Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2010

As many of you know, I've been working for the past year+ on a book about visitor participation in museums, libraries, science centers, and art galleries. The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to visitor participation. The Participatory Museum is an attempt at providing such a resource. Tweet about it.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 18, 2014

And it''s got me thinking about how we build energy and audience for the arts in this country. Barry Hessenius recently wrote a blog post questioning the theory that more art into the school day will increase and bolster future adult audiences for art experiences. Like Barry, I feel that more art in schools is always better.

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Arts Build Audience United States 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 29, 2006

I met Janet Salmons many years ago while I working on various arts and technology projects in New York State for the New York Foundation for the Arts. I started in the Cornell University Center for Theatre Arts , where I founded and directed two programs: Cornell Theatre Outreach and the Community-Based Arts Project.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

Resource List Early Use of Backchannels Tara Hunt, Backchannel=Blogosphere Marc Cantor, Spell My Name Correctly Liz Lawley, Backchannel Modes Liz Lawley, Confessions of a Backchannel Queen Clay Shirky, Snarkiness on Parade NY Times, In the Lecture Hall, A Geek Chorus Dannah Boyd, Bridging Diverse Groups Backchannel in Learning and Education Vicky Davis, (..)

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Conference Reflection Resource Tips 69

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. There were times when coordinating a fire art festival while researching social capital theory made me want to burn my computer. I learn a ton from her every day and wanted to share her thinking--and her graduate thesis--with you.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 17, 2010

This is the second in a four-part series about writing The Participatory Museum. Several hundred people contributed their opinions, stories, suggestions, and edits to The Participatory Museum as it was written. Several said things like, "I was curious to see how this kind of participatory, collaborative approach would work in practice."

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 29, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Gender, Race and Open Source June 29, 2007 My session on Free and Open Source software and the US Social Forum went great yesterday. Both of these things have lead me to think a lot about this topic.

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Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments! I've seen this line of questioning almost completely disappear in the past two years due to many research studies and reports on the value and rise of participation, but in 2006-7, social media and participatory culture was still seen as nascent (and possibly a passing fad).

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 28, 2009

I am the director of a non-profit that promotes open museum practices, and we are in midst of launching a free service for arts organizations: a web site that permits any museum to create a participatory exhibit space and social network centered on the museum's collections.

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Museum 2.0

APRIL 19, 2010

Louise Govier posed this provocative question in an excellent paper on co-creation in the arts: Leaders in co-creation? Why and how museums could develop their co-creative practice with the public, building on ideas from the performing arts and other non-museum organisations (free to download). was the most overwhelming answer.

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Arts Museum Participatory Lesson 22

Museum 2.0

APRIL 21, 2011

I'm reaching the end of my consulting days, with just one more day on the road before I dedicate myself to Santa Cruz and The Museum of Art & History. On Monday, April 25, I'll be participating in an online video chat with Andrew Taylor and James Undercofler to explore new business models for arts organizations.

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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. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments! Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others? Yes and no.

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Non Profit Quarterly

NOVEMBER 17, 2021

The app will become available for free download on iOS and Android. As before, it remains free to accept and reuse BerkShares, encouraging local circulation of currency. The user experience of the BerkShares app will resemble those of mobile payment services such as Venmo.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. Over 150,000 people have accessed the free online version. I thought the pinnacle of participatory practice was an exhibit that could inspire collective visitor action without facilitation. Over 20,000 copies have been sold around the world.

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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 2.0

JUNE 11, 2014

This post was written by my colleague Nora Grant, Community Programs Coordinator at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) , we have been experimenting with a kind of pop up museum that is primarily created by the people who show up to participate.

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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. The busiest day in both 2011 and 2012 is our longtime community program, Free First Friday.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2010

Last week, I gave a talk about participatory museum practice for a group of university students at UCSC. I immediately flashed to my work with art museums and staff members' concerns that older, traditional audiences will shy away from social engagement in the galleries.

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Social Teen Museum Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 31, 2012

The Arts Dinner-vention Project - date TBD. This one was cooked up by Barry Hessenius, former director of the California Arts Council and public art blogger extraordinaire. Barry is asking the universe to send him names of "unheralded arts sector leaders" to be considered for an all-star dinner party in 2013.

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Professional Develop Museum Arts 35

Museum 2.0

MARCH 13, 2013

Visitor-contributed photos surround a collection piece in Carnegie Museum of Art's Oh Snap! It can be incredibly difficult to design a participatory project that involves online and onsite visitor engagement. In this guest post, Jeffrey shares the story behind their big hit with a visitor co-created exhibition.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 19, 2006

I'm seeing more and more examples of participatory media -- take for example WGBH's Video Sandbox. Reminds of the exquisite corpse like games we used to play on Arts Wire ten years ago with images. (And note how he has incorporated the use of his mail comment line into his content). t want to make it a big story.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2018

We partnered with foster youth, former foster youth, artists, and community advocates to create an exhibition that used art to spark action on issues facing foster youth. You can download it for free right now. This project wove together many different participatory threads. Short story: we learned a lot. What did we learn?

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Issue Community Create Childhood 45

Have Fun - Do Good

OCTOBER 30, 2009

Interesting WorldChanging post, Just Launched: Journal of Participatory Medicine. 19 Free Webinars for Nonprofits - November 2009 on Wild Apricot Blog. In the first edition of this partnership, I interviewed Erin O'Connor Jones , the Director of Candidate Services and Managing Associate at Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 1, 2016

The result is a new book, The Art of Relevance , coming out in a few weeks. The Art of Relevance will launch live and in-person on July 12 at the Arts Marketing Association conference in Edinburgh, and you'll be able to order it online soon. My last book, The Participatory Museum , did well. That's where you come in.

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Bloomerang

MAY 21, 2021

Great session every week, totally free, totally educational. But there are some benefits, some real clear benefits of inclusive participatory strategic planning. And feel free to put something in the chat if you. Renee and I were talking about how last year in 2020, we were doing like two or three sessions a week. Yes, maybe.

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Video Nonprofit Question Process 128

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2013

You''re in for a treat, with upcoming posts on creativity, collections management, elitism, science play, permanent participatory galleries, partnering with underserved teens, magic vests, and more. Thank you for inviting me to come to your museum/conference/art center/home. I''ve never taken a break from blogging before.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

On September 10, the Whitney Museum of American Art started offering a new membership called "Curate Your Own," in which members select one of five specialized "buckets" of benefits in addition to core admission and discount benefits. People want to experience art in quite individual ways. The "insiders" are another example.

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 7, 2010

There's not a lot of work in pinball, and I had a deep secondary interest in unschooling and free-choice learning. I also learned that the best money in museums for someone who's starting out is in art modeling. I survived the first half of 2003 financially on art modeling and poetry gigs.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 12, 2006

" Later, her work brought her to Mali, where she advised on participatory methods. s possible with free tools. The art of advising communities of practice. I feel I need quite some free, unplanned time to think of new ideas, stimulate creativity, so I try to safeguard my own creative space by. Practical examples.

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Museum 2.0

APRIL 8, 2010

Many of the talks are related to The Participatory Museum and I will have books for sale on all of these forays. I'm giving a free talk at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on the evening of the 22nd, and then a free workshop on the 23rd at the National Postal Museum on designing better mechanisms for visitor feedback and response.

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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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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. We want to break out.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum. 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. Museums could make the platforms for those experiences. Nine years later, I still believe this.

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 25, 2008

I didn't grow up staring open-mouthed at natural history dioramas or wandering through art galleries. I'm a strong believer in free-choice learning, and I see museums as places to circumvent the hazards of compulsory education and support a democratic, engaged society of learners. What is free-choice learning? I go on hikes.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 13, 2009

A few good links that have been zooming across my screen: A long and incredibly thoughtful piece by Diana Ragsdale about the value proposition of arts organizations in the midst of a "culture change." I set up a participatory site for the retreat alongside the more traditional AAM offering to provide a more interactive interface.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 15, 2009

In Praise of the Post-It There's lots of post-it-powered art on the web these days (like this and this ). The previous exhibit in this space was a very provocative art exhibit about sexual violence, and yet in our brief site survey in April we saw almost no one stop to look at the art. Not so for the post-its.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 13, 2007

I personally want to move away from the metaphor of making movies of the computer screen to more shoulder-to-shoulder instructional media and perhaps something that is more participatory or for lack of a better word, social. It has a critical mass of users, is fairly easy to use, and it is free. Tagging in Art Museums.

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