Museum 2.0

MAY 3, 2010

Last week, I attended Structure Lab , a half-day workshop on legal and financial structures for ventures for social good. The Structure Lab is set up as a "game" in which you explore cards in various categories (values, assets, financing, etc.) to better articulate what you are really trying to do with your project concept.

Structure 31

Structure Model Social Profit 31

Museum 2.0

MAY 13, 2008

I once asked Elaine Gurian how museums can change. Here's the problem with both of these ways: they require circumstances that are outside of most museum employees' control. Here's the problem with both of these ways: they require circumstances that are outside of most museum employees' control. There's no client, no cash.

Museum 31

Museum Place Project Model 31

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 20, 2019

I tell the story of the one-man band because I think many museum professionals feel like him. But, most importantly, few museum professionals have a free hand or moment. We might think of structural racism or the classism inherent in our funding structures. Museums rarely have the funding to replicate positions.

Museum 29

Museum Accessibility Articulate Teen 29

Museum 2.0

MAY 11, 2010

While it hasn't happened here in awhile, a new Museum 2.0 Many museum and library professionals use the concept of the third place to describe the idealized vision of a cultural institution as a place for community use and civic engagement. For four weeks starting June 1, each Tuesday there will be a Museum 2.0

Museum 25

Museum Place Library Discussion 25

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 5, 2010

The bigger question is about how to structure the second phase. For example, the Tech Museum Awards of five $50,000 prizes each year attracts many organizations with real capacity who are seeking both prestige and funding that could be significant in getting the new projects off the ground. Are they intended to inspire students?

Accessibility 100

Accessibility Award Proposal Student 100

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.

Wikipedia 40

Wikipedia Arts Museum Project 40

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 28, 2009

What role does “promoting human happiness” play in the mission statements and actions of museums? That’s the question I’m pondering thanks to Jane McGonigal and the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM). Earlier today, the CFM offered a free webcast of Jane McGonigal’s talk on gaming, happiness, and museums.

Museum 21

Museum Structure Game South America 21

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.

Place 41

Place Discussion Culture Museum 41

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 asked a few people I trust who are not museum folks to read the third draft. I structured the copy editing very tightly.

Participatory 33

Participatory Museum Process Experiment 33

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.

Interview 46

Interview Director Museum Benefit 46

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.

Open Source 22

Open Source Museum Open Game 22

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 7, 2007

I got my copy of the fall issue of Museums and Social Issues this week. The theme is "Civic Dialogue," and the journal includes articles on the historical, cultural, media, and museum practice of getting people talking to each other (including one by me about such endeavors on the web). A place many museums are not.

Museum 22

Museum Lecture Denver Journal 22

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2010

A simple example: the cocktail party The best place to start conceptualizing structures for social participation is via familiar social experiences. Here's how the Flickr experience maps to me-to-we design: For a museum example, consider the Walters Art Museum's Heroes exhibition. Ideas participatory museum.

Design 34

Design Social Museum Participatory 34

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 6, 2008

This problem is analagous to the repeat visit problem for museums. Museum visits, like book reading, can be an intense and wonderful experience. But is one museum visit enough to compel a second visit? How do you encourage visitors to have a sense of pervasive experience with the museum? But the approach is valuable.

Museum 23

Museum Platform Game Relationship 23

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

The conventional wisdom on museum memberships is that they are "one size fits many" programs whose primary benefits are free entrance to the museum and insider access to exhibition openings. But what about all the other people who love your museum? Want to know how the Brooklyn Museum is answering this question?

Museum 24

Museum Audience Program Artist 24

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2007

In January, I interviewed Sibley about the potential use of virtual worlds and Second Life by museums, but in the four months since then, the virtual world platform--and the hype around it--has exploded. It seems that Second Life is both the closest and farthest thing from many museum professionals' minds.

Second Life 20

Second Life Museum Life Virtual 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Museum professionals tend to think this is OK because they think of the contributory act as the important part of the participation. This sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way many museums approach participatory projects. I think this is why the Top 40 exhibition at the Worcester City Gallery and Museum was such a success.

Participatory 35

Participatory Museum Rate YouTube 35

Museum 2.0

JUNE 8, 2007

Yesterday, I turned in my keys and said goodbye to the Spy Museum and to Operation Spy, the narrative, immersive game experience I've been developing/building over the last two years. Adventure is a slice of a large museum, and it's been closed to the public for the last few years (only available to be rented for special events).

Museum 20

Museum Game Facilitation Indiana 20

Connection Cafe

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

The following post was originally published on the Center for the Future of Museums blog. On Wednesday, August 8, over 300 museum professionals joined CFM director Elizabeth Merritt and Seema Rao, principal of Brilliant Idea Studio , to explore self-care in the museum workplace. But effort and efficacy are not the same.

Museum 21

Museum Professional Culture Training 21

Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2007

This week, we consider Chapter 11 of Elaine Gurian's Civilizing the Museum , "Function Follows Form: How mixed-used spaces in museums build community," but first, a short and relevant note about my writing process. Museums are naturally tuned to some of these but not all. short streets and frequent opportunities to turn corners.

Museum 20

Museum Los Angeles Arts Children 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 12, 2009

About three months ago Beth Kanter wrote about the Crowdsourcing of Vision at the Smithsonian Museum. Tags: crowdsourcing. I've been keeping a careful eye out for thoughtful comments that could turn into guest posts. That's where this post about crowdsourcing came out of it! Jon Husbands is a Listener, watcher and facilitator.

Leadership 82

Leadership Aggregator Culture Method 82

Museum 2.0

MAY 14, 2009

I've become convinced that successful paths to participation in museums start with self-identification. The easiest way to do that is to acknowledge their uniqueness and validate their ability to connect with the museum on their own terms. Who is the "me" in the museum experience? Not so at museums.

Museum 20

Museum Personal Experiment Profile 20

Forum One

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

It might record that the user clicked play and then clicked pause after 16 seconds, or that they searched for the hours of a museum, clicked through to the information page, and stayed for 40 seconds. In contrast, the event model records the actions people take, for example clicking or scrolling. Implement it.

FAQ 86

FAQ Organization Analytics Google 86

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.

Project 38

Project Museum Artist Map 38

Museum 2.0

APRIL 1, 2009

On Monday, I gave the keynote at the Museums in Conversation conference in Tarrytown, NY. I learned to cultivate creative greed while working on Operation Spy at the International Spy Museum, where I was lucky to be working on a project that was so new to us that we didn't have any pre-established models or structures for doing it.

Museum 20

Museum Conversation Columbus Local 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

I've added a fourth model to this citizen science typology, one may be more appropriate to facilities like museums than to scientific organizations: co-option. Working with the museum or using the museum as a platform to do your own thing? There is no "best" level of participation for museums and cultural institutions overall.

Public 36

Public Research Participatory Lesson 36

Museum 2.0

JUNE 22, 2009

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). And then at the end, when she asked how many of us could do this in our own museums, no hands went up. We loved it.

Ideas 31

Ideas Action Museum St. Louis 31

Museum 2.0

APRIL 7, 2008

Now that there are over 200 posts on this blog, I'd like to start acting intelligently to organize the content--beyond the tags I assign to individual posts--so that you can most quickly find the posts you most want to read. But rating is just the tip of the organizational iceberg. spirit) that is driven by your interests and site use.

Taxonomy 20

Taxonomy Museum Folksonomy Rate 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 23, 2010

The reward for participants of having your contribution displayed is fairly and clearly structured. Participating in this made me wonder: could a museum or library run a project like 3six5? Museums and traditional institutions are not typically set up to manage participatory projects at such a high level of detail.

Participatory 34

Participatory Project Museum Journal 34

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.

Museum 29

Museum Alternative Education Professional 29

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 3, 2019

But we also know that it hasn’t made an appreciable impact on the people coming to museums. I cheered every time people tagged me in their shares. I loved how she brought up so many issues, often combining structural issues with the related effects. Rebecca also mentioned another issue about our museums and how we entice people.

Accessibility 32

Accessibility Museum Grant Voice 32

Museum 2.0

APRIL 23, 2009

Like many people who've worked in science centers and interactive experience museums, I've always been perplexed by the fact that hands-on workshop audiences top out around age 14. They are more than just workshop spaces--they are member institutions, like museums. Isn't this one of our dreams for museums?

Museum 24

Museum North Carolina San Francisco Structure 24

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. Museum staff create an exhibit by a traditional internal design process, but the exhibit, once open, invites visitors to contribute their own stories and participation.

Participatory 27

Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 13, 2009

Earlier this year, the New Museum and Creative Time commissioned a traveling piece by artist Jeremy Deller called "It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq." I saw It Is What It Is twice at the Hammer Museum. Why would I want to talk about Iraq on a visit to an art museum? Even for me, the barriers were too high.

Challenge 28

Challenge Iraq Museum Library 28

Museum 2.0

APRIL 19, 2010

"How often do we hear colleagues from museums and galleries stating as their fundamental reason for working co-creatively with audiences that they want to make a great piece of museum work, rather than primarily for reasons of social inclusion or democracy?"

Arts 22

Arts Participatory Museum Lesson 22

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2009

As a graduate student in a museum studies program, I have learned how to develop an exhibit based on a collection of objects or a specific story. The University of Washington Museology Graduate Program invited Nina up to Seattle to teach a course on using social technologies in museums. What’s the content? What’s the message?”

Advice 33

Advice Remix Museum Student 33

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

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." This is the opposite situation of the previous design goal, one typical in science and children's museums.

Goal 31

Goal Difference Design Platform 31