Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2016

They wanted to help museums and galleries across the UK make significant, sustained changes in the ways they engage community partners and visitors as participants in their work. The result, Our Museum , is an extraordinary funding program with a focus on community participation. didn't mince words. Here are my three top takeaways.

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Museum Participatory Resource Place 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Participants who felt more confident modeled generous behavior and engaged others. The museum itself was well-integrated into the event.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2018

We've see this model succeed at the MAH and at other community-centered organizations around the world. The model we landed on was movement building. We're excited about this movement-building model for three reasons: It taps diverse sources of expertise. We want to share the methods and tools that make it work. Consulting.

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Los Angeles Network Oakland Change 31

Museum 2.0

JULY 2, 2014

What if we used art to activate space in a different way? I''ve been reflecting a lot recently on our museum''s work on " social bridging "--bringing people together across cultural, ethnic, geographic, generational, and socio-economic differences--and how to take it outside. We don''t have a business model for it.

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Design Community Museum Hype 47

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

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

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 6, 2014

One of the themes I’m going to discuss is the Art and Science of Engagement. The art part includes all the ways nonprofits and schools can engage and connect with alumni of their programs through social channels. In the book, we share a couple of case studies and examples of engagement models. Register here.

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Social Media Network Media Free 108

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

Our values reflect this commitment. Many told them that sometimes they just need some “creativity time,” that is to go to a museum or walk around. The organization formalized “creativity time” in its employees handbook and established a policy that staff take “creativity time” as half-day per month. Have story?

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Product Time Create Museum 50

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! Me: Have you ever been to this museum? meetup for Elite Yelp!

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Museum Hosting Model Community 22

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

And then there's the Berkeley Ace hardware store, which has a basement lair devoted to model trains. 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.

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Museum Los Angeles San Francisco Model 34

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 18, 2011

We’ve been doing a little experiment at our museum with labels. 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. who were the surfers who used them?” “how

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Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

Museum 2.0

JULY 9, 2009

Seb Chan has a lovely, long interview up at Fresh+New with Helen Whitty about the Powerhouse Museum's new mini-exhibition, the Odditoreum. The Odditoreum is another wrinkle in the study of visitors' understanding and interpretation of authenticity in museums. I enjoyed listening to it (virtually, not at the museum).

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Museum Alternative Portland Artist 22

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

JANUARY 11, 2012

For years, I'd give talks about community participation in museums and cultural institutions, and I'd always get the inevitable question: "but what value does this really have when it comes to dollars and cents?" We're hearing on a daily basis that the museum has a new role in peoples' lives and in the identity of the county.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 10, 2009

Exhibit labels in science centers ask more questions than any other kinds of museums, and yet the questions are often awful--teacherly, overly rhetorical, and totally meaningless. asked by a cop or mother, garners the full attention of asker and askee alike, museum questions like "what is nanotechnology?,"

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Reflection Research Question Museum 20

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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Museum Maslow Facilitation Personal 28

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

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. We had tripled our attendance.

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Process Change Develop Museum 20

Care2

JANUARY 13, 2012

Create categories that reflect what users are looking for. Pin masterpieces from the budding artists in your arts classes. If you're a museum, zoo, or aquarium: 19. Create a shared Board for visitors to pin their favorite works of art or to share shots of themselves feeding their favorite animals. (In

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Ideas Images Flickr Adopt 78

Museum 2.0

MARCH 15, 2010

People often ask me which museums are my favorite. I visit lots of perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums. In some cases, that's based on subject matter, as at the Museum of Jurassic Technology or the American Visionary Art Museum. Some are scrappy and iconoclastic, like the City Museum in St.

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Support Museum St. Louis NSF 41

Museum 2.0

MAY 15, 2012

Last week, I sat down on a toilet in our museum and found myself looking at an interactive station intended to test a “Legends of the Stall” sign concept for the restrooms. Some of my happiest moments as a director come when I encounter awesome things in our museum that I had absolutely nothing to do with. Sorry for the delay.

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Culture Build Museum Articulate 53

Museum 2.0

JUNE 28, 2017

Precarious business model. Even if an institution or a project is fabulous, it may not have a solid, replicable business model behind it. Arts institutions have beat the innovation drum for decades now. Professionals share program models, exhibitions, and design techniques across organizations, often for free.

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Culture Organization Model Podcast 21

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 7, 2010

Last week marked four years for the Museum 2.0 People--especially young folks looking to break into the museum business--often ask me how I got here. Ed Rodley recently wrote a blog post about museum jobs entitled "Getting Hired: It's Who You Know and Who Knows You." hour at the Museum. I made $26/hour at NASA and $7.25/hour

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Museum Boston Participatory Job 52

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 28, 2015

We are especially guilty of this in the nonprofit arts. I''ve been thinking about all of this recently because I''m in the midst of negotiating a partnership with a for-profit real estate developer to enhance a public plaza adjacent to my museum. business models evaluation institutional change' You can see where this is heading.

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Museum Measure Evaluation Profit 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This is the second part of a two-part interview with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard on their book Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New Business Models for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions. I love this idea, but I often find that museum staff are really nervous about making any changes that might alienate current members/donors.

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Interview Museum Phase Reflection 32

Museum 2.0

APRIL 23, 2009

Like many people who've worked in science centers and interactive experience museums, I've always been perplexed by the fact that hands-on workshop audiences top out around age 14. They are more than just workshop spaces--they are member institutions, like museums. Isn't this one of our dreams for museums?

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Museum North Carolina San Francisco Structure 24

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 5, 2008

Cultural Connections is a group of museum professionals who meet up a few times a year and host excellent programs on a variety of topics. This week, they hosted "Let Them Be Heard: Visitor Participation in the Museum Experience," featuring four presentations on incorporating visitors' content into museums. Here's what they did.

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Case Study Participatory Studies Museum 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 24, 2007

This week, thoughts on Chapter 12 of Elaine Gurian’s book Civilizing the Museum , "Threshold Fear: Architecture program planning." In this essay, Elaine discusses the various barriers to entry for non-traditional visitors to museums, that is, the threshold fear that keeps such potential visitors from walking in our doors.

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People Museum San Jose Chapter 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 7, 2008

Moveable Type, like its predecessor, Listening Post (now touring international art and science museums), is an exercise in harnessing and repackaging data as art. But when it comes to presenting data, most museum folks believe that over-interpretation is necessary. But in Hansen and Rubin's case, it actually gets across.

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Design Data Artist New York 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

This year, Alan invited me to present a webinar for participants in the Marcus Institute Digital Education for the Arts on how Networked Nonprofits use Facebook. This post reflections on the training design as well as my content notes. I had hoped to find a good example of a museum or an arts organization with a custom landing tab.

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Facebook Network Museum Nonprofit 111

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 22, 2012

What happens when a formal art museum invites a group of collaborative, participatory artists to be in residence for a year? Will the artists ruin the museum with their plant vacations and coatroom concerts? But for museum and art wonks, it could be. No, this is not a reality TV show.

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Artist Museum Project Public 39

Museum 2.0

JUNE 6, 2008

On June 4, we opened The Tech Virtual Test Zone , a new 2000 sq ft gallery at The Tech Museum of Innovation featuring exhibits on the theme of art, film, and music that were originally developed in Second Life by a community of creative amateurs. Some museum pros have been puzzled by this.

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Virtual Tech Lesson Develop 21

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 27, 2018

In mid-2019, I will transition out of my role as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) to focus full-time on leading OF/BY/FOR ALL, an emerging global movement to build more inclusive community institutions. But the museum needed a new direction, and the board took a risk on me.

Global 42

Global Local Museum Change 42

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 16, 2013

When you count attendance to your museum, do you include: people who eat in the cafe? Louis Post-Dispatch published the kind of "how sausage is made" story that rarely gets written about the arts. It''s about museum attendance and how the five big, free museums in St. Summertime concerts at the history museum?

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St. Louis Impact Museum Denver 55

Bloomerang

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

I’ve managed campaigns ranging from about $5 million to over a billion dollars in health care, education, arts and culture, and advocacy sectors. So first is how we can reflect on the importance of diversity to our board’s work, specifically fundraising. Again, how many of you have attended an event or go to a museum?

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Leadership Fundraising Gift Slides 60

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2010

When a technologist calls me to talk about their brilliant idea for a museum-related business, it's always a mobile application. There are lots of wonderful (and probably not very high margin) experiments going on in museums with mobile devices. Most visitors to museums attend in social groups.

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Museum Group Mobile Project 40

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 8, 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?" Other person: "But doesn't that erode museums' authority?" If the museum isn't in control, how can it thrive? Me: "Sort of." and my emphatic response is YES.

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Authoring Platform Museum YouTube 42