Sustaining Participatory Projects

    The hardest part of managing participatory projects isn't pitching them or staffing them; it's sustaining them. Participatory projects are like gardens; they require continual tending and cultivation. They may not demand as much capital spending and pre-launch planning as traditional museum projects, but they require ongoing management once open to participants. For example, in the Weston Family Innovation Centre at the Ontario Science Centre, visitors can use found materials, scissors, and hot glue guns to design their own shoes, which they can then display informally on a set of plinths throughout the gallery. This shoe activity requires the museum to provide a steady stream of materials, to clean up the detritus and hardened glue that accumulates, and to roughly manage the display and rotation of visitor-created shoes. This is not an activity that is "done" at some point; it is renewed every day.

    Even a simple comment board requires ongoing moderation and organization of visitor content. And these are just the maintenance duties. For institutions that are intent on doing research, manipulating and aggregating content to a designed effect, or digitally redistributing or sharing participants' actions, project management takes on a whole other level.

    Sometimes, a museum decides it can only go so far. For example, in 2008, staff at the San Jose Museum of Art wanted to produce an element for their upcoming Road Trip exhibition that would both promote the exhibition and add an interactive element to the physical gallery. They decided to solicit postcards from real people's road trips to be displayed in the exhibition. They created a quirky video promoting the postcard project, put it on YouTube, and waited for the postcards to roll in.

    What happened? For the first eight weeks, not a lot. There were about 1,000 views of the YouTube video and 20 postcards submitted by August 15, at which point, something strange happened. Director of Technology Chris Alexander left work that Friday afternoon having noticed the YouTube viewcount on the video suddenly rising. By the time he got home, 10,000 new people had seen the video. After some puzzling, he realized that the video had been featured on the homepage of YouTube. The mysterious unseen gods of YouTube had anointed the Road Trip video with top billing, which shot the views way up (over 80,000 to date) and sent comments and video responses pouring in. The comments, which were previously unmoderated, suddenly were overloaded with opportunists who wanted their voice to be heard on the YouTube homepage. Alexander spent an exhausting (but rewarding) weekend moderating comments and taking control of the video's newfound fame.

    The attention from being featured on the homepage of YouTube motivated an energized burst of postcards from around the world. Overall, the museum received about 250 postcards. The team had expected more, but the contributory ask was fairly high--go to an attraction, buy a postcard, write something clever, mail it in. I'm impressed they got 250 in such a short time frame--these projects often take months to build momentum. Many of the postcards received were gems that provided powerful connections to strange people and places. They were featured in the exhibition in a little sitting area along with the video and will be kept in the museum's interpretative archive at the end of the project.

    This was a relatively quick, easy project that generated a lot of positive publicity and participation for the museum. But there are some places where it falls short. The SJMA team could not afford to scan or transcribe the postcards, so they are only viewable in the museum, not online. This was a one-shot approach--put out the video, collect the postcards. The people who sent in postcards didn’t have a way to see their content as part of the collection (unless they visited the exhibition in person), and they weren’t recognized for their contribution in a place online where they could both spread the word and enjoy a little fame. This is not a project that could take on a life of its own beyond this exhibition. It didn’t launch new relationships.

    From a management perspective, the Road Trip postcard project team made clear decisions about how far they would take their engagement with the postcards. They received, organized, and displayed them, but didn't digitize them. Even with this self-designated budget-related constraint, they still ran into management surprises. Alexander gave up a weekend to manage the onslaught of online participation and spam that arrived with the YouTube homepage feature. The combination of controllable design choices with pop-up opportunities is common to many participatory projects. If you use social platforms to promote or share your project or you empower community members to take partial ownership of the project, they are likely to generate both management crises and opportunities.

    Sometimes, particularly in co-created or co-opted projects, community members may take the project in a direction that differs from original institutional intent or goals. Consider the SF0 game described in the previous chapter, in which creative players develop game-like tasks for others to complete and document. New tasks are introduced through a moderated pipe that is controlled by the game designers, who only allow a small percentage of submitted tasks to be uploaded to the game. This curation allows the designers to keep the game diverse and open to a wide range of player interests rather than flooding the system with, for example, hundreds of game tasks involving taping things to chickens (yes, this is a real example). Because the game designers had a vision for how the game should evolve, they struck a balance between completely designing the tasks on their own and flinging the doors wide open to players' desires.  This balance requires their active participation as managers. 

    After several years of this structure, in 2009 the SF0 team embarked on a new project to create two versions of SF0-like platforms: one that is entirely open and community-managed, and another for institutions that is highly constrained and moderated. This bifurcation represents different management strategies for different goals. With the open system, the game designers are hoping to reach a broad enough audience that no one player will be able to easily overwhelm the system with his own nefarious chicken-taping desires and no moderation beyond user-flagging and rating will be necessary to manage the platform. With the closed system, the game designers are planning to focus on delivering consistent institutional experience goals and to reduce players' ability to engage as co-creators. (Could you include link or citation to this work at SFO? SB)

    When it comes to selecting a management process that works for you, consider your institution's and staff values and pick the battles that will make your project successful. (This also speaks to need to recognize the spectrum of desired participation at many levels. Characterizing the type and level of participation is key to defining the project/experiment and to setting expectations on the part of staff and visitors that will be met. Setting and meeting expectations is critical component for staff, visitors and boards. SB)  For example, in the case of the Minnesota History Center's MN150 exhibition, exhibit developer Kate Roberts commented that the staff were able to manage citizens' nominations of topics for the exhibition... but not much more than that. They didn't let visitors vote or join in on the topic selection process. Instead, as Roberts said, the team "locked ourseives in this room with the nominations. We as a team then winnowed based on our criteria--geographic distribution, diversity of experience, topical distribution, chronological distribution, evidence of sparking real change, origination in MN, exhibit readiness, and quality of nomination. We did it with a lot of talking." A few months later, they emerged with a list of 150 topics and went back to the nominators to congratulate them and solicit objects. 

    In contrast to this formal and limited participatory engagement, the Tech Virtual project involved continual communication among participants and staff, featuring deep and changing relationships as well as a whole lot of direct community management. Neither project is better than the other; each was made possible by unique and different staff cultures and institutional needs.

(One of the key messages of this section is that participatory projects are not predictable, and have unintended consequences. Yet, you have indicated that this section will teach people to sustain participatory projects. What does it actually take (and mean) to manage a dynamic participatory project that involves real humans who are unpredictable? At another level, what does it take to shape a participatory project so that future costs and staff requirements are anticipated and the ongoing support of the institution is secured? Maybe the trio is pitching, evaluating and managing, rather than 'sustaining'. Staffing is one aspect of management. Sustainability is one outcome of good management. SB)

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