Institution, Participants, Audience

    Each participatory structure can be considered from three perspectives. First, we'll look at institutional goals, considering how the participatory model might benefit the institution and defining situations in which it would be of value. Second, we'll look at participants' goals, and ways to structure the experience for participants so that roles are clear, activities are attractive, and participants successfully accomplish both personal and institutional goals. And finally, we'll look at how participatory outcomes can be displayed and shared in ways that are valuable and interesting to the broader museum audience, including both visitors and external stakeholders. [CA - I start losing it here, I thought you were talking about the chapter overall - not just this section. It might be helpful to say at the outset of this section what it's about ie 'Before looking in detail at the four main models of participation, we will look at how planning participation can be approached from the three main perspectives: institutional, etc. SB's sub headings are def an improvement on version I read (hard copy)]

The design process always starts with two simple questions: what will visitors and the institution gain from this participatory activity? How will the contributions be useful and valuable to both of these constituencies, and what other constituencies or communities might benefit from it?

Institution (SB, propose 3 subheads in bold to help make this more readable.)

    Some elements of these perspectives are common across all participatory models. [CA - platitude?] On the institutional side, the participatory approach should be driven by the identification of an activity or resource that is most usefully provided by someone external to the institution. [CA - what??? I re-read that several times and still not clear to me] For example, if you want to "crowdsource" a problem related to the visitor experience and get a wide variety of recommendations and opinions, a contributory model would allow you to receive diverse ideas from your audience. Or, if you are trying to produce an exhibit that reflects the authentic experience of a local group, a collaborative model would allow you to work closely with members of the constituent group to collect and display their objects and experiences.

Whatever your objectives, you should be able to define the specific way that the participatory project has value for your institution, and be ready to clearly draw a line between that value and your institution's mission statement and bottom line. It may be valuable for one museum to receive lots of snail shells collected from visitors, whereas another institution may find value is providing a forum where visitors share their opinions on a difficult topic with each other. It’s also important to clearly state what kinds of participation would NOT be useful; contributed snail shells that might thrill one institution would offer only stress to another. Uses of participation may be as diverse as the goals of the institution overall: to attract new audiences, to collect and preserve unique content, to provide educational experiences for visitors, to produce appealing marketing campaigns, to display locally-relevant exhibitions, to become a townsquare for conversation...  the list of potential values of participation is endless. [CA - v good point and v clear]

Participant (SB)

    Unfortunately, many museum staff settle for an unambitious value of participation that is not compelling to institutional directors and stakeholders: visitors will like it. This is not a robust value, and it turns participatory projects into trivialities instead of opportunities to satisfy core institutional goals. I certainly hope visitors will enjoy participating with your institution, but if you focus solely on participation as a "fun activity," you will do a disservice both to yourself as a professional and to visitors as participants.

    Yes, it is fun to help paint a mural or construct a giant model of a molecule. But these activities also promote particular learning skills, create outcomes that are usable by others, and so on, and the more you think about which of these other mission-relevant goals you want to support, the more likely you are to design a project that satisfies more than visitors' desire to be entertained. As Geoff Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Pennsylvania State University, commented: "To be most satisfying,  leisure should resemble the best aspects of work: challenges, skills and important relationships." Participatory projects can accommodate these interests and are often better suited to providing visitors with meaningful interpersonal work than typical museum experiences. 

    Of course, some participatory activities, like designing shoes or making stop-motion videos, are rewarding on their own, and visitors may not care what the institution does with the outcomes. But even these activities are most successful when the institution makes a designed effort to display or share visitors' creations, which helps visitors understand their actions contextualized to the overall institution. The extent to which museums care for and respect visitors' creations is a reflection of the extent to which museums care for visitors themselves.

    While the desire to provide participatory experiences for their own sake is admirable and understandable, it can lead to problematic situations in which visitors perceive that staff are pandering to them or wasting their time with trivialities. Even if the effort is minor, participatory activities should never be a "dumping ground" for interactivity or visitor dialogue. And in cases where visitors are actually asked to "do work," that work should be useful to someone.  It's fine to design participatory projects in which visitors produce work that could more quickly or accurately be completed by internal staff (see the Children of the Lodz Ghetto case study in the section on collaboration); however, the work should still be of value to the institution ultimately. If the museum doesn't care about the outcomes of visitors' participation, why should visitors participate? [True, but I would also make a short mention that when the museum is beginning to open to participatory projects, or when is starting 2.0 presence, at that initial stage, it may be more valuable to offer and get contributions than the intrinsec value of those, just to test the institution and to make visitors feel comfortable and used to the participatoryu offer of the museum. Of course, the contributions received must be put in value, displayed either on the web or onsite, even if  they may not mean a real value for the institution. I mean, that at initial satges. more important than the output is the process itself. CR]

    For potential participants, the key motivator for participation is not perceived value of the activity or outcome but clarity of roles. Unlike institutions, which have explicit and narrow mission-related goals that presumably dictate what activities are valuable to pursue, individuals have a wide range of personal goals and interests that dictate behavior. Early in this book, we talked about John Falk's research into visitors and identity-fulfillment, and the concept that visitors select and enjoy experiences based on their perceived ability to reflect and enhance particular self-concepts. When designing opportunities for visitors to participate, especially when these opportunities are foreign to the standard museum experinece, it is essential for staff to clearly define the participatory roles and opportunities so that visitors can evaluate whether those activities are compelling and in-line with their own identity goals. Many studies have shown that visitors are already confused about what their roles are in museums and that confusion increases anytime the museum offers an opportunity that is aberrant, or even directly contradictory, to typical museum behavior.

    While this may describe the plight of particularly uninformed museum visitors, clear role definition may be even more important for savvy participants.  Visitors who are familiar with creating and sharing content in other venues (especially the Web) are highly attuned to issues of privacy and intellectual property. What happens to the video I record in your gallery? Who owns the idea I share with the museum? Being clear, specific, and honest about participants' roles in participatory projects helps visitors of all kinds know what to expect and evaluate whether an opportunity is right for them.

    Whether you are asking for a long commitment or a brief encounter, a contribution to research or exhibit development or marketing, clarity and honesty are the key to supporting positive engagement by participants. In some cases, especially when working with the more flexible participatory models like collaboration and co-creation, roles and activities change over time, and both participants and staff members can break promises, let each other down, and get frustrated. I've worked in several "fast and loose" collaborations with visitors which were sustained almost exclusively by relationships built on open communication. As long as visitors feel that they understand what they are being asked to do and can trust that you will use their work respectfully and appropriately, they will engage wholeheartedly. You can change your mind, make mistakes, and evolve with each other if you are clear and honest every step of the way. And the more you can express to participants--in actions as well as words--how their work helps the institution or other visitors, the more they will see themselves as partners and co-owners of the museum experience.

    In the book Here Comes Everybody, technologist Clay Shirky argued that there are three required components for a participatory mechanism to be successful: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the [participants]." (This sentence was worth making bold. SB)These components define the relationship between institution and participants. The institution must offer an experience that is perceived as valuable and appealing, and it must be easy and clear how to participate successfully. The rules governing participation must be reasonable to participants. Even if your promise, tools, or bargains have to change over the course of a project, you should always be able to articulate what you are offering and expecting clearly and openly. 

Audience (SB)   

    But participatory projects are not solely for institutions and participants. There is another populus constituency, the audience of non-participating visitors. How will your participatory project produce outcomes for the rest of the museum community that are valuable and interesting? Some participatory environments are continually open and evolving, so that any audience member can electively become a participant and the outcome and process are intertwined, but very few projects are designed this way. It is much simpler to say, "you can submit your idea until the end of the year" or "we will work with twenty teenagers from a local high school to develop this project," and for many institutions, constraining the scope of participation is an appropriate approach.

    If only a few people participate, then their experience, no matter how superlative, must be weighed against the experience that others will have with the outcome of their work. A mural on the wall isn't just for those who painted it; it must bring pleasure to others as an art object as well. Likewise, the exhibits, research, marketing materials, programs, and experiences produced in collaboration with visitors must be compelling outputs in their own right. That is not to say they can't be different from standard museum-created programs; ideally, projects developed using participatory models will have unique value that cannot be achieved by traditional processes.

    There is no single concept like "mission-relevant value" or "clear roles for participation" that defines what makes a successful participatory project in the eyes of the audience. This is true for two reasons. First, audience goals, unlike institutional goals, are diverse and broad. What's valuable to one visitor is a waste of time for another, and no process is going to change the reality that different museum experiences appeal to different visitors. But secondly, from the institutional perspective, goals with regard to audiences for participatory projects are also wide-ranging. In projects in which visitors' contributions are targeted to a very specific and narrow outcome, for example, a research project or exhibition development, the participatory element may be hidden from view of the final intended audience. In situations in which participation is open to all visitors, such as via talkback boards in exhibitions, the institution may desire for the participatory element to spark conversation or to model active behavior that might encourage reluctant visitors to add their own opinion to the wall. When we design visitor experiences via traditional techniques, there is little opportunity for visitors to peek behind the curtain or to add their own mark to the content on display. Participatory projects open up that potential, and so institutional goals may shift from focusing on delivering content experiences to modeling and inciting visitor action in new ways.

    Whatever your goal with regard to ultimate audience, it is essential to keep these folks in mind throughout your participatory process. If your goal is to encourage all visitors to see themselves as participants, you will have to design in mechanisms by which participation (even by a small percentage of visitors) is celebrated, encouraged, modeled, and valued in the eyes of the audience. If your goal is to create a high-quality product that is acceptable to an audience accustomed to a certain level of rigor, design, and content, you have to make sure your process delivers that output. One of the most interesting things about citizen science programs is the fact that the ultimate audience for user-supplied data is professional scientists, a constituency that demands an incredibly high level of confidence and rigor in the content they will use and consume.  The awareness of this demanding audience forces the people who direct citizen science projects to ensure that their participatory processes will accommodate those end-user needs.  While your average museum visitor may be less demanding than a university biologist, her needs are no less important to bear in mind as you design and implement projects whose results she will consume.

Continue to the next section, or return to the outline.