plug in, offering their own workshops and festivals and events, with our support. If we can create the right platform for daily events, it serves our community, by giving them the support, space, and frequent events they desire. It advances our theory of change, by empowering locals and bridging their diverse communities. And it puts the MAH at the center of the web of activity, as a valued partner and platform provider.

Building platforms is not the same as building programs. It flexes new muscles, requires different skill sets. But to me, the benefit is clear. In a platform model, our community takes us further than we could ever go on our own.

How Do You Inspire Visitors to Take Action After They Leave?

This month, we opened a new exhibition at the MAH, Lost Childhoods: Voices of Santa Cruz County Foster Youth and Foster Youth Museum (brief video clip from opening night here).

This exhibition is a big accomplishment for us because it incorporates multiple ways we push boundaries at the MAH:

• we co-designed it with 100+ community partners (C3), including artists, foster youth, and youth advocates, with youth voices driving the project from big idea to install to programming.
• we commissioned original artwork that was co-produced with youth.
• it uses art, history, artifacts, and storytelling to illuminate a big human story and an urgent social issue.
• it encourages visitors to participate both in the exhibition and beyond it by taking action to expand opportunities for foster youth and youth transitioning out of foster care.

There's lots to explore about this project, but today I want to dive into this last element: inspiring visitors to take action. 

When we developed the big ideas for this exhibition, MAH staff and C3 partners agreed: we wanted visitors to "feel empowered to take action and know how to do so."

This big idea excited us all. But at the very next C3 meeting with our partners, we ran into two big questions of content and design:

1. The issues facing foster youth are huge and complex. How could visitors take actions that are both meaningful and achievable?
2. How could we develop a clear, explicit, and appealing way for visitors to take action?

We addressed the first question with guidance from one of the former foster youth who helped develop the exhibition. She pointed out that while big things like becoming a foster parent are super-important, there are also a lot of little things people can do to help foster youth succeed. We decided to hone in on the little things - from baking a birthday cake to donating clean socks to volunteering - in our TAKE ACTION center. 

The TAKE ACTION center has two components - a woven artwork (left)
and a set of business cards visitors can take home with them.

We crowd-sourced "little things" from our C3 partners. Then, we worked with one of the commissioned exhibition artists, Melody Overstreet, to create an artwork that weaves all these little things into one tapestry. Youth handwrote the little things on the woven strips, in English and Spanish. The artwork metaphorically suggests that we need to do all these little things to build a supportive social fabric for foster youth.

Closeup of the woven artwork by Melody Overstreet and C3 partners.

While the artwork is beautiful and inspiring, it's not a clear, explicit call to action. In C3 meetings, we experimented with different activities related to the weaving. We tried making bracelets to remember an action you want to take, or weaving your action into the artwork. But we decided that these were too conceptual. We wanted to live up to that big idea that visitors would feel empowered to take action and how how to do so. 

So we took the actions in the weaving and translated them into business cards. The front of each card shares the action, and the back shares the contact info for the person/organization to make it happen. We discussed creating a single "take action" postcard instead and pushing all the action/contact info to a website, but that felt like it added too many steps for visitors from inspiration to action. We wanted visitors to have all the information they need to do a given action on the card itself. The cards are clear, brief, bilingual, and granular. You can take it and use it right away.

A few of the TAKE ACTION cards.

Front/back closeup of one card.

We opened the exhibition with 40 different action cards. We had debated whether to pare the number down so as not to overwhelm visitors, but ultimately, we felt that more was more. We've even held a few extra slots open to add new cards in the future in case our partners' needs change over the 6-month run of the exhibition.

How will we measure if people take the actions on the cards? We're tracking this in two ways:

1. We are counting how many cards of each type get taken. Already in the first few days of the exhibition, we've had to replenish some cards multiple times. 
2. We are asking C3 partners to report to us on the extent to which people take action. We started a simple google doc to catalogue these reports. We've already heard from partners who have had new volunteers sign up based on the cards.

I'm really curious to see how the TAKE ACTION center evolves over the run of the exhibition. I'm cautiously optimistic that we may have found a system that works for Lost Childhoods - and may work for other projects as well.

What's your take on this approach? How have you inspired visitors to take action in your projects? How have you measured it?

Against Participation

At first, I thought it was a joke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temple Contemporary and the Puzzle of Sharing Powerful Processes

The first thing I noticed about Temple Contemporary were the chairs. Desk chairs and theater seats, sleek modsters and dilapidated stuffed things, a motley crew lined up on hooks around the room. They were charming, but puzzling. Looking closer, I saw that each seat had its own handwritten label, telling the story of the Philadelphia cultural institution from which it originated. The chairs were cast-off art, reclaimed as art, available for people to take off the hooks and use. They were there for artist talks. They were there for project brainstorming. They were there for chair races.

What kind of an art institution is this? That's what I found myself wondering again and again in the too-short hour I spent with the director of Temple Contemporary, Rob Blackson. Temple Contemporary makes strange objects and gorgeous documentation. It encourages process-driven performances and art projects. It is unfinished, unassuming, and whimsical, and at the same time, deadly serious. It takes the kind of risks that a university art gallery should take. It opens up new conversations about the work of art in our communities.

Temple Contemporary’s mission is to creatively re-imagine the social function of art through questions of local relevance and international significance. They live their mission, working in questions and projects rather than exhibitions and programs. Every other year, they convene TUPAC, a group of 35 outside advisors, including teens, college students, Temple University professors, artists, philanthropists, and community leaders. TUPAC advisors come together for one meeting, each bringing a question of local relevance and international significance--a question they don't know the answer to. The advisors share their questions, vote on the ones that they think have the most power, and set the direction of Temple Contemporary.

For example, right now, Temple Contemporary's offices are packed floor to ceiling with broken musical instruments from classrooms across the city of Philadelphia. One of TUPAC's current questions is about the state of art education. In Philadelphia, the budget for arts education has been slashed to pieces. The cuts were so deep that school music rooms are full of unplayable instruments. There's no money to fix them. And so, sparked by TUPAC's big question, Temple Contemporary decided to collect these silenced instruments - 1,500 in all - and commission a Symphony for a Broken Orchestra by a famous composer, David Lang. After the symphony premieres in 2017, Temple Contemporary will have all the instruments restored and will return them to their schools, new repair kits tucked inside the cases.

I left Temple Contemporary energized and inspired by their work. The work that Temple Contemporary is doing with their community is radical and impressive. Temple Contemporary is truly community-led. There is no formula. The community drives the question. The question drives the work. And the work takes the form or forms to which it is best suited. This makes Temple Contemporary excel at responsive, relevant projects. But it also makes their "front-end" experience incoherent. As a visitor, I'm not sure what I left with. My positive experience was 95% rooted in the tour that Rob Blackson gave me. Without him as my guide, all I had was fragments. A bunch of chairs hanging on the wall. Some students folding clothes. Empty pegboards. Half a car attached to the ceiling. Artsy journals. I saw slices of something interesting, but I had no idea how to piece them together.

I would never have learned about the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra if I hadn't been invited into the back office. I would never have known that TUPAC exists, who they are, or what they do. I wouldn't have drunk from the cup made from Pennsylvania oil field shale or read the book about the funeral they held for a row house. I would have walked in, puzzled at the white box's mysteries, and walked out.

This problem isn't unique to Temple Contemporary. It's a challenge in all process-driven work. Often the most powerful community work lives behind the scenes, in the brainstorming and prototyping and trying things out. The same is true of much artwork--the juice is often in the work's development, which dies a little bit when the work is "done." But that juice is fickle. It is powerful when you can experience it directly. It loses its flavor--or is completely imperceptible--when people don't understand what they are drinking.

How do we resolve this? The standard answer is to let the process stay behind the curtain and the product live onstage. Give people the exhibition but not the debates about content development. Give people the symphony but not the stacks of patient, injured cellos. This approach is straightforward. Leave the process to the collaborators and give the product to the audience. But there are two big problems with this approach:

1. It's easy to get caught in the hamster wheel of delivering products to audiences. You start systematizing to deliver a program every week, an exhibition every quarter. You promise your audience quality and you hone your process to deliver it. You don't have time to convene the community. You don't have flexibility to imagine whether their questions are better answered with a symphony or a storybook. You don't have space to take the instruments. You can't open yourself fully to the possibilities. 
2. It denies audiences the powerful opportunity to tap into the process. In most of these kinds of projects, the number of collaborators is finite. The collaborators themselves are often hand-selected or nominated. Visitors can't walk off the street with their own big question and join the scrum. While that's sensible, it's also limiting. How could Temple Contemporary (or any institution) invite each person who walks in the door into the biggest, meatiest work currently underway?

How can we invite people into the processes that drive our most powerful work?

I don't have the answers. I'm curious if you do--and what big questions this sparks for you.

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Our Museum: Extraordinary Resources on How Museums and Galleries Become Participatory Places

Six years ago, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation set out on an ambitious quest. They wanted to help museums and galleries across the UK make significant, sustained changes in the ways they engage community partners and visitors as participants in their work. The result, Our Museum, is an extraordinary funding program with a focus on community participation.

In its first five years, Our Museum yielded real change at twelve diverse UK organizations. Our Museum also produced a suite of online resources and reports that are impressive, honest, and comprehensive (though a bit tricky to navigate--I recommend using the search function). You could spend a day getting lost in the meaty, thoughtful writing and videos on the Our Museum site. I recommend starting with the final report, No Longer Us and Them.

Our Museum started with a clear-eyed assessment of community engagement funding and practices across the UK. Dr. Bernadette Lynch's provocative 2011 report, Whose Cake is it Anyway?, didn't mince words. While there was evidence of plenty of community engagement work across museums and galleries, most of it was funded project by project. Most participatory projects were short-term, siloed innovations, not institutional transformations. And in several cases, the projects constituted "empowerment lite" for participants rather than true collaboration, co-creation, or transformation.

Five years later, project director Dr. Piotr Bienkowski's final report for Our Museum tells a different story. No Longer Us and Them describes organizations that have changed dramatically, from top to bottom and across program areas. I strongly recommend you read the report. Extra credit if you read the Our Museum evaluation (or its summary) as well. Here are my three top takeaways.

Institutional Change is about Change, No Matter the Focus

The two big lessons from Our Museum that Piotr identified are not about community engagement per se, but about institutional change:

• Small Changes Add Up. 
• Participation is Everyone's Job. 

These two lessons are probably true of any major institutional change process (swapping the word "participation" with the focus of the change). Many of the barriers to participation identified in the report--lack of committed leadership, conflicting strategic agendas, silos, staff resistance, lack of capacity, fear--could apply to any change process. The evaluation additionally called out some faulty assumptions in program design about leadership and staff continuity throughout the multi-year process. Disruption can be confusing, destabilizing, and potentially derailing, no matter the focus of the transformation at hand.

Interestingly--for good and ill--this transformative funding program coincided with a national funding crisis in the arts in the UK. This made the work more urgent, fragile... and realistic. Most major change doesn't happen when things are going well. While a funder can have impact in directing organizational leaders to turn their heads in a particular direction, it's often negative externalities--financial pressure, political changes--that spur organizations to significant action. The financial austerity measures applied external pressure to the Our Museum institutions. While that was painful for the organizations involved, it also helped force the issue of whether participatory engagement could be core to a strong future business model for each organization or not. It upped the stakes on change--something a funder could not provide alone.

Different External Voices Bring Different Skills to the Table

Community partners, artists, peers, and funders all play different roles as collaborators and contributors to participatory institutions. My favorite section of No Longer Us and Them is the discussion of the specific value and roles of each type of outside contributor (scroll down in this document for a helpful visual representation). 

In particular, Piotr calls out "critical friends" as helpful external partners. Critical friends are trusted outside observers who may raise tough questions and uncomfortable truths that a collaborating community group cannot or will not share. Critical friends are positive, constructive, and able to tease out real challenges. As this video points out, critics make you swear. Critical friends can make you smile.

Piotr also notes that artists, while excellent at providing fresh perspectives on an institution's work, may not be the most helpful or well-received when it comes to providing more formal feedback or participating in reflection and shared learning sessions. While I don't fully agree with all the role designations in the report, I appreciate the nuanced insight that different types of outside contributors bring different expertise and value to the table. 

Watch Out for Things to Watch Out For

No Longer Us and Them's magic ingredient is honesty. That honesty shines through in the report's clear language, specific tips, and frequent bite-sized notes of "things to watch out for" when working to become a participatory organization. Indicated with a bold exclamation point, the "things to watch out for" are warning signs and traps to avoid. Some feel small and specific--"be sensitive to staff body language in meetings"--whereas others are more strategic--"be clear about your starting point when you approach communities." In all cases, I found these warnings to be refreshing, educational insights that taught me more than any success stories could.

In summary: read the report. Check out the Our Museum online resources. Consider your own path to institutional transformation. And consider sharing a comment here with a takeaway that is meaningful for you.  

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10 Ways to Build a Better Community Brainstorming Meeting

You're planning a new exhibition. Considering a new strategic direction. Designing a new program. And you've decided that you want to integrate community feedback into the development process.

Awesome. Admirable. Now how the heck do you do it?

Here are ten things I've learned about making these kinds of community input meetings successful. Please add your own ideas in the comments too.

SELECTING AND RECRUITING THE PARTICIPANTS

1. Consider whether you want a bonded group (people who are like each other) or a bridged group (people who are different from each other). 

Bonded groups are useful if you want to understand people's existing attitudes and impressions. Focus group participants will be more forthcoming and honest if they feel like they are "among friends." Bonded groups exhibit groupthink--but sometimes that's the best way to really understand the concerns of a specific group of people. For example, when we held community meetings about the development of a new creative town square next to our museum, a group of middle/upper-class moms talked about not feeling safe downtown. When I've talked with those same folks in bridged groups, they use more circumspect language (i.e. not feeling "welcome") or don't mention their safety concerns at all. But those concerns are real. Not surprisingly, a different focus group of social service providers and homeless adults had a very different set of concerns about downtown. Bringing these different communities together in the same space might not have created safe space for the true issues of each group to emerge.

Bridged groups are useful if you want people to collaborate on a more inclusive vision of the future. If you are building something new and want people's ideas, go for bridging. When you are doing creative work together (making, building, brainstorming), it's catalytic to work with people who see things in a whole different way. In creative brainstorming, groupthink is a killer. The more diverse perspectives in the room, the better. We're much more capable of empathy when co-imagining the future than we are when thinking about the present.

2. Find trusted leaders in communities of interest with whom to partner and recruit participants.

Want to hold a meeting with people from worlds where you don't spend much time? Great. But if you have no credibility in someone else's community, your invitation may fall right into the trash can. Better to establish a relationship with a leader in their community--someone with whom you are building reciprocal value--and ask them to help be your ambassador. It doesn't matter what incentives you offer to participate or how attractive the invitation is if the recipient doesn't know or trust you as a host.

3. Respect and value people's time. 

If you're asking for community input, what are you offering in return? This could be financial; some organizations pay people to participate in community meetings. But it could also be something else that demonstrates appreciation and value. Snacks. Child care. Networking opportunities. Free tickets. You should have a credible and understandable offer, alongside your ask of their time, experience, and expertise.

4. Overcommunicate.

I use a simple rule of contacting participants the week before, the day before, and the day after a meeting. Communication should be clear and motivating. Especially if you don't meet with these people frequently, you can't remind them enough. You also can't thank them/follow up quickly enough.


SETTING UP THE MEETING

5. Create a structure that values peoples' participation. 

There are a million ways to run a community meeting--different depending on what you are trying to achieve. The best book I've read on the topic is Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner. It's an incredible compendium of specific meeting formats for different kinds of participant engagement.

In general, I find it is useful to:

• Honor everyone's contributions and ability to contribute at the top. 
• Include a mix of individual activities (often writing or drawing), partner/small group work, and whole group discussion. Different people thrive in different levels of social intensity. I recommend spending as little time together as a whole group as possible because it can be intimidating and unproductively slow. Spend just enough time as a whole group to get people motivated and connected to each other (and reconnected at the end).
• Ensure that you as convenor are talking for a very small amount of the time--ideally just to frame, contextualize, provide clear instructions, and keep people moving.
• Build on their existing expertise/experience/perspective as opposed to asking them to comment on yours. Participants' stories are often more valuable than their opinions. 
• Use unorthodox activities to inspire fresh thinking. Movement, making, and imaginative projects are all good for shaking new ideas loose. We use the Pop Up Museum--inviting small groups to build artifacts from the future--in many of our community meetings.
• Close with a rallying activity, ideally one that invites people to continue conversations with each other.

6. Be honest and clear about the opportunity at hand. 

Share where you are clearly and concisely. Explain the opportunity to participate and what is and isn't on the table, so people don't get frustrated. Don't overpromise.

7. Provide snacks and drinks and a bit of time at the top to enjoy them. 

A little socializing and sugar can go a long way. We almost always use nametags with a playful prompt on them ("what superhero would you be?," "what's your favorite local place to relax?" etc.) to get the conversation started.

8. Inspire people to stay involved.

There's a big difference between a meeting that feels like a chore and one that generates energy. When participants get excited by the experience--whether because of the content, the other people in the room, the format, the invitation--they are more likely to seek opportunities to go further. Note that for most participants, the content is NOT the most important part of this calculation. Good content cannot succeed if delivered poorly, or in a group context that feels dull or unsafe. But ambiguous content in a room full of enthused people doing fun activities can thrive.


AFTER THE MEETING

9. Follow up.

If the meeting was successful, you now have a whole crew of people who are interested and rooting for your project to shine. While you don't have to continue the level of engagement present at the meeting, it's poor form to drop them entirely. At my institution, we (embarrassingly) did this for a long time. People would come participate in a meeting and then we wouldn't even add them to the weekly mailing list. Part of this is rooted in a legitimate desire not to spam people. But imagine how you would feel if you were invited to someone's house once and never again. You'd assume that something hadn't gone well. We're now inviting participants to get more involved--both broadly in the world of our organization and specifically in activities that build on their experience and expertise.

Followup is important on the individual level too. Most community meetings are short. Catalytic. You hear an intriguing 20-second snippet. You see someone light up at something you didn't expect. Most of the value you will get from participants comes when you follow up to say, "hey, I'd love to hear more about X. Can I buy you a cup of coffee and hear more?"

10. Use their input.

This is the most important part. It's why you held the meeting, right?

The worst way to disrespect participants is to ignore the advice, experience, and expertise that you asked them to provide. You don't need to involve them in every step forward of the project. But you should use their input to guide and shape where you take it. You should--bonus points--reach out to individuals to acknowledge how they influenced your direction. You should--double bonus points--let the whole crew know where their input took the project. But most of all, you should use the input. Community meetings should never be a "check the box" activity. They're too much work--and offer too much value--to tokenize.

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Does Community Participation Scale to Destination Institutions?

Our entire strategy at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History is rooted in community participation. We invite diverse locals to share their creative and cultural talents with our greater community at the museum. Printmakers leading workshops. Teens advocating for all-gender bathrooms. Volunteers restoring a historic cemetery. Sculptors building giant metal fish with kids. You get the idea.

When I share these stories at conferences, someone always asks: what about institutions that serve millions of visitors each year? Does community participation work for big cultural destinations too?

It's a good question. On a basic level, the answer is no. Local community centers and destination attractions are different beasts. If your institution is built for millions of one-time visitors, it is not built for thousands of frequent visitors, and vice versa.

My museum can pursue radical collaboration because of our small size and local focus. We have the opportunity to build relationships with community members over time. The time to get to know folks who walk in the door. The flexibility to be nimble, responsive, and involved.

When people ask if our work in Santa Cruz scales, I start by acknowledging our distinct strategy. We are doing something different than the big guys, for good reason. And they should do something different from us.

But does that mean community participation is only for small institutions or small communities? No. The principles of community participation--seeing the public as partners, inviting folks to get meaningfully involved, welcoming their talents and perspectives--work at any size. But the strategies are different.

Think about democratic politics. People participate in national and local politics--and they do so completely differently. Local politics are personal, accessible. You can meet a candidate. You can show up to a public meeting and ask a question. You can even get on a commission if you are so inclined. National politics are sweeping, remote. You can join a movement. Attend a rally. Share links and opinions and funds online.

People participate in both of these political arenas, and they do so differently. The same is true for cultural participation.

Here are a few distinctions between participation in cultural institutions by scale. Instead of separating these into smaller and bigger institutions, I separated these into "local" and "destination" institutions. I think it's a more realistic representation of the two types described, and a more useful way to look at strategies for community participation.

HOW DO YOU DEFINE COMMUNITY?

• LOCAL INSTITUTION: Your community is a definable group of people connected by place. You can probably name several of them. Many of them can name each other. You run into each other in and beyond the institution. It's reasonable to focus your marketing and programming on participation onsite at your institution or at sites within your city. Your community lives nearby. Of course they can participate here. 
• DESTINATION INSTITUTION: If your visitors come from all over the world instead of from down the street, defining community strictly by place doesn't work. You can't define your primary community as the people of Manhattan if 75% of your visitors are from other cities. For huge institutions, it's more appropriate to define community by identity or affinity instead of by geography. Think Etsy, Sierra Club, Mormon Church. Each of these institutions engages a community of like-minded individuals spread around the globe. Engagement for a distributed community can't happen solely or even primarily onsite. It requires a lot more distributed online engagement to complement onsite engagement. 

HOW DO YOU INVITE INDIVIDUALS TO PARTICIPATE?

• LOCAL: If your visitors can come in often, you can build relationships with people over time. They can attend first as audience members or spectators, checking out the space and getting comfortable. As you get to know visitors, you can learn more about their talents and interests. You can invite them into opportunities that build on their strengths. You can invest in building relationships on your site and theirs. Participation can be onsite only, or onsite and online. It's OK to expect people to come back to keep going deeper, and it's manageable for you to go to their sites, too. 
• DESTINATION: If visitors come once a year or once a decade, the stakes are higher on the first encounter. Onsite participation has to be welcoming to first-timers, and it should catalyze opportunities for deeper engagement offsite. That means offering clear, visible, appealing participatory experiences that enhance the destination experience. And then it means creating some kind of digital link--via email, social media, photos--that encourages people to continue building relationships when they are back home. 

HOW DO YOU BUILD COMMUNITY THROUGH PARTICIPATION?  

• LOCAL: One of the hazards of small and local institutions is the potential for insularity. Some organizations invite a certain number of locals into the club and then close the door. If you want to build community, you have to balance the tribal desire to bond with buddies with the collective opportunity to bridge with strangers. Strong local organizations build alliances across sectors, cultures, and neighborhoods. They link people together across differences. This can happen through committees, summits, or long-term projects in which a group puts on a show builds something together. The local scale makes it possible for individuals in the group to make commitments to the institution and to each other. 
• DESTINATION: Frankly, I think building community is difficult for large destination institutions to execute. Visitors to these institutions are often so focused on their own bonded group experience--my family vacation, our special date at the opera--that they are uninterested in strangers. Worse, since many of these institutions are crowded, visitors see strangers as annoying obstacles instead of potential friends and community members. However, destination institutions can build community through participation in at least two ways. First, through large crowd events (think political rally or pro sports game), where numbers work for you to build a sense of shared identity. Second, online, where participants from around the world can commit to long-term projects and relationships. 

I'll be honest: I prefer to work on the local level rather than in a big institution. I love tackling the challenges of building a more connected community in our county through art and history. I love sharing stories of our work--in part because I believe small institutions deserve more credit for their unique contributions to our field. But do I think local institutions are better than destination institutions? No. I appreciate the big guys too. Especially the ones developing ways for community participation to shine in their environments.

How do you see community participation thriving in large/destination institutions?

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One Simple Question to Make Your Work More Participatory

Photo by CLoé Zarifian, MAH Photo Intern

We're working with a guest curator, Wes Modes, on an upcoming experimental project at our museum. Wes is an artist, and this is his first time running a museum exhibition development process. In a recent meeting about the exhibition process, Wes asked me: what am I not thinking of that I should be doing?

I said to him: I can't really answer that question. I'm sure you're thinking of a lot of steps to make this process work, and many more tasks will arise. The key question is, every step of the way: how can you invite people beyond yourself to help make this step better?

This is the question I ask myself anytime I'm working on something with a participatory intent. How can people--staff, volunteers, community members--help make this project better?   

In the case of the exhibition process that Wes is leading, we talked about how others could be involved in an experimental exhibition/residency in which artists work with visitors in the gallery. The obvious start was to think about how we recruit the artists--using an open call to invite anyone, anywhere to participate. But even developing that open call was a participatory process:

• Wes worked with other staff to think through how the residencies could work. Their input helped shape the entire project, which in turn shaped the call.
• He asked staff and artist friends for feedback on the concept. Their input helped shape the messaging of the project and the key questions to be answered in the call.
• Once the call was 95% ready, Wes circulated it to a small group of existing museum partners and artists for feedback. Their input helped us get to 100%, and it created a group of invested collaborators who were ready to help spread the word once the call was live.
• Once the call was ready, Wes circulated it to even more museum partners, as well as to artist listservs and our general membership. These people were both potential participants and promoters of the call, helping it continue to spread.

All of these steps helped make for a better call to artists, one that has gotten way more response than I ever expected.

This open call project may sound like one that is uniquely suited for participatory input. But I find that the more I live with that question of how others can make something better, the more naturally it infuses all kinds of work at our museum. Developing new staff policies. Prototyping all gender bathrooms. Creating an event or exhibit. All of these activities involve ongoing collaboration and co-creation with people beyond the staff member(s) responsible.

How can people help make your project better? Here are a few tips to asking this question successfully:

• ask the whole question. It's not just a question of how people could get involved or participate. It's a question of how they can make it BETTER. You can always come up with ways people could participate. But if those approaches require a lot of time or effort and don't improve the result, they're a waste. Be generous and creative about what "better" could look like, but hold onto that goal. That way, you'll build a virtuous cycle where you keep wanting to find opportunities for participation to continue improving your work.
• share your work. It's impossible to ask this question if you work so close to the chest that no one can even see what you are doing, let alone get involved. Inviting starts with sharing. Share what you are doing, the questions you have, the things you're unsure of, and you'll naturally encounter people who want to help make it better. This takes confidence in sharing half-baked ideas, and also the time to type them out, circulate them, have a meeting, etc. It's part of a culture of learning and curiosity--something I hope that museums can embody.
• define "people" in the way that works for you. At my museum, the people who participate may be staff, volunteers, community members, organizational partners, Facebook folk... it depends on the project or task at hand. It's always good to start closest to home. Ask your colleagues. Ask your friends. And then as you build confidence in their ability to help make your work better, you can start inviting participants who are further from your comfort zone.

How are you inviting other people to help make your work better?

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ASKing about Art at the Brooklyn Museum: Interview with Shelley Bernstein and Sara Devine

I’ve always been inspired by the creative ways the Brooklyn Museum uses technology to connect visitors to museum content. Now, the Brooklyn Museum is doing a major overhaul of their visitor experience--from lobby to galleries to mobile apps--in an effort to “create a dynamic and responsive museum that fosters dialogue and sparks conversation between staff and all Museum visitors.” This project is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of their Bloomberg Connects program.

I’ve been particularly interested in ASK, the mobile app component of the project. The Brooklyn team has been blogging about their progress (honestly! frequently!). To learn more, I interviewed Brooklyn Museum project partners Shelley Bernstein, Vice Director of Digital Engagement & Technology, and Sara Devine, Manager of Audience Engagement & Interpretive Materials.

What is ASK, and why are you creating it?

ASK is a mobile app which allows our visitors to ask questions about the works they see on view and get answers—from our staff—during their visit.  

ASK is part of an overall effort to rethink the museum visitor experience. We began with a series of internal meetings to evaluate our current visitor experience and set a goal for the project. We spent a year pilot-testing directly with visitors to develop the ASK project concept. The pilots showed us visitors were looking for a personal connection with our staff, wanted to talk about the art on view, and wanted that dialogue to be dynamic and speak to their needs directly. We started to look to technology to solve the equation. In pilot testing, we found that enabling visitors to ASK via mobile provided the personal connection they were looking for while responding to their individual interests.

Are there specific outcome goals you have for ASK? What does success look like?

We have three goals.

Goal 1: Personal connection to the institution and works on view. Our visitors were telling us they wanted personal connection and they wanted to talk about art. We need to ensure that the app is just a conduit to helps allow that connection to take place.  

Working with our team leads and our ASK team is really critical in this—we’ve seen that visitors want dialogue to feel natural. For example, staff responses like: “Actually, I’m not really sure, but we do know this about the object” or encouraging people with “That’s a great question” has helped make the app feel human.

Goal 2: Looking closer at works of art. We’d like to see visitors getting the information they need while looking more closely at works of art. At the end of the day, we want the experience encouraging visitors to look at art and we want screens put to the side. We were heartened when early testers told us they felt like they were looking more closely at works of art in order to figure out what questions to ask. They put down the device often, and they would circle back to a work to look again after getting an answer—all things we verified in watching their behavior, too.

Moving forward, we need to ensure that the team of art historians and educators giving answers is encouraging visitors to look more closely, directing them to nearby objects to make connections, and, generally, taking what starts with a simple question into a deeper dialogue about what a person is seeing and what more they can experience.  

Goal 3: Institutional change driven by visitor data. We have the opportunity to learn what works of art people are asking about, what kinds of questions they are asking, and observations they are making in a more comprehensive way than ever before. This information will allow us to have more informed conversations about how our analog interpretation (gallery labels for example) are working and make changes based on that data.

So, success looks like a lot of things, but it’s not going to be a download rate as a primary measure. We will be looking at how many conversations are taking place, the depth of those conversations, and how much conversational data is informing change of analog forms of interpretation.  

You’ve done other dialogic tech-enabled projects with visitors in the past. Time delay is often a huge problem in the promise of interaction with these projects. Send in your question, and it can be days before the artist or curator responds with an answer. ASK is much more real-time. As you think about ASK relative to other dialogic projects, is timeliness the key difference, or is it something else entirely?

How much “real time” actually matters is a big question for us. Our hunch is it may be more about how responsive we are overall. Responsive means many things—time, quality of interaction, personal attention. It’s that overall picture that’s the most important. That said, we’ve got a lot of testing coming up to take our ASK kiosks—the ipads you can use to ask questions if you don’t have or don’t want to use your iPhone—and adjust them to be more a part of the real time system.  Also, now that the app is on the floor we’re testing expectations that surround response time and how to technically implement solutions to help. There’s a lot to keep testing here and we are just at the very beginning of figuring this out.

That’s really interesting. If the conversations are about specific works of art, I would assume visitors would practically demand a real-time response. But you think that might not be true?

In testing, visitors were seen making a circle pattern in the galleries. They would ask a question, wander around, get an answer and then circle back to the work of art. Another recent tester mentioned that the conversation about something specific actually ended in a different gallery as he walked, but that he didn’t mind it. In another testing session, a user was not so happy she had crossed the gallery and then was asked to take a picture because the ASK team member couldn’t identify the object by the question; she didn’t want to go back. This may be one of those things people feel differently about, so we’ll need to see how it goes.

If we are asking someone to look closer at a detail (or take a photograph to send us), we’ll want to do that quickly before they move on, so there’s a learning curve in the conversational aspect that we need to keep testing. For instance, we can help shape expectations by encouraging people to wander while we provide them with an answer and that the notifications feature will let them know when we’ve responded.

Many museums have tried arming staff with cheerful “Ask me!” buttons, to little effect. The most common question visitors ask museum staff is often “Where is the bathroom?” How does ASK encourage visitors to ask questions about content?

Actually, so far we’ve had limited directional, housekeeping type questions. People have mostly been asking about content. Encouraging them to do more than ask questions is the bigger challenge.

We spent a LOT of time trying to figure out what to call this mobile app. This is directly tied into the onboarding process for the app—the start screen in particular. We know from user testing that an explanation of the app function on the start screen doesn’t work. People don’t read it; they want to dive right into using the app, skimming over any text to the “get started” button. So how to do you convey the functionality of the app more intuitively? Boiling the experience down to a single, straight forward call-to-action in the app’s name seemed like a good bet.

We used “ask” initially because it fit the bill, even though we knew by using it that we were risking an invitation for questions unrelated to content—”ask” about bathrooms, directions, restaurants near by—particularly when we put the word all over the place, on buttons, hats, signs, writ large in our lobby.

Although “ask” is a specific kind of invitation, we’re finding that the first prompt displayed on screen once users hit “get started” is really doing the heavy lifting in terms of shaping the experience. It’s from this initial exchange that the conversation can grow. Our initial prompt has been: “What work of art are you looking at right now?” This prompt gets people looking at art immediately, which helps keep the focus on content. We’re in the middle of testing this, but we’re finding that a specific call-to-action like this is compelling, gets people using the app quickly and easily, and keeps the focus on art.

Some of the questions visitors have about art are easily answered by a quick google search. Other questions are much bigger or more complex. What kinds of questions are testers asking with ASK?

It’s so funny you say that because we often talk about the ASK experience specifically in terms of not being a human version of Google. So it’s actually not only about the questions we are asked, but the ways we respond that open dialogue and get people looking more closely at the art. That being said, we get all kinds of questions—details in the works, about the artist, why the work is in the Museum, etc. It really runs the gamut. One of the things we’ve noticed lately is people asking about things not in the collection at all—like the chandelier that hangs in our Beaux-Arts Court or the painted ceiling (a design element) in our Egypt Reborn gallery.

Visitors’ questions in ASK are answered by a team of interpretative experts. Do single visitors build a relationship with a given expert over their visit, or are different questions answered by different people? Does it seem to matter to the visitors or to the experience?

The questions come into a general queue that’s displayed on a dashboard that the ASK team uses. Any of the members of the team can answer, pass questions to each other, etc. Early testers told us it didn’t matter to them who was answering the questions, only the quality of the answer. Some could tell that the tone would change from person to person, but it didn’t bother them.

We just implemented a feature that indicates when a team member is responding. Similar to the three dots you see in iMessage when someone on the other end is typing, but our implementation is similar to what happens in gchat and the app displays “[team member first name] is typing.” In implementing the feature this way, we want to continually bring home the fact that the visitor is exchanging messages with a real person on the other end (not an automated system). Now that we’ve introduced names, it may change expectations that visitors have about hearing from the same person or, possibly, wanting to know more about who is answering. This will be part of our next set of testing.

The back-of-house changes required to make ASK possible are huge: new staff, new workflows, new ways of relating to visitors. What has most surprised you through this process?

This process has been a learning experience at every point... and not just for us. As you note, we’re asking a lot of our colleagues too. The most aggressive change is more about process than product. We adopted an agile planning approach, which calls for rapid-fire pilot projects. This planning process is a completely new way of doing business and we have really up-ended workflows, pushing things through at a pace that’s unheard of here (and likely many other museums). One of the biggest surprises has been not only how much folks are willing to go-with-the-flow, but how this project has helped shape what is considered possible.

In our initial planning stages, we would go into meetings to explain the nature of agile and how this would unfold and I think many of our colleagues didn’t believe us. We were talking about planning and executing a pilot project in a six-week time span—absolutely unreal.

The first one or two were a little tough, not because folks weren’t willing to try, but because we were fighting against existing workflows and timelines that moved at a comparatively glacial pace. The more pilots we ran and the more times we stepped outside the existing system (with the help of colleagues), the easier it became. At some point, I think there was a shift from “oh, Shelley and Sara are at it again” to “gee, this is really possible in this timeframe.”

After two years of running rapid pilots and continuing to push our colleagues (we’re surprised they’re still speaking to us sometimes!), we’ve noticed other staff members questioning why projects take as long as they do and if there’s a better way to plan and execute things. That’s not to say that they weren’t already having these thoughts, but ASK is something that can be pointed to as an example of executing project—on a large scale and over time—in a more nimble way. That’s an unexpected and awesome legacy.

Thanks so much to Shelley and Sara for sharing their thoughts on ASK. What do you want to ask them? They will be reading and responding to comments here, and if you are excited by this project, please check out their blog for a lot more specifics. If you are reading this by email and would like to post a comment, please join the conversation here.