Three Business Books that Deliver on Organizational Change and Leadership

Have you ever picked up an intriguing-looking business book, started to read it, and then realized it's just one five-page article's worth of content spread out over 300 pages?

Maybe I'm unlucky or a bad chooser, but I've encountered whole shelves of one-horse fluff and drivel. It gives the gems a bad name.

But! Here are three great books that have stuck with me. I found each really helpful in navigating an aspect of organizational change and leadership.

• Nonprofit Lifecycles: Stage-Based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity by Susan Kenny Stevens. This slim book provides cogent and insightful analysis of organizational evolution from startup to growth to maturity to decline to turnaround (hopefully). I have used this book in many ways over the past few years: to diagnose and understand an organization that was new to me, to plan for the future, and now, to relearn the needs and abilities of my organization as it moves out of turnaround and into growth. These 130 pages have a magical quality; I keep finding more in them. I didn't know what "capacity building" meant when I first picked up this book. I still don't entirely. But I do know that this book keeps helping me learn and grow... and that's about as good a definition as I've got at this point.
• The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. I've been recommending this book to many friends and colleagues recently as they take on new leadership roles. Unlike the other two books on this list, this book is more about the individual in the organization than the organization itself. I found it to be incredibly helpful when I was preparing for and then taking on an executive director role, but it can be useful for anyone taking on a new role who wants to do so mindfully and successfully. This book uses the classic business book formula--pithy missives mixed with diverse examples--but it does so really, really well. The thing it does best is help you think about how to strategically plan out not just what you will do at work but who you will be, and how you can construct your position, relationships, and roles intentionally instead of having them "happen" to you.
• The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni. I picked up this book on a whim at the beginning of the year based on the fact that Fractured Atlas, an organization I admire, was using it to guide their work. Like The First 90 Days, The Advantage employs a classic business book formula. But instead of focusing on individual leadership, this book focuses on organizational culture. I'm not sure I completely buy Lencioni's big idea, but the content is solid and useful--regardless of what trumps what. For us at the MAH, this book has been helpful as we shift from a startup culture of change and experimentation into a growth culture of strengthening and deepening our work. We are using approaches from The Advantage to write meaningful organizational values, infuse those into our hiring, onboarding and performance review processes, and protect and cultivate the unique aspects of our interpersonal culture that make us thrive. 

Now, I'm hunting for truly great books about moving from startup to growth/mature operations while maintaining energy, collaborative spirit, and creativity. I'm personally struggling with this a bit and would love your recommendations of books that can help in thinking about how to add structure in a way that supports and builds with minimal ossification.

What kinds of books would help you most in your work? What books would you recommend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple other scheduled events I recommend:

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

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

Quick Hit: Last Week to Apply for MuseumCamp... and Summer Internships at MAH

Dreaming of a summer filled with learning, community engagement, and sea lions? Time to stop dreaming and start doing.

This is the last week to apply for MuseumCamp 2014, a professional development experience in which diverse people from the arts, community activism, and social services will measure the immeasurable together. Our focus is on assessing social impact in communities, and we will encourage teams to look at complex outcomes--like safety, cohesion, compassion, and identity--that are not commonly covered in standard evaluative practices. We will do this by defining impacts of interest, identifying indicators of those impacts, developing creative ways to measure the indicators, actually doing the measurements, and reporting on the results. And we'll do this all in three days on July 30-August 2, 2014 in Santa Cruz, CA. The application period closes Friday, February 28... so get on it.

And, if you want to join us in Santa Cruz for more professional hijinks, consider an internship at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. These internships all run from June 25 - Aug 26. There are seven different types available, and you are welcome to apply for more than one. Special additions this year include:

• MuseumCamp internship. Bring out your closet camp director and help coordinate this killer professional development event.
• Community Engagement internship. We're expanding our engagement with Latino families in our community, and we want your help with our first partnership in a multi-year effort.
• Guerrilla Marketing internship. Want to cover the town in paper flowers with our street team? Yes you can.

All of these internships are unpaid. I know that is controversial, and believe me--we are well aware of the complexity of the issue. We offer unpaid internships for three reasons:

1. We prefer to focus on developing paid opportunities for people who are in our community and can be a part of the museum for a long time. We have been slowly expanding paid entry-level positions here with a focus on local people from diverse backgrounds. We are also expanding paid opportunities for local artists. When we really thought about the options when it came to incremental dollars, we chose to spend them locally in this way.
2. The demand is very high. We get many, many solicitations from people who would like to come intern, shadow, volunteer, etc. 
3. We provide interns with opportunities to do real projects that (we think) they can't do anywhere else. We support our interns and their future careers both with the experiences they have here and relationships that stretch on after they leave. We feel strongly that we are following the requirement that unpaid interns get more than they give... though we prefer to think about it as a situation with shared benefits and sacrifices.

If you want to know more about what the intern experience is like at the MAH, check out their blog on Tumblr.

And finally, if you'll be at the California Association of Museums conference next week and you want to get together, please let me know.

What Tools Do You Use to Organize Your Work?

One of the benefits of being Jewish is the opportunity to work over the Christmas week in peace. It is the most focused time of the year for me--a great time to close out projects and prepare for the new year. For me, the end of 2013 coincided with a clear need to improve my general approach to list-making, task-recording, and note-taking. In 2013, I found myself constantly shaking my notebook and hoping that the needed bit of information would drop out. Until I figure out how to turn a notebook into a magic deck of cards--or at least embed a Command-F function into it--I need a better system.

There's a whole industry of tools and tips for getting things done, and I don't intend to add this blog to that empire. But I figure that we all have come up with tools that help us, both individually and in teams, to organize our work. I wanted to open up this post to your favorite approaches, especially simple things that don't require specialized software etc.

Here are five things I've started doing in 2014 that seem to be working:

1. Added a Today list to my to-dos. I've always had a long task list on my desktop. I used to separate the list into two parts: "This Week" and specific projects. I almost exclusively worked from the This Week list, but it rarely got shorter and it became clear over time that some things on This Week were actually more like This Century. So I've added just one simple component to this list system: a list at the top called "Today." In the morning, first thing when I come in, I move things from This Week to Today and also add other things. I try to truly only include things I think I can accomplish that day, being mindful of my calendar. My rule of thumb is that I should be able to close out the Today list by noon. This means that most days, I finish the Today list, feel good about that accomplishment, and feel ready to "pull up" something from This Week to work on later in the day. I'm amazed at how This Week is getting smaller, even as new projects continue to come up.
2. Blocking time on my calendar to work on projects. My calendar tends to be quite open a few weeks out, but totally packed within the next fourteen days. If it doesn't get calendared, it will get squeezed out. I had blocked time for grant proposals in the past but now have expanded this practice to other work that requires concentrated blocks of time.
3. Separated Tasks from Notes. My notebook used to have both tasks and notes, which made it a mix of big ideas and time-limited, potentially trivial activities. Now, I use the notebook strictly for notes, and I use a mixture of my digital task list and scrap paper for task lists.
4. Added a Table of Contents to my new notebook. This meant doing two things: numbering the pages and leaving a few blank in the front for the Table of Contents. I'm sure I could do this better, but for now, I just put a couple of big ongoing project headings in the Table of Contents and started marking pages on which notes for those projects occur.
5. Started using Follow Up Then. OK, this is a piece of software, but it's free and super-easy to use. FollowUpThen is a system that allows you to forward any email to yourself at a time in the future ("monday" or "march2" or "2pm"). The email will pop up in your inbox at the designated time. I use this tool to clear my inbox of things that I need to follow up on eventually but not now. I get a couple hundred emails each day, and this allows me to focus on what I need to do and not waste time scanning my inbox and re-acquainting myself with things I guiltily feel that I should do. When something pops up from FollowUpThen, I know it's something I should consider to be on my "Today" list.

What do you use to lasso your tasks, goals, and dreams?

Quick Hit: Upcoming Talks on Leading Change

Let's say you want to transform an organization. What's more effective: drastic change with incremental progress towards that new vision, or incremental change that builds a new vision?

I'm prepping for a week of talks to museum, zoo, and library folk, and this is the question that is driving some of what I plan to share. Note: if you are in NYC area or Toronto, I have FREE talks in each - see bottom of this post for details. Preparing talks is always a great opportunity to reframe my thinking about what's going on in my work and how it might be relevant to others. And this time, since a couple of the talks I'm giving are explicitly for directors, I'm thinking about leadership and institutional change.

In thinking about some of the changes that have happened at our museum in Santa Cruz, I've realized that they were predicated on setting a clear, big vision first, and then incrementally moving towards that goal. When I write it down, that sounds like a pretty obvious approach. But change doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes there's a new direction but not a known destination. Sometimes an organization noodles with change in many areas and finds itself wobbling into a new place entirely.

Here's my hypothesis: while a top-down approach may seem autocratic, it can be incredibly inclusive and democratic in implementation. When there is a very clear, explicit vision and goals, many people across an organization can become leaders in the change. When the vision is clouded or the goals uncertain, you are stuck with a "I know it when I see it" approach to change that may leave people frustrated or mystified as to how they can make a difference.

I'm struggling with this now as we embark on our next phase as an organization--one with more distributed leadership. That distribution hopefully means more collective ownership. But if we don't do it right, it could also possibly mean more confusion, and, paradoxically, less participation.

I remember talking with a director of a large public radio station about many innovative things happening at his organization. "But you know," he said, "when I'm really honest, I realize that most of these ideas ultimately come from my desk." When I heard that, I wondered if everyone in his organization knew what his vision was for tremendous work. I wondered if he was articulating it clearly enough for others to bring brilliant ideas forward. I wondered what I could do to avoid that kind of feeling.

When I see projects at my museum that I'm proud of, more often than not they are things I have very little to do with directly. They are projects led by staff members, volunteers, and collaborators who are infused with our vision. They can make magic and scale up our impact because they know what we are trying to achieve and they want to be part of it.

So I'm planning to use these talks to encourage people--especially directors--to articulate clear, powerful visions. To fight for those visions, support people who want to further them, and protect those people from detractors. I'm not sure this is the best way to lead institutional change. But it's a way that has allowed our work to get out into our community quickly and powerfully, often without having to touch my desk at all.


If you happen to be in New York/New Jersey or Toronto, I will be speaking:

• JERSEY: Monday January 27 at Seton Hall at 7pm in the Walsh Library, Beck Rooms. I don't really know where that is, but I'm sure we can all figure it out. No RSVP required.
• TORONTO: Thursday January 30 at the Textile Museum from 4-6pm. This is a more informal talk/dialogue. They can only fit 70 people, so you must RSVP to programs@textilemuseum.ca

I look forward to traveling, speaking, and learning with you in the next week.

Join us for Museum Camp 2014 on Social Impact Assessment

What is the change you hope your work effects in your community? Igniting compassion? Building a more creative workforce? Bridging cultural differences?

We all have aspirational social impact goals for our organizations. These goals are expressed in mission and vision statements. They are hinted at in fundraising letters. They are stewing in our guts when we wake up to get to work.

But how do we measure them? How do we know if our work leads to an increase in compassion, or unity, or creativity? How can we learn from our successes and failures and adapt our work to increase impact?

These are the questions that underpin Museum Camp 2014, a professional development experience in which diverse people from the arts, community activism, and social services will measure the immeasurable together. Our focus is on social impact in communities, and we will encourage teams to look at complex outcomes--like safety, cohesion, compassion, and identity--that are not commonly covered in our standard evaluative practices. We will do this by defining impacts of interest, identifying indicators of those impacts, developing creative ways to measure the indicators, actually doing the measurements, and reporting on the results. And we'll do this all in three days on July 30-August 2, 2014 in Santa Cruz, CA.

This is the second year that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) is hosting Museum Camp. Last year, the focus was on risk-taking in exhibition design. This year, the focus is social impact assessment. While the topics and the participants are entirely different, the core format is the same: three days, small teams of people from diverse backgrounds, intense learning, doing, and playing in a collaborative environment. It's summer camp for adults, 'smores included.

Because we at the MAH are not experts in this social impact assessment, we are working with smart researchers and evaluators from the arts, social services, academia, and social justice organizations to make this camp happen. We are co-presenting Museum Camp with Fractured Atlas, an organization that inspires me for their thoughtful approach to making art measurable and meaningful. Ian David Moss, Fractured Atlas's Research Director (and the rockstar behind the Createquity blog) and I are working together to develop the camp content and recruit brilliant counselors to support the process. This is the beginning of a couple partnerships between Fractured Atlas and the MAH, and I am PSYCHED to work with and learn from Ian and their crew. We also have some great counselors onboard from United Way, WolfBrown, and Animating Democracy@Americans for the Arts (and more to come).

If you are interested in applying to attend camp, please check out the site and fill out an application today. We will accept applications through February 28 and inform people of our selections in early March. Space is extremely limited, so I encourage you to apply soon.

We are particularly interested in applications from people who are NOT in the arts or museums. Last year, many campers felt that the best part of the experience was the diversity of people in the camp. The strength of our experience together is partly based on the opportunity to come together across different disciplines and perspectives, and we want to continue pushing for that. So please, spread the word--and if you have a friend who you think would love this, encourage them to apply.

Guest Post: A Shared Ethics for Museum Internships

Is your museum running on interns? In this guest post, CUNY lecturer and former manager of the Guggenheim Internship program Michelle Millar Fisher makes a passionate argument for the end of unpaid internships. It is a strong, museum-focused complement to an excellent three-parter on Fractured Atlas about the ethics and future of unpaid arts internships. 

One of the most poignant signs I saw waved during the Occupy Movement was held by a young woman who politely advised The System to "F**k your free internships." Free intern labor wasn't ever right, but it has become glaringly unethical in the current post-Lehman-crash era. That protest placard highlighted the unpaid internship as a simultaneous symptom and result of badly broken political and social systems.

If you're reading this at work, you're probably reading it within ten feet of an unpaid intern. It's probably a path you had to navigate too. There's a sense of "it worked for me...." And it does - it did work for me. I got my first real job in a museum (at the Guggenheim) after a life-changing internship. My supervisor was amazing, caring, and supportive. I worked so hard in those three unpaid months that I made myself indispensable and jumped ship from my home country (Scotland) and came to New York. My whole career path has been positively changed by that one internship experience.

However, my experience was an exception to the rule that internships increasingly prove: free labor contributes to the growing inequities of the non-profit labor system. Issues of class and economic status haunt the museum internship. You have to be able to afford to work for free in order to take an internship that will help you onto the career ladder. There are certainly excellent programs that try to circumvent this stereotype, and there are stipends to be had in some museums, but they are far from the norm.

My experience was exceptional for one simple reason: my internship at the Guggenheim was the only unpaid internship I ever did. It was the only one I could afford to do. It was made possible by a small, unexpected windfall. If I hadn't had the windfall, it's highly unlikely that as a first-gen college attendee I would have been exposed to the other opportunities it afforded me. (I have somewhat of a "control" in this social experiment in that my talented sister has plied a similar path to me, but was unable to afford the opportunity of one unpaid internship at a museum. Even though she worked just as hard as I did, it took her five years longer to get her foot on the arts employment ladder than it did for me.)

I have done my very fair share of perpetuating the cycle of unpaid internships. As an Associate Manager of Education, I coordinated internships at the Guggenheim museum for four years before I headed back to academia. I expanded the program from around seventy-five interns per year to over one hundred and thirty in almost every department of the museum. I loved my job, and I think many of the interns had amazing experiences at the museum because we tried to take care of them, introduce them to arts networks through a rich weekly seminar program, and encouraged supervisors to be the best mentors they could. But now, as I counsel my university students, I feel it unethical to recommend the same path I took. I have taken a firm stand. I will not forward unpaid internship postings that come my way and actively respond to the senders, even when I know them well as colleagues: “This is not ethical!”

Is unpaid participation in the life and operations of a museum always a bad thing? No. Are the worst offenders larger museums who know they can get away with asking people to work for free? Yes. Is it unethical to ask college juniors and seniors, graduate students, and recently qualified degree holders to undertake multiple free internships? Absolutely. Making small changes and offering some kind of basic compensation for interns in the arts would benefit us all. If the lowest wage on the ladder is zero, entry-level wages don't have to be much higher, and this affects the whole pay scale for the majority of those who work in non-director positions.

Would some form of universal museum internship standard mitigate this? How about a national Museum Internship Ethics Charter that would make three core promises to any museum intern:

1. a stipend 
2. a clear written statement of expectations given at the beginning of their internship 
3. a final face-to-face evaluation with the internship mentor at the end of the internship 

I'm constantly surprised at how many students I speak with, even those who are working for college credit where this is meant to be regulated, do not receive any of these three components. A shared ethics on the subject of internships means a shared ethics for human resources in museum more generally. This type of shared ethics can only be a positive thing for both individuals at all levels, and the institution - and thus its visitors. Happy employees (yes, even interns!) mean greater productivity, creativity, and accountability.

 The students I teach in undergrad classrooms in New York are about a decade younger than me. They're the Internship Generation. The more I am faced with their predicament when they ask me about how to balance work experience that won't pay them with study and (especially at the city college where I teach) the jobs that are paying their tuition, or to write them letters of recommendation for unpaid labor, the more uncomfortable I have become.

How could we all better address this issue? Could museum managers agree to hire interns who need the work experience rather than those with a resume already the length of the Nile? Could they agree to put aside a small part of their yearly budget to compensate interns in some way? Could university instructors (especially those with tenure and a voice) steer their interns in the direction of paid opportunities, and campaign within their own departments to end the cycle of internships for credit? Could we all agree to a universal standard under the auspices of a body like the AAM? Are there already internship models out there that do this that we could learn from and offer as examples?

I'm truly interested in any discussion and feedback on this topic, and taking sustained action. I want to do better for my students, and to participate in the rethinking of a broken model I have helped to perpetuate.

What's your vision for the future of internships? Share your thoughts with Michelle and the Museum 2.0 community in the comments.

Come Work With Us at MAH as School Programs Coordinator

I know, I know. Any job with the word “coordinator” in it sounds like you might spend your time sorting socks into pairs. But this job is really important to the future of our museum, and I’m hoping that you or someone you know might be a great fit for it.

We are hiring for a School Programs Coordinator to wrangle the 3,500+ students and their teachers who come to the museum every year for a tour and hands-on experience in our art and history exhibitions. While we used to have a Director of Education who managed this, we’ve recently restructured our Community Programs department to have a Youth Programs Manager (the brilliant Emily Hope Dobkin), who oversees all experiences that visitors 2-18 have with the museum. School programs fall within this landscape, and our goal is not to see them as completely separate from the other work we do with youth—Kid Happy Hour, family festivals, teen program—but on a continuum. In this role, you will be the thoughtful, creative, detail-oriented lead who thinks about how school groups fit into the bigger ecosystem of youth experiences at the MAH and develops and implements them accordingly.

This job involves administrative management of all things school tours as well as collaboration with a diverse group of volunteer docents and education interns. Because 30% of the students in our school district are English language learners (and the majority of those, Latino), we are seeking someone who is bilingual and able to communicate comfortably with kids and adults in Spanish.

We see this job as a starting point for someone who is cheerfully obsessed with the future of museum education. Like most museums, we’re facing some big questions when it comes to the future of school programs:

• Buses aren’t cheap, and teachers are increasingly stressed about “proving” the value of expensive field trips away from the classroom. Our school visit numbers have risen over the past few years, but we also hear a lot from teachers about this tension, especially when the teacher is trying to justify an art tour. How should we think about the role of onsite museum experiences in future educational partnerships? 
• Many families in our area have opted into non-traditional school and educational formats, especially homeschooling. What kinds of programs should we consider providing for these groups? 
• Not all learning happens in school. How should we think about the balance between formal programs for school groups and youth-centered programs that happen after or outside of school? 
• We are an interdisciplinary institution that focuses on igniting “unexpected connections.” How can we create school tours that reflect the diversity and interconnectedness of creativity and culture without completely confusing teachers? 
• We are an institution that focuses on “shared experiences” and social bridging amongst diverse groups. Most school tours are for intact groups—a single class or grade. How can we develop programming that encourages students to make connections with kids of other ages or from other parts of our County? 
• We care deeply about participatory experiences in which visitors have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to large-scale collaborative projects. How can we invite students to collaborate with us the way we do with community partners and visitors? 
• We are transforming our history gallery to be a more dynamic platform for civic engagement. How will this affect our school programs and our work with teachers? 

If these questions excite you, I hope you will consider applying. The application period closes on Monday, July 29.

Hack the Museum Camp Part 2: Making Magic, Reality TV, and Risk as a Red Herring

We did it. Last week, my museum hosted Hack the Museum Camp, a 2.5 day adventure in which teams of adults--75 people, of whom about half are museum professionals, half creative folks of various stripes--developed an experimental exhibition around our permanent collection in our largest gallery.

We now have a painting hanging from the ceiling that you can lie under and experience in 3D. We have a gravestone with a Ouija board in front of it so you can commune with its owner. We have a sculpture in its crate/prison cell, unwrapped and unexhibited since its acquisition thirty years ago.

We also have 75 new friends, slightly bleary from the experience, which felt like one part intense work project, one part marathon, one part hallucinogenic love-in.

I'm not going to write too much about the process here--please check out Paul Orselli's blog post for his perspective as a counselor, Sarah Margusen's Pinterest board for her perspective as a camper, or Georgia Perry's article for the Santa Cruz Weekly, which provides an outsider's view on the process. You can also see a ton of photos on Instagram, and I highly recommend the Confessional Tent videos for sheer silliness (more on those below).

Here's what I got out of Hack the Museum Camp.

It is amazing to actually DO things with colleagues in professional development situations instead of just talking. In 2009, after we hosted the Creativity and Collaboration retreat, I wrote a post about ditching "conferences" for "camp" experiences. Four years later, my appetite for these kinds of experiences hasn't changed. It felt great to once again be working with people--brainstorming exhibit challenges, editing label text, even just messing around on the player piano together. As a floating camp director, I got the best of this (interaction with all the campers) and the worst (no intense team time). I felt lucky to be able to dip into the various project teams, though that also gave me a completely aberrant perspective on camp. I was impressed by the extent to which the teams seemed to gel and people appeared, for the most part, to be happy spending the majority of their time here with a small group of teammates. There's always a balancing act between team project time and everybody time. If we do this again, I think we will swing towards a bit more everybody time so people could learn from more of the diverse and fabulous campers who were here.

I was surprised by the extent to which reality TV culture imprinted on the experience. People talked about the camp as Project Runway for museums. I'd give a team feedback and they said it was like Tim Gunn had blessed their project. As a forest-dwelling hippie, I know very little about reality TV, but it's clear that the model of "do an ambitious, wacky project really fast" is now tied closely to a slew of shows about everything from cooking to art-making. There were some ways we deliberately played with this--MAH staff member Elise Granata created an ingenious Confessional Tent where campers could make hilarious first-person videos about their experience--but there were other ways it really surprised me. Teams were more intense than I anticipated. Every team completed an exhibit in the time allotted. I assumed that at least one team would fizzle out, erupt, or just decide not to fully engage. Instead, everyone was focused and intent on creating something fabulous. I'm not sure how much reality TV affected this, but it was clear that people had internalized the "rules" of camp and were ready to play, and play hard. This mindset also impacted perception of everyone's roles in the camp. While it was completely hilarious to hear that "this is not Nina Simon best friend camp," it was also a little sad to realize that in the framework of something like reality TV, the camp director doesn't get to really jump in in an authentic, casual way with campers--I was expected to play the host role.

Diversity isn't just nice to have--it's fabulous. We selected our campers from a fairly large pool of applicants; about 1/3 of those who applied were invited to attend. During the selection process, we prioritized diversity--of experience, of geography, of gender, of perspective. Then, when we put together teams, we again tried to break people up such that every team would have a blend of individuals across several axes. Several campers commented to me that their favorite part of camp was the diversity of the campers' backgrounds and frameworks. If we were to do this again, I would ask one additional question of applicants: age. We had a good mix of people in their 20s-50s with a smattering of outliers, but it was clear that the most effective teams had age diversity within a team itself. Many of the oldest campers were "counselors"--seasoned exhibit designers I've known and respected for a long time--and we didn't have enough counselors for every team to have one. I'm not sure how important it is for every team to have a designated counselor--interestingly, in early feedback, many campers wanted leadership whereas counselors wished there had been a more even playing field. I do think that no matter what, it is valuable for every team to have a mix of ages and experiences.

The idea of "risk" is often a red herring. This was probably the biggest surprise for me - yet it shouldn't have been. We framed this entire experience around "creative risk-taking." Throughout the camp, I pushed teams to make sure that their projects truly challenged traditional museum practice. While this probably did inspire some teams to do some weird and wonderful things, it was also problematic for two reasons:

• For campers who are not in the museum field, it was confusing. Everyone's definition of risk is different, and while museum professionals may share a common language around the topic, that commonality breaks down when you involve artists and technologists and game designers and performers. The whole point of bringing in non-museum professionals was to expand the dialogue around what is possible, and in some ways, the "risk" framing limited those possibilities.
• More importantly, I've discovered again and again that when you are actually doing what others categorize as risky, it doesn't feel like risk at all. When I hosted a panel on risk-taking at AAM in 2011, all of the panelists agreed that we don't see our work as "risky"--we just see it as the work we are compelled to do (scroll down to the second part of this post). Once each team got into their projects, they were just cranking to make it happen. Sure, they might have decided to present an art object in a confrontational and opinionated way. Or they might have chosen to make up a fictitious narrative around history artifacts. Those are risky decisions in the broader museum context. But in the context of Hack the Museum Camp, they were just the starting points for projects. I wish we had focused more on a theme like "make an exhibit that is completely delightful and surprising" and less on "make an exhibit that takes a risk."

On the other hand, it was also empowering for some campers to experience how doing things that are "against the rules" can generate really wonderful levels of creative output. I know that our staff and members are really excited and energized by the exhibition that this camp created. We'll open the exhibition formally to the public this Friday, but already, we've had great response from donors and visitors who have wandered through. Yes, the exhibition is chaotic. But it is also full of surprises and vitality, and it showcases a very wide palate of approaches to collection objects. While the timing isn't great given my upcoming maternity/blog leave, I'll try to write a post at the end of the exhibition run sharing some of the reactions to the exhibition itself from visitors.

What questions do you have about camp? What would (or wouldn't) make you want to participate in something like this? I also encourage campers and counselors to share comments here, though I know that you represent a tiny subset of the folks reading this.

In closing, a quote from one camper's evaluation of the experience:

I like to say that if I am not afraid every day, then it is time to move on to another job. There were several moments during camp when I was felt a surge of anxiety, trepidiation, self-doubt. What is amazing about being with such a great group of people, is that they carry you through it. ... By the end of this week I will probably forget the sound of the player piano, the feel of the hard floor, or the carpal tunnel setting in my fingers. But I won't forget the many individuals who were so generous and tenacious; so honest and proud.

Thanks for all the memories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AAM 2013: Let's Talk in Baltimore

I'm heading to the American Alliance of Museums' annual conference this weekend, and I'm psyched to reconnect with friends and mentors and meet new people who can inspire and stimulate fresh ideas.

This year, I'm involved in two sessions:

Tuesday, May 21, 10:15AM in Room 309 - Success: What Does it Look Like?
This session wil feature varied perspectives on what it means for a museum to be successful from a longtime museum planning consultant (John Jacobsen of White Oak), a director whose museum pushes for environmental stewardship (Stephanie Ratcliffe of the Wild Center), a director whose museum is a beacon of community activism and creativity (Jane Werner of the Pittsburgh Children's Museum), and me. It will be hosted by Eric Siegel, chief content officer at the New York Hall of Science and consummate rabble-rouser. Rapid-fire presentations followed by honest conversation. Join us.

Wednesday, May 22, 10:15AM in Room 322 - On the Edge: A Talk Show about Risk and Reward
Kathleen McLean and I are back again to host a freewheeling talk show in which we chat with unusual guests and terrific audience members--this year, on the topic of risk-taking and its attendant rewards and perils. This year's guests include Ian David Moss of Createquity fame along with museum folks who have thrived and suffered because of the risks they've taken. This session has been so rowdy in the past that this year they dropped my name from the program in hopes it would calm the crowds. No, really. I'll be there, even though the printed program doesn't say so. And we'll be just as loud as usual.

I'm also hoping while in Baltimore to have conversations to explore a few of these topics:

• Social bridging: how to design for it, how to assess it, who it works for, who it doesn't.
• Hybridizing programs and exhibitions. How can we look at "experiences" across space and time instead of separating place- and event-based projects?
• Developing transparent formats for exhibition proposals from outside. How can we invite in new ideas and link them clearly with our institutional goals?
• Small-scale evaluation for non-professionals. How can small museums with limited resources do some meaningful research with our staff and volunteers?
• Supporting staff in a time of growth. Growth feels exciting and fabulous, but it's also tiring. We have a strong innovative team right now, and there are some particular issues that come up because of the high energy, creativity, and drive in the office.
• Creating spaces in the museum for open exploration of the behind-the-scenes. Permanent prototyping, museum inside out, working in public spaces.

If you're interested in exploring any of these topics next week in Baltimore, let's do it. I don't care what type of institution you are from or what your experience is, or even if you are attending the conference. I just care about having good conversations and learning from each other. Monday afternoon is looking particularly open for some meaty chats. Let me know.

And FYI, we will soon be opening a full-time Education Associate job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. If you want to talk briefly about job/internship opportunities at AAM, I'm up for that too.

How I Learned to Think about Marketing/PR Differently, and a Job Opportunity

We just posted a part-time position at my museum for a Community Engagement/Marketing Associate. This is a big step for us, not because we haven't had a dedicated marketing person for a long time, but more because I wasn't sure we would ever want or need one. But several experiences and smart people have changed my perspective on this, and that's what this post is about.

Does a Small Museum Really Need a Marketing Person?

For a long time, I was super skeptical about marketing and public relations professionals. At their worst, they seem like self-deluded cheerleaders for their organization/cause/event, wielding exclamation points instead of analytical rigor. I've had bad direct experiences with high-priced PR firms that are slaves to antiquated promotion calendars. I love Trevor Donnell's brilliant book and blog, Marketing the Arts to Death, in which he documents the disasters caused by our inability to be audience- and data-driven in our marketing efforts.

So I assumed we didn't want a marketing person, or at least, not THAT kind of marketing person. At our museum, we distribute marketing tasks--some with our membership director, our programs staff, and our visitor services staff. The people who produce the programming or who have the relationships produce the messaging, so the conversations are authentic and personal. Curators and front desk staff blog about their interactions with objects and visitors. Program staff invent guerrilla marketing techniques, run the photobooths and program evaluations, and send out the follow-up emails.  As director, I post, tweet, and talk with visitors along with the rest of my team.

For a long time, I thought this was the best approach. It allows us all to be involved in promoting and documenting experiences at the museum. It cuts out the middleman--when someone from the press wanted to know more about an event, they talk to that event producer. It invites spontaneity and diversity of voice on a range of social media outlets, from Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest to Instagram. And it cultivates authentic relationships between staff members and the awesome community members who can make our museum better.

But then, a few things happened. We started...

• to see the limits of our distributed approach to marketing. We sometimes lose track of the big goals that should underline all of our promotion, and we don't spend the time to develop and refine those goals based on research. Our programs staff are overtaxed and spending a lot of time putting together materials to promote their events. We rarely get the chance to go deeper or follow up when creative opportunities arise. No one has time to analyze the results of our approaches when it comes to what is and isn't working. In other words, we're getting tasks done, and we're doing it creatively, but no one is steering the bus... and thus, we're not learning and adapting as much as we could. 
• imagining possibilities that no one "owns" currently. Our programming and exhibitions staff work with visitors to co-create a huge amount of stuff--from giant yarn-bomb sculptures to funny breakup stories. We don't "do" much with this content currently. We'll post a few stories on Facebook, share photos, and of course, let visitors take things home with them. But we started imagining a person who could focus a bit on these collaborations and say--hey, let's turn those stories into a funny little book, or let's make sure the local radio station knows we're capturing people's bird sounds and get them in on it. Recently, Alpo hosted a block party in Santa Cruz inspired by a guy who came to our Wearable Art Ball in a costume made from dog food bags... but we didn't have anyone to get the museum involved in the followup. We produce a lot of "wasted" media here with our visitors, and with a bit of tweaking, it could become something really amazing and shareable.
• realizing that there are community-based organizations that do marketing really, really well. Only they don't call it marketing. They call it advocacy. I got so many emails over the past year from political and cause-based groups that are super-smart about how they build movements and inspire participation. They do constant A/B testing to understand what is and isn't working. And they are driven by a passion not just to advance their cause but to do so by increasing the engagement and involvement of collaborators and supporters. That sounds a lot more like what we want to focus on at our museum than selling tickets.
• meeting people in arts marketing who changed my perspective. My favorite new conference  in 2012 was the National Arts Marketing Project in November. I went into it pretty nervous--how would a group of marketers respond to my talk about active audience participation, inclusion, and social change? Turns out they were the MOST engaged, the most thoughtful... and in their other sessions, having really interesting conversations about experimental projects, diversifying constituents, the neuroscience of choice, and the ethics of pricing. It made me think that this kind of person could help our organization if we could articulate the position properly. And smart people I met there, like Clay Lord, helped me think that through.

And so we came up with a job for a person who is part marketing/PR task-master, part journalist/media-maker, part community organizer. We made research and creative collaboration key parts of the job description. I'm excited to see what comes of it, and if this sounds like you, by all means, please apply.

Three Exhibition-Related Opportunities in 2013

The year is ending, and I have three exciting opportunities to share with you if you are an exhibition-oriented individual, or someone with an interest in the indoor side of creative placemaking.

1. Join our team. We're looking for an Exhibitions Manager to join our team here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. In this full-time role, you will be responsible for interactive exhibition development, project management of all our site-specific work, and you will lead the redevelopment of our permanent History Gallery into a more dynamic, participatory, and flexible space. This is a highly collaborative role, and we are looking for the perfect blend of strong design skills with a generous enthusiasm for amateur and professional co-creation. Please check out the full description and how to apply if you are interested. 
2. Come to Camp. You Can't Do That in Museums Camp is filling up. Next week, I will be reviewing applications for this event and making decisions. If you are interested, please apply soon! This camp will be a 2.5 day event in July of 2013 at which participants work in teams to create an exhibition full of intriguing, unusual, risky experiences. If you've ever wanted to design an object-based exhibit that really pushed the boundaries, this is the event for you. You do not have to be a museum professional to be part of this--we'd like a diverse mix of participants. Registration will be $150 and by application only. 
3. Join the conversation. Spurred partly by the most recent (and fabulous) issue of the Exhibitionist and conversations we're having at our museum, I'd like to hear your reflections on how you think about exhibition formats and schedules. We're toying here with switching from a format where we change all of our exhibitions four times per year to something more flexible throughout the building. I'm curious what has worked or been challenging at other museums, especially small and mid-sized ones, when it comes to both frequency of exhibition changes and the approach. Some of the big questions on my mind include:

• If we change exhibitions more frequently, will it drive more repeat visitation? Will it give a sense of energy and change? 
• What do we lose in quality and ability to create complex work if we rotate more frequently?
• Would it work to create an infrastructure for exhibitions that are flexible, inviting changing insertions and shifts, but don't rotate entirely? Would visitors "read" that as new content, or would the visual similarities make it seem like same old same old?
• What if we slowed down and changed some spaces less frequently--like once a year? What opportunities might that open up for participatory and community projects that evolve over time in the space?

If you have thoughts on any of these questions or want to share the story of how you approach exhibition rotation and formats, please share a comment!

And if you know anyone who should be at Camp or should apply for the job, please pass this on.

Four Unusual Professional Development Events in 2013

Ever wish for a low-cost, energizing professional development experience where you can work intensely with diverse colleagues in a risk-tolerant environment?

I'm involved in four upcoming events that I'd love for you to consider attending. Three of them are being hosted at my museum, and one at a mystery location.

1. You Can't Do That in Museums Camp - July 10-12, 2013. I've always loved helping run events where participants can really work together on something meaty and challenging... and this one is going to be awesome. In July of 2013, the MAH will host our first You Can't Do That in Museums Camp (or better name to be suggested by you), inviting 80 creative people to collaborate on an experimental exhibition. This camp will be a 2.5 day event at which participants work in teams with pre-selected permanent collection objects to create an exhibition full of intriguing, unusual, risky experiences. If you've ever wanted to design an object-based exhibit that really pushed the boundaries, this is the event for you. Registration will be $150 and by application only. We will also offer a half-day series of workshops on July 10 for a wider audience for $50. Yes you can sleepover at the museum to heighten the insanity and reduce the cost. No you don't have to be a museum professional to participate. Yes you can apply now. Please do.
2. The Arts Dinner-vention Project - date TBD. This one was cooked up by Barry Hessenius, former director of the California Arts Council and public art blogger extraordinaire. Barry is asking the universe to send him names of "unheralded arts sector leaders" to be considered for an all-star dinner party in 2013. I'm on the small committee of folks who will be selecting the winners based on your nominations. Barry is accepting nominations through November 20, and anyone who submits names will be entered into a random drawing for a free trip to join in on the fantasy dinner party. Read more about the project and how to participate here. 
3. Ze Frank Weekend - Jan 12-13, 2013. We're working with participatory online artist Ze Frank on an exhibition at the MAH this winter that features the missions, creations, and explorations of his current web series, A Show. Because this work is evolving and involves people creating stuff all over the world, we decided it would be good to have a weekend where that wildness can find a home at our museum. I know very little about what will happen on this weekend, but rest assured it will be strange and geeky and very different from a typical museum gathering.
4. Loyalty Lab workshop - Jan 29, 2013. We have been working for a few months now on a project called Loyalty Lab to deepen our relationships with frequent MAH visitors. On Jan. 29, we'll be holding a workshop in the afternoon to discuss our experiments to date and brainstorm with participants about how we can all find creative, low-tech ways to reward and celebrate our visitors. We would love to share that conversation with anyone in the museum/arts/culture world who has an interest. We will have some whip-smart game designers on hand to push our thinking. We can accommodate about 25 people at the workshop - please email me if you are interested in participating. 

Here's to a new year full of experimenting, learning, and sharing. And by "new year" I mean year six of Museum 2.0. I know; it's crazy.

Open Thread: Is the Gender Imbalance in the Arts a Problem?

Note: This is a post about gender diversity. I feel strongly that there are huge issues with racial and ethnic diversity in museums and arts organizations that deserve a million more posts. I don't know if gender diversity deserves more posts. That's why I wrote this.

Last week, I spoke at three conferences. One was a conference on risk-taking for librarians. One was a conference on pushing our practice in art museums. And one was a local TEDx. The first two had something in common that the last one didn't. Any guesses?

In library- and museum-land, the participants were 80-90% women. At TEDx, the mix was 50/50.

It took me awhile to catch on to the gender divide in museums, arts organizations, and libraries. I was an electrical engineering student (1% women), then worked at NASA (10% women), and then slowly slid from science museums (about 50% women) to history and art museums (60-80%, depending on who you ask). Even the museums I worked in with a fairly equivalent gender balance were completely out-of-whack when you looked at departments. Exhibits, technology, security, and senior management were majority male. Education and programs were female central.

At first, I reveled in working in progressively more female-engaged environments after my engineering background. But running a museum with 100% female full-time staff and 95% female interns has made me struggle with the obvious disparity. When we have new jobs or internships open up, men represent less than 5% of applicants. We have good male representation as volunteers, trustees, and visitors, but we're lousy on staff. We have 0.75 full-time equivalent men between a contract preparator, graphic designer, and visitor services staff member. We can't even rate a whole guy.

Judging from statistics in a few research studies on museum workers (and the obvious visual data at any museum or library conference excepting tech-oriented ones), this imbalance is extreme but not atypical. It gets even worse if you look at the future of the field. AAM has noted that museum studies graduate programs are "80% white and 80% female." It's not quite as bad as my 99% male electrical engineering class, but it's getting there.

This is a problem. Without this most basic kind of diversity on staff, people make myopic decisions that are biased towards certain audience types. Just as a male-dominated tech industry created a hugely celebrated device that women thought sounded like a menstrual management product (the iPad), a female-dominated museum and library industry leads to a narrow set of preconceptions when it comes to program development and design. I've had plenty of meetings where we had to remind ourselves that we couldn't just create craft activities for women and no there would not be hearts on the walls in the Love exhibition. We consult community advisors on a regular basis to compensate for our gender diversity (and other) deficiencies and ensure that our programming is meaningful and non-exclusionary for men. It's a challenge on a daily basis to run an organization for our whole community when our staff represents half at most.

But, and here's where it gets tricky... how BIG a problem is this gender imbalance? When we talk about other kinds of diversity in the museum workforce--racial, ethnic, socioeconomic--it's clear that the problem is serious. Many museums and other arts organizations are seen as instruments of an elitist, white culture that systematically excludes people of color (e.g. this post). True diversity on staff leads to the exposure and deconstruction of discriminatory practices that prevent our organizations from feeling truly relevant and open to diverse community members.

It's not as clear to me that this same issue applies when talking about men, especially white men, who are not victims of systematic discrimination. When it comes to fields like engineering, the reason that people are so energized about increasing minority participation is twofold:

1. Many minorities (women and racial/ethnic minorities) receive constant harmful messages about their inadequacy when it comes to that may prevent them from pursuing passions in math and science. This is perceived by some as deeply unfair. It takes active intervention and investment to reverse this systematic discrimination and bias.
2. Engineering careers come with economic opportunity that can move people up socio-economically and advance national GDP/innovation. Engineering jobs can enable minority citizens to achieve more, thus balancing out some inequity and cultivating more overall wealth. 

Do these same arguments apply in fields like the non-profit arts? These jobs are low-paying, economically unstable, and highly competitive. They are not seen (unfortunately) as essential to generating significant personal or community wealth and value. And I don't know that there is a systematic gender bias preventing men from pursuing careers in arts or education. I've never heard of a man who was told that art might be too "hard" for him as my female college roommate was told about mechanical engineering. There may be a gender representation issue in museums, but is there an equity issue? I'm not sure.

I would really, really like to work with more men. I would love for them to be interested and to be represented. But I don't know where the point is at which men are feeling deterred from their interests in pursuing museum careers and what I can do about it. I don't know if I should worry about this.

Maybe it's OK to have some fields that are gender-imbalanced as long as minority voices have a role in program development and production. Maybe it's great that there's a field where women can take the lead. I'm proud that our institution went from having a male director and all-female staff to a female director and all-female staff--at least girlpower goes all the way to the top here. There are plenty of other content and media industries that don't have female domination--our power in museums could be a balancing salve in the bigger picture. We can and do create superb programming for our whole community, with the same implicit deficiencies of any organization that lacks diversity.

Or maybe it's terrible that men are slowly opting out of museum work. Maybe it means they will slowly opt out of cultural institutions altogether and perceive them as irrelevant to their lives. I know from talking to friends who work in ballet that it is indeed possible for a whole genre of art to be seen as "for women."

What do you think? Is the gender imbalance causing problems for arts workers, visitors, or society? How does it affect you? What should we do about it?

Participatory Internships in Santa Cruz this School Year

It's the end of the summer, which means we are sadly bidding farewell to our fabulous summer interns, getting lonely and scared about how we will possibly do amazing work in the coming months without their brilliance, ingenuity, and creativity.

And then comes the part where we recruit new interns, get blown away by their abilities... and the cycle continues. At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, we take our interns seriously, give them real responsibility, creative challenges, and meaningful work opportunities. We ask a lot and we give a lot and at the end of the day we sometimes throw parachute men off the roof.

I'm particularly excited about two internships that relate to participatory exhibition design. We also have fabulous opportunities in Community Programs, Education, and Development - please check the website for all the options and information on how to apply. You don't have to be a student to be eligible. Our interns include undergraduates, graduate students, and people of all ages looking to jumpstart creative careers in community engagement.

First, there is the Participatory Exhibit Design Internship. These interns work with our curatorial team to develop interactive and participatory components for upcoming exhibitions. Current and former interns have developed everything from games to personality tests to a whole-gallery installation of memory jars. We typically have two to three interns in this role, working 15 to 24 hours per week. Interns this year will be focusing on our winter Work in Progress show (Thomas Campbell, Ze Frank, Timber Framing) and spring Photography and Identity show. We are always looking for interns with strong graphic/3D design skills; the best interns can help us plan exhibits, design labels, AND learn to develop terrific participatory experiences for visitors.

Second, and highly experimental, is the Museum Camp Internship. We have recently decided that in the summer of 2013, we will be hosting a 3-day professional development hack-a-thon in which participants will develop, design, and deploy innovative interpretative experiences around collection objects. It will tie into an experimental, month-long exhibition in our main gallery. In other words, people who participate in Museum Camp will get to test all kinds of wild ideas for visitor engagement with a real live exhibition. We already have enthusiastic support from some museum rock stars like Kathleen McLean, Maria Mortati, and Eric Siegel. Exciting, right? To make this a hit, we're going to need someone who wants to make this their baby and support its creation. So if you want to help develop an unconference and explore participatory exhibit design, this internship is right for you. (And of course, much more to come about Museum Camp in the months to come.)

Fine print: all internships at the MAH are unpaid. We are happy to help you get school credit for your work here, and we love writing glowing recommendations for your future careers. Our interns tend to be highly self-motivated people who have always dreamed of having the latitude to make their dreams real. People who struggle tend to need more structure and direction than our institutional culture affords. Please feel free to comment or email with any questions.

Dangerous/Ridiculous: Reflections on AAM

Last week, I was in Minneapolis for the American Association of Museums annual meeting. As always, the conference was a party mix of inspiring and dull, familiar and new. It's one of the rare settings in which you can see glimpses of the past and the future all under one roof.

Here, in no particular order, are the things that energized me most:

• "No idea is too ridiculous." Kathleen McLean led a terrific session called "Dangerous Ridiculous" about risk-taking in museums. While I'm always inspired by stories of how we take risks to make programming more relevant and dynamic (thanks, Lisa Lee and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum), I was particularly struck by Kathy's thoughtful framing of the session. As she noted, it's fairly obvious why it feels risky to do something dangerous in our institutions. What's less obvious--and potentially, a bigger problem--is the self-censorship we perform to avoid doing things that seem ridiculous in the eyes of our peers. Looking silly, Kathy argued, is a barrier to experimentation. I found this idea really powerful. Interestingly, at my museum, our team is naturally better at ridiculous than we are at dangerous. Our curator writes labels about licking the art. I host dating games. We dance out our bad times. This session made me see our silliness as a real asset as we keep pushing boundaries.
• Talking about money, openly. I led a session with Eric Siegel and Ellen Rosenthal on museum business models and some of the issues we grapple with in managing money. Ellen shared the brilliant work at Conner Prairie to make finances transparent to all staff. Eric talked about how the New York Hall of Science is trying to fund risk-taking, not just talk about it or under-resource it. And I talked about some of the challenges of finding the right income and expense models for a museum that operates more like a community center than a traditional cultural institution. It was terrific to have a packed room and a long, open conversation (we split the session into half presenting, half audience discussion) about these issues. Attendees brought up questions about how they can get more involved with financial discussions in their institutions, how we can change the ways we approach fundraising, how we can think about earned income differently. This was a topic I was never interested in before I became a director. Now I think it's really critical to all of us advancing the field and making our institutions viable. Here are our slides and Ellen's handouts if you want to learn more.
• Merilee Mostov and the Columbus Museum of Art. This woman is killing it when it comes to developing in-gallery interactive experiences around permanent collections. Merilee and I were on a panel together called Museum as Prototype (my slides here), and I got that delightful jealous feeling seeing all the amazing stuff she's doing. Handing out paper hearts on Valentine's Day so visitors could put them in front of favorite paintings. Creating her own versions of classic board games like Guess Who? for the galleries. Testing, refining, experimenting, and doing it all with style. The lead photo on this post is from a project I saw when I visited last spring. If you are interested in innovation in in-gallery experiences, get thee to Columbus.
• Viability of meetups. A couple of weeks ago, I posted on this blog that I was interested in meeting some new people at the conference. I was amazed at how effective this was--almost immediately, my schedule filled up with short, focused meetings with diverse individuals about topics I really care about. In particular, we had a great group of 15 talking about participatory history experiences on Sunday. I was also thrilled to see Michelle DelCarlo do a pop up "pop up museum" during the conference, advertised only through Twitter. While the content of any one meeting wasn't mind-blowing, the fact that we're now sufficiently technology-mediated that these kinds of informal, spontaneous events can happen is really exciting. Frankly, as someone who attends fewer sessions every year, I wonder how long it will be before there is a shadow conference of people who come to the city just to meet up around the edges. AAM (and other conference organizers) might want to think about how to embrace and engage these kinds of folks before they become seen as annoying parasites on the conference itself.
• Participatory art and co-creation on the rise. The conversation about community engagement at AAM has evolved, and this year, it had a distinctly social practice/art bent. The conference showcased many fabulous projects--Flux Foundation, Open Field, Shine a Light, Create Denver--that support substantive co-creation experiences for artists and amateurs alike. It's interesting to me that this year's conference seemed so art-heavy when it comes to participation. Art museums may have been slow to come to this party, but those that do are coming in smart and strong. History and science museums... time to step it up.
• Staying with friends. OK, this one is personal, but I was amazed at how wonderful it was to stay with a good friend, in a house, away from the insanity of the conference. We hosted a dinner party for diverse museum people, made pancakes, and reconnected at the end of long days. Not every city has a good friend, but this does make me think about the option of renting a house for future conferences. AirBnB might make it viable... who wants to stay in a houseboat next year in Baltimore?

What did you get out of the conference? What excited you? 

AAM Conversations: Want to Talk?

(No relation to AAM. Just cute.)

I'm heading this weekend to the American Association of Museums conference in Minneapolis. I'm psyched to spend a few days with friends and colleagues talking about some of the challenges we're grappling with in our work. I'll also be part of two sessions on Tuesday, May 1 - one in the morning about money and business models, and one in the afternoon about prototyping and experimentation.

I'm bringing a few big questions with me to AAM this year. If any of these are questions that you are working on or thinking about, I'd love to find some time during the conference to sit down and talk. As I've spent more time in the AAM community, I've developed some really deep friendships--which is good--but it also means that I am less likely to spend much time at conferences with people I don't know. I hope this year that some of these questions can introduce me to new people and new ideas.

Here's what I'd love to explore at AAM this year:

• Event-driven models for museums. About 85% of visitors to our museum attend through a program/event. How prevalent is this? What should we be thinking about as we respond to community demand for events? What role will exhibitions play in this kind of institution? What's the chicken and what's the egg when it comes to events, exhibitions, and museum hours?
• Participatory history programming. Over the past year, we've found it fairly easy to invent and sustain participatory art and craft projects. We're having a harder time doing the same with history, especially when it comes to drop-in or single-night activities. I'd love to learn more about what other organizations are doing to invite casual, active participation in history. UPDATE! THIS TOPIC IS SO POPULAR THAT WE WILL HAVE A MEETUP ON SUNDAY, APRIL 29 TO DISCUSS. MEET IN CONVENTION CENTER LOBBY B, OUTSIDE THE AUDITORIUM, AT 1:30 FOR A ONE-HOUR INFORMAL DISCUSSION. NO RSVP REQUIRED. TEXT 831.331.5460 IF YOU CAN'T FIND US.
• Ethics of civic action. My institution is increasingly partnering with local cause-based organizations, especially in the social services. How should we be thinking about the ethics of who we partner with (and who we don't)? How do we deal with the blending of personal and institutional goals when it comes to contributing to efforts to improve the whole community?
• Working with teams through change. We've undergone a pretty radical transformation over the past year. People (including me) are energized but tired, too. What should I be thinking about as a manager who wants to keep pushing forward but also wants everyone to feel supported and not burned out?
• Fundraising with a community. Our museum is becoming increasingly community-driven in our programming and the way we engage with visitors on a daily basis. Our fundraising, however, is not moving in that direction. To what extent is it realistic or desirable to broaden our funding base? Should we think of ourselves as a client service organization (where visitors are clients and the support comes from others) or a "by and for the community" organization? This will come up somewhat in the Tuesday 9am Show Me the Money session, but I thought I'd raise it as a general question too.

If you want to talk about any of these questions too, awesome. I don't care what type of institution you are from or what your experience is, or even if you are attending the conference. I just care about having good conversations and learning from each other. Sunday April 29 is looking especially good for me for some meaty chats--let me know. Thanks!

p.s. If you are interested in interning/working at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and want to talk briefly about that at AAM, I'm open to that too.

Summer Internships at the MAH: Come Do Something Exciting

We've gotten a little more organized at The Museum of Art & History, and we've now released opportunities for summer internships. These are unpaid part-time and full-time opportunities to help design public programs, develop new uses for the museum, perform visitor research, and pursue unusual projects.

I'm personally most excited about the two types of interns who will be reporting to me:

1. Community Research interns, who will start developing a methodology for us to use to understand how people in Santa Cruz connect with arts and culture experiences and what role the museum can play in satisfying their interests. This could be a serious research opportunity for someone interested in impact assessment, community attitudes towards the arts, and the role museums can play in transforming communities.
2. Special Projects interns, who will do, well, whatever you want. This internship is for the truly self-motivated person out there with a brilliant idea for making museums more participatory, welcoming, community spaces who just lacks an institution at which to try it out. Our internships have generally gotten more structured. This is the Pigpen in the family--the internship for the wild-eyed but highly effective person who wants to make something amazing happen.

But I would be remiss if I did not say that the community programs internships are all rocking. Stacey Garcia, our Director of Community Programs (who began as a graduate student intern) is the queen of working with interns to produce truly inspired events. Community programs interns work with artists and historians, families and adults, to make everything from mini-participatory exhibitions to full-blown concert series. While we offer very few exhibitions-focused internships at the MAH, community programs interns often have the opportunity to do the kind of research, design work, and prototyping that exhibitions folks do--and their work ends up on the floor far more frequently.

At the MAH, interns are most successful when they are highly motivated people who like to work collaboratively and can deal with a little chaos. Based largely on your feedback, we've gotten more explicit about intern supervisors, expectations, and roles. But we're still a group that thrives on spontaneous craft material trips to the dump and sudden breaks to help wheel a piano in the door. Sounds good? Good. Come join us.