Framework vs. Sensibility: Separating Format from Voice

I was talking this week with Mark Allen, the founder of Machine Project (an alternative arts space in LA), about different models for community engagement in cultural institutions. At one point, he commented that there's a difference between the "framework" and the "sensibility" for engagement. The framework is the format or setup for how community members are invited to participate. The sensibility is the content and the style with which the engagement happens.

I've written before about the difference between participatory processes and products, but this question of frameworks and sensibility is more broadly applicable to community engagement strategies. An institution might have a formal framework and an informal sensibility or vice versa. For example, consider two independent arts organizations in Los Angeles -- Machine Project and The Public School. Machine Project has a curatorial framework--Mark and his team carefully craft its events, workshops, and exhibits. In contrast, The Public School has a democratic framework--anyone can use their website to propose a class she'd like to take or teach.

The Public School's framework is more open than Machine Project's, but that doesn't mean it has a more informal sensibility. From the perspective of a potential visitor, Machine Project presents a friendly, often silly sensibility, whereas the Public School feels formal, even a little elitist. Check out the Public School website, and you'll see you can take classes in Spinoza and Japanese aesthetics. There are terms like "cosmology of the intangible" that raise my high art hackles. Machine Project, on the other hand, recently hosted a dumpling party and offered parent-child workshops in hot-wiring cars. Here's an excerpt from the delightful dumpling party invite:

Tickets are $20 a person and cover all the dumplings you can eat, unless someone else eats all they can eat faster than you and we run out of dumplings. But we're going to get a lot of dumplings. Space is limited because it's just one grandmother's condo and the neighbors are really old and we don't want to upset them.

For me, it's helpful to separate sensibility from frameworks so I can think about what I'm trying to achieve with a particular project or institution. Sometimes, when I'm focused on welcoming visitors and being good hosts, I'm really talking about sensibility. And other times, when I'm focused on opening up access and opportunities for audience members to partner with staff, I'm talking about framework. It's interesting to note that frameworks can be easily replicated and extended--The Public School now has centers in seven cities around the world--whereas sensibilities, which are often idiosyncratic to institutional leaders, cannot.

It's easy to assume that an informal sensibility implies an open framework and vice versa--but that assumption doesn't bear out in reality. A museum can be friendly, or serious, or funny, while maintaining a traditional relationship with visitors as consumers of experiences. And alternatively, an institution can conduct co-creative projects with community members without altering its external sensibility or institutional tone. A welcoming and collaborative sensibility is important to attracting and working with participants, but that tone may not carry over to the rest of the institution and its broader audience.

In fact, I find that participatory products are often more likely to reflect a formal sensibility than their traditional counterparts. Community galleries look old-fashioned because citizen curators aspire to emulate the most traditional vision of a museum possible. Teen docents are more serious than adults because they want to be treated like professionals. Co-creation projects are often measured partly by their ability to "fit in" with the rest of the institution. It takes a high level of confidence--which comes with experience--to reject the dominant sensibility and try something else.

When we look at innovative community engagement initiatives, or when we think of how we ourselves want to be innovative, it's worth considering the difference between innovative frameworks and sensibilities. There are some extraordinary institutions, like STREB Labs in New York, that innovate in both ways. But it's far more typical to focus on just one. The Exploratorium and MCA Denver are both masters of pairing fairly standard museum frameworks for audience engagement with an energized, funky sensibility. The Wing Luke Asian Museum marries an incredible, radical community framework with a more traditional museum sensibility. The Wing Luke makes their format available for others to use, whereas the elevator performances at the MCA Denver and the cardboard villages at the Exploratorium are part of what make those institutions uniquely themselves.

When I first met Adam Lerner, the Director of the MCA Denver, we had a friendly argument about visitor participation. Adam advocated that museums should focus on cultivating a strong voice rather than giving up to the clutter and dilution of the town square. I argued that involving visitors with a well-designed process meant diversifying and opening the institution, not muddling it with junk. I realize now that we were talking about two different things. Adam is a master of sensibility. I was focused on framework. We're both driven to make museums more exciting and relevant to visitors; we were just tackling the problem in different ways.

These days, I spend a lot of time working on new models for both framework and sensibility. It's hard to say which is more important--or challenging--to transform. What's more interesting to you--changing the voice and sensibility with which you engage audiences, or changing the framework for doing so? Do you see these as separate, connected, or conflated?

Quick Hit: How Do You Follow Up with Participants?

When someone leaves a comment, makes a sculpture, or writes a poem at your institution, is that the end of their participation? This email from TripAdvisor is a great example of the simple power of getting back in touch with participants--to thank them, and more importantly, to demonstrate that their participation mattered to other visitors.

There are great examples of this kind of thing focusing solely on the participant--for example, the Chicago Children's Museum practice of inviting kids to write postcards home to themselves from the museum. But a lot of participation extends beyond the individual, and we should celebrate that. Too often, we treat participation as a one-on-one transaction between participant and institution, when in reality visitors are always making things for each other as well. These kinds of messages help people be more aware of how their actions impact others, helping them move from "me" to "we."

Imagine sending someone a simple email to say that "fifty visitors have played with your toy/enjoyed your video/responded to your comment." This kind of message does three things:

• it validates participation in the eyes not just of the institution but other "people like you"
• it reminds visitors that they participated and that their work lives on at the institution
• it may inspire them to come back again to see how their work has evolved and what others have shared

Of course, this requires capturing an email address at the point of participation, which isn't always easy, especially for low-tech projects. But in a few recent projects where I've offered visitors the option to have something emailed home, I've gotten 95-100% participation. People are eager to continue their relationship with an institution after having a creative, social interaction onsite. Why not use messages like this one to help those relationships along?

Design for Participation: Video from NODEM 2010

I just discovered that my keynote at the 2o10 NODEM conference on digital media and heritage is available online. If you're into video, check out this 25 minute talk I gave on the conference theme "from place to presence." I focused on three surprising things I've learned about design for participation both in physical spaces and on the Web:

1. the importance of constraints and scaffolding to supporting creative and social participation
2. the role design plays in driving how people participate
3. the essential necessity for the institution to be responsive to participants

If you want to download the slides, they're here. And if you want to see other NODEM talks from Fiona Cameron and Michael Edson, they're here.

Enjoy!

Leading the Participant

Remember the last time someone said to you, "this is entirely your choice?" Maybe it was your family saying you could pick the restaurant, or your boss offering you one of two paths forward. Whatever the situation, personal or professional, the choice is not always honestly yours. Sometimes you really are the master of your own fate. Sometimes you're not.

When institutions invite visitors to participate on their terms, it's often tinged with the same lack of clarity about visitors' personal agency. Last month, the radio show This American Life ran a fascinating episode called "Kid Politics," which starts with a long segment about the Air Force One Discovery Center immersive experience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Whatever your opinion of Reagan, the segment, reported by Starlee Kline, is a fascinating perspective on what happens when we tell visitors the choice is theirs and then subtly (or not-so-subtly) tell them what to do.

The Discovery Center is a one-hour simulation in which groups of students (grade 5 and up) role play in a realistic, interactive environment. The students are each given roles on one of three teams--the Oval Office, a military command center, and a press room. The topic is the invasion of Grenada. The students are presented with the situation that Reagan faced (1983, a Communist revolution in a small country near other Communist countries, a group of 800 American medical students stranded there) and asked to figure out what to do. You can listen to Starlee Kline's opinionated 20-minute piece about it here. There's also a shorter, more expository (and positive) CBS video about the experience here.

As the students enter the simulation, onscreen actors tell them:

When you walk through these doors, you will no longer be students. You will make history. Lives are at stake. Adult staff members are not here to answer questions or help you. The responsibility is entirely yours.

But that's not exactly true from Starlee Kline's perspective. Starlee follows the group of students who portray Reagan and his advisors in the Oval Office. The simulation is structured to give students information, then a binary choice. Then more information, then another binary choice. Each time the students decide what to do, the young Reagan picks up a red phone and presses either A or B. But it's not a fair choice. As Starlee explains:

Before they start, the kids are told there aren't right or wrong answers. But the whole thing's rigged to make what Ronald Reagan did in 1983 look like the most appealing option. Each time they choose to do what he did, a bell goes off like they've won a tropical vacation to Grenada, instead of an invasion.

The adult educators and onscreen actors reward the group, saying things like "nicely done, that's correct based on what Ronald Reagan did," and "excellent work, President Reagan."

Starlee follows several groups through the Discovery Center experience over the course of a day. It isn't until the last group when Starlee sees a young Reagan who decides against the invasion--and against history. Whenever he enters the "wrong" choice, there's a loud, angry buzzer. This time, the onscreen actors and educator don't say "good job" or reward the students for their desire to avoid invasion. Instead, they get a lecture on what really happened in 1983.

If the point of the Discovery Center is to teach students the facts of the Grenada invasion, it's reasonable to create a program in which there's a right and wrong answer about what happened in history. But walking into this experience, the kids were told that the responsibility was "entirely theirs." It's disingenuous--and makes for a lopsided role playing experience--if there's only really one path to take.

That said, I sympathize with the challenges involved in designing something like this--challenges we faced again and again when I was working on the Operation Spy immersive experience at the International Spy Museum. Mira Cohen, the Reagan Library's Director of Education (and the creator of the Discovery Center experience) told me that the intent was to design a pilot program for 5th graders with a focus on learning historical thinking skills. As Mira explained:

The goal is for students to experience presidential decision making, and then debrief, discuss, and share, utilizing historical and civic literacy skills. The buzzer is meant to show whether or not you made the same choice as Reagan--not whether or not there was a right or wrong choice made. And the intention was for the facilitator to point out either during the experience itself or during the debrief that there are a lot of different choices.

Alissa Whitely, who manages the operation of the Discovery Center for the Reagan Foundation, felt that Starlee Kline misrepresented the whole Discovery Center experience and that it is much more even-handed than was portrayed by Starlee. Alissa told me:

Again and again, our educators tell the students that there are no wrong answers here and that students have a different perspective given their place in history. Yes, the majority of the groups probably choose what Reagan actually did. But when the students leave, we want to make sure they have the right information about what really happened in history. There's a thin line between understanding what really happened and imagining something else based on what the students experienced in a simulation.

Could 5th graders handle a truly open simulation? Maybe, maybe not. In a charming and potential heretical chapter in the book Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions, Minnesota History Center Museum director Dan Spock argues that for kids, imagining history, even inaccurately, may be more valuable than teaching them what really happened. While I tend to agree with Dan, I suspect that school boards across California may not share our enthusiasm. Imagine how the Discovery Center simulation might be different if kids really had a choice, if the Library worked with historians to imagine and spin out augmented versions of the past. It would be both exciting and confusing.

It would also be expensive. In the case of Operation Spy, we developed a fictitious espionage story, so we felt free to give visitors open choices and spin out different, value-neutral outcomes. But even in that situation, we only gave visitors a truly open choice at the end--it was just too complicated and costly to design spaces, interactive challenges, and media to support multiple storylines throughout the whole experience. Mira Cohen noted some of the practical considerations that kept the Reagan Library team from going in this direction with the Discovery Center, commenting:

From an experiential perspective, if we had true forking paths, it would take more time and more complex facilitation. We had a mandate to be able to put through five school groups per day, which means 45-50 minutes per group. Also, we're working with 5th graders who actually aren't learning anything about 20th century history, so they're coming in with a focus on historical thinking but not a strong understanding of what happened in the 1980s. I absolutely could imagine that those kinds of forking scenarios could be created using more space, more historical documents, greater time for analysis, maybe a different audience, and I think that would be extraordinarily exciting.

This post isn't a question of who's "right" about how these experiences are perceived by visitors. There's no A or B button at the end of this post with a buzzer ready to go off if you agree with Starlee Kline or the folks who work with the Air Force One Discovery Center. This post is here to raise questions: what kinds of choices are you letting participants make in the experiences you design? How honest and transparent are you about those choices? And if you are leading the participant, why?

Are the Arts Habit-Forming?

Imagine this situation:

You go to an arts event, one of a type you rarely or never take part in. Maybe it's a live music concert, or a museum visit, or a play. You have a great time.

What will it take for you to do it again?

This is a question I've been puzzling over now for a few months, both professionally and personally. There's been a lot of innovation in arts programming in the last few years. Museums and other venues are offering special programs for teens, for hipsters, for people who want a more active or spiritual or participatory experience. Sometimes these innovations are woven into the institutional core programming, as at the redesigned, highly interactive Oakland Museum of California. Others layer these new activities and audiences on through monthly late nights or short-term installations.

In most cases the goal is the same: to attract new audiences and help them understand how the institution (and the arts experience) might fit into their lives. Internally, staff members spend a good amount of time grappling with how to invite new audiences in, and whether it is possible to use "parallel" programming to draw new visitors into the "pipeline" of core offerings.

But I'm interested in a more basic question: what does it take for a person--a visitor/audience member--to form an art or museum habit? If we want to transform museums into place for everyday use that people drop in on for a quick fix of history, a meeting with a friend, or a cup of coffee, what will that require?

I ask these questions because I think there's a pretty big gulf between the one-time or occasional arts experience and the idea of art and institutions as part of your life. For myself personally, this gulf rears its head every time I go to a live music concert. Each time I go (about four times a year), I have a fabulous time. But it never makes me want to increase the frequency of my participation. Only in the last two weeks, when I've had the unusual experience of going to three music events (symphony, rock, jazz) in a short period of time, have I started to think about the possibility of integrating live music more consistently into my life.

How do you form an arts habit? Is the psychology behind doing so the same as forming a fitness habit or a social habit (like going out to the same bar weekly with friends)? Investigating this question with friends and colleagues, it seems like people form habits that take them outside the home for at least four reasons:

1. Social pressure. If you have a friend or group of friends who like to "go out"--whether that's brunch, hiking, movies, or museums--you're more likely to form a habit that involves external venues. I've met people who tell me, "every Sunday we go to brunch and then the museum," or "our crew loves to go dancing every weekend." These habits tend to be highly socially-focused--if the group or some portion of the group isn't going, individuals won't go out on their own.
2. External schedule or pressure. Soccer leagues, weekly yoga, six-session guitar lessons, theater season passes. When something gets booked on your calendar, you attend. Some of the most successful museum programs I know of that draw people again and again happen on a regular schedule. If you love Toddler Time, it becomes part of your Tuesdays. It's funny that museums tout the fact that you can come "anytime," but in most of our lives, the things we commit to are things that happen on a regular schedule. If your calendar doesn't ping you to go to class, you might not attend.
3. Repeat exposure. This is related to 2) but slightly different. Lots of motivational literature suggests that it takes multiple sessions in a short timeframe to take on a new habit, whether a new food, fitness regimen, or activity. This is why some yoga studios offer "30 day challenges" in which you get all your classes free if you come every day for 30 days. The idea is that once you've come every day for a month, you'll be sufficiently hooked to continue your participation (albeit likely at slower frequency). I think I'm experiencing this shift with live music now due to repeat exposure in a short period of time.
4. Intrinsic pressure or desire. This is the holy grail for arts, I think--the person who shifts from social or external pressure to feeling, deep inside, that they want to make the arts institution part of their regular life. Of course, intrinsic desire is not always motivated by the purest intentions. People go to the gym and the grocery store because they feel they must. It helps that these activities have an outcome that is widely accepted as good and useful. Even internally-driven motivation is influenced by external societal pressures.

Some activities are terrifically good at encouraging regular use because they combine all three of these. For me, this often happens with team sports. A new sport instantly introduces me to a gung-ho social group, a regular schedule of opportunity to play, a heavy dose of endorphins, and the chance to challenge myself physically and mentally. For someone else, this might be knitting (which also can come with social support, regular schedule, opportunity to be creative, and a warm and pleasing outcome). There are other activities that start with only one type of motivation--say, the intrinsic desire to get a cup of coffee--but are reinforced over time by other forms, such as casual friendships with the coffee shop staff and other regulars.

What are museums and arts institutions doing to tap into these forms of motivation? If you want to encourage people not just to come once but to come regularly, how do you do it (besides hawking a membership)? Here are a few ideas I could imagine supporting the development of new habits around arts participation:

• Market your venue explicitly as a social one. The single most likely reason I will go try something new is if a friend, date, or family member invites me. Even though data shows that the majority of people visit museums in social groups, there's a misperception--especially of art museums--that they are places for solo contemplation. Especially for infrequent arts participants, marketing that emphasizes the museum as a date venue, a post-brunch stroll for the girls, or an after school hangout, can help people see that they can suggest a museum to friends the way they might suggest a restaurant.
• Create more regular programming that you encourage people to buy or register for as a series. There's a reason theaters work so hard to get season subscribers (and it's not just the advance payment). When you "sign on" for six plays, you have an external motivation to attend. You don't have to remember, consider the opportunity, and motivate yourself each time a new show comes--it's already on your calendar. I've talked to some busy parents who say museums aren't part of their lives because their kids are already jam-packed with soccer and violin lessons and play dates. If families in your area coordinate their outings on an advance calendar, your institution needs to get on that schedule to be a viable part of their lives.
• Introduce new participants to committed members at every new event. New audiences may not be aware that there are other people who see dance performances or jazz shows or science exhibits as part of their everyday lives. One of the most powerful motivators I've had in athletic situations is when an experienced player welcomes me into the game, gives me some pointers, and invites me to join the team to hang out after the sweating is done. Too many new arts experiences are lonely, transactional, and devoid of social engagement with other participants. If your institution or event has members or regulars who love the programming, those people are the best ones to welcome newcomers and share their (hopefully infectious) joy with them.
• Help people understand what they will "get" out of regular participation. To a newcomer, it's not apparent that a museum offers many kinds of programs, or that regular attendance to an arts event might provide deeper or multi-faceted experiences over time. What they see is what they get: that day, that event. Gyms are incredibly good at selling people on the idea of increased fitness, attractiveness, self-confidence, and muscle tone over time. They introduce every new member to the wide range of activities offered and explain how all of them contribute to a healthier you. But arts professionals are more squeamish about trumpeting the value of their offerings. People are not bombarded by marketing messages and societal pressure to engage with cultural venues. There aren't ads on TV talking about how great it is to get lost in art. Cultural institutions need to be overt and unapologetic about the benefits of sustained involvement. Visitors, especially new ones, aren't going to connect the dots on their own.
• Encourage people to use the institution for a broad range of reasons. Jasper Visser wrote a great blog post about untraditional uses of museums, celebrating people who come in to shop, do homework, or meet new people. We need to make these myriad uses more explicit. The people who feel comfortable having a social event at a museum or popping in to spend time with a single artifact tend to be people who have great experience with and comfort in the institution already. Most visitors feel like they have to "do it all" to have a successful experience. We need to debunk this impression if we want people to use the museum casually. I love the Dallas Museum of Art's list of "100 experiences" you can have at that institution. This kind of list helps people understand that there are lots of ways to "do" the museum and that they don't have to leave exhausted to have done it "right."
• Find a way to encourage a participation blitz. What's the 30-day yoga challenge equivalent for the arts? Could a group of institutions in your town get together and offer a set of experiences, events, or cultural practices that people could partake in daily for a month? This could be an exciting way to jump start participation in many institutions, and at the same time, to support the development of new social relationships that center around the arts.

What do you think it takes to build an arts habit?

Sustaining Innovation Part 4: Slack or Shoestring?

This is the last in a series of posts about Paul Light's book Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally. This post is another "open thread" encouraging conversation about a core question that arose for me as we've explored the topic this month.

Last week, this blog featured an interview with Sarah Schultz, a long-time staffer at the Walker Art Center, about her experiences working in an innovative arts organization. One of the things Sarah focused on is the idea of having "slack"--money, time, and headspace--to pursue experiments and let innovative ideas germinate. As we discussed slack, I was very sensitive to the fact that Sarah works in a big institution where there IS money to find in the corners of the budget and where there are enough people to be able to put together creative projects without completely abandoning their basic work requirements.

Most museums, frankly, aren't like that. The majority of museums are quite small in budget and staff. Sarah may be looking for slack on the order of $10,000 while your museum might be lucky to scrounge $100 for new ideas.

And this makes me wonder: is the "slack" model as appropriate to small, scrappy institutions as it is to larger organizations? The alternative is the model that startups use--the "shoestring" model--where passionate people bootstrap their vision into being, constantly facing threats from the outside. In Paul Light's book, he describes several nonprofits that are more shoestring than slack, fighting every day to make their innovative ideas happen. One of those--the Phoenix Group--overextends itself and has to close up shop, but the others survive and thrive.

Picking this apart requires differentiating organizational maturity from size or budget. In her great book on nonprofit lifecycles, Susan Kenny Stevens defines seven stages of nonprofits: idea, startup, growth, mature, decline, turnaround, and terminal (if the turnaround doesn't happen). The Walker is clearly both mature and large. As a mature institution, it needs to focus on using slack to drive innovation, since innovation often falls off the table when an organization reaches maturity. Without continuing to innovate and stay relevant, the organization goes into decline.

But for institutions that are not yet mature, baking in slack may not be necessary or even feasible. An institution that is (whether by design or accident) constantly in startup or growth mode is one that is constantly innovating by necessity. This mode of operation can be exhausting and risky, but it's also exciting and not as prone to slip into the self-congratulatory irrelevance that marks the shift from maturity to decline.

I'm not sure what's better: to be a mature institution with various systems to continue promoting innovation or to be a startup institution that is always hungry for innovation to drive growth. I know that Paul Light would say it's the first one, because nonprofits need to avoid risk to sustainably deliver on their missions. But I'm not sure I agree, or that that model is best for everyone. What's worse, the threat of irrelevance or the threat of insolvency? How would you rather innovate--on a shoestring, or with built-in slack?

Want to Get Your Content Out There? Put it on Wikipedia.

At a recent talk in Chicago, an audience member asked a question. His foundation supports a private museum that is rarely open to the public. Over the past few years, they've worked hard to make their rich content more accessible both through digitization and programs... but people aren't coming. How can he promote smarter outreach for the future?

While there are many ways for museums to reach new audiences, when it comes to specialized knowledge, it's often a question of reaching the niche who care deeply about German watches from 1822 or the evolutionary shift in raccoon striping over time. The people who want that content may not be in the same city as the museum nor even aware of the museum's holdings. So they go to the Web and start exploring.

This is museum digitization 101. Museums of all sizes have moved to digitize objects and place them on discrete webpages so visitors can easily get to the content they want through a Google search. Institutions create exhibit microsites, blogs, and knowledge portals so people beyond the museum walls can explore content. But Google isn't the only way people access information on the Web. When people want knowledge, their first stop might not be a search engine. It might be Wikipedia.

If you want people to find out about your unique holdings and knowledge, rather than just sharing them on your own website (findable through Google, but maybe not at the top of the search results), why not also add them to the largest world encyclopedia? Wikipedia is an incredible place to reach hungry learners and join a community of dedicated researchers who care deeply about making knowledge accessible to everyone.

This isn't rocket science, but it's surprising how few museums have gotten involved with Wikipedia. What excites me about it is how accessible it is to any size institution. Anyone can contribute to it... including museum professionals.

For example, for the Brooklyn Museum's recent exhibition on women and pop art, Seductive Subversion, curatorial intern Rebecca Shaykin was assigned to improve (and write) Wikipedia articles on the 25 artists profiled in the show. The goal was twofold: to share knowledge about these artists with the world, and to create a content base that could be used for an iPad-based interactive component of the exhibition.

Before the project started, 14 of the 25 artists had articles on Wikipedia, of which only 11 were full-size articles. As Rebecca put it:

I certainly wasn’t expecting to find Wikipedia entries for all the artists in Seductive Subversion. After all, a good number of them, such as Mara McAfee, Dorothy Grebenak, and Kay Kurt, have been virtually forgotten over the years. But I simply couldn’t believe that many celebrated artists, including May Stevens, Dorothy Iannone, and Lee Lozano, had no Wikipedia presence whatsoever, while Pauline Boty, Britain’s reigning “Queen of Pop,” had one paltry paragraph dedicated to her brief but stellar life.

Rebecca spent much of the summer before the show researching the women artists, translating curatorial knowledge into Wikipedia's markup language, creating articles, and expanding the existing ones to produce museum-quality contributions.

The exhibition is now closed. The iPad-based interactive was very popular, both for the novelty of the iPad and the familiarity of the Wikipedia interface. From an operational perspective, this approach to content development does double duty--it generated a great content base for visitors AND one that persists in a widely used online space.

While many museum media projects involve developing content that can be used across multiple platforms--web, kiosk, mobile--that content usually stays within the institutional domain both physically and virtually. Even projects like ArtBabble, a niche video site that exists across and beyond the museums that feed it, must attract new users who do not have a pre-existing relationship with the website. Working in a platform like Wikipedia allows museum knowledge to go where the people are. And unlike YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and other highly-trafficked third-party sites, Wikipedia's mission, lack of ads, and status as a non-profit makes it a more comfortable bedfellow for many museums.

When you add content to Wikipedia, it's not like putting up a video on YouTube. It doesn't live on "your" page, open only for user comments and site-driven advertising. The content belongs to a diverse ecosystem of researchers and explorers. This may feel like a loss of control, but it's also a great step toward sharing knowledge, which is fundamental to museums' reason for publishing content in the first place. As Rebecca from the Brooklyn Museum commented:

The artists featured in Seductive Subversion deserve to be better integrated into the narrative of Pop Art, in text books, on museum walls, and, yes, even on Wikipedia. What I’ve done is simply lay the groundwork for their presence on this popular site, in the hopes of generating deeper interest in their lives in work amongst visitors to our exhibition and the general public alike. The pages featured on the iPads in our galleries, like all Wikipedia pages, are continually being updated. Already Wikipedians have begun contributing to the pages I created just a few weeks ago.

Like any information source, Wikipedia has inherent weaknesses. The knowledge presented is hardly universal--as Rebecca found out when she first investigated the presence of these important artists on the site. The Wikipedia community is serious about sharing knowledge, and museums can help that knowledge grow in particular directions of interest and expertise. Institutions can do so actively, as Brooklyn did. But they can also just make it easier for Wikipedians to find and use museum content in their work. At the Powerhouse in Sydney, objects in the online collection now have Wikipedia citation codes so interested folk can add images and information from the museum content to Wikipedia articles.

If you're interested in jumping into the Wikipedia waters and need some guidance, send an email to glam[at]wikimedia[dot]org. That will send you to Liam Wyatt, a friendly Australian who manages cultural partnerships for Wikimedia and is a vocal advocate for museums entering this space.

Sustaining Innovation Part 3: Interview With Sarah Schultz of the Walker Art Center

This is the third in a series of posts about Paul Light's book Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally. This post features an interview with Sarah Schultz, a museum staffer at one of the institutions Light profiled in the book (the Walker Art Center). Sarah has worked at the Walker since 1992 and is currently the Director of Education and Community Programs.

As a long-time employee of the Walker, how do you react to Paul Light's observations about what makes an institution innovate?

I honestly wasn’t aware of the book when it first came out. But having just read it, I think it's really accurate. Light’s notion of innovation as an organizational practice that has to be continually nurtured is right on. I've had the benefit of being in an organization that really does practice and value innovation at every level. There's a high tolerance for risk and failure, trust from the top, and a strong sense of mission in everything we do.

In my experience, innovation is about flexibility, capacity, and collaborative relationships. It's the ability for me to work with my CFO to be able to budget and align the right kinds of resources for new projects. A crew that has the capacity to build a sign at the last minute. Guard staff who are willing to let an artist step between two panes of glass to perform. Our collective willingness to be nimble and generous is really the reason I've been able to do any kind of innovative project here.

How does the process of getting an innovation off the ground work at the Walker?

One key idea that Paul Light talks about is the notion of slack. You need the headspace and the free time to think of ideas, and the resources to make them happen--whether that's $30 or $300,000. A good organization will value unstructured time and a good CFO will help you find that financial slack. Every organization has pockets of restricted and unrestricted money. To innovate, you really need those unrestricted dollars. How do you loosen up funds? My CFO has been very proactive and a wonderful partner in figuring out how to create an overall department budget that frees up small pockets of money for new projects.

Can you give me an example?

It's always seemed challenging here to find funds for interpretative materials. It's easier to secure grants for community-based programming or exhibitions, but it's not easy to get funding for some of the core work that museums do. So when we want to innovate with interpretation, we have to budget creatively. For example, Card Catalogue is a project around our permanent collection, an evolving catalog made up of printed cards visitors can collect and keep in a binder. It’s a great project that allows us to keep researching and creating content around our collection, and we need about $10,000 per year to produce it. That is a not a major expense here, but we also don’t have $10,000 just lying around. It's too small to write a grant for, too big to assume we just have the money. Working with the CFO, we went through my budget and found ways to realign funds to find the money to do the project.

You talked earlier about the importance of flexibility and nimbleness on staff--the proclivity for people to be open and say yes to something new rather than throw up barriers. What do you see that makes that possible--or not possible--in different situations?

I can't stress enough the importance of opportunities for staff to gather informally, be collegial, and play together. That's how we build trust. The Walker is also a place where everyone is committed to supporting artists and new work, so every time we bring in an artist, staff are enthusiastic about the idea of coming together to create something. It's inherent in what we do.

That said, the fact that we work with contemporary artists can also create a lot of stress in our institutional systems. Their processes can be really different from ours. We just had a situation with an artist collective that came for a site visit and decided they wanted to build an igloo. Their process was to plan what and how we will work together this coming summer is by actually by doing a project together right away. While everyone supports the energy of working with artists, when it's -10 degrees and you're being asked to help build an igloo on the fly, people can get frustrated. A lot of these partnerships push against our internal ways of working, and while that's a healthy tension, we need to be sensitive to the stress on our organizational systems and each other. This is especially true in today's climate, when everyone is trying to do more with less.

It seems like when that happens, you'd have to ask yourself: should we change the system based on this experience, or did this push us beyond our ability?

Exactly. Every time, we have to ask ourselves that question, balancing innovation with our institutional capacity. Asking those questions and refining your practice is precisely how you continue to stay inventive and responsive.

Can you think of a time when you changed the system in response to an external need or stress point?

In the 1990s, we decided we wanted to engage a teen audience. This would be a major institutional undertaking. We created a teen arts council, invested in staff, and invested in programming. We discovered that teens felt uncomfortable in the galleries because they had to check their backpacks and they felt the guards were watching them. And the guards were watching them; they didn't trust teens. So we had to do a training program with the guards so they could understand teens and change their behavior in the gallery to make people more comfortable. From that one experience, we are now much more sensitive to how different people experience the galleries and the guards. Guards, visitors services, and education staff have become leaders in advocating for visitor experience--and we're much better at staff training and being responsive to issues that arise.

How do you think the current economic climate has affected your ability to innovate?

I do think the combined intensity of institutional ambition, public expectation and constrained resources is stressing people out. It's harder to find that slack money and free time now. We are culturally in a time of serious recalibration and that's a bumpy ride. There are moments when we get through it very gracefully, and there are times when we don't.

I don't think this is specific to the Walker. Museums are in the business of the public good and the people who work in them are very committed and creatively ambitious. We tend to be generative and generous people and we want to make things happen. We want to deliver on our promise and try to provide something for everyone. Strategy is hard because strategy is about sacrifice. It's hard in this line of work to say no.

My favorite part of Paul Light's book was his discussion of "why to say yes and how to say no."

Everything we've been through economically in the last two years could help us learn how to say no and how to focus and prioritize. This is actually my personal struggle--how to do less better. I'm hungry and my staff is hungry and we want to do everything and we can't. And so we have to focus and find the most effective work we can do. It’s finding some optimism in that saying, “never let a good crisis go to waste." Ironically, this can lead to greater innovation.

How does the need to say "no" affect your approach to innovation in lean times?

We have an inclination to innovate becuase we're constantly asking ourselves how we could a do better job. At the same time, we're dealing with this question: what happens when you do something innovative and it becomes the status quo - internally and externally? In the 1990s, we were an innovative leader in teen programs. Now the teen arts council model is no longer considered innovative. Do we focus on implementing the programs we know are successful, or should we be pushing out in a new direction?

You could spend all your time doing what you now know works, and spend no time on new creative challenges. On the other hand, innovation for its own sake isn't productive. I get frustrated when a client asks for something no one has done before. That shouldn't be the reason we try something. But I know that funding and media often demand it.

If a funder is saying they will fund something new, or if the media attention is for something new, or even if innovation is part of the narrative of your institution, it is sometimes going to drive some of your decisions in a way it probably shouldn't. That is part of the challenge and lesson in learning to say no.

If you start with the right question and a real desire to create something of public value, it can lead you interesting places. We didn't start our teen initiative to do something new; we did it because we believed there was a real need and opportunity to serve teenagers in a way that no one was doing at the time. It drove us in a direction that turned out to be very innovative. But we don't always have to be the ones with the new idea. You know, MOMA did a really great project with visitors with Alzheimer's. When we were researching this idea (which is now our Contemporary Journeys program), we consulted with them. We shouldn't redesign that wheel but maybe just adapt it. The goal is to do great work, not to be innovative.

Have you ever done a project that was innovative but didn't hit your goals in terms of serving your community?

We are committed to serving a broad audience and to supporting artists who are pushing at the boundaries of artistic practice. That's a really interesting tension, and it's allowed us to do a lot. It also means we're sometimes out of step in one direction or the other.

Back in 2004, just before we opened the building, we undertook a project to conduct some local research about art and civic engagement. Our metaphor for the new building was a "town square," and the research project was intended to help us figure out what that would look like and feel like. We talked to 30 audience representatives--artists, activists, local leaders--and we dove into the work that Barbara Schaffer Bacon and Pam Korza had done through Animating Democracy. We created a framework for how this would look in the institution. We made a full color poster, a spectrum of civic engagement, lots of materials, and we were going to give this to the curators to use. This would be a model for the new way we were going to work with artists and audiences.

The research was sound, the model was pretty good, and it basically went nowhere. It just went into people's file cabinets. I think there are two reasons this happened. Our internal team, including myself, was not yet the most skilled at the internal advocacy needed to move the project forward. So the institution couldn't seem to wrap its head around how to put this research into action.

What I'm now finding 5 years later, is that a lot of these ideas are manifest in Open Field--a current project to explore how an institution, artists, and a community can come together to co-create a place for creative exchange. I don't even think I was conscious of the connection between the research and Open Field. The research turned out to be a seed we were planting. It just took awhile to find its ground. I think Open Field would have been almost impossible without that map, but it was not a linear journey.

You need to be open to the purposelessness of innovation. Some things move at different paces. This is why informal staff discussions and time together is so important. When we invested in a new outdoor grill and some large communal picnic tables last summer as part of Open Field, suddenly a lot of ideas were generated between staff at lunches and casual time together. You can't go to a meeting and be innovative. Innovative thinking is a balance between structured collaboration, happy accidents, and serendipitous conversations. You can't really say I'll be innovative at 2pm on Fridays. You need a balance between structure and openness to make all of this possible.

Thanks to Sarah and the Walker for providing such powerful, honest, realistic stories of innovation in action. Sarah will check in with the blog to respond to comments or questions you might have for her.

Sustaining Innovation Book Discussion Part 2: Your Experiences with Innovation (and Lack Thereof)

This is the second in a series of posts about Paul Light's book Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally. This post is an "open thread" post, in which you are encouraged to share your own experiences (positive and negative) with innovation in organizations. Next Tuesday will feature an interview with Sarah Schultz, a museum staffer at one of the institutions Light profiled in the book (the Walker Art Center).

This post is number 500 in the world of Museum 2.0. It's a long time coming. I've wanted to do open threads for years--to, at least part-time, transition this blog into a more democratic conversational space for cultural professionals. I think (hope) that Museum 2.0 now has a critical mass of readers and participants that we can make this work.

So I'm just going to ask two questions and then open the floor. Last week, I reviewed Sustaining Innovation, a book that explores management styles and internal procedures that support innovation at non-profits and government agencies. And so I'm curious:

• In your own work experience, what practices have you seen that encouraged or made innovation possible?
• What practices have you seen crush innovation or make it impossible?

Please share your stories (anonymously or otherwise) in the comments!

Postcards as a Call to Action: A Powerful, Political Participatory Experience at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

The best participatory projects are useful. Rather than just doing an activity, visitors should be able to contribute in a way that provides a valuable outcome for the institution and the wider museum audience. Finding legitimate ways for visitors to be of use is easier said than done. This week, I saw a great example at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum that blew me away with its power and simplicity.

The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum is a small historic house dedicated to the story of Chicago’s progressive activists in the early 1900s. The participatory activity in question is part of the new Unfinished Business gallery, a room in which the museum engages with a contemporary issue related to the passion and work of Jane Addams and the historic Hull-House activist residents.

The current Unfinished Business exhibition focuses on the prison industrial complex. It has three main parts: graphic novel-style wall graphics about the history of Hull-House activism related to incarceration and youth imprisonment, an activity station focused on juvenile justice reform, and a second activity station focused on prisoners in solitary confinement at Tamms Supermax Prison. It is this station that grabbed my attention.

The station is a collaboration between the Museum and Tamms Year Ten, an advocacy group that supports prisoners and seeks to expose the injustice with which many are held in solitary confinement. A simple label explains that when Tamms opened in 1998, prisoners were only supposed to be held in solitary confinement there for one year. Ten years later, one-third of the prisoners were still there. Tamms Year Ten runs a number of projects that invite people to write to prisoners, send photographs of the outside world, and advocate for them. The Museum activity label begins:

The Tamms Poetry Committee came together after asking prisoners what people on the outside can do to alleviate the stress of prolonged solitary confinement.

"Send poems!" was one of the answers.

Museum visitors are invited to write poems on postcards and send them to Tamms prisoners. There is a set of books of poetry that visitors can copy from (recommended by the Museum's poet-in-residence), or they can write their own. Tamms Year Ten provides lists of prisoner names and addresses, and the Museum prints up address stickers that visitors can affix to their postcards. The Museum screens and mails the postcards to the prisoners. Unfinished Business curator Teresa Silva told me that only a handful of postcards have had to be removed for negative or off-topic comments. The majority are beautiful, thoughtfully-rendered postcards. I choked up just looking through a stack. The messages were lovely, but the real power came in the simple address stickers that connected the cards to real prisoners in solitary confinement.

Yes, this activity is political. But it is political in a way that fits right in with the Museum’s mission and history. The Hull-House activists were concerned with creating a compassionate criminal justice system, and that work is by no means “finished” business in this country. Just as visitors to the Monterey Bay Aquarium clamor to take real action to protect the oceans, visitors to the Jane Addams Hull-House respond positively to this opportunity to engage in a bit of progressive, compassionate activism.

From a design perspective, this activity is scaffolded for success. The political nature of the activity is overt, so participating visitors know what they’re getting into. The postcards say right on them “I am sending this poem in solidarity with you.” Furthermore, selecting and copying out a poem from a book is something that most anyone can do. People can decorate their poems as much or as little as they like, and those who choose to take a more creative route and write their own poems or letters are invited to do so. Like the best participatory projects, this postcard activity is constrained but not limiting. The Museum gives people the tools to engage confidently without prescribing the output.

And most powerfully, that output is something useful, something that matters not just to the museum or to other visitors, but to the world. Kudos to the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum for such an inspiring call to action.

Note: for more photos and explanation of this activity, please consult this blog post by curatorial assistant Teresa Silva.