Connection Cafe

APRIL 6, 2021

Beecher Hicks III, President & CEO of the National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM) in Nashville, TN. NMAAM is the only museum dedicated to preserving and celebrating the many music genres created, influenced, and inspired by African Americans. Even though the museum is now open, the Museum Without Walls will continue.

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Music Museum National Nashville 27

Tech Soup

JANUARY 31, 2012

Our ability to collaborate effectively in the cloud and create meaningful media together is quickly evolving as more nonprofits expand their borders. On February 8, Nonprofits Live will explore how to collaborate on video stories across borders and office boundaries. Guests for Nonprofits Live: Collaborative Video.

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Storytelling Collaboration Video Thailand 67

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. This year was a year of building, challenging, and strengthening. We talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. Naming fears, too.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Connection Cafe

AUGUST 1, 2019

Museums and nonprofits can also reap huge benefits from employing artificial intelligence, particularly in their membership and development departments. Nonprofits and museums depend on dedicated, but oftentimes limited, development staff to sift through countless prospects to determine which ones are priority.

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Museum Game Chicago Indianapolis 29

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

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Writing my masters thesis for Gothenburg University’s International Museum Studies program while also working four days a week as the Director of Community Programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History this spring was certainly a challenge but also an incredible opportunity.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A year ago, I put my consultant hat on the shelf and decided to jump into museum management (a sentence I NEVER would have imagined writing five years ago). I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

MARCH 24, 2020

Expect they've had a challenge. The museums of the world are collaborating to bring you #MuseumGames every Sunday, with a new crossword puzzle each week featuring clues from all sorts of museums. ??: While donations are going down, global interest in museums seem a boom industry. Allow for their emotions.

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Museum Work Time Doc 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 17, 2012

When I started this blog in 2006, I made a multi-media introduction to the concept of "museum 2.0" Venue as content platform instead of content provider: the museum becomes a stage on which professionals and amateurs can curate, interpret, and remix artifacts and information. The museum gets better the more people use it.

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Museum Artist Remix Professional 47

Tech Soup

JANUARY 20, 2012

Our ability to collaborate effectively in the cloud and create meaningful media together is quickly evolving as more nonprofits expand their borders. For Nonprofits Live on February 8th we will explore how to collaborate on video stories across borders and office boundaries. Guests for Nonprofits Live: Collaborative Video.

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Collaboration Storytelling Video Thailand 44

Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2013

Last week, my museum hosted Hack the Museum Camp , a 2.5 day adventure in which teams of adults--75 people, of whom about half are museum professionals, half creative folks of various stripes--developed an experimental exhibition around our permanent collection in our largest gallery.

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Museum Arts History Professional 49

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 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. I''ve spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

For years, I've been fascinated and a bit perplexed by the Elsewhere Collaborative , a thrift store turned artists' studio/living museum in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 2003, my collaborator Stephanie and I began an excavation, declaring nothing for sale. George will respond to comments on this post and is also reachable here.

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Collaboration North Carolina Museum Artist 36

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

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

NTEN

AUGUST 21, 2012

But budget and staff constraints often make it a challenge for organizations to find and provide optimal solutions to technology needs—especially smaller ones. You can also read the case studies for four of the organizations we talked with: The Chatanooga Museums Collaborative. Environment America. Flickr photo: torkildr.

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Case Study Research Studies Share 81

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. Across the museum field, the questions about visitor participation have gone from "what?" Over the past four years, I''ve been running a small regional art and history museum in Santa Cruz, CA. and "why?" to "how?".

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Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

I eagerly read about a new social psychology research study in which whites, Asians, and Latinos engaged in a simple collaborative activity--making a music video together. The book of the same title that he edited is rocking my world, both as a museum professional who cares about inclusion and as a new mother.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

MAY 6, 2016

Five years ago, I left the consulting world to take the helm at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) at a time of crisis and change. We have spent the past three years planning and raising money for a project to build a creative town square for our city on the front porch of the museum. What field are we in?

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Museum Director Arts History 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 18, 2014

While informal involvement or input for a specific project is always useful, there''s also value to more sustained participation--and the relationships and accountability that comes with it. CON: can feel disconnected from the primary governance of the museum or can feel like a second-class board overall.

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Community Story Museum Map 39

NTEN

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

As part of this pilot, 19 people representing organizations large and small are working together this year to try to unlock and solve some of the challenges nonprofits face when it comes to: measuring and managing data making data-informed decisions and sharing the results with colleagues, partners, funders, and the public.

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Open Source Case Study Museum Social Media 65

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last month, MAH curator Susan Hillhouse and I sat down and wrote an exhibition philosophy for our museum. In particular, we want exhibition collaborators--artists, researchers, historians, collectors--to understand our goals and how we intend to steer the exhibition development process.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2012

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we've started experimenting with a "community first" approach to program development. We don't want to wear them out on standing meetings or ongoing projects that may not draw on their talents. Moving from community needs out to possible projects/collaborators.

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Program Community Design Museum 49

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). Nina Simon, the executive director of the museum, is an expert in participatory design and fantastic facilitator.

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Causes Change Museum Social 50

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Every once in a while I come across a project I wish I could have included in The Participatory Museum. For one year, a group of twelve schoolchildren age 9-11 were invited to work with staff at the Wallace Collection to develop a family-focused exhibition using the museum's artifacts. it's a Secret! , What made Shh.

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Children Museum Create Project 46

Tech Soup

OCTOBER 27, 2011

The Tech Awards , an annual event that honors projects which use "technology to significantly improve human conditions," just unveiled their laureates for this year. This blog post originally appeared on the TechSoup Global Blog. In its tenth year, we are still tackling core issues that afflict most of the developing world.

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Award Tech Challenge Model 36

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

DECEMBER 6, 2010

Marc van Bree and I were chatting about some of the collaborative arts marketing strategies that some arts organizations have experimented with on Twitter. Since there have been a few examples, I asked Marc if would write a post looking at some of these. How did you get 340 museums to participate? Of course, there are challenges.

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Arts Twitter Examples Los Angeles 101

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. He's explicit about different project structures and their implications, listing five levels of participation and three of non-participation.

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Design Participatory Children Museum 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 31, 2012

Three of them are being hosted at my museum , and one at a mystery location. You Can't Do That in Museums Camp - July 10-12, 2013. I've always loved helping run events where participants can really work together on something meaty and challenging. Yes you can sleepover at the museum to heighten the insanity and reduce the cost.

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Professional Develop Museum Arts 35

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

I like to ask myself this question periodically, challenging myself to find substantive ways for visitors to contribute to our museum. We actively seek participation and develop structured opportunities for visitors to collaborate with us. We don't have to convince them that it's their museum.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 4, 2010

It's rare that a participatory museum project is more than a one-shot affair. But next month, Britain Loves Wikipedia will commence--the third instance of a strange and fascinating collaborative project between museums and the Wikipedia community (Wikimedians). Some of these challenges were about mission fit.

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Wikipedia Arts Museum Images 40

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. At the same time, our community relevance was limited.

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Museum Learning History Arts 55

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 17, 2017

Dear Museum 2.0 friends, I want to share two great opportunities to get involved at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in 2017. Each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History hosts MuseumCamp , a professional development experience that is part retreat, part unconference, part adult summer camp.

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Job Museum Childhood Arts 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2018

Two years ago, our team at the MAH embarked on our most challenging co-creation project ever. This project wove together many different participatory threads. We commissioned new collaborative artwork. The lessons I learned from Lost Childhoods are at the heart of the OF/BY/FOR ALL project we're building now.

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Issue Childhood Community Create 45

Museum 2.0

APRIL 1, 2010

This is the final segment in a four-part series about writing The Participatory Museum. This posts explains why and how I self-published The Participatory Museum. COST: Museum books tend to be expensive - because they are printed in small runs, the price for a 400-page paperback can be as high as $40. Why Self-Publish?

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Participatory Museum Process Adobe 33

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 8, 2007

This week, with the gracious help of Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science , Museum 2.0 is launching an experiment in collaborative exhibition design. I (and probably many of you) have always wondered about the basic challenge of deriving quality from mass participation. In the spirit of that question, Museum 2.0

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Museum Experiment New York Voice 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 18, 2008

Thanks to Bryan Kennedy from the Science Museum of Minnesota for providing this overview/reflection on the Museums and the Web conference that recently concluded in Montreal. Museums and the Web 2008 guest blogger Bryan Kennedy here. Their task is both especially important and challenging. Who's sharing authority and how?

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Museum Web Teen Flickr 20