Connection Cafe

APRIL 21, 2014

Working with arts organizations there are often concern that your constituent stories aren’t as impactful. million likes surely someone touting the effect of music and art on their lives can get just as many. Participatory fundraising often starts with events that allow people to get involved causally with a small time commitment.

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Arts Story Org Personal 37

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

SEPTEMBER 10, 2014

Scene: a regional workshop on arts engagement. A funder is speaking with conviction about the fact that her foundation is focusing their arts grantmaking strategy on engagement. Engaging people actively in the arts. Any questions? It is not code for one idea. No arts experience hits them all. Core Museum 2.0

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Participatory Museum Arts Culture 55

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. This post shares some of the most interesting questions I''ve heard throughout these experiences. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments! The Museum 2.0

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. Weekly, I hear from someone who is putting ideas from the book into action. Across the museum field, the questions about visitor participation have gone from "what?" Over 150,000 people have accessed the free online version. and "why?"

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Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 26, 2015

Designing A Participatory Hook for a Virtual Meeting. In a face-to-face training, I might do an exercise with sticky notes where I get participants to write down answers to a question or two related to the content on sticky notes. For this meeting, we asked two questions: What makes a meeting a good, productive use of your time?

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Facilitation Virtual Arts Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

This post shares some of the most interesting questions I've heard throughout these experiences. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments! BROAD QUESTIONS ABOUT AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION 1. Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others?

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2010

As many of you know, I've been working for the past year+ on a book about visitor participation in museums, libraries, science centers, and art galleries. The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to visitor participation. The Participatory Museum is an attempt at providing such a resource.

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Participatory Museum Vietnam Netherlands 30

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

Earlier in 2013, I was amazed to visit one of the new “Studio” spaces at the Denver Art Museum. The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations.

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 23, 2008

I'm prepping for a workshop on Social Media and wanted do a round up of recent compelling examples of arts organizations using social media strategies and tools. I've covered arts organizations and social media here and there over the past three years and last winter co-wrote a cover story article with Rebecca Krause-Hardie for ArtsReach.

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Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

Source: Share Your Ideas. 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. Scientists design the test questions, steer the data collection, and analyze the results.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

My biggest question for these social psychologists is this: how do we apply their lessons to our work? We have some strategies for tackling this: convening diverse content advisors, incorporating anti-bias educational approaches in our design, developing participatory opportunities for visitors to connect past to present.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

APRIL 7, 2009

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? But the difference between the two examples teases out a problem in differentiating "participatory design" from "design for participation." In the first case, you are making the design process participatory. In the second, you make the product participatory.

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Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 3, 2015

It is always challenge to use participatory techniques when your participants are not native English speakers and you don’t speak the language. I thought I’d share a few quick insights and tips that I learned for others who may be preparing for doing tech training internationally and want to use participatory techniques.

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Facilitation Training Train International 50

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. A strong participatory process is not a loosey-goosey, open the doors and do whatever strategy. It''s not a question of the participatory process being unidirectional, something that we are doing for you the community.

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014

The event also included plenary speakers, including a provocative talk about data methods from Alexandra Samuels and cross-track sessions from traditional panels to unconference. The culmination of these two and half very intense days was an Idea Accelerator Lab. Scribe: The role of the scribe is to capture ideas and build group memory.

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Reflection NTEN Change Facilitation 124

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection. This past July, artist Guillermo Gómez proposed to restore a piece of art. Both objects and art-objects would be part of this continuing transformation and evolution.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 29, 2006

I met Janet Salmons many years ago while I working on various arts and technology projects in New York State for the New York Foundation for the Arts. I started in the Cornell University Center for Theatre Arts , where I founded and directed two programs: Cornell Theatre Outreach and the Community-Based Arts Project.

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Arts Community Online Intergenerational 50

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2011

It's a little living room in a lobby area that invites people to lounge on comfortable chairs, leaf through magazines and books related to art and Santa Cruz history, and generally hang out. The area that houses the Creativity Lounge also shows art. Lisa and I have fundamentally different ideas of what a "good" museum experience is.

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Museum Arts History Columbus 51

Tech Soup

JANUARY 31, 2012

One of the most frequent questions I hear at events from nonprofit professionals in the field is how to coordinate teams to produce compelling media across offices, time zones and countries. Get your story ideas ready and RSVP for Nonprofits Live on February 8. of art, activism, and academic inquiry on the politically charged.

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Storytelling Collaboration Video Thailand 67

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2013

You''re in for a treat, with upcoming posts on creativity, collections management, elitism, science play, permanent participatory galleries, partnering with underserved teens, magic vests, and more. I had no idea how to reasonably approach them or talk to them in the cocktail party milieu of big conferences.

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Museum Participatory Reflection Conference 35

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

Here, in no particular order, are the things that energized me most: "No idea is too ridiculous." I found this idea really powerful. Our curator writes labels about licking the art. Merilee Mostov and the Columbus Museum of Art. Participatory art and co-creation on the rise. I host dating games.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2010

I spent last week in the glorious country of Taiwan, hiking, eating, and working with museum professionals and graduate students at a conference hosted at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts. It's not topic-specific; I've done these exercises with art, history, science, and children's museums to useful effect.

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Museum Technique Taiwan Social 41

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

Recently, I was giving a presentation about participatory techniques at an art museum, when a staff member raised her hand and asked, "Did you have to look really hard to find examples from art museums? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" I was surprised by her question.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 1, 2014

It made me dig up this 2011 interview with Tina Olsen (then at the Portland Art Museum) about their extraordinary Object Stories project. They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they learned some unexpected lessons along the way. Why would people look at that?

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Museum Story Project Design 43

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 21, 2015

And, finally, with the rise of data and automated generation, leaders need to ask and answer questions with data, and faster. As the book points out, while fast, frequent, and informal makes it all sound easy, there is an art to it. Sharing has to help spread authenticity, emotion, and point of view.

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Digital Strategy Chapter Advice 50

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

When talking about active audience engagement with friends in the museum field, I often hear one frustrated question: how can we get adults to participate? There are many participatory experiences that appeal primarily to adults, and they are designed distinctly for adults.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

MAY 3, 2017

This is the ninth 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. We develop the ideas. The “we” isn’t always staff; in most cases, our staff work with community partners in a participatory, co-creative model.

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Develop Artist Participatory Blended 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

What does the word "participatory" mean to you? This isn't just a rhetorical question. The various definitions of participatory projects can lead to confusion and misunderstandings. The scientists control the process, steer the data collection, and analyze the results.

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Public Research Participatory Report 36

Museum 2.0

MARCH 13, 2013

Visitor-contributed photos surround a collection piece in Carnegie Museum of Art's Oh Snap! It can be incredibly difficult to design a participatory project that involves online and onsite visitor engagement. hinges on the ideas experimentation, uncertainty and partnership. Here are some reasons why I think Oh Snap!

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Authoring Open Experiment Museum 53

Tech Soup

JANUARY 20, 2012

One of the most frequent questions I hear at events from nonprofit professionals in the field is how to coordinate teams to produce compelling media across offices, time zones and countries. Get your story ideas ready and RSVP for Nonprofits Live on February 8th. Guests for Nonprofits Live: Collaborative Video.

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Collaboration Storytelling Video Thailand 44

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

I came to her with an idea I called "Gut Sense." We recruited folks and designed software that texted them five times a day for thirty days, asking one question, "Rate your mood 1 (low) to 10 (high)." I wholeheartedly believe it has the power to advance science (and art and cultural heritage) through the power of play.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 14, 2007

We talked about Cambodia and one of the questions was (an excellent one), what do teachers need to think about if they are doing an over the web collaborative project with a classroom in the developing world. The question forced me to reflect on my experience last summer. How do you know if a charity is legit?

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Reflection Conversation Develop Cambodia 50

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

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. I partnered with staff member Bambi Grajek-Specter, and we went out into the galleries armed with a simple question: "What would you recommend that I see?"

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Experiment Lesson Learning Museum 44

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 22, 2010

And this leads to a basic question, one I haven't figured out: how do you encourage visitors to participate when they speak different languages? While there are some kinds of participation that are not language-based like making art or voting, most participation is lingual. What have you tried? What have you seen work?

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Museum Work North America Language 38

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

The chairs were cast-off art, reclaimed as art, available for people to take off the hooks and use. What kind of an art institution is this? It encourages process-driven performances and art projects. It takes the kind of risks that a university art gallery should take. The community drives the question.

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Process Share Philadelphia Arts 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2012

It made me think in ways that I haven't before about the relation of art--as expressive culture--to democracy. It is multi-disciplinary, incorporates diverse voices from our community, and provides interactive and participatory opportunities for visitor involvement. Note: you can view these photos of the exhibition on Flickr here.)

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Participatory Museum Blackboard Game 51