Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

My Day at the Powerhouse Museum

 

During my time in Sydney,  I spent a day with meeting with the staff at the Powerhouse Museum and Seb Chan who writes the Museum's blog, Fresh + New(er) and who I have had many virtual conversations with via our blogs but have not met face-to-face.   I got to meet the entire web team who I interviewed using QIK (see above), got a whirlwind tour of the museum (the Lost in Space Robot is in their collection!) and have an informal workshop with members of the marketing staff and curators.  Seb Chan has a good write up here.

The Powerhouse has done ground breaking in integrating social media into their communications and web strategies (most recently they've joined the Flickr Commons) but are also in the process of embracing the groundswell concept and making social media part of their organizational culture.   The afternoon workshop was another opportunity for education and discussion about social media and the museum's mission as well as a great example of how you create social change behind the firewall. 

I also met and interviewed Dr. Lynda Kelly, Head of Research, Australian Museum who shared some of her recent research on museum participation and online social activities.  She took excellent notes about our session and blogged it here.

My flickr photos are here

 

Social Media Strategy Is Everywhere in the Organization and More Cute Dog Theory Evidence from the Indianapolis Museum of Art

As Cute As I Get by Hermanosmccoy (used with permission)
Photograph of  "Calder," from Richard McCoy IMA Blogger

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has done an amazing job of integrating a social media strategy into its communications strategy.   What makes them a success?  Whether it is managing their Facebook presence or encouraging conversation on their blog with art lovers, their social media strategy is a team effort.   While they have put someone in charge, their social media strategy is everywhere - from the conservation department to the curators. 

Parceling the workload - whether it is blogging or managing a Facebook profile has lots of benefits.   It doesn't make it an overwhelming task for one staff person to participate on different sites.   Furthermore, it is a great strategy for engaging people in the organization to discuss and own the organization's social media strategy.  This is what leds to success.  Having everyone participate leads to understanding.

I'm NOT suggesting that everyone on staff stop doing their work and spend hours and hours blogging or making friends on Facebook.  And, there may be one or two staffers who have more hands-on, tactical implementation responsibilities.  I'm talking about not putting the social media strategy in a little box that is separate from the organization - that "thing over there."   To be successful, it needs to be a part of the organizational culture and people need to experience to some degree.

Sharing the workload has other advantages as well. Keeping the organization's social media strategy implementation tightly compartmentalized or siloed within just one person's or department's domain personalizes it too much.  The strategy succeeds everyone is brilliant and if there are mistakes or learning, then it was just one person's "bad idea" - and the experimentation and reiteration that is necessary for success is just not done. 

I wasn't surprised to discover that two of the IMA bloggers, Richard and Robert were dog lovers.  (Richard has a golden lab named Tana).  Richard has an appropriately named bull dog - Calder. Here's the photo shoot he did recently with Calder.

What are the secrets to success as they relate to staffing and your social media strategy?  Sharing the workload is one.   What are some  of the others?

Social Media Time Investment = You put in is what you get out? The Time Scale

From Museum2.0 Blog, Nina Simon

Nina Simon has an excellent post looking at time investment and types of projects.  There are three approaches:

• Participant:  1-5 Hours per week (See 10 Web2.0 things you can do in ten minutes to be a better nonprofit - suggested by nptechers)
• Content Creator:  5-10 Hours per week
• Community Organizer: 10-20 hours per week

But as Alison K notes in an article she wrote about social media and nonprofits, you get out what you put in.

Arts 2.0: Examples of Arts Organizations Social Media Strategies

| View | Upload your own

The above slide show was created based on all the information I gathered from my network below.

 

I'm prepping for a workshop on Social Media and wanted do a round up of recent compelling examples of arts organizations using social media strategies and tools.   I've covered arts organizations and social media here and there over the past three years and last winter co-wrote a cover story article with Rebecca Krause-Hardie for ArtsReach.   So, thought I'd take an opportunity to query my network via Twitter and Facebook and see what's new.   

I was particularly interested in examples using blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, and Facebook.

Everyone is a Curator

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. They're now running a compelling experiment in crowd-sourced exhibition creation and curation via the photography exhibition Click.

Here's how Nina Simon described it on her insightful post analyzing the tactics used.

1. The Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups, and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organizations.

2. On the web, anyone can evaluate the photographs in terms of aesthetic quality and relevance to the exhibition theme. All evaluations are private; all artists are unnamed. It's very easy to sign up and judge... and you can do so now by registering here.

3. The photographs will be installed in a physical exhibition running for six weeks this summer. The art will be displayed in order of the average juried scores. Visitors will be able to see how different subgroups (including art experts) ranked and responded to the art. The exhibition will coincide with programs about art theory, online communities, and crowd theory, providing a forum for public evaluation and discussion about the process.

Nina observes that the following makes this project really special:

• It is 100% community-based
• The internal team is led by a non-curator.
• They kept the interface simple
• They make it easy to evangelize
• They are sensitive to the artists who are being judged.
• They ask judges to self-define their art knowledge.

But as Nina notes, they are doing research from this experiment about the role of independence and influence in a participatory experience.  Note that this is a research/learning approach that is key to success of Web2.0 projects.

More at TechCrunch and Technology in the Arts Blog.

Another theme of web2.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.

Blogs

Elizabeth Perry, an artist in Pittsburgh and pioneer of "sketch blogging" reported that local arts organizations have been good at integrating social media without having to create or maintain anything new.  "They have begun inviting local bloggers as press to openings and events - usually they get in touch with Mike Woycheck or Cynthia Closkey, two of the co-founders of Pittsburgh Bloggers, who then re-blog the invitation and spread it via Facebook or their own Twitter streams. Lindsay Patross runs the blog, and people get hold of her, too.

Similar strategy to what the San Francisco Symphony did with its blogger outreach event.   ASOL gives a write up and some pointers for holding your own blogger outreach event.

What Should Artists and Arts Organization’s Blog about?  An excellent question posed by Beth Dunn of Small Dots.

Most people are fascinated by the interior life of artists. Many people are turned on by the chance to peek backstage at a theater. Almost everyone I know thinks they can curate an art exhibit. Are they right?

Artists: Write about your favorite kind of paintbrushes. Write about where you go shopping for paintbrushes. Write about how hard it is to find decent studio space. Write about why you ditched that banker job to see if you could make it selling art. Write about your crippling self-doubt and fears of failure. Write the truth. Not the press release.

Arts Organizations: Write about your insides — what goes on inside a theater, a museum, a historical home? Not the tedious soap opera that will get you fired if you share - the cool stuff we’re all dying to know! Where do your staff come from? What brought them here? How much fun did you have striking the set over the weekend? Can I help next time?

Artist Blogs

For individual artists, a blog can also help sell or promote their work.  Here's some artists personal blogs that support their gallery sites where they sell their work -- A Planet Named Janet,  Self VS Self, PaMdora's Box and Jen Lemen

Arts Organizations

Let's look at individual blogs.  Here was have the professional development or career blog like Museum2.0, and Im in Ur Museum Blogz that is written by an individual, not as part of the organization.  The content is focused on the professional area of expertise.   Blog helps deepened expertise.   Many early adopters in nonprofits got started this way - outside of the firewall.

Fresh + new(er) is an institutional blog from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Australia written by staff member Seb Chan.   Interesting that this blog has evolved into one that serves the sector of museum professionals.  (see for example the post about blogging policy).

The Academy of Vocal Arts has a blog written by Daniel Pantano.  According to Maryanne Devine, the staff member to go to for all the AVA gossip. "The writing is in his own voice, personal and authentic, and he's giving the patrons exactly what they crave: who won which competition, who just got engaged, where alums are singing, backstage snapshots. He doesn't get much in the way of comments, but when he misses a few days, he gets lots of complaints.   

Musematic is a group blog of museum technology professionals.  The description: "Rants and raves on the latest trends in the world of museum informatics and technology. An intrepid cast of experts from the Museum Computer Network and AAM's Media & Technology Committee share their insights, observations and tricks of the trade."

The Walker Blog was one of the first arts institution blogs.  The idea was to give an inside view of the inner workings of the Walker.  Different departments or individuals came on gradually.  (I wrote about this blog back in 2005)

The Brooklyn Museum's blog is another one that takes a group approach, also focuses a peak behind the scenes. As does Indianapolis Museum of Art blog.

Tate's Mobile Blog is collecting audience input on the new building design at the Tate - via mobile phones to blog - or mob blogging.   

Over the next six months we’ll be inviting all kinds of people, including designers, artists, young people, families, students and Tate staff, to share their ideas. Why not send us your own photos and join the discussion here at The Great Tate Mod Blog?

Finally, Rebecca Krause Hardie has some notes from a blogging workshop given at the Museums and the Web Conference earlier this month

Flickr

The Academy of Vocal Arts uses a flickr account to document organizational events/galas/benefits - good way to get started. Arts Northfield has well organized collections and sets of all organizational activities.

Brooklyn Museum of Art has a very active and successful group  - notice the  lively discussion board.  MOMA has a group for its graffiti project.

This example of using Flickr for exhibitions - both in Flickr and on the web site. The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. online exhibit developed by the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico and Ideum.

Here's the description of how they used flickr for the exhibition.

In designing and developing The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. website with The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology we’ve found ourselves spending a lot of time in Flickr. The Collection of photographs found on the site are pulled in from Flickr using a Flash-base mashup. The Shooting ScriptColonizing Social Spaces, looked more broadly at the benefits and drawbacks of museums utilzing social networking sites. In this post, I’m going to look exclusively at Flickr and our experience with the American Image site. activity works in similar way: pulling out John Collier Jr’s images as well as those of other Flickr members. An earlier post, Colonizing Social Spaces, looked more broadly at the benefits and drawbacks of museums utilzing social networking sites. In this post, I’m going to look exclusively at Flickr and our experience with the American Image site.

I interviewed Jim Spadaccini and he told me that initially more people had viewed the photos in flickr versus the exhibition web site.   He also mentioned that the commenting on the photos was fascinating and that they even got an email from someone who knew the Gagnon's family that the name was not correct! Read more of Jim Spadaccini's reflections

Finally the Library of Congress community tagging pilot project on flickr. (Launched in Jan. (follow up here)

A pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).

The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

 

Nina Simon has a good piece on why museums should use flickr.

Facebook

Individual profiles, groups, fan pages and applications.  There are many museum professionals active on Facebook - step one is to create an individual profile and then go find your colleagues. The group Museum Professionals Unite Across Facebook has about 2,000 members and 89 discussion threads, so there's definitely lots of places to talk shop on Facebook with peer professionals.    There are a number of museums with official group and fan pages, like this one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As Nina Simon points out, Brooklyn Museum of Art is the gold standard of Art Museums using social media and its projects on Facebook are no exception. (Be sure to check out Nina's Museum2.0 Blog for lots of great posts.

Brooklyn Museum of Art developed a Facebook application called Art Share.  It lets Facebook users share works art from Museums around the world on their profile.  Artists can upload and share their own work using this application.  Participating institutions include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Brooklyn Museum, Canada Agriculture Museum, Corning Museum of Glass, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Powerhouse Museum, Royal Ontario Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, V&A, Walker Art Center, Walters Art Museum.

The application launched in November according to this progress report the usage stats as of February were:

• 1000 people using ArtShare on Facebook.
• 174 artists are using ArtShare to share their own works.
• Institutions have uploaded 438 works from their collections and artists have uploaded 754.

Some more on the metrics from the progress report:

On Facebook,  the highest traffic comes from browsing profiles, so exposure to the images may be significantly higher. For instance, if each ArtShare user has 20 friends, a lot more people could be seeing the images from ArtShare being shuffled on that profile. In a nut shell, 1000 people may have installed it, but a lot more may be seeing it and while this is not the kind of traffic we can measure, it is interesting to think about.

I wanted to take a quick look at what the performing arts scene was like on Facebook. 

Doing a quick search on the word "symphony" on Facebook turned up more than 500 individuals.  A few of these are Symphony orchestras using their individual profiles (incorrectly and a violation of the TOS) for an organizational presence.   (There are quite a few individuals with the last or first name symphony.)

There were about 70 Fan Pages that turned up including a number of youth and college symphonies.   A couple of major symphony orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony with 1336 fans and the Boston Symphony. The fan pages are like mini-web pages with the ability to add applications.   The features on their Fan Pages include music player (filled with symphony selections), albums, photos, events, and videos.  There is also a discussion board and the ability to post notes.  The Boston Symphony has been doing ticket giveaway promotions.

While I focused on Facebook for social networking examples, there are examples on MySpace.  Even found an artist social network that is called Dripbook.

Twitter

Twittours has a list of museums using Twitter.  Looks like most are just learning how to use twitter and mostly tweeting about content on their sites.  Using it like a newswire similar to New York Times Arts Section

Brooklyn Museum of Art is using twitter - mostly to point to blog content or web site content.   Tate is also twitter, but hasn't really engaged yet  - probably in the Twitter is the dumbest thing I've ever seen stage?    But as the Field Museum notes on its MySpace page status - still trying to figure it out. 

Heard on Twitter a mobile poetry project on Twitter is in the works.  (Poets.Org is already mobile)

Still more arts organizations on twitter found at TwitTours - this post about  Alliance for Historic Hillsborough - tweeting about bites of information about its programs.

Beth Dunn has a great post on artists and twitter.  It points over the Cycling Artist's post about the benefit and value of Twitter for artists.

YouTube

Anaheim Ballet has a YouTube Channel with over 130,000 channel views.   Perhaps due to their MySpace presence? Another good example is Youth Speaks.

Thanks everyone for the leads .. any other comments or suggestions - leave them in the comments.  Now, off to finish the workshop curriculum ...

Better Blog Museum Metrics

Seb Chan

I just discovered that one of my blog colleagues in Australia, Seb Chan,  is writing about a topic of mutual interest - social media metrics (my blog ramblings here and my wiki/presentations here).  I am also prepping a panel on the topic for NTC (more about that later)  Seb Chan is focusing specifically on blog metrics for museums.

He is suggesting two metrics for museums (which are also recommended by the others talking about this topic in other disciplines):

In our paper Jim and I avoided site traffic and instead proposed that two better measures of success for museum blogs were citations/linkbacks and user comments. These captured the ‘interactivity’, the multidirectional communication, that most museums set up blogs to encourage and explore.

He thinks that Avanish Kaushik's model is particularly well-suited for museum blogs.  I am wondering about the "ripple index" as described by Kaushik:

Ok so you are talking, people are listening, and lo and behold they are talking to you on your blog as well. Hurray!!

But in a world of networks and connections what is your impact beyond your immediate blog?

A key validating factor for a blog, any blog, is that other people talk about what you are writing about. They reference back to you (with nice words or scathing critiques!). They link to you.

I call these Citations. People talk about you, discuss you point, throw up on you, praise you. Citations.

To measure Citations I use Technorati rank.

It Technorati the best measurement tool for measuring ripples or "influence"?  KD Paine notes why measuring blog influence isn't so easy with a pointer to Brendon Cooper titled "Which Metric is the Most Important" that discusses looks at different method to measure influence in the blogosphere.  (He is the originator of the PR Power Index) Take it all with a grain of salt.

Another explanation of influence can be seen in this illustration of ripples,  I came across this visual a few months back from David Armano.   

Ripples of Influence

Seb, I have a few questions .. Where is the paper you refer to located?  Is it here? It's on my reading list.

For your metrics/measurement for the new blog, what will that look like?  Do you have plan or logic model to share?

What is your impression of the flickr stats feature?

In your institution, what are some of the attitudes about evaluation metrics that you need to change or challenge when thinking about a social media measurement plan?  What easily connects to your existing practice of metrics/measurement for the Museum Web and what does not?

ArtsReach Cover Story: Social Media for Arts Organizations

My Flickr Stream

A few months ago, Rebecca Krause-Hardie and I co-wrote an article for ArtsReach Magazine about how arts organizations are mixing in social media strategies.  You can find a copy of the article here.  If you are interested in learning about how arts organizations are using the social web, read Becky's blog! 

Cyberinfrastructure: What is it? What does it mean?

Back in the early 1990s, I was "hoisting" web pages onto the Internet with a colleague David Green who worked at the New York Foundation for the Arts on the Arts Wire project.  David (and Arts Wire) is long gone, but recently David contacted me to tell me of a new collection of essays he has edited on "cyberinfrastructure"

We all remember how the First Wave of the Internet hit: the first time we used a web-browser, the first time we ventured forth with our (or our institution's) first website, the first time we started using web-based resources. Now a Second Wave is about to hit: Cyberinfrastructure. This unwieldy new word connotes the combination of a whole new generation of computing power, massive online data resources and new capabilities for online working collaboration with peers. The National Science Foundation is convinced cyberinfrastructure will transform the conduct of the sciences and that other academic disciplines will soon follow. The director of the NSF has gone so far as to say that it will "usher in a technological age that dwarfs everything we have yet experienced in its sheer scope and power."

I've just guest-edited a "special issue" of an online journal/site, Academic Commons, on the topic of Cyberinfrastructure and the Liberal Arts and I thought you might be interested in either the subject as a whole or one part of it - the future of scholarship, how disciplines might be changing, how the role of campus museums might change quite radically, and so on. 

The table of contents can be found here.

Indianapolis Museum of Art: Transparency

This came the "dashboard" for the Indianapolis Museum of Art , an ongoing effort to measure various aspects of the Museum's performance.  According to the web site, the goal is to seek to quantify and report out on areas of activity of general interest to museum studies specialists, colleagues, and patrons.

The Web section offers a sampling of numbers only data.    What is interesting is how the web metrics include a mix of traditional web analytics and social media metrics, in this case number of friends on myspace (454) and views (see above) on its youtube channel.  What it doesn't show me is any trends over time or analysis based on gathering data from several types of resources.  I would like to see some context.

The dashboard is one feature in he Indianapolis Museum of Art's new Website which launched in September with lots of social media features.  According to a blog post at the site, at least one staff person thinks the dashboard is cool:

For more than 5 years, I didn't think another dashboard could rival my Passat's for coolness. And while it may not be exactly the same thing, I think the IMA's new dashboard might just do it. So what's so cool about our dashboard? We're really the first museum in the world to use technology like this. The public now has access to statistics about attendance, the art collection and even our budget. For instance, folks can check to see how much we have spent so far this year and how it relates to what we projected in our 2007 budget. Visitors can also check to see how many people have visited Roman Art from the Louvre or shopped in the IMA Shop. For better or for worse, the IMA's dashboard let's you see the IMA from the inside.

Jim Spadaccini from Ideum Blog notes that dashboards are not new, in fact, there's a book about Dashboard Design. However, "This a great example of a museum presenting basic information about the institution in a dynamic and unconventional way."

There is some question as to who would be interested in this type of information - a somewhat out of context random set of numbers.  More commentary here.  What do you think?

UPDATE:   The Giving Blog writes about the Dashboard here

Greetings from Chicago and the Museum Computer Network Conference

I'm here in Chicago for a very brief trip on a panel about metrics and measurement for museums called "New Spaces, New Measures."   My slides and resources are here.

I came across two more excellent resources on this evolving topic of social media metrics and wanted to quickly summarize before I add to the link list in the wiki.

The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority by Michael Jensen published in the Chronicle in June, 2007 describes how scholarly authority is being influenced by Web 2.0.   He points out, "While those trends are enabled by digital technology, I'm not concerned with technology per se — I learned years ago that technology doesn't drive change as much as our cultural response to technology does."   He talks about the cultural shift from information scarcity to abundance.  He suggests this list of metrics:

• Prestige of the publisher (if any).
• Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
• Prestige of commenters and other participants.
• Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
• Raw links to the document.
• Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
• Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
• Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
• Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status?
• Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
• Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s).
• Significance of author's other work.
• Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
• Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
• Length of time a document has existed.
• Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
• Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

He also notes that change will be slow:

Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument. Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.

Via RSA Networks blog

Kami Hulse, who gave a small taste of her presentation on relational objectives has shared her presentation notes and slides on a post with the title "Let's Talk About The Bottom Line and Dreaded ROI"  I used a similar title in the presentation I gave at Podcamp last week called "Let's Talk About Social Media Metrics, Measurement, and ROI."  Geoff Livingston has started a conversation meme here.
Be sure to check out Kami's links on measurement.

 

 

I look for patterns

Flickr photo from AussieGal

The how do you write meme is swirling through the edtech community and now Vicky Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, has tagged me ... (calling me a pro -- but honestly in comparison to Vicky's work, I feel like more a Sunday afternoon painter.)

Vicky has written a brilliant post answering the question "How do you write for your blog?" using the metaphor of an orchestra conductor and virtuoso orchestra musicians making music together.

In yet another example of the connectedness of the Web2.0, another person Vicki tagged was Doug Johnson, author of the Indispensable Teacher's Guide To Computer Skills published in 1999.  I've never met Doug face-to-face, but I sure know and admire his work.  I modified his "Mankato Scale" into a nonprofit tech skills assessment for a technology planning curriculum for arts organizations for NYFA back in 2000.  I shared this on a listserv with some nonprofit technology geeks (aka circuit riders) and one of them told me that his father worked at the same school as Doug in Minnesota.  I think I gushed about how much I learned from his work.  Several weeks later, I received an autographed copy of Doug's book in the snail mail!

Since my formal education is in music (studied flute), I'm going to riff on Vicky's ideas because they reasonate with me.   Vicky says that writing a blog, like music, is more than a single solitary note, but a composition.  True.   But in music school, I did spend a lot of time alone in a practice room honing my technical skills (chops).  Yet, etudes did excitment as much as playing chamber music  with other people.  And, of course, having an audience always added a little bit of energy too.

For me, writing a blog is balancing between  "wood shedding" alone and thinking/writing outloud with others.  That marvelous patch work quilt of different and connected s in the blogosphere that influences your thinking, your writing, and sometimes your practice.

I've written about my blogging workflow before, but I'd like to share my creative process.

1.  I wait for the butterflies to flutter out of  my RSS Reader

Flickr photo by Markopolos - CC "BY" license

I've written a lot about how my RSS reader is an information coping tool.  It is also becomes my muse and a key source of inspiration.  My reader has lots of blogs feeds, comment feeds, tag feeds, search feeds, and more.  I read for patterns and wait for what Will Richardson called the butterflies to flutter.

I’m reading and two or three pieces of content flow up from my network that begin to click together in my brain like magnets, making connections. And at that moment, my mind starts writing, composing a post that it needs to make sense of the ideas, the patterns that seem to be emerging. I’ve come to rely on the blogging to cement together the pieces and make them more of a whole, one that I know is never fully complete, and never will be.

And, like Will, observes, blogging allows you to sew those butterflies into a beautiful patchwork quilt.

2.  Can I connect that pattern to  a picture? And, how does the picture  morph and change that pattern/idea?

Flickr photo by Markopolos - CC "by" License

None of us possess all the of the nine multiple intelligences -- but if we are self-aware we know which ones we can use to enhance our writing process.   My strong modalities are a visual and naturalistic intelligences.  Once the pattern starts to emerge, I immediately translate the pattern into a visual.  I often use flickr as a pre-writing tool, often searching by tag clusters to think through the idea.  It may not lead to any actual writing, but it helps trigger my creative thought process which connects to my writing.  Writing is thinking ...

3.   Can I connect the pattern or picture with my own experience, a story, or annecdote ?    Does it make me think of a person?

A page from my son's Kindergarten writing journal that says "That's me catching butterflies."  He was describing this activity.

I'm also trying to think about what connections from my own experience might come to bear to help understand what I'm writing about.  Or, I start to think of people that I've connected with about this topic. That's where that the open source thinking or the connected conversations start to happen.

4. What have I learned about the topic?

Flickr photo from Markopolos

And, then it is time to step back and reflect on what learning has taken place.  It is the stepping away, the 500 ft. view, the letting the post marinate .... I feel constant tension in my blogging life between the need to get things done and the need to capture learning.  If I don't take the time to reflect, I get cranky.  I get overwhelmed my information.  Digesting is important.  So is distance.

Opening the Kimono

I've opened the Kimono to my creative process.  And, now I'm hoping that others in the nonprofit tech community will share too.  I was inspired by Marshall Kirkpatrick's sharing of his "work flow" and Andy Carvin's thoughtful post about his writing process.   Take this further into the nonprofit tech space.   Alan Benamer,  Katya Andresen,  Laura Quinn, Holly Ross, Nedra Weinreich, Gavin Claburgh,  Michelle Murrain, Michele Martin, Marnie Webb, Allison Fine and Lucy Bernholtz.

UPDATE: SLAP my wrists.  I've been so Americentric in my tagging of others .. I apologize.   So, here goes a shout out to all the rest of continents .... to spread this meme globally ..

David Wilcox, Miles Maier, Steve Bridger,  Ricardo C, Bev Traynor, Mike Seyfang, Joitske Hulsebosch, Nick Noakes, Tharum,  Jinja, and  Ore

The Painting Journalist: Witness To Peace

I've had the great pleasure to meet many kindred spirits and interesting people via my blog who I did not know offline or may have never connected. 

One such person I've met is Ashely Cecil, a self-described "painting journalist" who describes the world with a paintbrush (and a scanner and a blog.)  I think of her work as a mashup between an extremely talented court room artist, journalist, social activist and philanthropist.

A few recent posts that I have enjoyed include her sketch and report about the grant preparation session held by a local foundation and her post/portrait of Braveheart, a dog available for adoption from the Human Society.  (I'm a dog person, so this one got my attention -- a portion of the portrait fee will be donated to the Humane Society, the dog might get a new home, and you can watch a time lapse video of her painting the portrait.

Ashely Cecil is fundraising on her blog for her upcoming to visit Venezuela this February with Witness for Peace where art will meet social activism.  She hopes to do the following:

• Meeting with labor organizers, scholars, professionals, business people, representatives of the media and activists to discuss the economic, social and political issues confronting Venezuelan society.
• Learning about grassroots resistance to unjust and devastating global economic trends.
• Discussing alternatives to current US policies and ways to advocate for more just policies towards Venezuela.

Here's the description from her blog:

The images I will gather from this trip will certainly yield excellent material for my paintings. I will be creating watercolors while I’m away and posting them (as well as my commentary) whenever an internet cafe is available.
So, here I am just one month from my departure, and $2,000 needs to be raised. I’ve added the badge above to the sidebar so my readers can contribute with donations.   If you’re not one to give without receiving, I am pre-selling paintings that will come as a result of this trip. 6″ x 9″ watercolors are $70, and 8″ x 10″ oils on canvas are $220. I encourage you to support my efforts in raising awareness about these issues and the organizations that are working to resolve them by clicking on the donation badge..."

Remember, if you support her trip with a pre-purchase of a painting, a portion of the proceeds goes to support organizations working to resolve these social issues.

Large Scale Art Event in Second Life on Feb. 11-13th - Call for Entries

In cooperation with Amoration AMO Studios, NMC Campus is hosting a large scale art event February 11-13, 2007.  Here's the email announcement from Alan Levine:

The NMConnect Visual Symposium will be the largest collaborative art event ever created in Second Life! Connect the Dots with hundreds of artists as we Illuminate and innovate together to weave new networks. Structures of artistic expression in every medium will be linked and combined to tell new stories on how we bond within our shared new worlds.  This will take place over multiple sims on some of NMC's new land.

There will be art on display, performances, discussion forums, guest speakers, and others modes of activity over the three days. Information on the event will be announced via the NMC Campus Observer (http://www.nmc.org/sl/) and posted to our Campus Wiki Guide (http://www.nmc.org/campus/NMConnect).

The schedule is still developing, but there is a call for Second Life Artists that will be open form now until the end of January. Interested artists should review the call and then enter their submissions via the web form at http://www.nmc.org/sl/nmconnect.php

Download NMConnectCallforArtists.pdf

Thoughts on Widgets and Community Building

From Mathew's flickr stream

I've known Matthew Saunders, an arts tech colleague, for many years.  He works for an arts agency and we've set on grant evaluation panels for arts and technology projects.  I remember having dinner with him and a colleague from the NEA about  4 years ago and I was bragging about having TiVo.  Matthew one-upped me big time: He told me he hooked up his local area network at home so he could access his TiVo remotely via the Internet and configure it to record programs.

I was delighted to discover his newly redesigned drupal blog and all the widgets he has installed.   He also wrote an excellent response to my query, "What do you think about widgets?"  I have to quote a few points here:

The Web’s holy grail has always been the creating of community. For the most part, it takes a group of zealots to create community on the Web.

Any time you have folks that are passionate about something, you will see community build around that thing/topic.  . . . Asking whether widgets will foster community is a tricky question. The predisposition for community will exist whether widgets are used or now. What a widget will do is make it easier for that community to embed interesting rich content into sites. This in turn attracts others to come participate.

I'd also add this it goes beyond embedding rich media content.  I think that widgets can facilitate social networking connections (check out the mybloglog widget on my sidebar) and enhanced the interaction or conversation already taking place on the blog.

He also relates my question to the arts sector specifically with the following points:

The arts are in a unique position to leverage these video, audio, and photo sites. The arts are all about sharing content. It makes sense for our art institutions to take advantage. Will they? It remains to be seen but I believe that in order for these organizations to remain relevant with today’s consumers, they are going to need to. Gen X and Y EXPECT interactivity. If you come to them with static sites, you’ve lost them right away.

This really speaks to participation in the arts and the shift in the way participation manifests itself. I believe that the industry needs to re-frame how participation is defined and work to be relevant in today’s consumers’ minds.

What is Indie?

Via an email from my friend Jay Moonah (AKA Uncle Seth) fo the Online Music Marketing comes a pointer to a film focused on the independent music business in Canada and U.S.   As an independent consultant (for the past 20 years),  I can relate to some of the ideas mentioned. 

Here's what Jay had to say:

Dave Cool (yes, that IS his real name) from Montreal has produced a great film called "What Is Indie?"   I think it's extraordinarily insightful look into the concept of what being "independent" is really all about, and a amazingly well-done documentary in general, particularly since it is Dave's first movie!

Faith Ringgold: 30 Years of Art-Making and Activism and Video Clip on Women Artists

Click here to listen to a very brief interview

Over the weekend, I attended the Technology in the Arts Conference in Pittsburgh where artist and activist Faith Ringgold was one of the keynote speakers.  Her talk was called "More than 30 Years in ArtMaking."   I had a chance to do a quick video interview with her about her thoughts on women artists.

It was a survey lecture, beginning with her work in the sixities and first-hand accounts of the civil rights movement in her "American People Series"  right up to her current work.  Her talk was inspiring and often humorous, sharing her stories to illustrate her life's work as an artist, activist, author, teacher, and parent.   

She spoke about advocating for women artists in the 1970's and the artistic works that emerged from that activism, like the one below, titled For the Woman's House.  She noted, "In the 60's, it was about answering the question "What is black art?"   In the 70s, what is women's art?  Why are women so important in visual art?"  (Listen to the interview for the answer to those questions)



My favorite group of paintings were the ones she did in Europe copying the masters and integrating African American history, culture, and icons.  She shared how in art school she had to copy the European masters and wasn't introduced to black artists.   When she had opportunity to travel to Europe for an extended visit, she decided to visit the places where the masters worked and the masterpieces and record her versions incorporating black artists.   They are brilliant!

• Dancing at the Louvre
• The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles
• The Moroccan Holiday

As she took us through a timeline of her work, she pointed out how she experimented with different mediums and genres and even invented a few.  She has created "quilts" on canvas and  evolved this technique into a story quilt, where she wrote the story in words she wanted to tell on the canvas so it couldn't be interpreted by someone else.   She has created sculpture, mosaics, paintings, stories, and children's stories and coloring books.

The coloring book, How the People Became Color Blind, was a series of sketches and a children's story that teachers have used all over the country.    This story is about being color blind, or free of color prejudice-- one of the most difficult things to achieve in our society.  At the end, the book asks readers: How do you deal with this problem in your life? Could you write a story?  Could you draw a picture? What do you think of How the People Became Color Blind?

She shared some of her paintings, inspired by seeing the different work that children all over the world has done and read from the story.  (I captured some of this on video and in my raw notes in an earlier raw notes post.)  You can order a copy of the book and paintings on CD from Faith Ringgold's site.

She made a few jokes about missing her slide projector and having to use powerpoint and a MacIntosh, but I was impressed that a woman in her 70's was so comfortable with the technology.  She mentioned at the end she was interested in creating video games for girls and based on what I heard and saw during the keynote, I hope she pursues that interest.

There's a growing number of artists, like Mary Flanagan who is on the board of Games for Change, interested in games.  According to Benjamin Stokes, co-founder of Game sfor Change, the NSF has funded several game projects aimed at girls.  There are also some women organized commercial developers and a few blogs covering the topic, like Game Girl Advance, particularly Brenda Laurel who is covered in some detail here.

Faith Ringgold: More than

Faith Ringgold gave an inspiring and humorous lecture shared many human stories that illustrate her life's work as an artist, activist, author, teacher and parent through the evolution of a body of work that contains more than 100 paintings. I was struck by a project on her web site, a coloring book for kids about being color blind.   I did an interview with her where she explains the project and I captured a short clip of her reading the story as part of the lecture. Visit her site:

http://www.faithringgold.com
Flickr photo set has more of her images.

I took notes in a