Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 18, 2011

The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum recently loaned us some fabulous surfboards that tell the co-mingled history of surfing and redwood trees in Santa Cruz. We decided to approach the label-writing for these boards in a participatory way. Understanding what you think helps us think about how we display our collections.

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Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

Museum 2.0

MARCH 29, 2011

Last month, I learned about a fabulous, simple participatory experiment called “Case by Case” at the San Diego Museum of Natural History that uses visitor feedback to develop more effective object labels. To date, the solution has been to put photos on the walls, pray for funding, and ignore the front-end evaluation bit.

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San Diego History Museum Participatory 55

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

But not enough people care about it anymore, and the museum is fading into disrepair. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. What do you do?

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2018

For the past five years, each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has hosted MuseumCamp. MuseumCamp is amazing, but there are two issues that come up every January when we announce the new session: The application process is very competitive, and hundreds of people end up being rejected or waitlisted.

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Community Participatory Museum Registration 31

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 7, 2014

In reviewing the data and themes from the audience input, some terrific questions about engagement popped out: How can we become better at using social media so that our channels experience more engagement and convert people to get involved? How can we get people to talk to us? Do you want people to click? The common tip?

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Social Media Headline Media Social 101

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2018

One that has found remarkable success is California’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. She says that the museum made changes in hiring and board recruitment practices, and invited the community in to help reshape the facility into a place that reflected and represented its people and their interests.

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Audience Washington Museum Intergenerational 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2011

I've now been the Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz for two months. What motivates people to come to the museum is not the idea that there's something that's open for the next three months and they can come any time. Lots more on this in the months to come, but I thought you might like to read the article.

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Museum History Arts Work 31

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2012

The event involved over fifty artists throughout the building helping visitors make their own paper, write poems, stitch books, etc. We don't yet know how people will respond to the emails, and we have some kinks to work out with the booth and camera setup. It accomplished several things at once: It drew people in.

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Activities Active Activism Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2011

It was Friday, a few hours before the drawing activity, and my colleagues were worried that it would be too challenging for people to draw the icons and landmarks selected. These are both busy people, and while they are very artistic, neither is a crack drawer. The problem? They wanted to drop the activity.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. To apply the results of my analysis to produce a community-driven program design specifically for implementation at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (the MAH). You can download and read the full version of my thesis here.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

We're hearing on a daily basis that the museum has a new role in peoples' lives and in the identity of the county. It also feels amazing to see some of my theories validated in this way--that giving people the opportunity to actively participate does really transform the way they see the institution and themselves.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. A third argues that the project won’t be truly participatory unless users get to define what content is sought in the first place. How can you describe user participation in a shared language that helps your team make the right decision for your project?

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

Museum 2.0

MAY 10, 2011

It's my second week as the Executive Director at The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, CA, and boy is my everything tired. I'm also making the 2011-2012 budget, getting to know our terrific staff and volunteers, and starting up a few small participatory projects to launch us into being a more community-driven institution.

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Museum History Participatory Arts 53

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 11, 2015

INTERNSHIPS If you want to join us in Santa Cruz for more professional learning, consider an internship at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We''re offering internships this summer in: Participatory Exhibition Design. Help take the participatory elements of this permanent gallery to the finish line. Video/Photo.

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Participatory Community Museum History 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Why should institutions engage with people in this way? Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others? The Museum 2.0

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. If all museums get better, we have more people who like going to museums, which increases museum revenues, and makes the field more stable. People go to school because they have to or want to in order to get to their goal.

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Ze Frank is a participatory artist who creates digital projects that are explicitly about creating and enhancing authentic interpersonal connections. Ze's community is worldwide people who self-select to engage with strangers online.

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This past weekend, in conjunction with our exhibition about Ze Frank's current participatory project, A Show , we hosted " Ze Frank Weekend "--a quickie summer camp of workshops, activities, presentations, and lots of hugging.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 26, 2015

Designing A Participatory Hook for a Virtual Meeting. This helped us do a better job of sense-making. This helped make the meeting more interactive and also helped participants think about what techniques they wanted to try after the session. Design must comes first. Finally, you identify next steps and follow up.

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Facilitation Virtual Arts Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2011

We've been offering a host of participatory and interactive experiences at the Museum of Art & History this season. I loved Jasper Visser's list of 30 "do's" for designing participatory projects earlier this month. If you want people to write and/or draw, encourage them to draw. People love pleasant surprises.

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

But these shifts come with necessary questions about how to scaffold the visitor experience in a "living" space so people understand what the heck is happening, how they can participate, and what is out-of-bounds. I''ve seen participatory artworks that lay untouched by visitors because the invitation to participate is not explicit enough.

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Museum Arts Artist Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

This simple participatory project invites visitors to contribute their own small objects in little alcoves in our bathrooms. But people have participated in completely different ways. People like participating, we take them seriously, and they take us seriously. The participation is almost 100% on-topic and appropriate.

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Museum Difference Examples Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 15, 2012

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

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Museum Participatory Arts Attitude 34

Museum 2.0

APRIL 4, 2012

Imagine you want to invite people to meaningfully engage with a serious topic in an exhibition. Too often, we jump immediately to offering visitors a way to act without first helping them care passionately about the issue at hand. When I visited the exhibition in November, I saw many participatory opportunities for visitors to act.

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Story Participatory Museum History 47

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

Granted, I live in an increasingly narrow world of people who are exploring these topics and want me to work with them, but I still learn a lot from the questions and struggles I hear from colleagues and people who comment on the blog. Why should institutions engage with people in this way? The Museum 2.0 Yes and no.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

We wanted to share with people, in as clear and transparent a format as possible, our approach to developing exhibitions. If you are working with us as an artist or contributor to an exhibition, you should expect that museum staff will create multi-modal, interdisciplinary, participatory, immersive, and social experiences around your work.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 23, 2014

They give high-energy, interactive tours of the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Dustin: About a year ago I met a couple of people from Museum Hack at a conference. If you want to get people who are not already interested in museums, how would they even know to look for you?

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Museum Interview New York Interaction 55

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 30, 2009

A Learning History of the CARE LAC - Institute for Strategic Clarity Guatemala Poverty Project. Note from Beth: As visiting scholar at the Packard Foundation, I'm connecting with other people who are studying and learning about how networks work. People can understand why someone else is doing what they are doing.

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Map System Profit Guatemala 86

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Last week I was honored to be a counselor at Museum Camp , an annual professional development event hosted by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). Each year they bring together diverse, passionate people for a sleep-away camp for adults where they learn together through active, creative workshops and activities.

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Causes Change Museum Social 50

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

LinkedIn has a new feature where people can congratulate each other on work anniversaries. It has some of the same feel as the disconnected affection of people wishing you a happy birthday on Facebook, with professional reflection baked in. I helped them find funding and partners and time to make amazing work happen.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

The supervisors toured the exhibition with some of the 100+ local partners who helped create it. Then, for an hour, former foster youth who helped design the exhibition shared their stories with supervisors. They helped conceive it, plan it, and build it. There is power IN the platform--power to shape the way people participate.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

Museum 2.0

MARCH 14, 2017

This is the second installation in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square , a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz. The MAH fundamentally has two jobs: we bring art and history out into our community, and we invite our community in.

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Public Museum Arts History 27

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We went through a dramatic financial turnaround and redefined our relationship with our community through a series of experimental participatory projects and new programmatic approaches. It is incredibly rewarding work.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2012

How do you help visitors know what they can and cannot do in your museum? I grew up professionally in the science and children's museum field, where touching is guaranteed and floor staff spend more time helping visitors learn and ensuring their personal safety than they do protecting the objects. Many objects not in vitrines.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 20, 2009

It is also a Twitter term that describes a keyword, prefixed by that symbol, that helps people track conversations on Twitter. A Brief History of Hash Tags Chris Messina ( @chrismessina) is credited with starting hashtags and has written about how to make them most useful. Photo by Mansikka. What is a #HashTag?

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Twitter Foundation Effective San Diego 95

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 28, 2009

We are asked to contain those people and make sure they do what we want, and also ensure only the “good” ideas are accepted. People are writing their own stories and ideas about our cause rather than us publishing content. Movements involve people, not Marketing, PR, Comms, Public Affairs, etc., Yes, that difficult word, BUT.

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Create Green Social Media Structure 94

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

A national election is the ultimate participatory project. When you hit a personal goal that helps a larger effort, you feel like a real contributor. As Jane McGonigal has written , "the chance to be part of something bigger" than yourself is one of the four things that make people feel happy and fulfilled.

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Product Build Museum Arts 51