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? History Museums OPPORTUNITIES - History museums are in many ways the best-suited for visitor participation.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

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. Despite its long history, few researchers studied the use and impact of citizen science until the 1980s.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

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 do we have to do differently?" Her goal is nothing less than to remake the MAH as the primary cultural touchstone of the Santa Cruz community, the place that best embodies the unique cultural vibe of Santa Cruz. "We

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Museum History Arts Work 31

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

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. Note: the title of this post pays homage to Elaine Heumann Gurian''s excellent and quite different 1981 essay of the same title. It looks different in different types of institutions.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

Earlier this fall, I read this headline: "Stanford study: Participation in a cultural activity may reduce prejudice." When the music video was focused on Mexican culture, the researchers found that the white and Asian participants demonstrated a decrease in prejudice against Latinos, both immediately after the activity and six months later.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 26, 2015

Designing A Participatory Hook for a Virtual Meeting. Depending on the number of people in your group, there are different ways to facilitate the report out. The features include being able to easily create different color sticky notes and type in notes and move them around the board. Design must comes first.

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Facilitation Virtual Arts Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

Note: the title of this post pays homage to Elaine Heumann Gurian's excellent and quite different 1981 essay of the same title. 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

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

We can change that by embracing participatory culture and opening up to the active, social ways that people engage with art, history, science, and ideas today. The difference in what we contribute is in the design of the invitation conferred onto us. I know that not all public participation is substantive.

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Museum Open Charlotte Participatory 55

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection. Successful” artworks draw out qualities in the collection, reflect material histories, and show the artists’ process and conceptualization. Restoration is a formal gesture for most museums.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

Seeing so many cheerful one-liners in my inbox made me think about how different my work situation is today than the last time I reflected on it in public in 2012, at my one-year anniversary. I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. Naming our goals and our culture.

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Museum Director History Teen 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. 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. 85% of our visitors attend through events.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2012

But we've just compiled all our attendance data for the past year at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (our fiscal year ends on June 30), and several people have written to me asking for the numbers behind our turnaround. design new programs with a focus on history. I promise--after this post, I'll stop writing about this.

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Museum History Arts Artist 47

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. Lisa and I have fundamentally different ideas of what a "good" museum experience is. The area that houses the Creativity Lounge also shows art.

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Museum Arts History Columbus 51

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum. Traditionally, museums and cultural organizations offer programs. This is the participatory platform model. Now that we've opened Abbott Square , we have a goal to offer free cultural programming almost every day of the week.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 20, 2015

government and encouraging participatory democracy. They work together in varied group sizes to consider historic issues, significant moments in the Senate’s history and current policies affecting the country. Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) is a critically acclaimed video game and interactive record of Alaskan Native culture.

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Game Tech Support Module 50

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

Major research studies by the NEA and others demonstrate that adults well into their 60s are highly motivated to participate actively with cultural experiences. There are many participatory experiences that appeal primarily to adults, and they are designed distinctly for adults. But I don't think that theory holds up.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 7, 2017

This small, startup cultural project in Rotterdam works directly and intimately with community members to share their stories. It is a platform for social bridging and cultural exchange. In its short existence (it opened in 2013), the place has made a name for itself as a successful community-driven, innovative cultural initiative.

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Storytelling Story Photography Museum 39

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

Sure, I admire cultural organizations that have a strong mission to change education or diversify access or transform the role of art in everyday life, but I'm an insider. A national election is the ultimate participatory project. It seems wonky and possibly confusing to talk strategy with visitors.

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Product Build Museum Arts 51

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

And I talked about some of the challenges of finding the right income and expense models for a museum that operates more like a community center than a traditional cultural institution. In particular, we had a great group of 15 talking about participatory history experiences on Sunday. History and science museums.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

We are hiring a temporary contract curator to activate the plaza this summer with 25+ cultural events. to experiment with different kinds of events (time of day, audience, size, type) and get a sense of how we can best program the space in the longterm. creative placemaking design Museum of Art and History programs public space'

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Public Activities Active Activism 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 24, 2011

When I worked briefly with the Balboa Park Online Collaborative to conceptualize a mobile phone-based game to connect visitors to the park to its cultural institutions and history, I knew Ken would be the perfect person to make it happen. Lesson: what myths are working for you in your game or participatory project?

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Lesson Game San Diego Design 49

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

Using facial morphing software to change a player''s avatar to a different ethnicity, we fed the game with hundreds of photos that were judged in a "hot or not" type interface and gave players a view of how intelligent, attractive, and trustworthy others perceived them to be as two different ethnicities.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Museum 2.0

MARCH 18, 2015

The design and feel of the place was different than any science center I''d ever experienced. I sat down with Emilyn Green, Executive Director of the Community Science Workshop Network , to learn more about their history, design, and engagement strategy. We''re really different from traditional science centers in our funding model.

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Green Interview Share Community 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 28, 2009

How can you tell the difference? Yet, our executives and managers, our internal stakeholders cannot understand the open culture. I began our talk today with my personal nonprofit history. Movements versus campaigning. Creating open communities with old siloed corporate structures. Get out now. The movement is not strong enough.

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Create Green Social Media Structure 94

Museum 2.0

APRIL 29, 2015

These are the slides and notes for the talk I gave at the American Alliance of Museums conference on Monday, April 27 about the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. When I became the director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History four years ago, I took this work with me. They talked about community building.

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Build Community Museum Artist 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 31, 2012

We're working with participatory online artist Ze Frank on an exhibition at the MAH this winter that features the missions, creations, and explorations of his current web series, A Show. I know very little about what will happen on this weekend, but rest assured it will be strange and geeky and very different from a typical museum gathering.

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Professional Develop Museum Arts 35

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2012

How do you find out what's important to different communities, and how do you change your plans based on their needs? At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we've started experimenting with a "community first" approach to program development. Six goals for MAH community programs. Then, we went honeycomb-crazy.

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Program Community Design Museum 49

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 2, 2011

We're seeking great folks for public programs, participatory exhibit design, online marketing, 3D design, and whatever else you might have to offer. And that's what this post is about--how we advertise the culture at our organizations (or not) when we offer new positions. Not everyone wants a super-unstructured internship.

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Museum Student Participatory Structure 35

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 was fascinating to see people--across social differences--responding to representations of love in the paintings, images, objects and narratives that were part of the installation. The Love Lounge I LOVE.

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Participatory Museum Blackboard Game 51

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 20, 2009

While the majority of experience-based museums like children's and science museums have unrestricted noncommercial photography policies, many collections-based art and history museums continue to maintain highly restrictive photo policies. Visitors use personal photos differently from store-bought ones. This is prejudicial treatment.

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Museum Photo Policy Open 54

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Third, you need to align your idea with institutional culture. I used the example of two very different exhibitions that solicited visitor-contributed content: Playing with Science at the London Science Museum, and MN150 at the Minnesota History Center. There are some ideas that will never fly where you work.

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Project Museum Teen North Carolina 22

Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2016

They catered to different audiences. I never felt like I stumbled into the gallery where no one else dares to tread (as I often feel when I enter the dioramas in many natural history museums, or the period rooms of art institutions). Both institutions made good use of their very different spaces. These displays were memorable.

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Museum Audience Music Arts 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

We need translators within each cultural context. Our museum in Santa Cruz has been slammed by those who believe participatory experiences have gone too far. We always knew that the inclusion of participatory and community-centered practices in arts institutions was controversial. But we do have ''and.''

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Participatory Museum Arts History 53

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

I meet them doing research in the archives, collaborating on cultural festivals, and contributing stories to exhibitions. The whole process of being interviewed for the story made me question the stories we tell and words we use to describe participatory work. What is the metaphor for participatory arts? Not a crowd. The circus?

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Journal Participatory Museum Community 54

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 18, 2007

I'll be using a new online learning platform that I haven't used before and the participants are a slightly different audience than nonprofit staff or at least I think. Are the results different? t doing something different - same staff, same tasks - but you are doing it a bit differently. Will it make a difference?

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Remix Professional Technorati Wiki 50

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 23, 2010

Yesterday, I had the delightful opportunity to participate in the 3six5 project , a yearlong participatory project in which 365 people write 365 journal entries for every day of 2010. The reasons to do so are many, particularly for a history-focused institution. I promise a very different window into my life.

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Participatory Project Museum Journal 34