Museum 2.0

MAY 10, 2011

It's my second week as the Executive Director at The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, CA, and boy is my everything tired. I'm also making the 2011-2012 budget, getting to know our terrific staff and volunteers, and starting up a few small participatory projects to launch us into being a more community-driven institution.

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Museum History Participatory Arts 53

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

There are many participatory kiosks that are functional black holes--visitors make videos or draw pictures or write stories, drop them in a slot, and. There are many participatory kiosks that are functional black holes--visitors make videos or draw pictures or write stories, drop them in a slot, and. nothing happens. nothing happens.

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Participatory Museum Rate YouTube 35

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. As the museum's website puts it, "this exhibition examines how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process."

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Participatory Arts Design Museum 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 15, 2010

Dear Museum 2.0 My book, The Participatory Museum , has done incredibly well so far, but there's a problem: the interactive components aren't working. My book, The Participatory Museum , has done incredibly well so far, but there's a problem: the interactive components aren't working. Thanks in advance.

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Participatory Chapter Museum Case Study 32

Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2010

Last week, I gave a talk about participatory museum practice for a group of university students at UCSC. During the ensuing discussion, one woman asked, "Which audiences are least interested in social participation in museums?" So what's a museum to do--especially one that is funded to encourage youth and teen participation?

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Teen Social Museum Participatory 49

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.

Case Study 20

Case Study Participatory Studies Museum 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Imagine that your museum is ready to start creating content on a small-scale in Web 2.0. Imagine you are the Boston Museum of Science, and you are ready to make some videos to post on YouTube. When I search for "Boston Museum of Science" on YouTube, I find 83 videos. You're ready to make a few videos to post on YouTube.

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Museum Technorati Boston YouTube 22

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2008

Museums (and libraries) are trusted sources of information. In February 2001, AAM commissioned a study about the trustworthiness of museums and found that "Almost 9 out of 10 Americans (87%) find museums to be one of the most trustworthy or a trustworthy source of information among a wide range of choices.

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Participatory Museum Teen Voice 20

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

MAY 26, 2009

On a recent trip to DC, an old friend showed me around a new exhibit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide. The paper is perforated with one section for the promise, which visitors keep, and another section for a signature, which visitors leave at the museum.

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Pledge Museum Digital Indianapolis 23

Museum 2.0

JUNE 1, 2010

You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 Like many museum and library professionals, I am enamored of the idea of cultural institutions as “third places” – public venues for informal, peaceable, social engagement outside of home or work. This is the only post written by me, Nina Simon.

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Place Discussion Culture Museum 41

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 23, 2008

One of the best projects that illustrates the basic idea of Web2.0 - listening and conversation and stakeholders creating their own experience with your organization - comes from the Brooklyn Museum of Art. o is Transparency - and the best example of that is what the Indianapolis Art Museum has done with its pubic metrics on its web site.

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Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

Museum 2.0

APRIL 22, 2008

Why discuss gifting on Museum 2.0? One of my greatest interests is the "p articipatory museum," in which there is substantive, unfacilitated visitor-to-visitor interaction. When I heard the tollbooth story, I started thinking about gifting as a model for participatory experiences in museums. Ideas participatory museum.

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Gift Participatory Museum Model 23

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

AUGUST 3, 2009

Last month, the Christian Science Monitor published an article entitled, "Museums' new mantra: Connect with community." It took me a couple weeks (and various museum blog responses ) to realize what bugs me about this article--it treats "connecting with community" as a marketing ploy, a "mantra" rather than a mission.

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Community Museum San Diego San Francisco 22

Museum 2.0

MAY 20, 2008

This blog often analyzes how websites, designed spaces, even dogs promote participatory experiences among users. Today, we look inward for a how-to on one type of participatory design as applied to museum exhibits. But in the museum, the distribution method is more personal.

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Design Participatory Social Museum 21

Museum 2.0

JULY 22, 2008

A platform for museum staff to serve as facilitators of safe spaces for difficult conversations? According to their website : The Living Library works exactly like a normal library – readers come and borrow a 'book' for a limited period of time. Could this be applied to museums? What is the Living Library? I think so.

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Library Model Museum Europe 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 12, 2009

I believe that focusing specifically on the social capacity of an object, rather than its content or interpretation, yields new design techniques for museum exhibits and other participatory spaces. I want to connect these students to a larger group of people interested in exploring topics around social technology in museums.

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Design Experiment Seattle Social 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? They thrive on secret websites, mysterious codes, and bizarre incidents. The game website is clear.

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Game Museum Arts Alternative 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 24, 2010

This is the third in a four-part series about writing The Participatory Museum. This post covers my personal process of encouraging--and harnessing--participation in the creation of The Participatory Museum. As the participatory content review progressed well, I started looking for other ways for people to help.

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Participatory Museum Process Experiment 33

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

The focus is on bringing in outside influencers--folks from the Burning Man festival to World Without Oil --to help museum experience designers recharge, connect, and explore new ways to do creative work in teams. We've created an alternative website to provide a more participatory version of the standard pre-conference informational site.

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Collaboration Registration Brain Participatory 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

JUNE 27, 2008

Joe explains some of the planned intentional dialogue events: First, for the opening night dinner, we hired a local dance company that is putting together pieces about visiting museums, punctuated by an actor/dancer asking provocative questions to the group. I was surprised at how generic the conference appears on the VSA website.

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Studies Associations Houston Museum 20

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

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. In advance, Daniel and Len had only to promote the concept, set up the website, and start soliciting and slotting in contributors.

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Participatory Project Museum Journal 34

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 26, 2009

This exhibition uses RFID tags to allow visitors to save their work throughout the space--something that many institutions have been experimenting with for almost ten years now. The personal webpage has many adherents, and some institutions, like The Tech Museum in San Jose, have been offering them for almost a decade.

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Personal Museum Pledge San Jose 34

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

How can you design museum spaces so that exhibits and artifacts become social objects--things that people want to share with each other? This is great news for museums. Unlike digital networks, which have to manufacture or solicit online versions of objects around which users can rally, museums are full of objects.

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Museum Social Participatory Flickr 26

Museum 2.0

JUNE 15, 2009

They reminded me of street vendors or great science museum cart educators, imparting an energy to the space without overwhelming it. This is a good lesson for museum talk-back design. In Advice, there were many forms of talk-back: the post-its, the bathroom wall, the book, the phone, the website.

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Advice Museum Facilitation Student 31

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 7, 2009

Every time a colleague tells me her museum has just hired a "community person," a part of me cringes. While subsequent museum staff have kept the project going, the community had connected with me as the focal point, and there has not been a new person who has been able to comparably rally the community to high levels of activity.

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Community Management Museum Aggregator 40

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

In many museums, comment cards are currently the most "participatory" part of the visitor experience. These services could be a powerful, cheap alternative to comment cards--especially those that are focused towards making suggestions about the museum.

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Comment Tools Museum Conversation 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 13, 2014

I first learned about this technique from Sam Kaner''s excellent book, Facilitator''s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. Tag Team the Facilitation. To me, this is analogous to the benefits of having multiple staff members engaged with community partners on participatory projects. Yes, it can be inefficient.

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Facilitation Professional Learning Participatory 36

Museum 2.0

MAY 13, 2010

Oh, and they wanted it to be participatory. I talked with Sarah Rich , one of the project’s instigators and staff members, to learn more about 48 Hour Magazine and its implications for other participatory media projects. You made contribution to the magazine participatory. You had a huge response to this project.

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Participatory Journal San Francisco Interview 36

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

There are lots of museums (and organizations of all kinds) looking for ways to inspire users and visitors to produce their own content and share it with the institution online. The World Beach Project is managed by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London with artist-in-residence Sue Lawty. The ask is clear.

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Project Museum Artist Map 38

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 25, 2008

Why do you care about and or work in museums? I don't work in museums because I love them. When I visit a new city, I don't clamor to visit museums. And while I'll visit museums out of professional (and occasionally personal) interest, I don't do it because of a deep emotional connection. And check out the comments.

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Museum Alternative Education University 29

Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2008

Traditional exhibition design, in which the museum has a specific story or message to tell, doesn't easily accommodate visitor co-creation. This realization--that a single museum voice was not the best way to tell a particular story--formed the basis for MN150 , the exhibition explored in this post. What more could it be?

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Interview Minnesota Museum History 21