Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. Imagine sitting around a conference table planning an upcoming project that involves user-generated content. A third argues that the project won’t be truly participatory unless users get to define what content is sought in the first place.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

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? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" I was surprised by her question.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 7, 2009

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? Museum invites community members to participate in the development and creation of an exhibit. But the difference between the two examples teases out a problem in differentiating "participatory design" from "design for participation."

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Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. The Museum 2.0 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 22, 2010

In the most extreme cases, I've talked to folks from museums that are government-mandated to provide all content in multiple languages who say they are unable to invite visitors to make comments because they'd have to translate all of them and simply can't dedicate the resources to do so.

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Museum Work North America Language 38

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last month, MAH curator Susan Hillhouse and I sat down and wrote an exhibition philosophy for our museum. It's a working document, and we mean to put it to work planning new projects with our partners. It's a working document, and we mean to put it to work planning new projects with our partners.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

I'm here in Chicago for a very brief trip on a panel about metrics and measurement for museums called "New Spaces, New Measures." Percentage of a document quoted in other documents. Raw links to the document. Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.

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Chicago Museum Network Conference 50

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

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Every once in a while I come across a project I wish I could have included in The Participatory Museum. For one year, a group of twelve schoolchildren age 9-11 were invited to work with staff at the Wallace Collection to develop a family-focused exhibition using the museum's artifacts. it's a Secret! , What made Shh.

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Children Museum Create Project 46

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

DECEMBER 16, 2010

You want to get some projects going, but you're not in any particular position of power. Ruth is a curator of pictorial collections for Puke Ariki, a museum/library/visitor center in the small city of New Plymouth, New Zealand. She came back inspired and eager to get moving on some experimental projects at Puke Ariki.

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Badge Museum New Zealand Participatory 40

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

JUNE 22, 2009

I'm working on a personal project (slowly) to open a cafe/bar venue that is also a design incubator for participatory exhibits. My goals are two-fold: to develop a dynamic, creative, social platform for my community and to distribute its successful elements to other civic learning institutions (museums, libraries, community centers).

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Action Ideas St. Louis Museum 31

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

How do you find your way around a multi-faceted museum? I spent some time playing with this question last week at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a large general museum that is moving toward redesign of the permanent galleries. Tags: design participatory museum usercontent. Do you interrogate the map? What would you do?

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Experiment Lesson Learning Museum 44

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

It started as a handout for a session that Stacey and I are doing at the California Association of Museums, and then I realized it was so darn useful that it was worth sharing with all of you. The majority of our public programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History are created and produced through community collaborations.

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Collaboration Community Tools Museum 55

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. Nina observes that the following makes this project really special: It is 100% community-based. Everyone is a Curator.

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Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

Museum 2.0

MARCH 18, 2015

There are lots of great science museum resources, but not where these kids can walk after school. Most Workshops also run a wide range of additional programs - supplemental school day programs, afterschool programs, mobile units that go to housing projects. Any big museum has barriers and limitations to full community ownership.

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Green Interview Share Community 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 5, 2009

I just returned from the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual meeting in Philadelphia. I led two sessions, one on visitor co-created museum experiences, and the other on design inspirations from outside museums. This spanned all the projects. This was particularly true for Click!, Neither Click!

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Slides Participatory Museum Children 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 20, 2017

Imagine that your existing project is a turkey sandwich. Treating the museum as a community platform? Other times, a visitor might use the exact language of our strategic documents. As Becky and Joe noted, it can sound like taking your amazing craft beer and distilling it into a Bud Light. it is dialed-in delicious.

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Turkey Model Museum Delicious 26

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 22, 2012

What happens when a formal art museum invites a group of collaborative, participatory artists to be in residence for a year? Will the artists ruin the museum with their plant vacations and coatroom concerts? But for museum and art wonks, it could be. And the projects themselves are brilliant.

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Artist Museum Project Public 39

Museum 2.0

JULY 22, 2008

A platform for museum staff to serve as facilitators of safe spaces for difficult conversations? They are often one-offs for events but are increasingly included in the regular slate of programming at major libraries and cultural facilities (but at my count, only one museum). It's also well-documented so you can do it yourself.

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Library Model Museum Europe 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. I couldn't drop the project for months or abandon it entirely. Check out the other parts here.

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Participatory Museum Process Experiment 33

Museum 2.0

JULY 27, 2009

I’ve long admired Improv Everywhere , the NYC-based participatory public art group. They construct wild performances in everyday settings, invite regular people to participate, and document their work well. Deconstructing just these few initial minutes of the program reveals a lot about what makes this project so successful.

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Instruction Instructional Nicaragua Experiment 21

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2010

I spent last week working with staff at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) on ways to make this encyclopedic art museum more open to visitor participation across programs, exhibitions, and events. While there, I was lucky to get to experience a highly participatory exhibition that the MIA mounts once a decade: Foot in the Door.

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Participatory Museum Arts Artist 46

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

They were there for project brainstorming. Temple Contemporary makes strange objects and gorgeous documentation. It encourages process-driven performances and art projects. It encourages process-driven performances and art projects. This makes Temple Contemporary excel at responsive, relevant projects.

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Process Share Philadelphia Arts 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 24, 2014

There are many different forms of engagement with many different outcomes depending on your goals, your project, or your institution." 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. But just naming it encourages us to talk about it.

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Goal Museum Evaluation History 48

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 4, 2010

I want to share a few fabulous evaluation and research studies that have greatly informed my work (and specifically, the development of The Participatory Museum , which is going to the printer this weekend). Note: these are all downloads, which means when you click on the link it will ask you if you want to save a document.

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Participatory Evaluation Project Report 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 20, 2010

On a recent trip to the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, I noted a discussion board in the "Nursery" gallery. For the Nursery discussion board, it's other adult visitors to the Children's Museum. Every adults who takes a child to a Children's Museum cares about his or her identity as a caregiver.

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Museum Children Discussion Childhood 41

Museum 2.0

APRIL 18, 2012

Last Friday, I witnessed something beautiful at my museum. At the adjacent table, my colleague Stacey Garcia was meeting with a local artist, Kyle Lane-McKinley, to talk about an upcoming project. I've been documenting lots of small bridging incidents at our museum over the past few months.

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Community Teen Build Social 42

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 11, 2008

s Hawaiian son as applied to museums. While there are some criticisms of its consensus-based model for information-vetting, there's no doubt of its success as a collaborative knowledge-creation project. Consider these two stories of museum-related wikis that struggled. What's a wiki? What makes them succeed? Great idea, right?

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Wiki Wikipedia Museum Doc 23

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 13, 2014

MuseumCamp is a playful, intense, spirited 3-day adventure in which small teams of diverse professionals do a rapid-fire project together on a theme. Last week, I focused on the 2014 theme (social impact assessment) and the many creative evaluation projects produced by campers. Acknowledge the dips. They are frustrated.

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Facilitation Professional Learning Participatory 36

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. Getting Started Guide as a first step and review other help documents as needed. Tagging in Art Museums.

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Screencast Instruction Instructional Tag 50

Museum 2.0

JULY 24, 2012

When we talk about making museums or performing arts organizations more participatory and dynamic, those changes are often seen as threatening to the traditional arts experience. What if historic arts experiences were actually a lot more participatory? But what if the "traditional" arts experiences is a myth?

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Greece Arts Industry Participatory 51