Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

I'm a huge fan of work and the way she thinks - especially after she road the Scare House ride on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with me and did a brilliant reflection on its design. Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. I've purchase a two copies, one for me and one to give away.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Photo Source: Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog. The Indianapolis Art Museum has been doing just that by sharing its institutional dashboard out for everyone to view. It was met by with both positive and negative reactions from nonprofit and museum professionals. Two years later, we might have some answers.

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Public Indianapolis Museum Organization 94

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. The back-channel was an especially active and important part of the conference this year.

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Museum Web Teen Flickr 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JUNE 14, 2010

So, I designed a training curriculum that embraces thoughtful do-it-yourself social media experiments and a process for learning from them. The whole idea got started a year ago when James Leventhal who is Deputy Director for the Contemporary Jewish Museum asked me if I would design some trainings for the local arts community.

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Social Media Media San Jose Social 99

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

OCTOBER 19, 2009

They edit the conversations into radio shows, which are then made available as a podcast (you can listen to episode featuring me, #89: Museum Secrets, here ). I still get fidgety listening to the podcast, but now I see it as an artifact of a supremely conducted participatory project rather the sole product of the process.

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Reflection Museum Podcast Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2008

It's been awhile since I've shared the progress of The Tech Virtual , the web and Second Life-based virtual exhibit workshop that The Tech Museum of Innovation opened in December of 2007. Functionally, I'm now project managing a very rapid exhibition production process. with a few significant differences.

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Museum Virtual Tech Second Life 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

Audience segmentation and research has become a hot topic in museums, especially when it comes to crafting appealing offerings that are customized to different kinds of visitors. I sat down with Kristen Denner, Director of Membership and Annual Fund, to learn more about the program's development and the museum's goals for its future.

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Interview Director Museum Arts 46

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2010

at the Brooklyn Museum, where you could track how people of various levels of art expertise rated crowd-contributed photographs. Instead, I'd like to see us asking broader questions about process, like: How do different people arbitrate the value of a piece of art, a historical artifact, or a piece of scientific evidence?

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Audience Music Artist Museum 38

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2008

This week marks one month of live activity for the Tech Virtual Museum Workshop , a collaborative, online platform for exhibit development. First, let's talk process. But museum folks, no matter how much we want to collaborate, don't move quickly. A month ago, I invited you to join this project. Now, on to the lessons thus far.

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Museum Virtual Tech Second Life 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 15, 2008

The presumed answer is "yes" your museum needs a blog, a pony, or a set of comfy couches. Does your museum need a custom online social network? Many museums have been experimenting in these spaces by creating institutional profiles, museum affinity groups, and connecting with visitors and other museum professionals individually.

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Museum Social Network Case Study Discussion 20

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

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

Today, Museum 2.0 I started the Museum 2.0 blog in 2006 as a personal learning exercise about "the ways that museums do and can evolve from 1.0 I started the Museum 2.0 blog in 2006 as a personal learning exercise about "the ways that museums do and can evolve from 1.0 and watched the Museum 2.0

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Museum Voice Minnesota Participatory 20

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

JANUARY 10, 2007

Recently, I’ve been grappling with the question of whether or not it is useful to create project-specific blogs for big museum initiatives during the development phase. For two years, I’ve been working on the same project at the Spy Museum. It will tell the story of a finished thing rather than the story of the process.

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Project Develop Museum Reflection 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

When you want visitors to spend a long time reflecting and sharing their thoughts, you need to design spaces for response that are comfortable and minimize distractions. Rabinowitz commented that "as a 40-year veteran of history museum interpretation, I can say that I never learned so much from and about visitors."

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Design Goal Difference Platform 31

Museum 2.0

APRIL 8, 2010

In my experience, lobby feedback systems generate three kinds of responses: Effusive, generic platitudes: "Great Museum!" The same survey found that 20% of complainers found the process "pointless" and almost a further 30% had found it "totally pointless." Probably not. Better food in the cafeteria, please."

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Build Museum Nebraska Comment 21

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Unsurprisingly, some of my favorite museums are small, funky places run by iconoclasts—but that’s not useful to most professionals who work for organizations in which they have little control over size or leadership matters. What new projects might allow you to better reflect those aspirations? It’s nice to have both.

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Project Museum Teen North Carolina 22

Museum 2.0

JUNE 25, 2008

When you design a new interactive, talkback station, or traditional exhibit for your museum, what best practices and design requirements do you consult? Museums don't have a well-developed body of industry-wide best practices. In 2006, I wrote about how game mechanics can improve the stickiness of a museum experience.

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Yahoo Library Design Experiment 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2009

In almost all cases, museums assure me that they want to be in conversation, that they want to be responsive, that they want to “really hear” what people think. Sadly, it was the second story that was about a museum. Is this a research project? It is an exhibit of user-generated content? Is it a conversation? Let’s start there.

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Conversation Museum Artist Minneapolis 21

Museum 2.0

JUNE 26, 2007

What does your museum have to say about it? What do visitors expect of museums, and what do museums expect of themselves, when it comes to timeliness? This is partially driven by museums, which want to be seen as "forums" for discourse, but also by the expectations of a media-saturated public. Pluto just got demoted.

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Museum Boston Authoring Chapter 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 24, 2010

This is the third in a four-part series about writing The Participatory Museum. When I decided to write a book about visitor participation in cultural institutions, I knew I'd do it in a way that reflected the values behind the book itself--transparency, inclusion, and meaningful community participation. Check out the other parts here.

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Participatory Museum Process Experiment 33

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 8, 2006

Elisa’s focus is interactive arts, media design, and cultural management, and she has been involved in many pertinent projects, such as MUVI (the Virtual Museum of the Collective Memory of Lombardia). Environmentalists, the Museum of Natural History at CU, they all responded very enthusiastically to this.

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Interview Museum Culture Sound 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? And the "stuff" of the game is real stuff, artifacts created by players and sent to the museum. To expand their audiences.

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Game Museum Arts Alternative 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 17, 2007

The exhibition of the art pre-decision exposes people to the art and creates buzz around the prize, and, more importantly, it brings museum visitors into the decision process. Nick Serota, the Tate's director, commented that "'the public display of four artists' work spurs people to reflect about art.'" Projects.

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Artist Arts Museum Celebrate 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 25, 2009

Reflecting on the impact of my Zealandia visit later at the National Digital Forum, I realized how rare it is that cultural professionals communicate with the public about the exciting ongoing nature of preservation projects. Tags: storytelling marketing design Unusual Projects and Influences inclusion.

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Action New Zealand Hints Project 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. We shrunk the exhibit design process (concept to floor) from 2 years to five months.

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Virtual Tech Lesson Develop 21

Museum 2.0

JULY 9, 2007

Last week, Elaine Gurian and I talked about radical change in museums. Former museum start-up queen, Jen is taking a small organization whose goal is to promote girls’ involvement in math and science through research and programming to new, innovative, exciting places. But my background is in museum startups.

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Interview Museum Teen Myspace 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 7, 2007

ExhibitFiles is a community-based site launched last month to encourage the documentation, sharing, and exploration of exhibits and the exhibit design process. The whole process of developing an exhibition tends to get stuck behind a museum's doors. Enter ExhibitFiles. There's no sharing of that information.

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NSF Interview Case Study Museum 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 26, 2008

In museums, attention to the visitor--her desires, his preferences--has grown over the last few decades. Ze Frank recently posed this question to several designers, filmmakers, and artists here , asking: When you make things with an audience in mind, do you have internal representations of that audience to help guide you in the process?

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Audience Artist Design Language 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 13, 2007

Photo from my flickr stream View the Tagging Screencast Presented by NTEN. I'm pleased to announce that my screencast about tagging has been released and showcased by NTEN ! I created it for the screencast to illustrate the definition of tagging. If you have questions about tagging or want to share your organization???s

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Screencast Instruction Instructional Tag 50

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 9, 2007

Not that I won’t still occasionally write about games, but they will no longer have a weekly presence on this blog ( though you can always find lots of them by clicking the "game" tag in the topic list to the right). The Open Source Museum project at The Tech is a grant-funded grand experiment. Tags: Tech Virtual.

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Open Source Museum Game Open 22

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

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 10, 2009

This can be an incredibly technical topic, as it focuses on the ways that platforms (online, exhibits, museums) can harness the individual activities of many visitors and create meaningful experiential outputs that connect people to each other. But designing an entire museum that functions this way probably isn't your goal. exhibition.

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Social Network Tech Network Museum 22

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2007

This is the penultimate installment of Museum 2.0's s book club on Elaine Gurian's collection of essays, Civilizing the Museum. As Elaine puts it in the essay, When I was last involved in such an endeavor, it was when the Boston Children's Museum was small, insignificant, and unselfconscious. have portrayed Indians inaccurately."

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Culture Storytelling Challenge Museum 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 4, 2008

How many museums have stacks of comment books that are only culled for the gushing quotes that belong on annual reports? Customers' judgments made for more confident, streamlined strategy discussions: Before this, customers' ideas had fallen like snowflakes, enveloping the development process in an undifferentiated blanket of suggestions.

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Museum Participatory Evaluation Chapter 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 14, 2007

Was it a museum professional or an outsider? I'm kneedeep in the final run-up to the opening of Operation Spy at the Spy Museum, but in the fleeting moments between disasters and near-disasters, I'm thinking about AAM. Several were created or conceived by a single person, often an artist/non-museum professional.

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Life Create Change Museum 20