Image Beats Text: Good for Museums, Tough for Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Small Step for Detroit, One Giant Leap for Museum Ethics (Maybe)

Over the past three years, the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) has served as the museum poster child for the debate on the public value of the arts. Last year, the DIA was saved from financial crisis by voters in its three neighboring counties who elected to take on an additional property tax to support the museum. And now, in the past month, Michigan's Attorney General and State Senate have blocked the emergency manager of Detroit from seizing the DIA's collection to pay off the city's debt.

Like last year's tax, this newest development is an important step for the DIA, but it has even greater impact on the field overall. From a non-museum person's perspective, it's a little mysterious.

What's Happening in Detroit

Detroit is in serious trouble financially. The city's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, is pursuing many options to avoid bankruptcy. One option he put on the table in May is to sell off the DIA's multi-billion dollar collection of art. The DIA and its collection are owned by the city, which makes it a city asset.

Museum supporters and art lovers were up in arms about this proposal, arguing that these "cultural gems" are held in the public trust and should not be shed to pay off creditors. But this argument for the public value of the art is tough to uphold in a time of severe challenges. Detroit's city leaders are looking at a host of tough choices, and it's hard not to be sympathetic to the idea that a bunch of artwork matters less than emergency services, schools, parks, and any number of other city programs and assets that might be slashed to avoid bankruptcy.

For museum wonks, there's a more specific ethical reason that the DIA's collection should not be treated in this way: we don't see museum collections as assets on the balance sheet the same way Kevyn Orr does.

The American museum profession has an ethical standard that says "in no event shall they [funds raised by deaccessioning collections objects] be used for anything other than acquisition or direct care of collections."

In other words, in the museum world, if you sell artwork, you must put the proceeds into a restricted fund to either purchase or preserve other artwork in the collection.

Of course, Kevyn Orr doesn't see it that way--he sees the DIA's artwork as assets, and that's not unreasonable. This DOES come up when museums go bankrupt, at which point collections can be seen as assets by creditors. However, in this case, it is not the DIA that is going bankrupt but the city. If the city (or state) forces the DIA to violate museum ethics to satisfy city debts, it will have grave consequences for the museum and for the museum world.

Think of Artwork like Organs

Here's a weird but apt analogy: organ donation. For large organs like the heart and lungs, there is a national body that governs all organ donation and distribution in the US. All organs are given voluntarily without compensation (usually by dying people), and then the national body manages a list with complicated algorithms to determine who receives which organ.

Imagine if Detroit's largest hospital had an organ donation program, and Kevyn Orr required that the hospital violate medical ethics by selling any large organs received to the highest bidder. This could be a significant income stream for the city and help settle debts. At the same time, it would likely lead to that hospital and its surgeons facing grave consequences in the medical world... just like the DIA will face if the city forces it to violate museum ethics.

I know organs and artwork are different, but the situation is functionally the same: a professional field with a particular code of ethics whose rules may or may not be recognized by government bodies. That's why it is so significant that the Michigan Senate voted to take on the American Alliance of Museum's code of ethics regarding collections - it functionally means that the state is acknowledging and abiding by the professional standard in the museum field.

Complications and Ethical Dilemmas

But let's not start cheering just yet. There is an ironic sidenote to this "victory" for museum ethics. At the same time as this controversy is playing out in the public arena via Detroit, museum professionals are in the midst of debate about whether the ethics of deaccessioning still apply. A recent article in Museum magazine (published by the American Alliance of Museums) talks about the ugly realities of how a collection may be sold if a museum goes bankrupt. The Center for the Future of Museums, which is also run by the American Alliance of Museums, has been hosting a virtual "ethics smackdown" on its blog about the ethics of deaccessioning over the past several weeks. Only a small percentage of museums are formally signed onto the AAM code of ethics. While deaccessioning may be a museum sacred cow, it is not broadly considered our field's most important challenge.

I feel conflicted about this whole question. On the one hand, it drives me nuts that the ethical rules around deaccessioning force museums to protect objects in a way we do not comparably protect other core aspects of our work. There is no requirement that if you cut an educational program that you have to use the funds saved from that to fund other educational experiences. I've worked with museums that have hefty collections and restricted acquisition funds but are closed to the public because all of their dollars and assets are wrapped up in objects and none in public service or access. I can also see the argument that it actually makes museums MORE relevant if our assets are considered fair game in a situation like Detroit's--just as important and just as endangered as other core services.

On the other hand, I feel strongly that as arts are generally misunderstood and marginalized in the public eye (and funding sphere), it's important for us to do whatever we can to help people understand WHY artwork is like organs, and why these objects remaining in the public trust matters. In an offline conversation about Detroit, Margy Waller, who is brilliant at framing the public value of art, put it this way:

The arts are already pretty much ALWAYS seen as a low priority among things of public value. In fact, they're (I want to say we're) often seen as a private matter -- and not a public good at all. 

The arguments about sale of DIA art strike me as forming inside that frame. And if it happens, I worry that it would reinforce what is already the dominant way of view of the arts --- and set back our case-making: that the arts create places where people want to live, work, invest, and visit -- all things Detroit desperately needs right now.

Great Participatory Processes are Open, Discoverable, and Unequal

When I was in college, I spent almost all of my free time in the slam poetry scene. A few years and a few hundred open mics into that experience, it became obvious that some venues fostered amazing poetry communities, others, not so much.

One of my favorite open mics was at the Cantab in Cambridge, MA. The Cantab had a formula. Everyone got five minutes on the mic max. Slots on the list were first-come first-served, though newbies were usually placed early in the set so they would have a gentle onramp (and so seasoned poets could skip the kiddie pool if they chose to). Once the list filled, there were still shadow spots for special poets--but you had to be good to get one of those. The crowd was uniformly supportive of all, but effusive applause was meted out based strictly on quality. Experienced poets worked hard to bring their best to the stage, and they got honest feedback from a motley gang of peers and spectators. The whole experience welcomed newcomers while helping them understand what "value" constituted in that community.

Compare that with any number of lousy open mics. Some were so exclusive that it was impossible to feel welcome as a newcomer. Others lavished praise so indiscriminately that poets were never challenged to improve or bring forward new work. Some had no clear time limits or criteria for participation, and the poetry swung between brilliance and poke-your-eye-out horror.

I was reminded of these experiences when reading Dan Thompson's excellent post about what makes a good jazz jam. Dan writes about the explicit and implied "rules" of participation for musicians that create great music both onstage and for the crowd. He casts the whole idea of a great jazz jam in the context of the tragedy of the commons--like a poetry open mic, the jazz club is a community whose experience is fabulous or awful depending on the extent to the culture cultivates and enforces a healthy participatory process.

When I think about what makes for great participatory experiences in both poetry open mics and jazz jams, it comes down to three basic things:

• The process is open. There is some way for anyone to walk in the door and sign up.
• The process is discoverable. If there are implied rules or idiosyncrasies (and in the best cultures, there are), they are not completely shrouded in mystery. Repeated participation can make them knowable and understandable. 
• The process is unequal. It acknowledges differences in talent, experience, and effort, and has a system--either explicit or implicit--for rewarding greatness.

These might sound obvious, but when you think about how they relate to bad participatory processes, it becomes apparent where things can break down. Here are just three participatory processes I think are in serious need of improvement:

• Public comment at city council meetings. These suffer from an excess of equality. Have you ever stood in line for your two minutes on an issue at a government meeting? The process is incredibly open and equal. Wackos and experts all get the same amount of time. And the end result--what politicians actually decide--rarely seems meaningfully correlated with the participatory process. These systems are open, but they are also excessively equal and not discoverable. The result is that people get turned off, cynical, and leave. Only the extremists remain. And thus councilmembers have to go outside the process to get good input from community members (if at all). The process becomes even less discoverable. It gets killed by the equality of it.
• Grant application feedback. These suffer from a lack of discoverability. You spend hours agonizing over the language for a grant application. You put it in, wait a couple months, and then you get a one-page form letter informing you that you did (or more likely, didn't) receive funding. Occasionally, the funder will offer limited opportunities for feedback on the proposal. Even more rarely, you will receive panel comments directly. Grant processes are inherently unequal--the funder is trying to find the best work to support. But they are also problematically not discoverable. It's rare that you get direct feedback about your proposal without aggressively asking for it. The whole process of grant applications would be improved if providing panel comments was a matter of course. Applicants would learn what they lacked, and funders would (hopefully) receive better applications. Opaque funding decisions don't help anyone.
• Exhibition proposals. These suffer from a lack of openness. This is an issue we are actively grappling with at our museum. We receive frequent inquiries from artists and community members about how thy might submit exhibition proposals for consideration by our institution. At many museums, the curatorial process is completely closed and undiscoverable--"don't call us, we'll call you." Others have clear and open processes for submittal and proposal review. As we figure out what's right for us, I'm guided by the desire to create something open and discoverable--but not necessarily "fair" and equal.

Do these three criteria--open, discoverable, unequal--resonate for you in designing or experiencing participatory processes? 

Memo from the Revolution: Six Things I've Learned from our Institutional Transformation

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to give one of the closing talks at the Theater Communications Group annual conference in Dallas. TCG is the industry association for non-profit theaters, the way AAM is for museums. Given TCG's multi-year Audience (R)evolution initiative, I took the opportunity to write a new talk about what revolution has looked like at our small museum in Santa Cruz.

This is not a transcript of the talk - just the highlights that I hope will be useful for you. You can download all the slides here.

First, a quick recap on our revolution. Over the past two years, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has undergone a significant transformation of program, audience, and resources. When I came to the museum in May of 2011, we were on the brink of closure financially. At the same time, our community relevance was limited. There was a small, dedicated group of people who knew and loved the museum, and then a larger community that barely knew we existed.

With our backs against the wall and a new vision statement positioning the museum as a "thriving, central gathering place," we started a revolution. Our revolution is predicated on three big ideas:

1. Art and history are something you do, not just something you learn about. By inviting people to actively participate with us in co-creating programming, we empower them as creative agents, cultural producers, and people for whom the museum is a relevant, compelling partner.
2. Being a strong community hub requires bringing people together across difference, encouraging bridging experiences instead of targeting a specific audience. When we work with diverse collaborators, from opera singers and ukelele players to knitters and graffiti artists, we catalyze new partnerships and relationships that make our community stronger and more cohesive.
3. We believe in fearless experimentation. It is only by trying things out, challenging our assumptions, and analyzing the results that we can adapt and thrive in a changing world.

In our first year of this new approach, we had extraordinary results. Our attendance more than doubled. Our busiest day more than tripled. And we went from five years in the red to running a generous surplus that got us on the path to financial stability. Best of all, the response from our community was incredible--a diverse range of individuals and local press is effusive about the new vitality, public value, and engagement in the museum.

Here are six things I've learned from this transformation that might be helpful to other would-be revolutionaries.

A revolution is not an exercise in concentric circles. Imagine you run an organization with a small set of resources (purple circle) and you want to expand to a larger pool of resources (yellow circle). When an organization grows in an evolutionary way, it primarily focuses on expanding its resources. More audience. More money. This kind of work is not risky because the center of it--the programmatic core--doesn't necessarily have to shift. You just get bigger. In contrast, in a revolution, the center of the circle shifts, often quite dramatically. Even if your new resource pool includes most of the people and funds that you originally had, the programmatic core of the transformed organization is likely way outside of the original purple circle. You have to be willing to jump off the ledge and recenter your programming where you believe your future audience and resources will reside. This is often the hardest part of institutional transformation--being willing and able to listen to the voices that are NOT inside your organization. If someone has been turned off by your organization or is not engaged, incrementalism won't reach them. You have to start where they are, with a whole new premise, to get them involved.

Focus on what matters. Why do political activists hammer on singular, simple messages? Because focus wins the day. If you are starting a revolution to make your facility more welcoming, your programming more edgy, or your audience more diverse, you have to focus JUST on that. Pick one or two goals and repeat them ad nauseum with your team. Don't let secondary concerns delay you from moving forward aggressively to make these things happen. A simple example at our institution had to do with making the facility more welcoming. We heard again and again that the museum was cold and uncomfortable. So we started getting couches donated. The couches didn't match. They looked junky. But they gave visitors a comfortable place to sit, and we started hearing that people felt welcomed in a way they hadn't before. Over time, we are getting more attractive couches that reflect a unified design aesthetic. But we weren't going to wait to solve people's comfort problem until we had the money or the design. We started with couches.

Be rigorous. Especially when working in an experimental or unorthodox way, it can be easy for it to look like you don't have a coherent strategy behind the work you do. Why are there these ugly couches? Why are you holding a pop up museum in a bar? In our case, we've gotten very focused on developing strategic frameworks to back up our approach to community participation, social bridging, and experimentation. We use a clear logic model to relate our activities to their intended outcomes and impacts (here's more about what a logic model is). This allows us both to explain ourselves to external funders and to have clear internal criteria for how we plan and evaluate our projects to ensure that we are moving towards our big institutional goals and vision.

Exploit your size. There are unique advantages to every budget level. Big organizations seem comfortable with this--they make big plays based on their scale. But many small organizations seem to spend too much time trying to emulate big organizations rather than exploiting the opportunity to be more personal, more idiosyncratic, and less bureaucratic. No one opens a small coffeeshop and thinks, "we'll really be successful if we are just like Starbucks." The whole point is to not be Starbucks. Instead of apologizing for the "lack of professionalism" of small institutions, we should celebrate the ways that our programming can lead to stronger engagement on an individual level. My first year at the MAH, I would often say that we are a "no money, no bullshit" operation. We may not have funding for your project, but we won't tie it up in red tape either. You want to have an artist collective sleepover at the museum? Sure. Want to give visitors sledgehammers and invite them to help make a giant metal sculpture? Sounds great. Want to give free admission spontaneously as a gift to visitors who need it? No problem. Just as a large organization can exploit its resources, we can do the same in a different way as a small organization.

Help it spread. At some point, you may personally feel like you no longer want to be a revolutionary, that your time as a risk-taker is over. That's fine. At that point, consider becoming a "space-maker" who provides other people in your organization with the support and the cover to be able to take risks to further the work. I occasionally meet creative directors who note that "all the new ideas have to come from my desk." When I hear that, I realize that those are leaders who are not ready to make space for other risk-takers on their team. The only way that a revolution can shift from a personal goal to a movement is by making space for lots of people to get involved. I first learned about this paradigm of risk-takers and space-makers from Beck Tench, and it has helped me as a manager ever since.

Remember why you got into this. The reason that we do this revolutionary work is in service of a bigger mission--in my case, to help people transform their lives and our community through active participation with art, history, creativity, and culture. Whatever your personal focus, it's worth thinking about whether you are working on a problem that you consider to be truly important. I have been inspired in this thinking by a brilliant speech by mathematician Dick Hamming about what it takes to be a great scientist. Hamming commented that, "The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems." Selling tickets is not an important problem. Building a building is not an important problem. Find a problem that is truly important, and you will find a revolution worth fighting for.

Guest Posts and Old Favorites Coming this Fall to Museum 2.0

There have been many times over the past six and a half years that my blogging has been strained by life and work. I've been proud that I've been able to keep up weekly posts--even when on vacation, moving across the country, or pulling 80-hour work weeks.

But later this summer, I'm taking on a personal transition that goes above and beyond: I'm having a baby. This is going to add all kinds of wonderfulness and chaos to my life. I don't want to blog about it. But I do want a healthy period of not feeding the Museum 2.0 beast while I am busy feeding another one.

For that reason, I'm planning to devote August and September of this year to a mixture of guest posts and re-posts from the Museum 2.0 vaults. After six and a half years, I have more than 650 posts, and given the statistics on new visitors to the site, I assume that many of you may have missed gems from the early years. At the same time, I'm hoping guest posts will bring in some fresh perspectives that push forward the dialogue on this blog and in the field.

So I'm curious:

• Is there anyone you would love to see a guest post from this fall? I have some folks in mind but would love to know if there are specific individuals, projects, or institutions you would like to hear from.
• Are there topics that you are curious about that you feel haven't been covered here (or haven't been covered for awhile)? I can pick posts from the past based on popularity, but if there is a more interesting lens through which to filter, I'm happy to do it.

P.S. Don't worry; I'll be back. 

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?

Thinking about User Participation in Terms of Negotiated Agency

Early this month, I got the chance to hear legendary game designer Will Wright (Sim City) give a talk. I've followed Wright's work for years because of his unique perspective on the potential for game-players to be game-makers - in other words, to co-create the gaming experience.

In his talk, Wright said one thing that really stood out:

Game players have a negotiated agency that is determined by how the game is designed.

In other words, the more constrained the game environment, the less agency the player has. The more open, the more agency. Think about the difference between Pacman and Grand Theft Auto. Both games have a "gamespace" in which they are played. Both games have rules. But Grand Theft Auto invites the player to determine their own way of using the space and engaging with the rules. The player's agency is not total, but it is significant.

"Negotiated agency" strikes me as a really useful framework in which to talk about visitor/audience participation in the arts. "Negotiation" implies a respectful relationship between institution (or artist) and user. The institution initiates the negotiation with a set of opportunities and constraints. But users play a role via their own agency--both in how they engage and when they break the rules.

Sometimes the negotiation works beautifully. You offer visitors markers and tape and a wall, and they agree tacitly only to write on the tape and not on the wall itself.

Sometimes the negotiation is contested. You tell people they can't take photographs in the gallery or the performance, but the phones sneak out, covertly or defiantly, to reassert personal control of the experience. Patrons clap between movements. Visitors talk over the tour guide.

Sometimes the negotiation can be exploited for artistic means. The theater is dark and the artist breaks the fourth wall and asks for conversation. The symphony conductor asks everyone to raise their phones and join the orchestra. The museum invites art-making in the elevator. This is a kind of negotiation jui-jitsu that can create art through creative tension.

In my experience, this negotiation works best if we acknowledge people's agency and seek ways to create something surprising and high-value through it.

And so I humbly submit two questions to ask yourself when thinking about user participation:

1. What is our negotiating stance in developing this relationship with participants? How can we make it a win-win?
2. How will participants seek to assert their agency in the experience? Will we encourage these activities, denounce them, or divert them?

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.

Using Social Bridging to Be "For Everyone" in a New Way

Like a lot of organizations, my museum struggles with two conflicting goals:

1. The museum should be for everyone in our community.
2. It's impossible for any organization or business to do a great job being for everyone. We're more successful when we target particular communities or audiences and design experiences for them.

How do you reconcile the desire to be inclusive with the practical imperative to target? In the past, I've subscribed to the theory that an organization should target many different groups and types of people to serve a constellation of specific audiences across diverse affinities, needs, and interests. 

But ultimately, that's still targeting. It's still grouping. And while it may be effective when it comes to marketing, it's limiting if your mission is to reach and engage with a wide range of people. It can lead to parallel programming: bike night for hipsters, bee night for hippies, family night for kiddies. And rarely the twain shall meet.

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, we're approaching this challenge through a different lens: social bridging. One of our core programming goals is to build social capital by forging unexpected connections between diverse collaborators and audience members. We intentionally develop events and exhibitions that matchmake unlikely partners--opera and ukelele, Cindy Sherman and amateur photographers, welding and knitting. Our goal in doing this work is to bring people together across difference and build a more cohesive community.  

We have been explicitly focusing on social bridging for more than a year now. What started as a series of experiments and happy accidents is now embedded in how we develop and evaluate projects. We've seen surprising and powerful results--visitors from different backgrounds getting to know each other, homeless people and museum volunteers working together, artists from different worlds building new collaborative projects. Visitors now spontaneously volunteer that "meeting new people" and "being part of a bigger community" are two of the things they love most about the museum experience.

This has led to a surprising outcome: we are now de-targeting many programs. This isn't just a philosophical shift--it's also being driven by visitors' behavior. "Family Art Workshops" suffer from anemic participation whereas multi-generational festivals are overrun with families. Single-speaker lectures languish while lightning talks featuring teen photographers, phD anthropologists, and professional dancers are packed. Programs that emphasize bringing diverse people together are more popular than those that serve intact groups. Why fight it?

And so, while we continue to acknowledge that specific communities have particular assets and needs, we spend more time thinking about how to connect them than how to serve each on its own. We're comfortable being deliberately unhip if it means that a seven year old, a seventeen year old, and a seventy year old all feel "at home" at the museum. This approach allows us to sidestep the question of parallel versus pipeline programming and instead create a new pipeline that is about unexpected connections and social experiences.

Focusing on social bridging also leads to tricky questions as to how we develop new programming, especially when it comes to outreach. When we offer programs at a school or neighborhood festival or community center, we do it to work with the group who live or learn there. Ironically and somewhat depressingly, our partnerships with marginalized communities often involve more segregated work because of our desire to engage in their space, on their terms. There are some groups who we work with terrifically in their own space but who we rarely engage in ours. This leads to good bonding, but very little bridging.

I don't have the answer to how we can incorporate bridging across the various ways we work with intact and blended communities. When it comes to school programs, we are now actively exploring how our approach might shift to emphasize bridging--among students in the same school, among students from different schools, among students across their school and home life. When it comes to working with intact cultural and ethnic communities, one of the resources that is helping me think through these questions is a 2004 paper by Dr. Pia Moriarty on Immigrant Participatory Arts in Silicon Valley. In the paper, Dr. Moriarty puts forward a paradigm of "bonded-bridging" to describe the way that ethnically-identified programs and organizations contribute to bridging in a majority-immigrant community. It's a thoughtful and intriguing paper, and I encourage you to read it.

I'm still chewing on the idea of "bonded-bridging" and the limitations and possibilities of a bridging strategy in a diverse community. But for now, I'm happy that we've been able to address some of our hand-wringing over targeted programs and inclusion with an approach that serves both our visitors and our core goals.

Does social bridging make sense for your institution? How do you reconcile inclusion and targeting in program design?

Open Thread: Your Stories of Risk and Reward

What's the biggest professional risk you've taken? What happened after you took the risk? 

In three weeks, Kathleen McLean and I are co-hosting a freewheeling talk show at the American Alliance of Museums conference. The theme is "risk and reward," and we plan to explore both individual and institutional relationships to risk-taking. 

Kathy and I have each spent a lot of time advocating for experimental practice and risk-taking in museums, both as consultants and on staff. We've seen the mixed results--lots of excitement, lots of push back, some progress. For me personally, risk-taking has led to incredible professional opportunities, for which I feel lucky and grateful. I'm particularly indebted to Anna Slafer, my amazing boss at the Spy Museum in the mid-2000s. Anna would kick me under the table when I shared ideas out of turn, yet she also fiercely defended me (and our whole team) so we could do creative, risky work.

But many organizations don't have an Anna. Many people struggle with fears of punishment or marginalization for taking risks. It's hard for me to evaluate the extent to which these fears are well-founded, and whether the climate for risk is changing in the arts sector broadly. 

So I'm curious: what is your experience? Did you or your institution take a risk that got rewarded? Punished? Ignored? 

Please share your story in the comments. 

And if you're coming to Baltimore, please join us on Wednesday May 22 at 10:15 for a lively conversation informed by your stories.