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.

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Participatory Museum Process License 33

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (s ee minute 2:20, above).

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Museum Participatory Artist Project 45

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. I never asked people for more, but I always highlighted and celebrated active participants.

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Participatory Museum Process Experiment 32

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2012

The booth was a nice way to celebrate what participants had done--and to create a digital record that they can keep and share. As we try to build a brand for "3rd Friday" as an ongoing museum series, I feel like these photos, more than any other collateral, will help people understand what the event is like and what they might get out of it.

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Participatory Active Activism Activities 50

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

Courageous speakers from dozens of countries described bold, participatory projects. El Museo Reimaginado is a collaborative effort of museum professionals in North and South America to explore museums' potential as community catalysts. They were coming together to celebrate and push forward. They were doing the work.

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Museum America Participatory Conference 40

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

For years, I'd give talks about community participation in museums and cultural institutions, and I'd always get the inevitable question: "but what value does this really have when it comes to dollars and cents?" We're hearing on a daily basis that the museum has a new role in peoples' lives and in the identity of the county.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

Earlier in 2013, I was amazed to visit one of the new “Studio” spaces at the Denver Art Museum. The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations. Does it matter?

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Even though for many of the participants, Ze is a celebrity of epic proportions, he did everything he could to make the event about them and their engagement and not about him.

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Community Reflection Online Museum 43

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 24, 2014

Inspired by Stacy, I wanted to share some of the work we are doing at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History to clarify what we mean by engagement. In early 2014, we developed a set of five engagement goals: Relevant, Sustainable, Bridging, Participatory, Igniting. Celebrates diversity and encourages unexpected connections.

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Goal Museum Evaluation Arts 48

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. In July of 2013, the MAH will host our first You Can't Do That in Museums Camp (or better name to be suggested by you), inviting 80 creative people to collaborate on an experimental exhibition.

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Professional Museum Develop Arts 35

Museum 2.0

MARCH 15, 2010

People often ask me which museums are my favorite. It's not the extent to which they are participatory. I visit lots of perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums. In some cases, that's based on subject matter, as at the Museum of Jurassic Technology or the American Visionary Art Museum.

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Museum Support St. Louis Children 41

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2011

This expresses itself most powerfully in museums when we talk about building relationships with visitors over time. But museums are one-night stand amnesiacs in the relationship department. This is terrible, both for the visitor and for the museum. I expect you'll remember some basic things about me--say, my name. We hang out.

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Relationship Museum Personal Celebrate 46

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Maybe it's a live music concert, or a museum visit, or a play. Museums and other venues are offering special programs for teens, for hipsters, for people who want a more active or spiritual or participatory experience. What are museums and arts institutions doing to tap into these forms of motivation?

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Arts Museum Calendar Music 50

Museum 2.0

JULY 7, 2010

Most of my work contracts involve a conversation that goes something like this: "We want to find ways to make our institution more participatory and lively." Most museums that offer interactive exhibits, media elements, or participatory activities offer them alongside traditional labels and interpretative tools. Fabulous!" "But

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Audience Museum Oakland Participatory 40

Museum 2.0

JULY 9, 2009

Seb Chan has a lovely, long interview up at Fresh+New with Helen Whitty about the Powerhouse Museum's new mini-exhibition, the Odditoreum. The Odditoreum is another wrinkle in the study of visitors' understanding and interpretation of authenticity in museums. I enjoyed listening to it (virtually, not at the museum).

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Museum Alternative Arts Portland 22

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 Project 40

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2008

There's a tag applied to many Museum 2.0 Posts under that tag tend to examine non-museum things, from malls to games to ad campaigns , and draw some design lessons for museums from their foreignness. What aspects of that socialness are desirable in museums (and how might we mirror buses or trains to promote them)?

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Participatory Design Museum Facilitation 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 3, 2019

I was thinking I’d do a few alternative histories of museums for the first post of the last month of the decade. As I imagined a world without the many museum tech projects of the decade, I felt inherently sad about the imagining away the successes that friends and colleagues have enjoying. But I couldn’t get there.

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Museum Work Social Media Audience 21

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2013

I spent the weekend queuing up posts for my forthcoming blog-cation--nine weeks of guest posts and reruns from the Museum 2.0 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.

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Museum Reflection Participatory Conference 35

Museum 2.0

JULY 8, 2015

I wanted to open up conversation about how we judge the relative ethics of various sources of museum revenue--all of which have moral grey areas. On platforms with many participatory options, more people are more active. Last week on this blog, I tried an experiment. On Facebook, you can post, like, comment, add photos, play games.

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Museum Game Participatory Comment 20

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. Gifting extends your message.

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Gift Participatory Museum Site 23

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. Here's the list for the next two months: April 14-17 - Denver for Museums and the Web conference. April 29 - I'm heading to the Oakland Museum for the preview of its reopening. Both are open to the public.

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Museum Los Angeles Participatory Minneapolis 22

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2010

Hosting a session on Monday at 2pm on Design for Participation with participatory design gurus Kathleen McLean and Dan Spock, along with research extraordinaire Kris Morrissey and participatory art rockstar Mark Allen. The king of idiosyncratic museums. Plus, this is absolutely the place you are most likely to see a celebrity.

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Los Angeles Participatory Museum Arts 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

Today, Museum 2.0 is celebrating its second birthday. 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

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Museum Voice Social Media Activism 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 10, 2009

Games are already highly participatory, but over the last few years game designers have been giving players more control over the gameworld and experience. What does "game 2.0" The ultimate substantiation of this is Spore, a game in which players invent their own life forms and manage their evolution.

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University Game Create Wiki 20

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 Interview San Francisco 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 activity is compelling.

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Project Museum Artist Map 38