Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

When you find a bar with your favorite song on the jukebox, or a museum room that feels like your grandmother's living room, you suddenly feel a strong affinity and are able to see yourself reflected in the space. Of course, the problem with all of this is that it sounds crazy from a business perspective.

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Museum Los Angeles San Francisco Model 34

Forum One

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Google undoubtedly grew tired of updating and developing two tools that couldn’t accurately reflect the type of complex user journeys we see today, where people switch between apps, mobile browsers, and desktops frequently. It may sound cliché, but the first step is really to embrace the change. Why is Google making this change?

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FAQ Organization Analytics Google 58

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 19, 2006

These moments when the audio stream was dropping in and out, a video and audio lag time between the 2 worlds of 15-45 seconds (adding some confusion), feedback and distorted sound quality, and a chaotic chat stream. Here's a few reflections from people in the room. You're not going to have perfection when it is a experiment!

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Second Life Life Reflection Avatar 50

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Last week, Jim Richardson and I hosted MuseumNext , a 24-hour workshop for museum professionals focused on bringing new, wild museum projects into the world. We also ended the entire event with one of my favorite exercises, the Exquisite Corpse game, in which participants co-created comics of their craziest museum dreams.

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Facilitation Reflection Museum Participatory 32

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 18, 2009

I often think museums are like church--passionately loved by staff and devout audiences, irrelevant or off-putting to lapsed or uninterested adults, alien and overwhelming to newcomers. Two years ago, my dad and I embarked on a podcast project called Museum Hater. Help people understand why you do what you do.

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Museum Culture Technique Badge 25

Museum 2.0

APRIL 23, 2007

and with it flocks of museum studies / education / exhibit planning graduate interns. I’m always curious when I meet these folks, who are about my age, choosing a different entry path into the museum world. The value proposition of museum grad programs is cloudy in my mind. Sure, it’s great to learn museum theory and history.

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Museum Program Student Skills 51

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 9, 2009

Between high-altitude hijinks, run-ins with wildlife, and very long days of hiking, I finished John Falk's new book, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. In other words, if you are a curious person, you will go to museums to learn new things.

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Have Fun - Do Good

SEPTEMBER 20, 2012

After one of the best meals of my life at Casa Lucio I'm back from a 2-week vacation in Spain, and wanted to share some of my reflections before it all fades away into the routine of everyday life. I usually get a bit weary after being in a museum for a couple hours, but when we left The Prado, I was energized and inspired.

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Spain Cancer Exercise Arts 61

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2013

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. We heard again and again that the museum was cold and uncomfortable.

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Museum Learning History Arts 55

Museum 2.0

JULY 27, 2011

I'm trying to reposition our museum as a cultural hub supporting creative and intellectual community growth. Our conversation made me reflect on the museums that most inspire me from a public service perspective--institutions with missions that stretch far beyond their walls. These museums work differently.

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Advocacy Public Service Homeless 44

Connection Cafe

JANUARY 7, 2020

Now is the ideal time to reflect on last year and set your course for the N ew Y ear and new decade. This might sound obvious, but it’s easy to take for granted : y our surrounding community likely consists of your main base of volunteers, visitors, members and donors. So call them and tell them! . .

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Culture Arts Organization Pledge 27

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 5, 2008

I was fascinated by our discussion, and Bob came to mind last month, when I was asked to write an article for the Association of Children's Museums quarterly journal, Hand to Hand , about children's museums and Web 2.0. To understand more, I turned to Elaine Gurian's article The Molting of Children's Museums? Why the uniformity?

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Classroom Children Museum Model 22

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 18, 2014

I''ve mostly seen museums employ one of two methods for formal community advisors: Create special "spots" on the board of trustees for certain kinds of community representatives. CON: can feel disconnected from the primary governance of the museum or can feel like a second-class board overall. I struggle with both these options.

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Community Story Museum Map 39

Museum 2.0

MARCH 27, 2013

I've written about different structures for participatory processes (especially in museums), and recently, I've been interested in how we can apply these structures to the design of public space. Lots of trust involved Adults serve as listeners, observers and sounding boards (i.e. Non-Participation 6.

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Design Participatory Children Museum 49

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 18, 2008

I've long believed that museums have a special opportunity to support the community spirit of Web 2.0 This month brings three examples of museums hosting meetups for online communities: On 8.6.08, the Computer History Museum (Silicon Valley, CA) hosted a Yelp! To some people, these events may sound like losers.

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Museum Hosting Model Community 22

Connection Cafe

AUGUST 17, 2015

When you love pricing, it can be easy to slip into pricing jargon…which might sound like a foreign language to some. While the blog post is targeted for performing arts organizations, many of them appeal to museums, zoos and aquariums as well. Do the words “pricing strategy” not sound exciting enough for you? Dressing the House.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Dial-A-Stranger is what it sounds like. They edit the conversations into radio shows, which are then made available as a podcast (you can listen to episode featuring me, #89: Museum Secrets, here ). Mercedes and Zach aren't just interrogators; they also shared their own reflections and stories throughout our conversation.

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Reflection Museum Podcast Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

How do you find your way around a multi-faceted museum? I spent some time playing with this question last week at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a large general museum that is moving toward redesign of the permanent galleries. Tags: design participatory museum usercontent. Do you interrogate the map? Get deliciously lost?

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Experiment Lesson Learning Museum 44

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 20, 2017

As Becky and Joe noted, it can sound like taking your amazing craft beer and distilling it into a Bud Light. Treating the museum as a community platform? Our participants reflecting local age/income/ethnic diversity? But if you're going to unleash something, you better make sure that you believe in it 100%. Social bridging?

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Turkey Model Museum Adopt 26

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. The Museum 2.0 In 2008 and 2009, there were many conference sessions and and documents presenting participatory case studies, most notably Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean's book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

Audience segmentation and research has become a hot topic in museums, especially when it comes to crafting appealing offerings that are customized to different kinds of visitors. I sat down with Kristen Denner, Director of Membership and Annual Fund, to learn more about the program's development and the museum's goals for its future.

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Interview Director Museum Arts 46

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 24, 2019

This month we’ve been thinking about “What is a museum?” (I'm I’ve been visiting museums my whole life. Does that make me the best judge of museums? People are the defining characteristics of museums. I’ve worked with and at plenty of museums that can sometimes feel empty. I'm not alone there.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2011

This post shares my reflections on the projects and five things I learned from their work. As one participant said, "the museum feels friendly in a way it usually doesn't." People make the museum friendly, not activities. You can explore the projects in full on the class wiki. All the photos in this post are on Flickr here.

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Participatory Arts Audience Museum 51

Get Fully Funded

AUGUST 24, 2021

A fundraising email is not the right place to thank Board members, reflect on events that already happened, spotlight a wonderful volunteer, or highlight a major donor. The mom has a job at a museum cafe, the older kids are in school, and the youngest attends a wonderful daycare center we are so fortunate to partner with.

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Results email Fundraising Story 122

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

In the spirit of a popular post written earlier this year , I want to share the behind the scenes on our current almost-museumwide exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz Collects. The content focuses on the question of WHY we collect and how our collections reflect our individual and community identities.

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Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

APRIL 10, 2008

On Monday, David Klevan (from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) and I spoke at the MAAM Creating Exhibitions conference about Web 2.0 and museums. framework, and David shared lessons learned from the huge range of projects the Holocaust Museum has initiated. I provided the Web 2.0 and sniff around.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 25, 2015

This is the first in a two-part series about the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History’s new theory of change. This week, Ian David Moss and I are each writing blog posts about our collaborative process to develop a theory of change at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. For three years, we hit the gas at my museum—hard.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 28, 2016

When you are on the inside, this doesn’t sound like inclusive language. It sounds threatening. It sounds like the thing that you hold dear being adulterated for public consumption. But they do want to see reflections, expansions, and distortions of their experiences in ways that allow them to form new connections.

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Arts Chapter Sound Story 34

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

When you want visitors to spend a long time reflecting and sharing their thoughts, you need to design spaces for response that are comfortable and minimize distractions. Rabinowitz commented that "as a 40-year veteran of history museum interpretation, I can say that I never learned so much from and about visitors."

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Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Unsurprisingly, some of my favorite museums are small, funky places run by iconoclasts—but that’s not useful to most professionals who work for organizations in which they have little control over size or leadership matters. What new projects might allow you to better reflect those aspirations? It’s nice to have both.

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Project Museum Teen North Carolina 22

Museum 2.0

APRIL 16, 2008

I've written before about the inspiring work that the Brooklyn Museum of Art is doing with their community-focused efforts. Click is an exhibition process in three parts: The Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups, and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organizations.

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Museum Participatory Artist Arts 24

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 8, 2006

Elisa’s focus is interactive arts, media design, and cultural management, and she has been involved in many pertinent projects, such as MUVI (the Virtual Museum of the Collective Memory of Lombardia). She talked about how hard it was to get different social groups to share perspectives on how sound should be managed.

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Interview Museum Culture Sound 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 7, 2008

For many museums, visitor research--how people use the museum, navigate exhibits, and understand content--may be an equally important arena in which to adopt groundswell listening techniques. I spent an hour this morning "brand listening" to what the online world says about one of my favorite museums, the Exploratorium.

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Museum Teen Second Life Discussion 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 2, 2008

I have to feel like the post is open enough to my experience, that the blogger and the community of that blog would find my voice worthwhile, that I have some strong reaction I want to share, that I won't sound stupid. Museum 2.0's Blogging can be a wonderful way to take time out from your life to reflect, even if no one reads it.

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Comment Museum Blogger Reflection 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

Today, the Luce Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is launching what they claim is the first ever alternate reality game (ARG) in a museum. Why would an art museum create an ARG? And the "stuff" of the game is real stuff, artifacts created by players and sent to the museum. To expand their audiences.

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Game Museum Arts Alternative 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 26, 2007

What does your museum have to say about it? What do visitors expect of museums, and what do museums expect of themselves, when it comes to timeliness? This is partially driven by museums, which want to be seen as "forums" for discourse, but also by the expectations of a media-saturated public. Pluto just got demoted.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 18, 2008

In the museum world, we often talk about lowering barriers to entry, helping people get through the door. And so today we look at an educational facility (not a museum) that swabs the deck with these barriers. This reason may sound like a technicality, but it has some interesting implications. It makes them walk the plank.

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Education Museum Audience Design 21