Hello Museum World!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unleashing Museum 2.0

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

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

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

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

Here’s how this transition will work:

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

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

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

Who’s Coming? A New Free Toolkit for Respectful Audience Surveying

Michaela Clark-Nagaoka surveying visitors at a MAH event.

Note: this is cross-posted on OF/BY/FOR ALL, where you can find more tools and stories for building more inclusive organizations. 

If you want to involve new people at your organization, you need to know who is coming - and who isn’t. Today, OF/BY/FOR ALL is introducing a new free resource - a guide to creating and implementing demographic audience surveys that are accurate, respectful, and useful.

I remember the first time I understood how powerful it was to have demographic data about our participants. At the time, I was leading the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We were three years into a dramatic transformation to welcome new people in new ways. For my first three years, we got a sense of who was and wasn’t involved based on observation and gut instinct. We tried things. We checked out the crowd. We noticed if people were younger or older, more or less racially diverse.

But after three years of ad hoc observation, we were hungry for hard data. We realized our gut instincts could only take us so far. There was a lot we couldn’t see - like economic class and sexual orientation. And there was a lot we were assuming - about race, gender, and age. We decided to make a commitment to collecting better data about who was and wasn’t coming.

We discovered that was not an easy thing to do. We talked to colleagues in other institutions who were struggling with the same questions. No one had a playbook of answers. We ended up working with two sets of consultants, funded by two different foundations, for over a year. Those expert researchers taught us how to conduct truly random surveys, how to train our team, how to ask sensitive questions in a respectful manner, and how to analyze the results. The outcome was a simple, powerful protocol... but our process in getting there was anything but simple.

That’s why we decided, as part of our first year of work with OF/BY/FOR ALL, to demystify audience surveying with The Who’s Coming toolkit. We’ve teamed up with Slover Linett Audience Research - with generous support from the James and John L. Knight Foundation - to write this toolkit. We wrote it for people like us: busy professionals who want to do a better job capturing and analyzing demographic audience data. In this toolkit, you’ll find step-by-step tools to help you write a survey, share it with a truly random slice of your audience, and analyze the results. You don’t need funding or a consultant to get started collecting data. You can do it yourself, with your staff and volunteers - and this toolkit.

In my experience, collecting good demographic data can help you smash stereotypes. It can help you make smarter strategic decisions and better programs. As one small example, in our very first round of data collection at the MAH, we learned that the audience coming to monthly free First Friday events was wealthier, whiter, and older than the audience for ticketed Third Friday festivals. This finding fundamentally shifted our perception of who attends paid and free programs. It made us ask why, dig deeper, and understand a lot more about what makes a program welcoming to whom.

The Who’s Coming toolkit has two parts. The first section tackles HOW to design and implement random audience surveys. The second section tackles WHAT to ask. While both parts are rooted in practitioner and expert experience, the WHAT will keep evolving as our collective understanding of identity changes. We wrote this toolkit from a US-centered perspective, and we know some of the demographic terms might be different in other countries. If you have questions or suggestions to make the toolkit more inclusive, please let us know.

Until then, I hope you’ll read it, share it, and most of all, USE IT. You are free to download, share, excerpt, and use this toolkit however you want. And if you do use it, we’d love to hear how it goes for you and what you learn. What gets measured gets done. When you measure demographic data, it accelerates your ability to make positive, inclusive change.

A Long Interview as I say Goodbye to the MAH (and Thoughts on the Privilege of Leading Change)

Some of our courageous team. We are strong together.

I'm in my final week at the MAH. It's everything I hoped and feared: sweet, exciting, sad, poignant, and full of delicious treats and surprises from my loving, zany colleagues.

Geoffrey Dunn, a fabulous writer and collaborator, just published a big cover interview with me in our local weekly, the Good Times. We talked Abbott Square, community issue exhibitions, surfing, and the beauty and struggle of community-driven change. If you're curious to hear more about what I'm most proud of in my eight years at the MAH, I hope you'll check it out.

I was proud to work with amazing colleagues to lead major change at the museum. We made it a more inclusive, relevant, and successful place. It was not easy. But it was needed. And it was worth it.

My favorite question Geoffrey asked me was about engaging with people who were critical of the transformation of the MAH. Here's his question and my full answer (which was edited down for length in the published article).

Geoffrey wrote: 
Some of the changes you imposed on the museum, including Abbott Square, generated criticism, mostly from some of the old guard types who wanted more traditional explorations of art and history.

Here's my full response:
Not everyone liked how we, and I, led the MAH. But as a leader, I have to weigh those small number of critical voices against the hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic people who got newly involved - including many who had never felt welcome in a museum before. For every critic, there were literally a thousand new people telling us how grateful they were for the changes.

In a lot of ways, I’m embarrassed I spent as much emotional energy on those critics as I did. I had to remind myself that every minute I spent worrying about someone who didn’t like what we were doing - someone who was never going to like what we were doing! - was a minute I wasn’t spending on someone who could and would benefit from being involved. Over time, I learned to bless and release those critics, so I could focus on the people who were ready to engage.

When I think of the loudest critics of our work, I think of people who wanted the MAH to be a more exclusive, elitist, academic place. I think that’s the wrong vision for a public institution. I think it’s the wrong vision for Santa Cruz. For a museum to survive and thrive today, it must be relevant and meaningful for many people from many backgrounds. It must sway to the pulse of the cultural community in which it resides. It must be radically inclusive, constantly working to invite new people to connect for new reasons. That’s what we tried to do at the MAH.

And these changes were not just my doing. The board hired me with the specific mandate to make the MAH “a thriving, central gathering place.” I hired community organizers and creative convenors. We made it our mission to open the museum up. To younger people. To Latinx people. To people who were unsure if their story, their art, their voice mattered in our community. We made the MAH a museum of “and” - art AND history, participation AND contemplation, loud Friday nights and quiet Tuesday afternoons. The friction, the hybridity, different people from different walks of life colliding through art and history and public life - that’s what building a more connected community is all about.

People often are afraid to lead change because they know that some will resist that change. That’s true. But it’s also true that if you are changing an organization to be more inclusive and relevant, many, many people will fall in love with the change. They will thank you for the change. They will push you to keep changing. I don’t see leading change as hard or painful. I see it as a great privilege and I feel lucky to do it.

***

To all the inclusive changemakers out there: I honor your courage. I honor your struggle. It's worth it. 

But What if it FAILS? Using the FMEA Tool to Analyze the Potential Effects and Impacts of Failure

You know the feeling.

You think your plan will work.
You present confidence to everyone around you.
You fire up the crowd, energize supporters, and rally the troops.
But at the same time, you're terrified you might fail.

I've spent many days hustling and nights stressing over projects that seemed just on the edge of falling apart.

Then, I went to an amazing training led by Becky Margiotta, and she introduced me to a tool that helped me focus during the day and sleep well at night.

That tool is called Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). FMEA is a quick, systematic way of analyzing:

• which parts of your plan could fail
• which of those potential failures are most likely
• which of those potential failures would cause the most severe consequences 
• which parts of your plan you should focus on strengthening to avoid likely, severe failures 

FMEA comes from the worlds of systems engineering and the military. It's used in many industries where failures can be catastrophic (i.e. hospitals, nuclear power, aeronautics). But it can also be useful in any situation where you want to get a clearer understanding of what failure might mean and how you can avoid it. For example, we share it at OF/BY/FOR ALL bootcamps to help cultural and civic professionals identify and address fault lines in their plans to involve new communities. You can use it for anything.

Here's how you do it:

1. Make a list of all the possible ways that your plan could fail. These are your failure modes.
2. Assign each failure mode a score from 1-10 for "likelihood" and another score from 1-10 for "severity."
3. For each failure mode, multiply the "likelihood" score by the "severity" score to get the total score.
4. Sort your failure modes by score. Focus your energy on finding ways to mitigate the high scoring failure modes. Don't let yourself be distracted by the low-scoring ones--they are either so improbable or so minor in impact that they are not worth sweating.

Here's a silly example we made up at the last OF/BY/FOR ALL bootcamp. The plan in question was to create a parade of 100 giraffes down the main street of a small town. As you can see, while bootcampers came up with several ways the parade could fail, there was only one ("can't get 100 giraffes") that would be both likely and severe enough to sink the project. So we focused our mitigation energy on getting the giraffes.

Here's a more serious example that our OF/BY/FOR ALL staff team created one month before we launched the Change Network program. Here, you can see that there were two failure modes we honed in on (1B and 3). Based on this analysis, we decided to focus on ensuring that videocalls would work and that we had enough staff time to support our First Wave teams. We acknowledged--but didn't sweat--the other stuff. 

I love this tool because it lets you get all your anxiety out on the table and then empowers you to realize most of your fears are either highly unlikely or do not have severe consequences. It generates clarity and confidence - fast. You can focus on what matters and put unreasonable fears in their place.

Here's a PDF template of the FMEA tool you can download and use if helpful to you. If you try it out, let me know how it goes. And if you have other tools that help you focus and remove stressful distractions, please share them in the comments.

Guest Post by Martin Djupdraet: Let the Decision Makers Do the Audience Research

This guest post is written by Martin Brandt Djupdræt, Head of research and presentation and a member of the management at the Danish open-air museum Den Gamle By (The Old Town). I met Martin last year at the MuseumNext conference. I was impressed by his commitment to putting visitors first - and his technique for inviting more of his colleagues to do so as well. In this post, Martin shares a simple yet effective way to involve staff at all levels in conducting visitor research to drive new perspectives and decisions. Note that Martin uses the word "survey" in a slightly more expansive way than is typical in the United States.

At Den Gamle By we have set ourselves a goal to broaden the perspective of those in responsibility and to ensure the management will take our audience seriously. Den Gamle By (“The Old Town” in Danish) is an open-air museum about urban life and the local museum of the city of Aarhus. It is the second most visited museum in Denmark. What we have done is quite simple, but it works: we require decision makers to do audience research themselves.

Learning experts have pointed out that when people are involved in a subject and actually experiencing it, they are likely to learn more. Interacting with visitors and engaging their emotions is a method used by many museums. But direct involvement with the audience is not necessarily a method used by museum management. Good museums listen to their audiences and the public before they make changes, but my guess is that most museum managers let others do the visitor research. Our experience now is that different lessons are learned when the management participate in collecting the data themselves.

Our new type of research was developed last year though workshops with museum researchers John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking. We wanted to understand the decisions visitors make while visiting and the impact of the visit. There are two elements of the research: tracking and interviewing.

Here’s how it works: a staff member from the museum meets a randomly selected person at the entrance. With the visitor’s consent, we follow and observe them during the entire, noting what parts of the museum they visit and when. The same staff member then interviews the visitor three weeks later.

Visitors are asked:

• why they chose this museum,
• what they noticed especially during the visit,
• whether they interacted with anyone, and
• whether they had talked to anyone about the museum after the visit, and what about

To make sure this knowledge is put to use in developing the museum, the management and curators are part of the team who carry out the survey. Managers have to leave their desks, and track and interview ordinary people they never would meet in their daily work or at the meetings they normally spend time on.

Before doing the survey, most of the management and curators felt they knew the museum and how visitors use it quite well, but it was an eye opener for us to spend an entire visit with one of the guests and interviewing them some weeks later.

What surprised us? The curators were surprised by how important other parts of the museum besides the historical content were for the visitor. The F&B manager and the head of HR were surprised by how many objects and stories the visitors were absorbed in. This has also given us insights into the work of our colleagues and made us appreciate their work to a larger extent. Now we all have useful and inspiring stories about visitors’ choices and the impact the museum had on them.

Another observation was the importance of food and drink. In our trackings we could see how much time the visitors spent on the museum’s eating places and the great social importance these breaks had. Something we learned about food through the interviews was that the guests consider the food at the museum as part of the museum's storytelling. This insight has encouraged us to focus on food and food history as a priority topic at the museum, and a colleague is going to work particularly with that subject.

This research has also given us confidence in choosing the core stories of the museum. For example, a woman in her 20s said that Aarhus Story, a new permanent exhibition about the city of Aarhus, had made her proud of being a citizen of Aarhus and that she developed a stronger sense of belonging to the city, because the exhibition showed her parts of the history that she could connect with. We were pleased and humbled that such an impact was possible. This observation along with other similar observations has already led to new decisions. They were part of the reason why we chose to skip the easy and light crowd-pleasers in our planning of new elements for 2019, and instead went for activities where the museum had a deeper knowledge, good exhibitions and good stories to tell. Through the research, we gained the courage to go for more difficult and ambitious activities and more profound stories.

Visitors have always been a focus for the management, but the research have personalized our audience and they are discussed differently now. As the head of finance described it: “I normally look at whether a task is well done, financially possible and efficient, but now I also consider more seriously how a visitor would feel and react to the changes we plan.”

Does it take time to do this research? Yes it does. Time which could be spent meeting with important people and dealing with important strategic considerations. But none of these worthy activities is more important that meeting the audience and taking their thoughts and actions seriously. Not one.

Is an individual observed in this way representative for all the guests? No, but the reflection shows that it gives new insight, and it certainly ignites the decision makers’ imaginations. Those who have tracked visitors up to now have spent maximum a whole working day altogether on tracking the visitor, the interview and gathering the information. That single day has been an eye-opener for the curators and other decision makers. In addition, we have made it easier for all of our staff to gain insight by meeting our visitors face-to-face by doing a half-hour shift as a welcoming host at the museum entrance. More than 20 staff member working at the offices tried this new practice last December. Most of them were thrilled about the talks they had with the visitors and back at the desk their experiences were discussed with colleagues. These efforts have taught us all through simple involvement that there are many different ways of understanding and using our museum. We have not just learned it, we have felt it.

Four other Nordic museums are now doing the same type of tracking and interviewing. In the year to come we will compare our observations, and will also be happy to share the result with you and others who might be interested. But we know already, before even looking at the collected data, that the project has been a success in Den Gamle By. It has broadened the decision makers’ perspective and made our audience even more important when new exhibitions and goals are planned.

From Risk-taker to Spacemaker: Reflections on Leading Change

Fifteen years ago, my boss kicked me under the table. I was a small fry at a big museum, volunteering for a project I had no business taking on. My boss and mentor Anna often encouraged me to stretch the limits. She protected and supported me in leading projects far beyond my job description. We had a push-pull relationship; I’d ask for opportunities, she’d say yes but also help me understand how far I could safely go. And when I went too far over the edge, she’d give me a well-placed kick.

I didn’t have the words at the time to identify what Anna was doing. She was being a spacemaker for me and for other creative risk-takers on her team. I learned this terminology later, from Beck Tench, who studies, mentors, and leads institutional change in public space. As Beck once put it, risk-takers need "space-makers" to provide them with the support, the creative license, and the encouragement to try new things, fail, and get up again.

As a young professional, I identified as a risk-taker. I was proud to be seen as a maverick. Success to me looked like taking bigger and bigger risks, and being recognized as the person who had created the project or made the initiative happen. My ego was tied up with making the thing and forging the path.

It was only later that I started to feel that the greatest impact comes when you stop focusing on what you can create and start imagining the space you can make for others to create. I didn’t want to blunt my activist energy, but I did want to find more effective ways to channel it. I realized my potential—if limited to my own creative abilities—was finite. But if I used my abilities to empower and make space for others, the opportunities were infinite.

It took three things for me to change my perspective on this. First, a deep and growing conviction that community participation is valuable—that every person can make a meaningful contribution to an effort if given a well-constructed space in which to do so. Second, growing confidence in myself—that my achievements would not be belittled nor diminished by the participation of others. And third, recognition of the privileges I enjoy, and the sense that it is my responsibility and joyful opportunity to share those privileges and related power with others.

When I think back on the work I’ve been proudest of over my past eight years leading the MAH, the projects that come to mind are those where I made space for others to lead us to new heights. In some projects, like Abbott Square, I was in the driver’s seat but invited hundreds of community partners, large and small, to take a turn at the wheel. In others, like the Community Issue Exhibition process, I was there as a fundraiser, networker, and sounding board for our brilliant team as they went deeper and further with community than I knew how to go.

In all these projects, I had to take a risk. I had to put my own credibility on the line. I wasn’t leading from behind. I was leading to clear space. As time went on, I felt more and more confident doing that to empower others rather than doing it for myself.

My favorite moments at the MAH are small, immediate surprises. I walk in on a day off and there’s something weird and wonderful happening that I had absolutely nothing to do with. A bonsai festival. A harp concert. An empathy fair. I know these things are happening because of our amazing, generous, risk-taking staff and community partners. And I know I have a small part in it as a spacemaker who carved out room for the idea that it was OK for a museum to be all these things to all these people in our community.

I’ve come to think of spacemaking as a form of allyship we can all practice with anyone whose growth and creativity we want to support. We make space when we ask, “Maria, what do you think?” We make space when we say, “I‘ll back you up on this no matter how it turns out.” We make space when we find the money and the materials and the partners to make someone’s big dreams real. We make space when we define its limits, with a helpful redirect here or a kick under the table there. And we make space when we hold the hands of risk-takers, take a deep breath, and step over the line alongside them.

Generative leadership isn’t about the person in charge generating all the ideas. It’s about the leader creating the conditions for new ideas and projects to keep bubbling up from many voices and perspectives. When we make space for others, we make space for possibilities beyond our imagining.

Sharing Power, Holding Expertise: The Future of Authority Revisited

This week, I've had multiple conversations with colleagues in the arts, symphonies, and urban planning about the fear professionals have about "losing control" when opening up new opportunities for people to participate. Their questions made me think about a blog post I wrote in 2008, The Future of Authority.

I want to reshare this post with you today for two reasons:

• We are still grappling with fears of losing control as we open up organizations to new participants and new communities. This post provides some useful perspective if you have these fears or are grappling with those who are fearful.
• While I originally wrote this post to advocate for more participatory practice (i.e. letting museum visitors contribute and collaborate in museums), I now see this as a crucial issue also for more democratic and inclusive practice (i.e. welcoming people with more diverse perspectives and backgrounds to participate meaningfully). Around the world, we see that participation is a meaningful entrypoint for new communities. New communities don't just want to consume. They want to help shape organizations to more fully represent and embrace their realities. Inviting participation, letting go of control, holding expertise, and sharing power is critical to inclusive practice.
• Our collective understanding and savviness about the power online platforms wield--for good and ill--has greatly increased since 2008. As I reread this post, I think about the incredible opportunities (and risks) for cultural and civic organizations - rather than publicly-traded tech companies - to create and manage platforms on which people connect, share knowledge, and participate in civic life.  

With no further ado, enjoy this post.

The Future of Authority: Platform Power 

(first published October 2008) 

I have a lot of conversations with people that go like this:

Other person: "So, you think that museums should let visitors control the museum experience?"
Me: "Sort of."
Other person: "But doesn't that erode museums' authority?"
Me: "No."

One of the primary fears museum professionals (and all professionals) have about entering new relationships with audiences is the fear of losing control. For hundreds of years, we've owned the content and the message. While we may grudgingly acknowledge the fact that visitors create their own versions of the message around subsets of the content, we don't consciously empower visitors to redistribute their own substandard, non-authoritative messages. So when people like me start advocating for the creation of tools and opportunities by which visitors can share their stories, reaggregate the artifacts, even rate and review each others' creations, museum professionals of all stripes get concerned. If the museum isn't in control, how can it thrive?

We have to change the framing of this conversation. There is a difference between control and expertise. In these conversations, people often say, "don't expert voices matter?" and my emphatic response is YES. Content expertise matters. Content control shouldn't.

Museums should feel protective of the expertise reflected in their staff, exhibits, programs, and collections. In most museums, the professional experience of the staff--to preserve objects, to design exhibits, to deliver programs--is not based on content control. It's based on creation and delivery of experiences. And in a world where visitors want to create, remix, and interpret content messages on their own, museums can assume a new role of authority as "platforms" for those creations and recombinations.

The problem arises when expertise creates a feeling of entitlement to control the entire visitor experience. Power is attractive. Being in control is pleasant. It lets you be the only expert with a voice. But if our expertise is real, then we don't need to rule content messages with an iron fist. As Ian Rogers has said, "losers wish for scarcity. Winners leverage scale."

Single voices represented on single labels is not scalable. I believe we need to develop museum "platforms" that allow us to harness, prioritize, and present the diversity of voices around a given object, exhibit, or idea. This does not mean we are giving all the power to visitors. We will grant them a few opportunities--to create their own messages, to prioritize the messages that resonate best for them personally--in the context of a larger overall platform. The platform is what's important. It's a framework that museums can (and should) control, and there's power in platform management.

When you think of a platform for user-generated content, you may not think of that platform as having power. But the companies that run YouTube, Flickr, and other major Web 2.0 sites have lots of power. There are four main powers that platforms have:

1. the power to set the rules of behavior
2. the power to preserve and exploit user-generated content
3. the power to promote and feature preferred content
4. the power to define the types of interaction available to users

These powers constitute a set of controls which constitutes a real and valuable authority. Let's take a look at each one and how it might be applied in museums.


1. The power to set the rules of behavior.User-generated content sites control user and community behavior, both implicitly through the tools that are and aren't offered, and explicitly through community management. Every Web 2.0 site has rules about acceptable content and ways that users can engage with each other--consider this article about the complicated and often highly subjective (read: powerful) Flickr community guidelines. These rules are not uniform, and their differences often influence the makeup of users who feel welcome and choose to engage.

When it comes to museums, comparable rules can guarantee that the museum remains a safe, welcoming place for visitors of all kinds. There are some "rules" already in place--like the rule that you have to pay to enter--that may have great effect on the types of users who engage in museums and the behavior they display within. Museums should consider, as Web 2.0 community managers do, what behaviors and visitors they want to support and which rules will make those people feel most at home in the institution.


2. The power to use and exploit user-generated content.Platforms also have the power to set rules related to preservation and ownership of the content on them--often with quite strict IP statutes that favor the platform over users. Every time you post a photo on Flickr, you give its owner, Yahoo!, the right to use that photo however they see fit. The same is true on YouTube, and on sites like Facebook, which are "walled gardens," you can't even easily export your user-generated content (friends, events, updates) outside of Facebook itself.

Again, these rules reflect platform control, and when the control is too heavy-handed, users get annoyed and stay away. Museums will always need to retain some powers to manage the preservation of objects, to wield IP controls properly, and to manage the digital reproduction and dissemination of content. There are many models as well for what we do with user-generated content in the museum. There are some emerging case studies for this. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's current Ghosts of a Chance game is accessioning player-generated objects into a temporary part of their collection database, with clear rules about what happens to the objects at the end of the game (they are the responsibility of a sub-contractor). In the same way that Web 2.0 sites display a range of respect for user-retained intellectual property, museums can navigate and create their own rules--and related powers--for content developed by visitors on site.


3. The power to promote and feature preferred content.

When you go onto a user-generated content site like YouTube, you don't just see a jumble of videos. One of the greatest powers retained by these platforms is the power to feature content that reflects the values of the platform. These values may skew towards promoting content with the most popularity/views, the newest content, or content that is unique in some way. The choice of what to display on the front page is not just about design. There have been huge user-protests of both YouTube and Digg for perceived bias in the "featured content" algorithms that vault some content to the top. And while some sites strive for transparency, most find ways to feature the kind of content and behavior that they want to see modeled for other users.

This may be the most important platform power when it comes to museums because it is the one that allows the platform to present its values and model preferred behavior. And many museums are far from assuming this power. Most museum projects that allow visitors to create content only allow for the most basic of prioritization. Consider video kiosks where visitors can create their own short clips (a pet peeve of mine). Many museum video kiosks will feature clips from famous people but do nothing to prioritize and prominently display high-quality visitor submissions. The kiosks are organized by recency, not content value--and so new visitors walking up are not given a model for the kind of content the museum would most like to receive.

When museums do assume this power, it is often in a zero-transparency way that doesn't model behavior for users. When I spoke with Kate Roberts about MN150, the Minnesota History Center exhibition based on visitor-generated nominations, she explained that after the nomination period was over, they entirely shut down visitor engagement in the selection process. It just felt too messy to do anything but lock the staff in a room and sort through the nominations. When the exhibition opened a year later, visitors could see which nominations were valued and featured, but they couldn't get this information in an early feedback loop that would have allowed them to improve their nominations during the submission process.


4. The power to define available interactions.

This power is so basic that it is often forgotten. On YouTube, you can share videos. On Craigslist, you can buy and sell stuff. On LibraryThing, you can tag and talk about books. Each Web 2.0 platform has a limited feature set and focuses on one or two basic actions that users can take. Museums don't need to offer every kind of interaction under the sun--we just have to pick the few interactions that most support the kind of behavior and content creation that we value. Again, there's a lot of power in the decision of whether visitors will be allowed to contact each other, rate artifacts, or make their own exhibits. As long as you create a platform that is consistent in its values and the interactions provided, you will be able to control the experience as you open up content authority.


There are real opportunities here for museums to retain authority related to values, experiences, and community behavior. The power of the platform may not let you dictate every message that floats through your doors. But with good, thoughtful design, it can ensure that those messages enhance the overall museum experience.

What's Stopping us from Building More Inclusive Nonprofits?

Every day, I’m amazed by the range of efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the cultural sector. There are funding initiatives. Grassroots activism. Academic research. Conferences and white papers and toolkits and blogs.

And yet, very little seems to change. The enthusiasm is high. The voices are in the room. Even people in power seem to care. So why aren’t more organizations changing?

There are many reasons. Many organizations have decades invested in operating in oppressive power systems. Some people in power resist change. But I’d like to posit another reason: we don’t talk enough about HOW to do it.

In my experience, the conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion has focused primarily on the WHY and WHAT. The arguments for WHY cultural organizations should diversify are stronger than ever. The vision for WHAT cultural equity looks like is increasingly powerful and compelling. But HOW do we get there?

In the excellent book Switch: How to Change when Change is Hard, authors Dan and Chip Heath describe three critical parts of an effective change journey. You must have a rationale for the journey. You must feel emotional drive to move. And the path to your destination must be clear. Chip and Dan suggest that most unsuccessful attempts at change suffer from a lack of one of these three: the head isn’t convinced, the heart isn’t swayed, or the path isn’t clear.

When it comes to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in nonprofits, I believe we have a path problem. Researchers and funders have done a great job making the argument (head). Activists--both within and outside organizations--are passionately advocating for change (heart). But the path is obscured. The path to the desired outcome is dark and riddled with 400-page toolkits. The result? People spend their limited time shoring up their head and heart, because those are the resources that are easy to find. They don't act, because they don't know how to get started or where to go.

Let me give you an example: diversifying nonprofit boards. Many organizational leaders have become convinced that recruiting more diverse trustees is critical. Funders, activists, even mainstream media have waved the flag of dismal current statistics. But HOW does a motivated director lead change in this area? How should they rewrite board member descriptions? How should they change nominating criteria and processes? What is the path to the outcome they seek?

The HOW is the work. It's the meat of the actual change we create. But we don't often focus on it. It sounds too prescriptive, tactical, or boring. I know I'm guilty of this. When I share our work--especially at conferences--I find myself focusing on the what and the why. I tell a story of pivoting to deep community involvement, and people get inspired. But they're often mystified about how we did it. In the best case, they take our story as motivation to go try something themselves - to forge their own path. But many draw another conclusion: that we're anomalous. That it couldn't work for them. It's like I'm waving from a destination to which there is no clear road nor map. By celebrating the destination, I'm ignoring the path that brought us there.

I've come to believe that if we can clear the path, we can accelerate change. That's what we’re building with OF/BY/FOR ALL. We're sourcing and sharing specific, step-by-step strategies for everything from a first meeting with a community partner to a full-on rewrite of your board nominating process. Our goal is to make it easy to understand how to move forward in becoming representative of your community and co-created by them.

We know doing the work is not easy. But it's even harder when you don't know how to do it or how to get started. If we can clear the path, hopefully it can help more organizations make change with confidence. And - if the path is clear - it will also reduce the number of reasonable excuses for not taking action.

I honor and appreciate compatriots around the world who are focusing on the WHAT and WHY of these issues. This is a growing ecosystem with many actors and many goals. I’m thrilled that every day, more people are convinced that change is necessary. But once heads and hearts are aligned, they need somewhere to go. They need a clear path so they can charge ahead. That's what I'm trying to create.

Apply Now for the World's Best Museum Job: Mine.

Hey, you. Yeah you, generous community builder. You, brilliant manager. You, fearless fundraiser. You, playful leader. It's time to make your dreams a reality and apply to become the next executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH).

Our board, staff, and community are seeking a new director to join the MAH in 2019. The job announcement is live now, accepting applications on a rolling basis. If an amazing leadership opportunity is on your wish list this holiday season, I hope you'll apply.

When you check out the job description, you'll see the MAH is not looking for museum-director-as-usual. We're looking for someone with vision and commitment to community involvement. We're looking for someone with strong experience in management, fundraising, and community organizing. We welcome candidates with nontraditional resumes, and we encourage women and people of color to apply.

As the current executive director, I'm not participating in the selection of the next director. But it is my honor and pleasure to tell you what a great job it is (and to answer any questions you might have).

Santa Cruz County is a open-hearted, generous community--a great place to be a cultural leader. It's the kind of place where people say, "Something different? Let's try it." It's a place where people strive to bridge cultural differences and fight for equity--even when it isn't easy. Santa Cruz County is full of natural beauty, iconoclastic history, and explosive creativity. And the MAH is in the middle of all of it, striving to build a stronger, more connected community.

As 2018 ends, I hope you'll give yourself the gift of considering this opportunity or sharing it with a promising leader in your life. I can't wait to meet - and support - the next director of the MAH.

Have questions? I imagine others do as well. Share yours in the comments below and I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability.